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Jodro2
Reviews
Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Great visuals, story well told, terrible music and misguided ending
First the positives: the visuals of this movie are wonderful. We watched it recently again, and the CGI still holds up, mostly, is beautifully rendered, and the Beast looks great. The story is also well-told, and having since read up a bit on the many complications of other versions, was expertly pared down to essentials.
Small village narrow-mindedness and mob mentality were also well portrayed. The Beast was portrayed with a good balance between danger and vulnerability, and the transformation in Belle and him from despising each other to mutual love was almost believable. Kevin Klein was also excellent as Belle's father. At two hours the movie did not feel too long, and I recommend it to anyone who wants a visual feast and a decent story well-told.
However, the film has two major drawbacks. The first is a matter of taste, but we found the music toe-curlingly bad. It's in the tradition of mid and early 20th century musicals, and if that's your thing, you'll love it. Perhaps the music was OK for the original version of the movie in 1991, but 25 years later we've had Hamilton, Moana, La La Land, Sing Street, and tons of other musicals with music with modern street cred. Heck, even Frozen had one great song. For anyone who likes rock, hip-hop or other modern genres, the music in B&tB is one big cringe-fest.
Then, I've not seen any comments on this, but one aspect of the ending of the movie really does not work. The Beast dies before the last rose petal falls, and the movie takes another couple of minutes for all the talking objects to freeze, and die. All seems lost. Then the enchantress comes in, and in true deus ex machina fashion, makes everything OK again, who a simple hand gesture, after Belle finally speaks the 'I love you' words to the dead Beast.
Clearly the film makers wanted to create a big moment here, but it completely undermines the entire premise of the movie. Believing in magic and spells is one thing, but the premise of pretty much all fairy tales is that the protagonists have to break the spell under their own steam. I don't know of any other fairy tale in which the enchantress or witch or wizard comes in and breaks or changes the rules, once they are set.
It turns the enchantress into an omnipotent god, who has the power of life and death, and one wonders who she is and why then she allowed other violence and misdeeds, and what the point of the rose was in the first place. Deus ex machina plot moments usually are a weakness, and in this case it really does not work. The fact that the Beast turned out to be far less beguiling in his rather wimpy-looking human form was a minor shortcoming compared to the above.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)
Unintelligible audio, non-descript characters and overlong, boring story.
We had high hopes for this movie, as we're not into action movies, and most Hollywood fare leaves us cold. The movie starts out OK, but we soon realised that none of us could make out more than 50% of what was being said. The youngest in the room was 18, so it was nothing to do with hearing issues. So we started again, with the subtitles switched on.
An hour later the teenager had left the room, my wife, who normally likes this kind of movies, was asleep, and as the minutes slowly crept by, I was trying to work out how long this movie was. I switched off at 75 minutes, thinking it had been 2 hours.
The problems? There are far too many to mention. A shell is rather difficult to empathize with, and while it may work for a 45-minute short, after 75 minutes the main character, with his silly, unintelligible voice, became really grating and boring. Dean also is non-descript and not engaging. Most scenes are too long, but most of all, there are far too many scenes to tell the story. It becomes incredibly repetitive.
We had read that the movie would have messages about friendship and family, but we saw none of that. Saying, in the movie, that it is about these things, does not make it so.
All in all, one of the most boring movies I've ever watched. The reason it gets a few stars is that the concept is cute, and the visuals and animation were well-done. Too bad about a script in which hardly anything happens for 90% of the time, and what did happen left us bored.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Four Minutes (2023)
A confused, depressing, and deeply disappointing ending to a great series.
My wife and I have great enjoyed all the seasons of Mrs Maisel, give or take the odd below-par episode, and found Season 5 excellent (apart from the weird 'Susan" episode). In the last before last episode the makers appeared be setting up even more loose ends that would need to be resolved in the final installment, not least how Midge would actually be getting her big break. So we had high hopes for the final, only to be left feeling totally let down.
