stuartwhyte300 Reviews

The Desperate Hour (2021)

Many reviewers here are missing the point

[7/10 · 15 September 2023]

I should first admit that, up until the major plot development about 34mins into proceedings, I was thinking about stopping the film & watching something else.

The scripting is a little manipulative of the audience's attention & the main character does seem less than capable as she struggles both to maintain her family & work life and to suitably engage with her 'support network', a year after losing her husband.

Her depressed son obviously lacks "a strong authority figure", so mum takes a 'personal day' off work & jogs off into the deep woods nearby. *Metaphor Alert* :-)

However, with very little acting support (although some good voice actors deserve credit) Naomi Watts carries the film with a very strong performance.

Given the story's focus, I should point out that this film was rated age 11+ on the streaming service I watched it on. There are, unfortunately, quite a few other school shooting films out there, mostly rated 18. Another I recently watched, revolved around the protagonists' actions & motivation from the POV of a student bystander - with, almost inevitably, quite a graphically high body count.

Which would you prefer your kids watch? Or discuss in class with their teacher & fellow students? How would the NRA seek to defend the high prevalence of gun ownership & the relatively easy access to them if your kids' grandma had watched this film & felt strongly that AR-15s should no longer be available to private citizens?

Essentially, for Watts' character to arc from uncertainty whether her son is going to school today, to then dealing with how far he may or may not be involved in a 'live shooter' incident, to her own personal involvement in the story's denouement, is actually quite a lot of work to layer together, whilst maintain pace/tension successfully. (And to signpost a few salient factors for a general audience to digest)

To answer some of the reviews of the "Watts running through the woods talking on her cellphone" variety, how would you describe the plot of The Blair Witch Project? Because when I saw that particular film my first criticism was "Don't park there, you idiots, you'll never find your car again!"

If you don't want to watch someone with literal 'skin in the game' react in real time, despite feelings of abject powerlessness, to an unfolding school shooting scenario with little information available, is that because you would rather watch a film about the violent shooting itself?

Manifest (2018–2023)

Narcoleptic Melodrama

[2/10 · 5 July 2022]

There is a point after the basic plot is drawn out when several episodes return to the premise, the plane in a storm & picks out an individual passenger/character whose story forms the plot of that episode. Dull though this sounds, this would be more interesting that what actually unfolds.

A lot of the acting & shot composition is poor.

There is a specific scene in Ep.12 which is surreally bad/funny: A missing child's sketchbook is explained to be a portent of future events. "This next one shows... us right now." A lame child's sketch of three adults looking at a piece of paper cuts to the same scene composition in camera. A lame child's camera shot surely?

Everything seems unintentionally wooden & comic thereafter.

The Card Counter (2021)

You will need to use your imagination and not simply 'tilt'.

[7/10 · 17 June 2022]

A man with an unusual talent for keeping a close awareness of every card in play in a simple game of chance uses this talent to gamble modestly, always ensuring he keeps ahead of 'the house' without attracting undue attention.

He meets a young man with a plan for revenge against a mutual enemy. The young man is naive, has no real idea of the full circumstances involved and seems motivated purely by emotion & loss.

The man, wishing to help by convincing him against revenge, offers to travel with him to keep him safe from enacting his plan.

To achieve this, The man seeks backing from a third party who normally he would not associate himself with as it will cost him his autonomy, exposes him to greater scrutiny & may mean he cannot return to his previously chosen game / anonymous pathway through life.

The literal game change is to play directly against other participants for far higher stakes rather than playing against 'the house' to consolidate your advantages.

Things go badly and everybody is compromised.

No-one was keeping count. Least of all the man expected to do so. The game continues without him & without conclusion or closure.

Perhaps other reviewers here might not have been fully cognisant of the US 'war on Terror' & the unlawful incarceration and torture of 'enemy combatants' at numerous 'black sites' around the world or of the political decisions behind the wars in the Middle East.

They should however have an understanding of metaphor, analogy & storytelling if they take film seriously. Patience is a given too.

The Card Counter may not have succeeded fully in its objectives. Perhaps Schrader's handle on the story is too tight & understated. His heightened yet obtuse style is not always well deployed.

