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gcronau
Reviews
A.P. Bio (2018)
Terrible. Turned it off after less than 10 minutes.
<Warning. Here there be spoilers...>
I don't know what the producers of this show were thinking. The main character is loathsome, not funny. Oswalt, who was fun on SHEILD here just plays an ineffectual school principal who lets Jack just walk all over him. The scene where Jack is in the teachers lounge with the 3 female teachers ended it for me. The 3 women, who were supposed to be teachers, just acted like idiot 15 year olds.
At that point, I asked the room: "I'm done, does anyone else mind if I change the channel?", at which the other 2 people in the room said "Oh Good! We thought you were into it or we would have asked you to change the channel 5 minutes ago..."
I tried, but my stomach isn't that strong. 1 star out of 10.
Wind on Water (1998)
Absolute Drek
Don't let the other reviewers here fool you. This show deserved to be canceled after only 2 episodes. In fact, 2 was 2 too many. Terrible clichéd plots and contrived action sequences. All meant to blatantly show off the actor's bodies. For no reason other than T&A. Think: The worst of Aaron Spelling and then take it down a couple of notches. I only watched the first episode. And then I badly wanted back that hour of my life. I really wouldn't bother to attempt to find this show unless you're just interested in a particular actor/actress in the show and just want to ogle their bodies. Mild Spoiler: Basically the show is concerned with the cavorting of rich spoiled 20 somethings who have no real problems, other than a ludicrously contrived one.
The Good Guys (2010)
Absolute Drek.
I'll keep this short. I really liked Bradley Whitford in the West Wing and Studio 60, so I went into this show with reasonable expectations of liking it.
But then I started watching the pilot episode and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Whitford's character made me cringe every time he started talking. (His character reminded me of a live action Foghorn Leghorn.) I was wincing at almost every scene. After 20 minutes I had to turn it off. I found none of it funny, and most of it just plain embarrassing.
This show appears to be a lot like _Psych_, which I don't care for either. So I guess if you like Psych, you can probably stomach this show too.
Armageddon (1998)
Michael Bay at his absolute stinking Worst!
I don't have enough hours left in my life to properly describe just how much I detest this movie. Stupid cliché on top of even more stupid cliché. Bad writing. Bad acting. Colossally *bad* science. A movie about space, science, and spaceships that panders to the ignorant and the Luddite.
If you're looking for any kind of intelligent, thought provoking story, I warn you, *look elsewhere*. Because you're not going to find it here.
I gave this film a 1 only because the IMDb system won't let me give it a 0. Or even a -10 for that matter. In fact, this movie is on my personal list of 10 worst movies of all time.
You've been warned.
Star Trek (2009)
J.J. Abrams Completely missed the point.
I've thought about this movie a lot since I saw it. Not sure exactly what I wanted to say about it. I can't really go into all that I find wrong with it, there are just too many things. It would take far too long to write about.
But I think the fundamental problem is that J.J. Abrams never fully understood what Star Trek was about. It's not about epic battles and wars and clever characters. At it's core, it was always about the voyage of discovery. An optimistic view of the future. A view that problems can be solved with the mind, not brute force. It was about hope and discovery and life. Not destruction and death.
In some magazine I read a quote from Abrams that really stuck in my mind. He said: "I was never a fan of Star Trek. I always liked Star Wars. But after making this movie, I'm now a big fan! I can't wait to see what happens to these characters next!" (That's the closest I can remember his quote.)
I can't help but feel I'm hearing someone say: "I never liked the taste of white wine, I was never a fan, but one day I poured out the bottle and filled it with Pepsi and now white wine tastes great. I'm a fan!"
J.J. Abrams has poured the essence out of Star Trek and filled it with absurd, contrived, poorly thought out fluff.
This movie is nothing more than Michael Bay nonsense dressed up in Star Trek drag. It has only the surface trappings of Trek without the heart.
Watchmen (2009)
Like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.
I think Zack Synder's legacy from this film will be to show, once and for all, why you *can't* make a movie exactly like the book.
Don't get me wrong, I think this was a very valiant effort. I would say that at least 80% of the scenes were an exact match to scenes from the graphic novel, and at least that much of the dialog was word for word lifted from the novel.
The problem was, there wasn't enough of them. Scenes or words.
As someone who read the graphic novel many years ago, and re-read it again recently, I knew what was happening in each scene, but I had to keep putting myself in the position of someone who *hadn't* read the novel. The question I kept asking myself was "Would someone who hadn't read the novel understand this scene, or understand it's significance?" and the answering I kept getting was "no".
It really did feel like I was looking at an extremely well made and detailed jigsaw puzzle, of which half the pieces had been stolen. The general picture was more or less visible, but too many of the details were missing.
One can only hope the DVD version is much longer.
Black Scorpion II: Aftershock (1997)
The good, the bad, and the oh-so-bad...
This movie has some good elements and some bad elements.
The good: Watching Joan Severance.
The bad: Everything else.
If it's 3:30am and you can't sleep, and there's nothing else on but infomercials, this movie still isn't really worth watching. The plot is lame, the characters are absurd and barely 2 dimensional, the situation is absurd, and the writing is adolescent. The main villian gave a new definition and dimension to the concept of "stupid". To say it was "comic-book-like" would be an insult to comic books. The only good thing about it was watching Joan, and even then I prefered her when she was in street clothes, her black scorpian outfit was one of the least flattering female "super hero" costumes I've ever seen. She has great eyes and the mask covered those. Even her dialog was cliched and silly. Watch only if it's late, you can't sleep, and there's *nothing* else on. Turn the sound off. Watch until you experience unconsciousness. 1 out of 10.
Charlie's Angels (2000)
Absolute crap.
Unbelievable. I'll keep this short. I used to think that the TV show was insipid and stupid, but in comparison to the movie, the TV show was high art. If you insist on watching this piece of absolute drek, do it with the sound off and save a few of your brain cells. Cameron Diaz and Lucy Lui are nice to watch, but the story and contrived situations are *beyond* stupid. I rated this 2 out of 10.
Timecode (2000)
Not for those with short or non-existent attention spans.
Some spoilers included.
I had never heard of this movie before. From what I read afterwards, apparently there was a lot of hype surrounding it, but somehow I managed to miss it all. But I was up late tonight, I saw the listing for it on HBO, read the quick review of it, and decided to give it a try. Experimental movies can sometimes take you by surprise, or they can be abysmal failures.
Unlike a fair number of people who have left reviews here, I have to say I consider this movie to be a very pleasant surprise. Does it lack a very complex or original plot? Yes. However, if you think that matters, then you obviously missed the point of this movie. It wasn't about plot, it was about trying to find a new way to use film to more fully immerse the viewer into the fictional world being portrayed. And in that respect, I think it succeeded exceptionally well.
I was glued to the screen from the moment it started. In addition to the obvious 4 screens, the thing that jumped out at me almost immediately was that the film was shot as a series of *very* long continuous takes. That is *extrememly* hard to do. To those people who have commented on the fact that the acting was bad, or that they thought a certain actor was a better actor, you have to understand what a *difficult* thing it is to do long continuous takes. It takes top notch actors to pull it off and make it look merely good.
I quickly decided not to try to concentrate too hard on the details of any one screen, but just to sit back and kind of just experience the whole thing. "You just have to let the art flow over you" to quote William Hurt from _The Big Chill_.
If you're looking for Die Hard or your attention span is only 5 minutes long, look for a different movie. But if you like movies that take chances, explore new ground, and ask for a bit of intelligence from their viewers, then I think you'll like this one.
I gave this file an 8 out of 10.