The section about the Gordon Ford show and how Midge took her big break instead of it being given to her was well-played and very satisfying. But the rest was a godawful mess. First of all, there are all the many loose ends that are not resolved. Why and how exactly did Joel end up in prison? How long did he stay there? Did Midge and he ever get back together? In an interview in early May of this year, actor Michael Zegen says that even he does not know the answer. Midge blows him a kiss on the Gordon Ford show and touches a photograph of them together in the 2005 scene. But what does this mean?
Moreover, what happens to Midge's kids, and her relationship with them? We finally got to hear the backstory of Susie and Hedy, but what's the relationship between Hedy and Gordon Ford? Why does he owe her enough for her to be able to demand that Midge gets on the show? And how could Ford weasel his way out of this? How did Susie get herself out of the hands of the mob? Until the final episode, Shirley and Moise Maisel couldn't take in that Midge did something of any importance on the Gordon Ford show. How could Shirley suddenly be urging Rose to go and see Midge on the show? What was the point of the opening scene with Lenny Bruce? What was the point of the second scene with Lenny Bruce? Why, the moment Midge has finally got her break, go back half a year earlier to Midge and Lenny having lunch? What was the point? I appreciate the makers didn't want to do a stereotypical Hollywood ending, but to not give viewers any moment of gratification at all after five seasons was just willfully obtuse. The list goes on and on. It's very sloppy writing.
The worst was the final section playing in 2005. First of all, while we understood and liked the shift in Midge that came from that phrase "Don't," which then was repeated by Hedy, and which pushed her into no longer being apologetic about her talents and ambitions, her sudden shift right at the end into naked ambition purely for the sake of fame and success, as she expressed towards the end of her four minutes, was out of character. It suddenly made her unlikable. It was another bit messy bit of writing that an audience that has only just been introduced to her would enthusiastically lap this up. Midge's strength and charm always lay in the combination of her wit and intelligence, and her underlying vulnerability. Successful people also remain vulnerable. Yet all that suddenly disappeared.
In the 2005 section it seemed like she was completely alone (and looking far younger than the 74 years old she's supposed to be) Presumably she either never got together with Joel, or he had died, again we have no idea, her parents had presumably passed away, again there was no sign of her kids, or any of the other people that had populated by the series, and so on. In the end there were just Midge and Susie, reduced to being lonely in their own homes, surrounded by servants, and only connecting long-distance. Did the writers want to illustrate the price people pay for major success? Or was it a celebration of major success? The laughter at the end seems to suggest that the writers thought they were serving up a happy ending. Perhaps living alone in the lap of luxury surrounded by servants is what people living in Hollywood see as the epitome of achievement. To the non-Hollywood viewer it comes across as desperately sad. So perhaps it was some kind of comment on the human condition after all? Who knows. It all felt depressing and at odds with the witty, optimistic, playful tone of the rest of the series.
Ocean's Eleven (2001)
After a mindnumbingly boring first half, we switched off
Clearly, this one-star review is only about the first half of this movie. It is possible, though from our experience of that first half not likely, that the second half is dramatically better.
However, what we (three people) saw in the first half was so mind-numbingly boring, with a bunch of lifeless, soulless, expressionless characters doing very little, very slowly, plus what they do is morally wrong, that we could not stand it anymore, and switched off, depressed.
The movie-makers seem to think that just presenting the biggest stars of the day, particularly Pitt and Clooney, interacting with each other is enough to carry the movie. That might have just about flown in 2001, but more than two-decades later it's a non-starter.
There's no character-development, and hardly any background given. Clooney and Pitt set out on their project for reasons that are never made clear, so we have no idea why we have to sympathize with them, rather than wanting the police to come in and arrest everyone else involved.
The part of the movie that we saw seems to be entirely in love with the actors in it, and itself, and glamorous Las Vegas kitsch, in a way that's a total turnoff. Apart from that the characters are lifeless, the editing is all at the same pace, and barely anything happens. We simply could not get past the smug, borefest that was the first half.