It is well shot & directed with good performances and avoids many of the commonplace cliches & pitfalls when covering this sort of subject matter.

Some post production issues. The soundtrack is quite minimal then suddenly leaps out to not always ideal effect. The editing seems a little removed from the context of the acting although the flashbacks are very tightly controlled. The overall mood of the film is sombre & a little oppressive.

Schrader is a little old fashioned (as ever?) and may demand more from modern audiences than they are willing to give but to judge a film with minimal action as boring without attributing any motivation or meaningful purpose to a protagonist 'with a past to redeem' is a mistake.

Domino (I) (2019)

Cartoon, offensive drivel by numbers.

[2/10 · 1 November 2021]

A terrible police procedural riddled with plot holes & a contempt for the viewing audience.

There are episodes of Ben10 with better characterisation & convincing storyline than this.

Not sure why it reached netflix at all.

Into the Night (II) (2020–2021)

Persevere with subtitles / original dialogue

[8/10 · 9 June 2020]

This is a good series and I anticipate a follow-up second run. The drama starts at a good pace and the characters develop through the dialogue/action with a few flashbacks in later episodes to fill out motivation or introduce contradictions. The cast perform well and camera work is unobtrusive. I watched the original dub with english subtitles over two days and it delivered, hence 8 stars. I did find some reviews here unnecessarily harsh, so I watched the first episode again but with the english dubbed dialogue & english subtitles. Wow, there is a huge drop-off. It is quite difficult to engage with these voice performances. A bit more time and money should have been spent on versioning. it's not just a matter of lip-sync dissonance, voices are flat, undeveloped & poorly mixed. Plot points are scattered about without emphasis as if we are hearing a first rehearsal and no-one has read ahead. Many of the Netflix European dramas are treated with poor post-production versions which detract from good original material. I'm no purist and understand that dialogue (and subtitles) will stretch in translation & when working to picture but this could be so much better.

Devs (2020)

Yes, I get it but I don't really want to watch a story that could have been written 30 years ago

[4/10 · 29 March 2020]

I found this interesting and disappointing by turns throughout all 5 episodes so far. Episode 5 does do some interesting reviewing/editorialising with the 'story so far' but even this is rather cheesy and off - if visually interesting with some necessary box ticking character build-out and plot gap filler patching. I tended to get the feeling that this production, whilst it initially feels of good quality in individual and even some cohering aspects, will date quite badly so as to appear anachronistic and cultish in future. A page turning melodrama made for a streaming service on weekly episode release isn't surprising but then perhaps neither is the slew of overly positive reviews popping up on here to 'balance out the negatives' gushing things such as "I was hooked immediately" or "it's the perfect balance of x, y & z" Sometimes a well-recorded and expertly mixed record just points out how poorly written the song was.

NB whether a post-production versioning error or wanton obliqueness, the scenes with father & daughter playing Go together were not subtitled from their mother tongue.

Locke & Key (2020–2022)

Better if compressed into a feature length pilot for a better written series with depth & nuance which is desperately lacking here.

[3/10 · 25 February 2020]

I liked the premise of this series and thought it chimed well with themes and concepts I'd enjoyed in other works before.

Unfortunately, a series which should have been aiming for a Guillermo Del Toro / Stephen King or perhaps a Herny James / Edgar Allen Poe gothic style of narrative tension slipped too easily into a sort of mash-up of the lesser parts of Buffy, Scooby Doo and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

As no-one at Netflix seems to have yet realised, dramatic, suspenseful stories involving teenagers rarely ever need the unconvincing and dull high school locker/corridor cliches so often employed to socially benchmark their leading characters. The audience-relatable outcomes are consistently poor and most likely you invert the sympathies of the viewer against your otherwise stoic heroes.

Also, another piece of dramatic shorthand used here - that should have been excised at script review - is the post-climactic family-gathers-for-breakfast-next-day scene. When your characters are hollow ciphers, lacking in drive and subtlety, the mundane chit chat of 'normality' only highlights the abundance of flimsy dialogue, clunky interplay and poor execution of both the set piece stunts and the expositional interludes elsewhere.

