morandb Reviews

Knives Out (2019)

Cringe. Uninvolving mystery. Uninvolving characters in extended cameos.

[3/10 · 16 April 2022]

The script (not "plot") seemed design to provided slightly extended cameos for actors with recognizable names, but not enough to make to make any of them credible suspects, even briefly.

Daniel Craig's attempt at a southern accent has been much criticized, but even worse, the particular dialect was not a fit to the physical presentation of the character: Craig's appearance and to how he moved. Every time he spoke, I had a strong urge to stop watching.

A character's throwing-up whenever she lied was worse than lazy screenwriting -- it seemed intended as a deliberate insult to the audience.

From very early on, I felt like I should just stop watching, but the high rating kept giving me false.

Endeavour: Oracle (2020) Season 7, Episode 1

Jumped the shark

[3/10 · 13 August 2020]

There is negligible plot here. It attempts to create interest by quickly jumping between many threads of the story, but it doesn't work here. All I got was that it was a tremendous waste of time, with artsy technique trying to obscure that the plot was minuscule and obvious.

Bull: How to Dodge a Bullet (2017) Season 1, Episode 21

Horrible script: bad guest character, massive plot holes

[1/10 · 10 May 2017]

The script writer - I use that term generously - has the guest character (played by Eliza Dushku) be impossibly perfect with extensive dialogue discussing how superior she is. If this had been Young-Adult fiction, the character would have been derided as a "Mary Sue".

The script has none of the various features that make the show entertaining, for example there is virtually none of Bull & Co analyzing the individual jurors.

Worse, the script has obvious, head-smacking plot holes.

Dirty Wars (2013)

Dishonest piece of insufferably self-absorbed "journalism"

[1/10 · 7 February 2016]

The "secret" the pseudo-journalist uncovers is not just something that had been prominently in the news for many years before that, but one of the biggest ongoing stories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even if you want to ignore this, the movie is a very ineffective presentation of the problem: It is a slow-paced, low-energy, repetitive narrative of the "journalist" wringing his hands about the events.

It is a waste of time to listen to the "journalist" droning on and on about his indignation about his cluelessness. If you have followed the underlying story, you can be modestly amused by all the obvious mistakes he makes in his "reporting".

Zero Hour (2013)

Unintentionally hilarious, at least for the pilot episode viewed late at night

[12 February 2013]

I watched the pilot online before the official broadcast because friends recommended that it would come across as just plain bad in its broadcast time slot (8/7pm).

--- Emotional reaction ---

The overall tone is hilariously overwrought. The scenes are hacked together. There isn't even an attempt at a pretense of internal logic. Even in the context of a portion of an individual scene, the characters' actions often are absurdly nonsensical. The silliness, stupidity and illogic come flying at you at such a pace it is impossible not to laugh -- I was laughing well past the end of the credits.

Watch it with friends and wine/beer/... and debate questions such as: Is this good enough to be a bad parody of "The Da Vinci Code" and the like? Is Anthony Edwards starring because Nicholas Cage said that there wasn't enough money ...?

--- Analytic reaction ---

Quick cuts between short scenes are typical of this genre, but to be successful, it requires audience involvement, either with the characters or the cause (idea, threat, ...). There is none here.

Nazis as villains is so overdone and outmoded in this and related genres that it hurts audience buy-in. Even if this isn't the case, it is just so badly done -- so over-the-top and comic. This is an enormous red flag that the show's creator has no creativity or imagination.

The genre appears to be race-to-the-treasure. This requires the lead characters to buy into the high-energy craziness, such as Nicholas Cage in the National Treasure series and the gaggle of comics in "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" (1963). Anthony Edwards is badly suited to play this role, both from the type of actor he is and audience expectations from prior role. And worse the script saddles him with two conflicting roles. The other one is that of the skeptic/voice-of-sanity (comic relief, exposition, whatever). Although the actor is much better suited to this role, the writers give him no support (I remember only one line, and it was a throw-away). The Anthony Edwards character could have been the "reluctant hero", but actor and the setup in the pilot preclude this.

There are multiple statements by characters to tell the audience that things are not what they seem, but rather than ambiguous hints to draw you in, they are ham-handed signals that the writers don't have the finesse to handle this genre.

Last Resort (I) (2012–2013)

Headshakingly stupid and ridiculous; another proxy for high school

[2/10 · 14 October 2012]

Ignore this review if you are part of ABC's target demographic (Grey's Anatomy, Revenge, Scandal, Nashville, ...) because this show is very much in that vein.

However, if you come to the show based on its ads, you will likely be very disappointed. It is a soap opera that makes absolutely no attempt to work within its supposed context, or to even leverage off its context. For example, some of the prominent errors could have been trivially avoided with a simple Wikipedia query. Many reviews talk about all the details, big and small, that this show got unnecessarily wrong. I spotted so many that my expectation is that it would be far quicker to list what it got right.

The characters are similarly ridiculous. My reaction to many of the male characters was that those parts were written for women. The third lead character Lt. Grace Shepard is played by an actress (Daisy Betts) who brings to mind Anne Hathaway in both appearance and mannerism, and this makes it hard not to notice that her story line seems inspired by "The Princess Diaries".

Even if your knowledge of the military and the Navy comes only from a couple of good movies or novels, you will constantly be saying "Wrong", "No way", "Stupid" and "Why the **** would s/he do that?".

And the politics underlying the events would seem absurd even if the national and international leaders were 14 year-old psychopaths.

I have to believe that ABC got a pitch for yet-another show that was a proxy for high school and asked to have it tweaked a little. Rather than school itself, how about a field trip? Not an airplane, but a cruise ship. And rather than the usual proxy settings (medical, legal, fashion,...), how about the military? Change that cruise ship to a submarine. And cruise to a exotic location, I know, a Pacific paradise.

Political Animals (2012)

Avoid unless you worship Hillary Clinton

[2/10 · 26 July 2012]

As virtually everyone has observed, this show is transparently a paean to Hillary Clinton. Her Sigourney Weaver avatar is portrayed as something combining a god and a comic book superhero. The dialog lays it on very thickly that she is a supreme being, including inserting praise where the situation does not call for it.

The format is obviously inspired by "The West Wing". It is preachy and has lots of expository dialog, but where "The West Wing" had a rapier, this show has a sledgehammer. TWW's Aaron Sorkin has an incomparable ear for such dialog, but the dialog writers here seem to be fleshing out a PowerPoint presentation.

As of the end of the pilot episode, rather than having empathy for various of the characters, my reaction ranged from dislike to detesting them. The Hillary-avatar has none of the appeal of President Bartlet in "The West Wing".

Too many story lines were introduced in the pilot, and introduced badly. First, they disrupted establishing the key characters, and second, they were largely uninteresting, seeming to have originated from two checklists: one for audience demographics and one for hackneyed plot elements.

I thought the acting was mediocre to poor, with the Bill Clinton character being hammy, with relentless mugging. But this could just be that the actors weren't given good material to work with.

The direction and camera work was poor: In most shows, I am rarely aware of actors hitting their marks and striking poses, but here it just leaped out at me. The artificiality of the visuals compounded/highlighted the artificiality of the dialog (or vice versa).