The Lion King (2019)
Terrible, soulless, pretentious nonsense
This movie really left a very bad taste in the mouth. The animation was amazing, hence 2 stars, but there's literally nothing else that's redeeming.
The main character, Simba, shows himself in the early scenes to be arrogant and pretentious, and needlessly puts himself and others in danger. He makes a bunch of bad choices and after he is banned ends up becoming an empty-headed fool of a lion with no depth whatsoever.
Of course, he's an improvement over Scar, but what exactly has Simba done to claim the right to become a king? Just through bloodline, clearly. But in 2019 that's such an old-fashioned concept, it's hard to understand why the film makers present this as a the central premise of the movie, and don't also make, say, good character and wisdom requirements.
There also is no demonstration as to why Simba's father is such a great king, and to justify all the cheering by the animals when his offspring is shown. At one point, after one of Simba's stupid and arrogant transgressions, the king says 'I have to teach my son a lesson.' 'Right you are,' you think as a viewer and wonder how he's going to administer the tough love. But there's nothing of the sort; after a half-hearted telling off they just frolic in the grass. No wonder Simba is so clueless.
Instead of greatness, the king just exudes weariness and talks to Simba about death and about ancestors residing in the stars. This sets up an expectation that Simba will later relate to the stars and find strength there, but no, instead the by then dead king speaks to Simba from a cloud, as the formerly arrogant and by now empty-headed lion clearly does not have the inner capacity to work anything out for himself. His instant transformation from empty-headed fool to challenger for the throne is not credible at all.
To add to all this terrible script writing, the characters have no facial expressions, which is a weird choice, and puts more pressure on great voice acting, and a good script. Instead most of the vocal performances are flat, pompous and without emotion. The music songs also were for the most part dreadful in conception and execution, both musically and visually. Even the orchestral score seems bereft of inspiration and consisted of just a parade of cliches. It's hard to understand how this movie ever saw the light of day.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Lights Out (2020)
Very very funny
This has to be the funniest episode of B99 so far. It truly is hysterical, and very intense, moving at great speed. At times it was pure slapstick. But it still had exactly the right blend of silliness and seriousness--the characters in B99 sometimes get so silly it becomes annoying. It makes it far funnier if one person, in this case Amy, remains relatively normal, and gets annoyed with the others. The old lady ("why don't you just shoot him?") had us all in stitches. What a way to go out just before the pandemic hit.
Billie (2019)
Doc that sets out not to portray Billie Holiday as a victim portrays her as a victim
What is there to say beyond the title? I was really disappointed in this doc, for several reasons. Some of them technical: the timeline was jumbled and very few facts are given. If you didn't know the story of Holiday already, you most likely would feel pretty confused. This would have been excusable if the audio interviews that the journalist apparently spent years collecting would have thrown up a lot of new information, but actually, there was nothing new at all, beyond a few small anecdotes. Perhaps the audio tapes contained nothing new or because of the choices of the film maker, but the audio was a mish-mash of unrelated stories, some of them interesting, some of them not so much, but rarely set in a clear timeline, and mostly of a personal nature. There was almost nothing about what made Billie Holiday such a great singer. Because of this focus on the personal, the end result was for the most part a portrayal of a tragic woman who was a victim of circumstances, exactly what Linda Kuehl had set out to avoid. The main thing this doc had going for it was some great footage of Holiday performing; however, and I may be wrong, some of it looked like it had been colored in.
Batman Begins (2005)
Fantastic first half, OK second half
We really enjoyed the first half of the movie, which gave the backstory of how Bruce Wayne became Batman. It's really well done, with great characterizations and locations, dialogue, an intelligent story-line, and completely different from anything I have seen before with these kind of movies. It was wonderful to get a sense of Wayne/Batman as a person, and the reflections on how to handle loss and misfortune were on-point. The movie has heart. The second half was a more traditional Hollywood action movie. Well done, but not as unique, and Katie Holmes was rather lightweight. But overall a great movie.
