jon-1749 Reviews

A.D. The Bible Continues (2015)

Ruined by being a primetime network TV show

[7/10 · 5 April 2015]

I'll give it to the producers of A.D. that the set work, the costumes, and the camera work, including the post-processing, make for some amazing imagery. This is a beautiful, visually breathtaking production. And the script of A.D. is definitely predisposed to illustrate the insecurities of mankind's establishments.

A.D. has been compared to House of Cards and Game of Thrones, presumably because of production value, script writing, and acting, and I suppose I can also see some parallels in how any story demonstrating insecurities of rulers and leaders can compare to those other shows. However, now that the first episode has been released, I'm a bit skeptical that the comparison is appropriate, as House of Cards and Game of Thrones both appear on advertisement-free cable television or Netflix, so the quality of script and pacing for those is not disrupted by so tight a viewing timeframe with each episode. Whereas, A.D.'s rushed pacing makes it a bland, shouty experience with little opportunity to delve into character development, except perhaps with Jesus's disciple Peter, who's portrayed as a bit of a mindlessly unstable schizophrenic, with Caiaphas, the Jewish leader who demanded Jesus's crucifixion, and with the Roman governor Pilate, who's portrayed with some odd and cliché melodrama as he argues with his wife.

Nowhere in any of this first episode, which quickly featured the crucifixion of Jesus within 10 minutes, was a single portrayal of Jesus' teachings portrayed. For anyone who is not familiar with the teachings of Jesus, having zero demonstrative hints of the backstory of who this man was and what he taught makes for a pretty meaningless crucifixion scene and honestly it makes the disciples look like a bunch of teary-eyed little alternate-worldview scamps running around that need to get cleaned up. I frankly find it difficult not to sit there and take the side of Caiaphas and Pilate when I imagine myself in the position of an uneducated unbeliever. All I'd ask for is five or ten minutes of one or two snippets of Jesus' sermons.

Instead, the best we get is Peter saying, "We're fishermen. Not fighters. We preach love." Or something like that. But for all the viewer knows, that's just this character's rough interpretation. We have no idea that he really was saying that this is what Jesus got at--that Jesus said, "You've heard it said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I tell you, if someone strikes you on the cheek, turn to him the other cheek. If someone steals your cloak, don't deny him your tunic also." No, you get none of this, you just get a bunch of angry Roman and Jewish leaders and Jesus disciples literally freaking out, about what, we're not actually shown.

I do realize that "it's been done". And I'm relieved that at least "The Bible Continues" is part of the official name for this show, as it tells the viewer that this is "sequel material". And knowing that there's more to come I can forgive the re-casting. But for a watchable sequel show you don't continue without a "let's review" snippet to go over just a tidbit of backstory you need to know. But that's exactly what they left out. With the exception of the time shown on the cross, the portrayal of Jesus probably had 2 minutes of screen time, just long enough to keep quiet until confirming the claim of being the Messiah.

None of this was the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was the pacing style. Dialogs play out like another rushed episode of CSI. No one has much of a chance to breathe, much less take more than a couple seconds to ponder and let the viewer empathize with a thoughtful beat. Disciples are realistically emotional, but there's zero character development to appreciate their pain; they might as well be kooks who lost their crazy leader.

The most "reflective" moment, during which Peter, Caiaphas, and Pilate are sitting around in introspection, their thoughts verbalized and echoing like the forced cliché that this method is, lasts a whopping 15 seconds or so combined before being interrupted by another earthquake. All we're missing is the "OOOOoooooommmmmm" musical sound effect that everyone uses in high energy screen "art".

All this to say, A.D. so far is a rush of a viewing experience, and not in a good way. I can only hope that the series will continue into less charted territory. There are meanwhile 2000 years of story in Christendom worth exploring beyond the deaths of the disciples and the fall of Jerusalem, most of which are probably not scoped within forthcoming episodes of this series because "The Bible Continues" as part of the title precludes stories not scoped to the context of the Bible.

Under the Dome (2013–2015)

Really, really bad writing for an otherwise interesting premise

[5/10 · 6 July 2014]

This is an interesting show with an interesting sci-fi / fantasy premise. Unfortunately, the episodes' writers and production team themselves suffered from a "we don't know what the heck we're writing here, we're just gonna keep you entertained in each individual episode". There is a story that moves forward from episode to episode, but several nuances and even aspects that were very huge just a few episodes prior become completely abandoned and betrayed.

