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michalchik
Reviews
Le ballon rouge (1956)
Not for this kid
I know a lot of people loved this movie but as a kid I didn't. It seemed boring and dreary. The lack of dialog and the spare gray streets made the movie seems desolate. The balloon looked weird not like any balloon I knew as a kid. The bullying seemed cruel and unmotivated. A balloon seemed like a pathetic friend that was neither very fun. The death of the red balloon was genuinely sad. The supposed liberating resolution did not make up for it. In fact it was scary and left me wondering if the boy fell to his death, was suspended in the sky forever or was taken some place far away with no way to take care of himself. I also felt sad for all the kids that were deprived of their balloons when they all flew to the boy. It seemed unfair.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)
Weak
I couldn't make it through this movie. I got my money back about halfway through. I didn't give it a 1 because the effects and action were almost competent and the opening was kind of cool, but even these the strongest points of the movie were still weak. We have seen it all before and better. It is obvious they spent money on this film, but the plot is contrived (I'll avoid spoilers), every action sequence is telegraphed and then rubbed in you face. You see each stunt coming a mile away (sometimes literally). The acting is wooden. The characters are caricatures, less that one dimensional. I won't even begin to go into how bad the science, technology, geopolitics, etc.. of the movie is.
I know, people aren't supposed to take a movie like this seriously, but its hard to play along when things get this ridiculous. If this was a Saturday morning cartoon it might be worth the price of admission and little kids might not see the glaring weaknesses, but this is a big budget movie and they should have tried harder. Cartoons can be made into good movies, the Transformers worked, Iron Man worked. This movie belongs on the trash heap alongside the He-Man movie and Cat Woman. If you watch all the trailers you have seen anything worth seeing in the movie. OK, I admit since I didn't make it to the end I don't know that for sure, but it is not worth the risk.
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007)
Adult swim will destroy themselves with this stuff
I watched this, or more accurately, I forced myself to watch several of these shows before writing this review. This is another in a long stream of adult swim live action shows that at best are filler because they aren't trying hard enough to find good animation. Watching it, you get the feeling that this show is produced by a couple of guys that just know the staff at AS. The guys are probably nice and may be funny in person, but this show is just pathetic. Doing vaguely disgusting things may be funny when it is 3am, you are drunk and grossing out some poor waitress at Denny's, but this sort of stuff is truly pointless on TV. I plead with Adults Swim to please stop giving your friends jobs, or at least don't give them jobs that affect the line-up. Filming a Junior High-school kid picking his zits would be more edifying and interesting than this show. I turn off my TV as soon as this how comes on and it rarely goes on again even if there are good shows on after it.
The Rachel Maddow Show (2008)
Simply the best!
Rachel Maddow is brilliant, well educated, very hard working and just a nice person. It shows in all her work. If you want to hear the news that is important she scours all the major news sources for the stories and homes in on the stuff that really matters. Her commentary is erudite and daring. She takes on the B.S. fearlessly and is expert in adding context that shows up deception, spin and hypocrisies. She is humble enough to admit when she is reporting something outside her area of expertise and readily admits it when she makes mistakes. To top it all off she has a goofy-gentle sense of humor that makes the news fun. If all newscasters were as good as her we would live in a country that really would be a shining beacon on the hill.
Futurama: Bender's Big Score (2007)
More a tribute to Futurama than a Futurama story.
Though the movie was OK, I was disappointed by it. I feel like it lacked a lot of the originality, coherence and edginess of the original series. It was largely the same old jokes repackaged and flung at you fast and furious. They made an effort to cram in a bit of everything and largely succeeded, but it lacked depth and coherence because of this. The social commentary was also largely recycled and felt forced. I'll see the next movie, but I hope they put more thought into it and go for something more meaningful. Here it seems like one of those cases where they tried to please everyone and wound up creating something unauthentic.