Blade Runner (1982)
Pretentious, gory tosh
My teenage son and I watched this movie with high expectations. How disappointed we were. The story, or what passes for it, moves at such a glacial pace, with nothing much happening for most of the time, that we regularly checked our watches. It's difficult to follow what is happening, and why.
Deckard seems to be some kind of anti-hero who bumbles and stumbles his way through his assignments. Without serious luck or having his life saved by replicants, he'd have died in each of the four encounters. We learn nothing about him that would make us identify with him, and it's hard to feel involved in or care for what he does.
Yes, the visuals look great, but the movie seems to be inspired by seventies European art movies, in which dark and gloomy is mistaken for deep and meaningful. The visuals, combined with the slow pace, brooding humans and deranged replicants may have looked cool in 1982, but in 2021 it just comes across as pretentious and shallow.
Every bit of meaning that people seem to project into the movie, they, well, project into it, presumably because it looks dark and gloomy. Plus the movie is sadistic. The violence is gory, and we hated it. It should come with an 18+ rating. I guess it's a new trick to first have a movie rated, and then later edit the gore back in.
The scene in which Roy kills his maker is disgusting, and totally unnecessary. Roy is deranged and traumatized and mad with resentment and hates his maker for the limited life-span he's given. We get it. No need to actually show his sadistic handiwork. Unless you think sadistic violence is deep and meaningful of course. What rubbish.
As an aside, watching this movie in 2021, it's amazing what people in 1982 thought was going to happen in nearly 40 years. Flying cars? Colonizing planets? No hint of something called the Internet? At least a ruined climate comes close to the mark.
The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021)
Cringe-country
Oh dear. This movie has a cool story line and admirable lessons about over-use of smart-phones and the dangers of AI. Kudos for that. But the execution is dreadful.
The most jarring thing for us--and this includes our teenagers, presumably the main age-category this movie is aimed at--is the habit of the movie to every two minutes or so drag the viewer out of the story with some super-clever, supposedly zany moments where the graphic style completely changes, or an actual YouTube video is shown, or rainbows or other irrelevant artifacts parade across the screen, and so on. It means that one's nose is every two minutes rubbed in the fact that this is an animated movie and not real and not serious.
Call us old-fashioned, but for the time we watch a move we like to believe in the universe it portrays. To be pulled out of the movie all the time is just jarring and we ended up with a shoulder-shrug: why watch this zero-second attention span rubbish?
And... is this the new thing? Just before watching this, we tried The Willoughbys, and switched it off after 20 minutes, for this very reason. The most recent The Croods movie was hampered by this weirdness, though not quite as frequently. Have the days of the inherently consistent animated story telling of Ratatouille, The Lion King, How To Train Your Dragon, Studio Gibli, etc, really gone?
Secondly, the movie was far, far, far too long. If it had stopped after the showdown in the shopping mall, we'd have given it 6 out of 10. But after that it continued for half an hour with mawkish, toe-curling, utter cringe, sentimental rubbish. Of course, it moves slowly and inexorably towards the final big shoot-out, which every American movie needs to have, it seems, and omg, is this section cringe and so unrealistic that all credibility and creative tension goes out of the window. The mother gets angry and turns into a robot-destroying, flying, super-hero. Super-cringe. The father and daughter also suddenly have super-powers and surf through the air and kill tons of robots. Cringe. And so on and on.
Of course, physically impossible things happen in most animated movies all the time. But, again, a movie needs to be credible within its own parameters. This movie just doesn't care, anything goes as long as it's deemed funny, whether it's weird colours, weird flags, the YouTube videos, feats that were impossible two seconds earlier, characters turning into superheroes just because they get angry, and so on and on. Despite the on-point messages, sometimes rammed home too explicitly, both our teenagers judged the movie a cringe mess, and we could only agree.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine: The Fugitive, Part 2 (2017)
Violent and shocking ending
We generally greatly enjoy Brooklyn 99, despite occasional story lines and actions by the characters that are so childish and silly that they become annoying. But in general the program has real heart, the characters are (mostly) credible and sometimes grow and learn new things, the inclusive values are great, and any violence is fairly minimal, and played for comedic effect and in no way disturbing.