** SPOILERS BELOW **

For example, in one of the middle episodes of season one, the world outside put on a big show of "goodbye" which it turns out because the military would nuke the whole village, but this strange dome ended up protecting its contents. For the next couple episodes, as I recall, the whole area just outside the dome was, well, nuked, completely barren. But by the last few episodes, the whole town just outside the dome is back again, green and lush with the same neighborhood that was there before it was all nuked, as if nothing back then had happened.

The whole "the butterfly is the monarch!" thing followed by the "you're the monarch!" and "he's the monarch!" and "she's the monarch!" played like a horribly played game of duck-duck-goose.

Some of the main characters are utterly unbelievable as human beings. "Junior", a fully grown young man who jumps from insane and imprisoning a former lover, to sane and competent and entrusted with a badge. A female top cop gullibly believes everything one guy (Big Jim) says and does the most ridiculous actions no cop would ever do, like tell everyone not to touch an alien lit-up device but then she goes and touches it herself, for no reason, at her own injury.

The show retained my attention to cause me to binge-watch, but by the end of Season One I was mostly irritated I got suckered into such a stupid mess of sometimes-consistency-sometimes- betrayal-all-the-time-just-entertaining "whateverness".

Flight (I) (2012)

Filth, filth, and more filth. Little to do with the title.

[2/10 · 28 June 2014]

First second into it, one of the most beautiful women gets out of bed completely nude. Next three minutes she's just chilling in front of the camera, nude, smoking a cigarette, while the star blabbers on the phone, until he sucks narcotic drugs through his nostrils. Next we see him getting on a plane as a pilot, boozing up his orange juice. Next scene we see some drug addict begging for drugs. The dealer is shooting a porn flick in the background and begging her to shoot porn for him. Next scene is a relevant scene for the title--some flight action. Great. Next scene the drug addict is threatened with rape. Then she notices a syringe, as if ready to shoot up. It wasn't until this point I walked out on the movie. THIS FILTH IS NORMAL ENTERTAINMENT NOW?

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

You must watch it with the lens of a decade of TOS reruns

[9/10 · 8 June 2014]

The only way to watch and enjoy this movie is to first watch the episodes of the entire Original Series immediately before watching this movie, along with the production backstory featurettes. You must understand the era that the franchise was born out of, and what people had grown accustomed to, which was a decade, literally, of The Original Series re-runs as the only Star Trek franchise available to be seen anywhere, not including the Animated Series. You must fall in love with the Enterprise, which is the star of the show, and with the characters of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. And most importantly you must appreciate that ten years is a very long time in fandom time to wait for anything to be made of the franchise. What you see here in this movie is love, absolute unadulterated love, of the Enterprise, now having been revamped and updated. You must picture yourself being there as Spock walks onto the bridge and everyone in the theater is so tickled to see that old friend waltz right in amongst his friends. And you must genuinely empathize with Spock's backstory to understand and feel his anguish has he fights the emotions of love he feels for his friends. You must also watch this movie appreciating that the majority of the Star Trek episodes consisted of ridiculous god-like superpowers imposing themselves upon the Enterprise or else upon entire planets and solar systems, and the studios just didn't have the technology nor the money to properly demonstrate it, but now, finally, they do. You must imagine how it must have felt to be in the production executive staff, now having technology and money to be unleashed to pour out over the love and attention to every little thing they really wanted to portray that they couldn't with their tiny budget series. The whole sequence (or two) of just ogling over the Enterprise with the wonderful symphonic orchestra is intended to be a delightful ceremony of infatuation. If you can't build yourself up to love and appreciate what this family of producers were creating, you'll hate this movie. Otherwise, you'll cherish this movie as one of your favorites.

Star Trek: The Savage Curtain (1969) Season 3, Episode 22

Truly Awful and Stupid

[2/10 · 7 June 2014]

If this is "true Star Trek" then Star Trek is nothing but a bunch of fanciful fantasy buffoonery. Abraham Lincoln shows up on screen, saying he's the real deal, but can't explain why, and Kirk has absolutely no guard up. Huh?! Then they all beam down to a volcanic planet and go through another arena experience as heroes versus famous evil folks duke it out with sticks and stones, a fight hosted by .. eh, I don't remember .. oh that's right, a ROCK MONSTER, one that dances a little when fighting commences. The ending had NO MORAL, of course Kirk and his closest cronies survive because the series must go on so this is no spoiler, but really I didn't pick up that anything really happened. The aliens responsible for this didn't learn anything about human philosophy, and Kirk and the crew didn't grow from the experience either. Just a total waste of time.