The flashbacks to previous periods seemed arrhythmic and often necessitated whole episodes of wool-gathering explainers to bring back a sense of coherence and volition. It felt like one of those MasterChef challenges where a 2nd competitor has to guess what their predecessor was trying to cook and aims to improve upon it before handing over to another competitor who tears their hair out before a final slapdash completion.

What should have been a sharp, snappy, solid bouncing ball of dynamic magic-realism and multi-foiled mystery was exposed as a weak, sagging helium balloon of humdrum novelty - albeit with a shiny, prepossessing surface.

Red Dawn (2012)

A film for which the entire concept of "spoilers" is irrelevant.

[1/10 · 24 February 2020]

If you can understand rudimentary stick men cartoons and have ever been amongst a group of six year olds pretending to fight a war with imaginary "dadadadadadah!" machine guns, then you need never watch this film.

If not, then by all means, watch without any plot issues being given away here.

For the still curious ( maybe Starship Troopers fans? ) I can say that;

i) the story is set up in the first three minutes.

II) there is some very dodgy voice-over narrative about half an hour in.

iii) there is an unforeseen and wholly lamentable 'pep talk' scene at commencement of the final reel action sequence.

iv) The pep talk also provides a desperately needed 'MacGuffin'.

-Why did this ever get made?

I can only imagine there was a redundant 'main street suburbia' film lot that needed demolishing before re-development and that some contractual obligations were long overdue to tie up.

Or perhaps the NRA has a tax-efficient youth film fund?

8 Days (2019)

Perhaps a more maturely realised end of the world drama.

[8/10 · 19 February 2020]

I managed to spread this mini-series over two days but it was pretty compellingly viewing all the same. Quite nice to have a guilt-free apocalypse saga for a change. A huge ambivalent asteroid will crash to earth and a US attempt to obliterate it in space failed. Ho hum. No need therefore for all those ridiculous flag-filled 'Incident room' scenes with telemetry screens, telex printers, flashing LEDs, multi-starred generals thumping desks, a relentless hunt against the clock to find the antidote / expert nerd / brave hero who could save mankind etc etc. Instead a mesh of interconnected individuals surrounding a central family unit in a comfortable, suburban Berlin milieu fight to make sense of their imminent death/survival options against a backdrop of contorting societal breakdown. The heart of the story is delivered early on by the terminally ill character who has read and explains about the five psychological stages of death/bereavement. However, the diversity of character, back story and dramatic arcs within the series is exemplary in developing these themes. The acting is also very good. Each of the characters faces multiple challenges and painful setbacks and each, for the most part, continues to rally themselves in defiant hope of salvation (of one sort or another). Often this is achieved by the simple dramatic means of awakening on the floor from last night's drinking. There are areas of relief, sentiment and human insight to be found amongst the stress, carnage, hedonism and self-interest and I feel this helps to serve a broad audience well. I would also give final commendation for the naturalistic photography and economical editing throughout all 8 episodes.

The Breadwinner (2017)

Faithful to the actuality of the story

[8/10 · 4 February 2020]

This is another superb animated feature from Cartoon Saloon (in co-production with Canadian and Luxembourgian production houses). It differs from their previous features in that it is an adaptation of a prominent, young adult novel rooted in contemporary, Taliban-era Afghanistan. What all three share is exceptional care taken in all aspects of production. Colour palettes are rich, animation is paced to suit narrative arcs, voice casting, sound design and music all propel the plot and enrich the visual style. In keeping with the subject matter, The Breadwinner is faithful to the everyday actuality described in the story; daylight can be harsh, the streets noisy and dusty, dialogue is sparse or often confrontational but this is juxtaposed with the considered portrayal of Parvana's family's interior life, their strong love for each other in desperate circumstances and the film still retains elements of pleasure, humour, storytelling and fantasy to punctuate and re-frame the impossible choices inflicted upon the characters. As is often the case with an adaptation from a book, I believe the plot has been somewhat simplified but (whilst not a reader of the book myself) I don't feel there is any loss to the momentum. The film's impact is still felt for some time after viewing and I fell that it's themes will (unfortunately) remain relevant for some time to come.

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (2020)

Great series

[9/10 · 27 January 2020]

Beatifully realised series. Exceptional backdrop artwork, good characters. Sympathetic scoring and entertaining original songs make the music integral to the storytelling. Very glad my youngest turned 7 just as this was released.