Until this episode. The very last second is so shockingly violent and so out of character that we could not believe it and were in shock. If the event had happened in an action movie, it would have been OK, as one is prepared for it. But this is a gentle comedy, for crying out loud! Why this sudden moment of extreme violence, with one character apparently killed off, even if it isn't shown in any graphic detail?
Someone in the room with us when watching has been in a few car accidents, and was pretty out of it afterwards, and she now no longer feels safe watching Brooklyn 99. Are sudden and totally unexpected moments of extreme violence like this going to happen again? We don't know, because this moment wasn't even mentioned in the. Violence & Gore section before I added it.
The Umbrella Academy (2019)
Graphic sadistic violence, uninteresting characters, confusing plot.
I was dragged into watching this by my teenage son, who had read good things about it. We both found it boring and confusing. There are too many main characters and none of them are particularly interesting. They also do the modern thing of being unhappy and unpleasant, with relentless dark and brooding music suggesting something interesting or scary will soon happen. Then towards the end of the pilot there's a scene of graphic violence (a knife stuck in someone's eye, etc) that was very unexpected in its intensity. It's graphic nature seemed completely unnecessary and at odds with the fantasy nature of the rest of the program.
Towards the end of the pilot the end-of-the-world plot theme is introduced, almost as if the film makers knew that without it, this would be profoundly boring. The series does look fantastic and we thought that maybe it will grow on us and become interesting. So we tried again for episode two. What we got was more brooding meandering from unattractive and uninteresting characters, and a barely comprehensible plot. Then, out of the blue, a vicious torture scene (nipple clamps, electrocution, blood streaming from armpits, etc etc). Why? And why would anyone want to watch this for entertainment? It's sick. I switched it off and my son did not complain.
Kimi no na wa. (2016)
OK, but kitschy, difficult to understand, and badly paced.
We watched this movie with the entire family, full of expectation because the reviews are so glowing. We found it OK, but there were many things that we were not impressed with. To provide some balance to all the 10 ratings I'll focus on those:
1. The script writing and editing. The story starts unbelievably slow, and at times we started talking as so little was happening. Then suddenly it goes into overdrive about two thirds in. Surely that could have been paced and edited better.
2. The plot is confusing. We had to read up online after the movie to understand everything of what we had just watched.
3. The music. We found the music pretty terrible: the songs were kitschy and overblown, with no memorable melodies at all.
4. The visuals. Much is also made of them, and while they were indeed impressive, they often crossed over into kitsch.
5. The crying. Characters break out in literally rivers of tears in a split second. Really? It's the main mechanism by which the movie is supposed to be touching, which again, is kitsch.
Finally, not a fault of the movie, but be warned: in the version we watched, the English dubbing was rather different from the English subtitles. On the positive side, this provided us with some entertainment during the slow parts of the movie.
Idiocracy (2006)
Good premise, not funny enough
Idiocracy is scarily on the mark when exaggerating a dumbed-down American culture that already exists in the increasingly strong anti-science, consumerist, conspiracy-theory-believing strands of American society.
The main problem with the movie is that it is not that funny. Many of the jokes are pretty lame, and one major drawback of the plot is that the main character, transported forward 500 years to a dumb future, also is pretty dumb, by today's standards. It would have had far greater comedic potential to look at the idiocracy of the 26th century through the eyes of someone who is actually intelligent.
But perhaps the movie still isn't dumbed-down enough to convey its message, as some reviews here see it as an indictment of liberalism, whereas it is, of course, nothing of the sort. In fact, the movie is a full-on attack on everything that's anti-intellectual in current US society, illustrated by a star appearance by an insanely dumb network called... Fox News. If that still makes it too hard for some people to connect the dots, then a real-life idiocracy may not be that far off.