I'm utterly shocked and confused that "Spock's Brain" is so frequently referenced as the worst TOS episode yet this one isn't. I'm going through the whole series and this one takes the cake. There's no sci-fi, no interesting dialog, no lessons, it's like a stupid bad dream, as if the writers sat down cobbled together the most formulaic Star Trek ideas (hallucinations, arena fighting) and slapped it into a script without any intention to produce anything interesting except only to ogle the history of Abraham Lincoln's presumed personality. This is beyond meaninglessly stupid and a waste of time.

Sarah Palin's Alaska (2010– )

More a politician's family adventures, less a political ad

[9/10 · 22 January 2014]

Although I was raised in a conservative Christian family and my mother adores Sarah Palin, I was not a huge fan of hers. I share her values, but I am not persuaded that she has the legal and political skill and prowess; she would be another W. at best.

That said, this show is not about her political campaigns. It's about the human being that is Sarah Palin taking a number of exciting outdoor adventures in Alaska. Some of these adventures, such as fishing and hunting, are routine for Sarah. Some of them were clearly scheduled for the show as a new, fresh adventure that Sarah hadn't experienced much or at all before.

That Sarah is a politician is not completely lost in this show; she makes a number of comments about her career as a politician, and we see her taking on television and radio interviews from time to time as well as making the rounds with the locals making political friends. And as she narrates the show (this is her show, after all), it's a no-brainer expectation that she would regularly try to use rhetoric about her adventures in Alaska as analogous to her political career. But really this stuff takes a back seat--way back seat. You come away from this show seeing Ms Palin as Wonder Woman (one of her friends on the show calls her "Amazon Woman'), not so much "governor", "vice-president", or some other officer of the state or United States. (On the other hand, isn't that just the sort of material America needs in office? Less white collar, more blood, sweat, and tears... That's definitely the message Sarah and her followers want portrayed by this show.)

And actually, the show proves less about Sarah than about her kids. Say what you will about their family (the term "idiots" has been used in these reviews, and I'm willing to bet that such reviewers were not so bright in their youth either), these people are real and down-to-earth, and while one would expect them to be seriously affected for better or for worse by Sarah's publicity, and they certainly aren't unaffected, they still seem, in my opinion, true to who they are. They're not idiots, they're people. One of Sarah's kids is retarded; you really feel like you're getting a transparent view of a vulnerable home, and I appreciate that glimpse.

The adventures that they have are quite interesting, if indeed one finds fishing, hunting, panning for gold, kayaking, and other great Alaskan adventures to be interesting. If not, skip, there's too much of it. But the adventures definitely give a picturesque view of Alaska, and this show is amazingly gorgeous in high definition. Get the Blu-ray when it comes out!!

Bedtime Stories (2008)

I'm 33, and, knowing it's for kids, I actually enjoyed this

[6/10 · 23 August 2010]

All the hate from viewers who hated this movie comes from their idiocy in their failure to see and understand the very first images of the movie: the turning pages of a pop-out storybook, which morphed into a real-world set and characters. Yes this has been done a few million times before, but because of the extent at which they try to build up the correlation with ridiculous themes in this storybook artwork, I saw that and immediately knew what Disney was trying to say: treat NOTHING in this movie with any relativity to modern-day reality, and watch this from an imaginative child's perspective. As one who grew up as an introverted child who would sit around and daydream silly stories like these, it gave me good memories of enjoying my own imaginative mind.

There are some movies types that I truly abhor. Practically any CGI-oriented Eddie Murphy movie is garbage to me. Whenever Hollywood uses CGI animals and invokes stupid toilet humor and childish jokes just for the sake of pumping out dorky, silly content for the big screen and fill the time I find it difficult to watch.

But for some reason, even though this movie had much of the same elements, it really didn't rub me the wrong way this time, and I think it's because the movie writers came back and said to the audience, over and over and over again, BE A 7-YEAR-OLD AGAIN.

I really enjoyed the character who played the old germ-phobic hotel owner. He was particularly well-casted and his part was true to the role.

I'd rate it 9/10 but three stars are removed for just painfully boring villains, a head-scratchingly confusing setup between the protagonist and the three gorgeous women in the movie, annoying story holes, and a tired Disney-typical climactic finale we've seen hundreds or thousands of times.

But I still enjoyed the movie. I was actually laughing really hard in a couple places. I will never think of the song Hokey Pokey in the same light again .. I was almost on the floor laughing when that song came up and was used the way it was ..

Stargate Universe (2009–2011)

A mini-series style plot that is engrossing and compelling

[9/10 · 17 October 2009]

Four shows in, I must say that I believe that this is going to be a fantastic series and likely my favorite television/movie franchise, ever. Right up there with the Star Wars movies.