Phantom Boy (2015)

very engaging kids film with natural warmth and jeopardy

[8/10 · 15 October 2016]

Our young family watched Phantom Boy today at the London Film Festival and really enjoyed the experience. The film has been dubbed into English and the dialogue runs smoothly - doing most of the story-telling in a nuanced, personable and fluid way.

It unfolds as a, perhaps slightly old fashioned, detective story. Leo's ability to travel out of his body is a very useful device to access remote places and to eavesdrop on others actions to help the story along. This also acts an intermediary or buffer to the film's action, helping to flag up wrong-doing, violence and other risks in a mediated manner, which works well for young viewers.

There are hints of the seriousness of Leo's Illness via the private worries of his parents, some physical violence and threatening use of guns but the emotional challenge is not overwhelming and the narrative pace carries you through.

Both our kids said they would want to see the film again and it will probably become a DVD favourite at home, for some time to come. The animated style is more hand-drawn in appearance and not as glossy or heavily automated as major studio animated films can be. This give a certain lightness of touch and warmth to what would otherwise be rather gritty, noir-ish city backdrops.

My only criticism would be the speed with which the story was established and characters introduced. A few minutes more focusing on Leo's arrival at hospital and the discovery and use of his special powers would have pleased me.

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)

An evocative and beautiful expansion on an old story

[7/10 · 15 July 2016]

This is an ensemble cast although the leads are exemplary in their service of the story. Scenes are well timed and the landscapes, locations, framing and art direction are quite exceptional when compared the film-making shown in other, perhaps more generic, films released contemporaneously (and since).

What the film does well is to marry the fantastical / allegorical content of the tale with a human / natural context. The locations provide suitable backdrop to the primary tone and emotion of particular scenes which should carry the viewer and the set design for close action and dialogue-driven parts are realistically executed, life-worn and substantial.

Possibly what is less well achieved is the overall 'package' of the film. I watched this at home and was able to pause and return to the film. If I had been in the theatre my attention may have strayed or it may have been fatigued by the volume of the well written score.

It seems unfair to haunt this film with criticism based upon the previous roles played by the cast. The optical impact, restrained visual effects, and story drive are to be most engaged with not the (unfortunately?) familiar starring actors.

Quest for Love (1971)

wow!

[8/10 · 24 September 2014]

Firstly, I applaud jekyll-booty1's review. Secondly this film, when watched as I did, mesmerised, from the first rather expositional minutes of set-up, is beautifully engaging to behold. The premise is so easy to go with, that the actual acting performances shine far beyond the mere scripting of character and circumstance would seem to allow. We want the alternative universe's possibility to live beyond the, somewhat jaded, actuality that provokes the sewer as the impossible, alternative, romance unfolds. Tom Bell does his profession justice. Joan Collins gets a bit of careful soft-focus allure but still runs well with the rather restrictive role the script provides her with (air hostess ?). A cracking TV film for an otherwise dreary mid-week slot, but so above the other too pedestrian fodder offered. Remarkable both for it's evergreen poignancy and it's disdainful yet life-affirming regard for one's world-weary, all-too-knowing, regrets and schadenfreude.

Coma (2012)

Horrendous

[2/10 · 6 June 2013]

When making Trainspotting Danny Boyle described the film as something of 'a remix' of the source book to allay any fears of viewers who had read and would perhaps feel allegiance to the cult phenomenon of the Irvine Welsh novel. To corrupt that same analogy, this production of Coma is like a bad 80's 12" version of the (rather schlocky) original 70s film. Some scenes are very faithfully/slavishly reproduced to seemingly mimic the original film. I know the source material is the same but exactly the same shots are employed without further thought or creativity. So there is familiarity in places for those who've seen the other one. But the over-riding feel is one of jarring cliché, unrealistic 'lifestyle gloss' applied to the characterisation and art direction and most problematically a lot of condescending exposition and spoon-feeding of plot without any regard for tension or pacing. The cumulative effect is of an overlong, corrosively hallucinatory 'bad trip' with dialogue and acting that create an oppressive air of malevolence that is both reductive and exploitative of the audience.