When Harry Met Sally... (1989)
Surprisingly boring
Because of Covid-19 we're watching far more movies than normal, and by this stage we're exploring old classics. This movie is supposed to be classic, but boy were we disappointed. There's only one truly funny in the entire movie, the famous restaurant scene, and there are a couple of smiles, but overall it just isn't particularly funny.
One could perhaps accept the movie as a romantic drama, rather than a romantic comedy, except that there's also not a lot happening from a dramatic point of view. We found ourselves looking at the clock several times, and at one point looking at each other as in, 'shall we stop or continue?' The characters are not particularly interesting, and the story itself is plain boring. Boy-meets-girl and in first instance dislike each other but draw closer over the years? Come on, that's old and by now boring.
A movie with a story like that needs an exceptionally witty or insightful script and great acting. The acting wasn't bad, but perhaps because of the 70s and 80s hair and clothes and the other trappings of that time, it felt like an alien country. Was it really normal for women to obsess like that about getting married as if it's the only thing of importance in their lives? It's difficult to really identify with the characters and root for them.
In the end our reaction was a shrug of the shoulder. The movie is not truly dreadful, but still felt like a waste of our time. Surprising, because we're fans of some of Rob Reiner's other movies, most notably Spinal Tap.
Phantom Thread (2017)
I'm speechless...
This movie made me feel depressed, cheated and perplexed in equal measure. Why on earth all these glowing reviews? Yes, great cinematography. Yes, great acting. Yes, amazing editing. Yes, beautifully rendered 50s London, and yes, great dresses, if you like the style. Also, the slow pace did not bother my wife and I at all. In fact, for us it was a refreshing change from all the noisy, instant-gratification tosh that seems to be the norm today.
The reason we hated this movie, despite all these positives, is that the morality or message underlying it was deeply sick. I've seen tons of European art movies depicting people doing sick things, but one could normally sense the film makers' underlying vision, portraying the sickness as a warning, something not to be glorified or admired. Instead, this movie glorifies sickness, and what left us most depressed is that, looking at the reviews, nobody seems to realise, or care.
So DDL acts a self-obsessed, narcissistic, control-freak of an artist. So far nothing new. Some reviews mention that the movie portrays "toxic masculinity." Are you kidding me? This may be so, but in fact he's upstaged by a far worse case of "toxic femininity." In the oldest trick in the book, playing on every single misogynist trope around, the main female character poisons DDL to get her way. And the movie rewards her for this. Does no-one see a problem with this? My wife was not impressed, to put it mildly.
Far worse still, DDL eventually realises the manipulations she's up to, and allows himself to be poisoned, a little, as a way of submitting to her. And so at the end we have two deeply unpleasant and damaged people riding off into some bizarre sado-masochistic sunset, with a baby to boot, and we're supposed to applaud this life-destroying, vacuous, manipulative, value-free rubbish because... it's art??? Seriously????
I fear it's another one of these movies that everyone likes because... everyone likes it. Nobody wants to be the kid pointing out that the arty-farty emperor has no clothes.
This impression is also borne out by the many glowing comments about the score. I'm a composer, and while tastes clearly vary, this score was in no way remarkable. Perhaps the makers senses this, because the music was for almost the entire film mixed very far to the back. It seems the only reason for praising the score is that it was done by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, the epitome of chic, arty cool.
Coco (2017)
Great movie, pity about the music
The movie is excellent: a great script with tons of surprising twists and turns and a message that goes beyond the usual Hollywood 'go for your dreams' fare, tons of funny gags, and fantastic visuals. Just one major drawback: the music is mediocre. Mexico has an amazingly rich music tradition, but the songs in this movie are just flawed pastiches that do no justice whatsoever to that tradition. Remember Me is just about OK, the rest is totally forgettable. The tragedy is that it affects the story, because it makes Miguel's musical aspirations and love of Ernesto de la Cruz much harder to understand. But if you can get past the average music, the story a wonderful.
