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Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
Low quality
I don't mind that it's an unexpected genre (absurdist comedy), but it's just bad. The dialogues? Bad. The story? Pretty bad, and full of holes - more and more so towards the end. The acting? Kind of tolerable, but with weak chemistry between two actors that should really have it, and damaged by the writing efforts. Once or twice you can easily predict the next lines because the perused vocabulary is just that simplistic and repetitive.
The special effects are TV quality at best, and some closeups of WW running look like anything but running. The music isn't even good, frequently misplaced, trying to create tension when there shouldn't be any, or just suddenly stops.
There's also new powers shoe-horned in in silly ways, similar to the "force heal" issue in Star Wars.
Gwitsongmal (2017)
Twists and turns and backstabbing, and then yet more of those for good measure
Whisper is a corruption-focused K-drama where a set of characters use various ruthless methods to reach their goals; the good guys want to uncover murder & corruption, while the bad guys individually seek to avoid trouble. There's occasional shifting alliances, but it's usually the two leads against everybody else.
The rapid pace of twists and turns keeps you on your toes, and the 'competent protagonist' is sure neat, though ultimately he's mostly the female lead's stooge throughout the majority of episodes. There's little he does that's not done to help her.
Sadly half of the time it looks like a cheap soap opera because of the way it was filmed - maybe it's mostly the framerate that has that effect. The camera work itself is occasionally obviously bad & even comical. I've watched some 25 Asian drama shows, and none had me laugh at the overdone zooms, silly angles, or poor cuts this often.
As many other viewers have noticed, you have to be able to stand "convenient" plot points, like how characters receive every phone call with millisecond precision to affect conversations they're having (and there's hundreds of these phone calls).
*SPOILER*:
Several hours of plot development or rather lack thereof from the middle could be cut out because the end of Ep 11 renders them void. I found that really cheap and underwhelming.
Rugal (2020)
After K2, Healer and Black, Rugal is my fourth K-drama thriller with glaring plot issues
*NO SPOILERS YET*
Now that I'm on the fourth show of this kind that I really wanted to like, but the writing prevented it AGAIN, I'm slowly at a loss for words.
Some shows like Healer and Black clearly run out of budget or time and have to rush the ending in a messy (& stupid) way.
Other shows like K2 and this just never really have a plot structure to begin with, despite a great premise. Every episode, some evil (or evil-seeming) person does something evil and has to be stopped, or some other challenge is to be overcome. The overall character relations are rather static, with most players looking to take a stab at one of their targets, but this rarely happening in a meaningful way.
After about half of Rugal, it even turns into what feels like endless filler episodes, one more ridiculous in plot than the next. The primary villain of the show is pretty much Chaotic Evil, truly over the top in his atrocities, and most other characters have the chance to end him, and spare us the last ~10 hours. Yet they all somehow help him, or even rescue him, and as a result we viewers must endure.
The acting is passable, but most supporting characters are underused and rarely get to shine convincingly.
The music is not that far behind K2's in excitement, but is used in comically unexciting situations.
There's a lot of action, yet it's sadly often sprinkled in to cover for the lack of anything else. Random fight scenes with an infinite legion of goons are all too common.
If a plausible plot is not among your requirements, you don't mind violence, and sci-fi tech plus hero vs horde fights sound good, Rugal is likely worth a watch. The same goes if you just really enjoy the kind of villain who could eat up any weaker character.
*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON*
Starting from the very beginning, several characters end up killed, except not actually killed. They resurface perhaps mostly dead, perhaps alive and well. Sometimes they're remote controlled monsters, but with a bit of good will they can be healed. One has part of his head sucked out, but then he's fully intact later on. It gets so bad that it's actually more surprising when a named character truly stays dead.
Sometimes the antagonist can create incredibly potent living weapons, other times they're just failures of ruthless human experiments. Rules of physics may or may not apply depending on the scene, the current week's horoscope, or who is supposed to look cool at any given moment. There's occasional Wuxia moves, fighters' motions can make robot noises irrespective of them having any biomechanical body parts, and for a police force without the license to kill, Rugal engages in a lot of neck-breaking.
His living weapons may be zombies, or have the same abilities as Rugal members.
The plot twists are built for shock value, but usually lack all logic. This includes absurd and implausible suicides.
Supposedly, the Big Bad has an incredibly long-winded plan for world domination, but the film crew obviously never know what it actually is, and so it fizzles away in favour of an obsession with winning the protagonist to his side.
Speaking about said main character, he is given an absurd amount of leeway, he turns into the most magically powerful one of the four Power Rangers for no reason, and everybody else is constantly enchanted by him for no reason. He's not even the team leader, but in every group shot walks ahead of the team taking point, and otherwise takes the center of attention. Because he's the team leader, Strong Man Tae-Woong also gets to remain relevant throughout the show, while Mi-Na and Gwang-Chul fade away into complete obscurity. To really drive home that they have no meaningful roles, they're given injuries to recuperate from for the finale.
While his artificial eyes 'whisper' to him after a few weeks/months of use, taking control of his actions and eventually subduing his will with pain, he happily murders a bunch of people, some unarmed in cold blood, but nobody really cares. The AI chip gets replaced with a fresh, untrained one, meaning it only buys time - yet even in the "several years later" epilogue that either never became a problem again or is handwaved away by having another character assist him.
Rugal starts as a somewhat simplistic yet entertaining show, before going all-out Dumb & Dumber. Sad.
Superman Returns (2006)
I'd rather be boned by CR9
...or CR7, as he's now called, than watch this. Both prospects are of roughly equal homo-erotic content. In retrospect, CR9/CR7 would have been done a lot faster (no offense to the Portuguese!), though, and thus could have saved me hours of indescribable suffering at the hands of whoever wrote and directed this junk. The "story", what remnants you may find of one, is 85% predictable and 150% painful, and really not worth discussing here. We basically revisit some other junky Superman movie (that admittedly was bearable when I was 10, simply due to the fact that 10-year-olds are not all that terribly judgmental), and now have Kevin Spacey as Lex, but Lex as usual doesn't do anything noteworthy and is about the least interesting villain of the 80s (or whenever he was conceived). His evil antics aren't really interesting, there's no character development during the movie, we get to experience a few obvious-from-the-start plot twists, and then it's over again as Superdude rises into space, to float about doing just about nada.
Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen (2006)
A report, no documentary.
Wortmann's "Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen" does not really contain anything you would've missed watching the World Cup on TV (in Germany), it does not contribute additional in-depth information about tactics or any other part of the German team's methods - yet it does a good job at summing up an event millions won't forget. Its arguably strongest scene is right at the beginning, showing the team crushed in the dressing room right after losing the semi-finals to Italy. Other than that it follows the German team throughout the 2006 World Cup, showing many nice anecdotes and avoiding any criticism of the team itself, true to Klinsmann's spirit.
Le Cinquième Élément (1997)
Wonderful mix of everything a good movie needs
Director Luc Besson manages it to blend action, comedy, romance and sci-fi into one, absolutely fantastic, masterpiece. Just about everything about this movie is perfect, good examples being the music and the special effects. The story and screenplay are very believable and make you forget that you are just watching a movie.