I've seen all the Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis episodes and have them all on DVD. I saw SG-1's Episode 200 and laughed with the rest of you. SG-1 had a certain campy feel to it that was sometimes nauseating and yet at the same time, for the same reason, quite endearing when associated with characters I'd grown to love for so long. I rolled my eyes at the swift extremities of Atlantis (such as the notion of the whole city flying around the galaxy like a butterfly and then nestling back into its old home, and particularly but not limited to its dorky ending with a certain recognizable element in the ocean's clear view) while at the same time greatly enjoying the extent of the writers' imaginations and the personalities of the cast of both series.

I also saw Battlestar Galactica. It had elements I loved, but it also had elements I hated. The extremities of drama were too much to handle. I own all those DVDs as well, except for the last season but I did watch it. BSG had a great ending but the series was ridiculous, and I can fully understand why SGU commenters are annoyed by similarities to BSG.

So it's true that SGU has similarities to BSG. Putting myself in the writers' seat, I can imagine them being humbled and "put in their place" by the successes of the BSG franchise even while Stargate SG-1 was wrapping up and Atlantis moving forward, because BSG had elements both on and off screen that set it apart from nearly every sci-fi franchise that had been released. BSG had the shaky cameras and the "live, no, really truly live action" feel of the drama and interplay. It also had an emotional intensity that few shows reproduce, and unfortunately that emotional intensity was simply too much to handle for a lot of us, which is why I found BSG difficult to keep watching. But from what I can tell, SGU is trying hard to strike a balance. Yes, there are elements of BSG style of storytelling, in that it's dark, gritty, and, in a nod to BSG's chaotic conflict resolutions, you don't feel quite as much like a happy ending is staged like you always felt with SG-1. The emotional mood of SGU's start is reminiscent, somewhat, of BSG's crew after the initial attack. The lighting is dark, and some people are worn so thin emotionally that they nearly have a nervous breakdown. (And then some.)

But that's where the similarities end. All of SGU's nods towards BSG are just nods, not all-out reproductions. SGU doesn't have hardly any of the annoying camera-shaking gritty style. SGU doesn't take BSG's extremities and push them further. It is rather a smooth balance in the middle between SG-1's Fun & Campy Adventures and BSG's dark melodrama in some distant location in the universe. The fact is, like the movies The Matrix and Star Wars permanently affected science fiction film-making standards and moviegoers' expectations permanently, BSG and Firefly and their extreme popularity affected television film-making permanently. Directors must adjust to changing times. SG-1 and Atlantis simply don't cut it anymore. And to be quite honest, there was a severe lack of quality television sci-fi entertainment that struck a balance between the extremities of each franchise.

In fact, I'd say SGU feels a lot more like Firefly's more suspenseful episodes than BSG's typical episodes. However, the cast of SGU are far more in number than in Firefly so there is, so far, less up front endearment to the characters. With a few exceptions, SGU requires a long-term investment in these characters as they develop, slowly.

To that end, SGU is so far very refreshing. It has just enough of the real Stargate elements (the background of the Ancients, the cameo appearances of SG-1 members, and the all-important requirement for the sense of adventure that the stargate itself offers, not to mention the technical knowledge retained) for me as a Stargate franchise fan to believe that this really is Stargate, and absolutely no shortcuts or compromises were made to that end like the Star Trek redux movie had. But it also has just enough balance of BSG-style qualities to swallow me in, including *extremely* high-quality and engrossing visual effects (if less of them than in SG-1 or Atlantis), actors that don't seem like mannequins, and a dark and suspenseful plot that is much further away from the comforts of home than even Atlantis was.

It must be stated that perhaps the biggest similarity to BSG is that there is, at least so far, no "back to where we started" type of resolution to each episode. This has a mini-series epic feel. The first season is all about simply surviving, even while getting just enough tiny bits and pieces of adventure to keep it entertaining. I can understand why some people may have already given up. If I didn't already check GateWorld.net to get an idea of what's to come, I'd be suspicious, too, that this series will really go anywhere besides continuous hopelessness and boring claustrophobic drama. But I did check. And I can say that this is going to be a wild ride. The first four episodes so far have been like climbing that first hill. We reached the top of the hill at the end of the fourth episode. From here .. well, you'll all see. I'm sure of it.

I really can't wait, though, for the exciting season finale episodes. I'm salivating in anticipation over what's promised.

This is DEFINITELY a series to get on Blu-ray, once it comes out on disc. Surprisingly, there are no placeholder pages for it yet on Amazon.com.