The Croods: A New Age (2020)
Appaling on almost every front
What's with all the glowing reviews? Seriously??? The story is lame, the characters are lame, the graphics are cool but who wants entire country-sides in kitschy pink, the politically correct feminist undertones are lame in the extreme. My wife and I are both totally into female empowerment, but this was done in such a corny and cheap way, it just sucked. If the kitschy pink was some kind of reference to the feminist theme, my wife would be deeply insulted.
We enjoyed the original Croods as a pretty run-of-the-mill animated story, but this was just dire. The worst of it was that no attempt was made to develop the story or develop some of the vaguely interesting themes in it (caveman vs modern man and their impact on the environment).
After a genuinely stupid and silly beginning we for a moment thought things would get interesting when these themes were introduced, but a few nice jokes aside, it just got more silly and annoying by the minute. No attempt was made to retain a whiff of credibility, and the regular breaking through the fourth wall was just pure silliness. If that's your kind of humor, fair enough, but it was not for us.
Mozart in the Jungle: Touché Maestro, Touché (2015)
Where's the plot?
This episode consists of 31 minutes of people getting stoned, drunk and laid. There's hardly any plot. This could be fun for five minutes, but for an entire episode it gets boring, and gives the impression that the makers were bereft of ideas.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
A visual feast, too bad about the cliched non-story.
First of all, be warned, this is not a comedy. I don't have a clue why it says 'comedy' in the description. While there are a few quasi funny moments, it's an angst-filled art-movie, one of those that thinks depression and melancholy and mental illness and self-destruction are the epitome of cool.
On the up, the cinematography is excellent and the quasi-one shot technique a technical marvel, even as it makes the viewer feel rather claustrophobic. The movie also features a great cast with some excellent performances. That's worth three stars. Just too bad none of the characters are particularly sympathetic or interesting, one major reason why it's difficult to get into the movie. If you don't care about the characters, why watch?
This is one of the reasons for the movie's worst failing, which is that it is rather boring. My wife fell asleep halfway through, and I found myself looking at my watch several times during the last hour, wishing it was over. Most of the time there's not much happening, as the film-maker presents endless scenes that presumably are supposed to be deep and meaningful, yet that are vacuous and seem to go on forever. The insertion of several OTT scenes that are supposed to be funny also felt forced, particularly as the ending turns out to be pretty nihilistic.
I've watched tons of European art movies in late 70s and 80s, and many of them thought that presenting life as difficult and depressing and meaningless was cool and held some kind of deep message. Eventually I realised that it was just another fad, with no more meaning than Back To The Future. There are a few movies with genuine deep and transcendent messages. Birdman isn't one of them. It's simply a rather boring 2014 riff on a familiar and cliched seventies European art-movie theme.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: All Alone (2018)
Terrible writing with everyone out of character
I'd really enjoyed the Catskills episodes, which were hysterically funny. However, this final episode left a bad taste in the mouth, with everyone doing stuff that was completely out of character, and at odds with what happened in the previous episodes.
First of all, why was there no follow-up on Midge's successful telethon appearance? It comes later on to some degree, but the fact that no-one seems to comment Midge appearing on TV is just plain bizarre. Benjamin grovelling in front of Abe is just so out of character, it's surreal. And why has Midge's mother become a totally one-dimensional hysterical charmless, life-sucking stuck-up control-freak after we've seen a completely different side of here in Paris? Then, someone as bloody- and independent-minded as Susie selling out and betraying Midge to a person she has hated throughout the series is just not credible. Lenny Bruce doing a melodramatic sentimental song about being All Alone is again out of character, and Midge's conclusion that she's going to be all alone just sentimental, cheap claptrap that does not ring true. Has the writer of this junk ever been on tour? Finally, Midge then going back to Joel is so not credible and so destructive of every single bit of growth she's enjoyed, it takes the breath away. This last episode undid all the great writing of the entire second series, and if episodes this inconsistent and badly-written are a risk of continuing to watch Mrs Maisel, I'm not sure I'll bother with series 3.
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
A stupid, hypocritical, depressing movie.
So at the very end of the movie, after spending well over 6 months in movie time making wrong life choices and selling his soul to The Man and suffering greatly and being partly responsible for enormous suffering of his son and wife, The Man finally decides to give Chris a tiny piece of the big money cake. There's no creativity, no light, no brilliance, just suffering, submission, and hard work. And this is supposed to be an inspiring morality tale?
I had great hopes of this movie, and throughout was willing myself to love it, despite its extensive longueurs and the fact that Chris kept making very questionable decisions. The suffering was relentless, and I kept hoping that it would all make sense in the end. It didn't. Chris did not make it big by inventing something, by being original, by taking the path less traveled. No, he made it big by buying wholesale into the capitalist American dream, where only money and hard work matter.
I should have known right at the start that this movie wasn't going to be a social critique, despite the gritty images. The dreadful sentimental music was a dead give-away that that the grittiness was all surface, and the heart of the movie was one long justification of a sick system: the idea that anyone can make it if you work hard enough. This myth is one of the many sicknesses of the American system, because the fact is, only the odd person makes it in this way, because the system is dramatically skewed in favor of the already rich.
The only thing that makes this movie watchable is Will Smith's performance. And as you get dragged along by this, for nearly 2 long hours, all the time waiting for a moment of transcendence, of redemption, of inspiration, it only becomes obvious in the very last minutes that the movie has its heart entirely in the wrong place.
Intelligent perspectives could have been given on the fundamental unfairness of the system, on race, and on other things. But in the end, the only things that matter are money, and the way to get it is by sucking up to The Man and working harder than anyone else. It leaves a terrible taste in the mouth. What a stupid, empty, depressing movie. Ugh.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Thank You and Good Night (2017)
Very good in parts, not so good in others, and morally dubious
We've really enjoyed this series so far, apart from the Doink episode, which was kind of boink, but this episode left us with very mixed feelings. First of all, the entire section of Joel and Midge spending the night together was far too long, and entirely unnecessarily so.
Getting back together with Joel, if only for a night, also seemed inexplicably out of character for Midge, and gives the feeling that an on-off drama of Joel and Midge's relationship was artificially created by the script writer to create extra interest, which the series doesn't actually need.
Second, Joel beats someone to pulp towards the end. They guy had been boorish towards Midge, but nothing worse. In viciously beating him, Joel was clearly acting out his hurt over what Midge was saying on stage. But that does not make his action OK. There nonetheless appear to be no moral or legal repercussions of actions. So it's just another bit of American movie making in which the goodies can beat up or kill whomever they perceive as a baddy? It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Third, it seems that Midge is using her onstage act has a platform to have a go at people who annoy or upset her. First a famous fellow-comedian, then Joel, then in a later episode some other stand-ups in the room. Cue tons of jokes at the expense of others. While it is at times very funny, this also leaves a bit of bad taste in the mouth...
Gremlins (1984)
what a difference 36 years make!
I saw this movie in the cinema when it came out, and my friends and I thought it was uproarious fun. So locked in quarantine I suggested to the family we watch this, and 36 years later it really comes across as a B-movie, and a bad one at that. The exposition, the time during which nothing of note happens, is at close to an hour far too long, and the acting is bad and none of the characters are particularly engaging or interesting, so it truly is boring. When mayhem breaks loose the movie gets funnier, but actually, the action is very undeveloped and uninvolving, and by this stage is fully played for laughs, losing some of the menace that could have made the movie more interesting. Our 2020 teenagers were not impressed.
Spy (2015)
Kinda funny, but why the graphic violence?
This movie is funny in some places and lame in others. I'd probably give it 5 or 6 out of ten stars, but deduct four because the violence is needlessly graphic, and completely out of place in a comedy.