....that Africans and Native Americans suffered atrocities at the hands of white people, here's an excruciatingly long, boring, drawn-out lecture. It's a four part miniseries with the goal of pointing fingers at who was (and apparently still is) responsible for the crimes against the aforementioned groups in the 18th and 19th centuries. Overall, it's not terrible, but incredibly dull and slow... like a grade school band recital played in slow motion (seriously, if you watch it: set your video player to 1.5x speed (this is not hyperbole))
Reviews
11 Reviews
The Twilight Zone
(2019–2020)
Can you imagine.....
28 June 2020
.... the real flagship episode of this ridiculous "re-imagining" of The Twilight Zone, is one where a white police officer relentlessly pursues, across many different timelines, a black mother and son who are simply going about their lives... he simply cannot handle the fact hat black people exist: driven by hatred and his white person genetics, he MUST, as if driven by his most base and primitive white male urges, seek out and destroy black people. Because, that's how white people act nowadays... that's just what they do, that's how they feel... all of them, right?. Can you imagine....no? You don't need to imagine, mainstream media has already given you all you need to know....
"What are we gonna do? We can't show Impractical Jokers reruns forever..."
19 April 2020
With tons of people tuning in to watch the hugely successful Impractical Jokers, TruTV has been trying to crowbar other, garbage shows down everyones throat and hope that one or two catches on. Along with "It's Personal with Amy Hoggart", other examples are: "Hot Ones: The Game Show" (which is abysmally bad, and is flopping hard), "I'm Sorry", "Adam Ruins Everything", "The Carbonaro Effect", and at least a few more. I can't pretend I have any suggested future path TruTV should take, but I don't think anyone else does either, they're a former courtroom/forensic drama channel turned in to comedy almost exclusively.
Mythbusters meets Blue's Clues....
16 March 2020
It's like Mythbusters if the target audience was children. Every new "test" premise is so simple that it requires absolutely no explanation, yet they BEAT YOU OVER THE HEAD for what seems like 15 minutes of explanation, interviews with professionals, statistics, setup, stupid jokes, etc before the "testing" or "content" actually begins.
There's little to no scientific analysis, just testing stupid situations like "We put funny hats on half of the test subjects and sent them in to speak to a high school classroom, did the hat cause the students to make more or less eye contact with the speaker????" riveting!
There's little to no scientific analysis, just testing stupid situations like "We put funny hats on half of the test subjects and sent them in to speak to a high school classroom, did the hat cause the students to make more or less eye contact with the speaker????" riveting!
Loved it!
22 February 2020
How can you not like these guys? Their personalities are great and their chemistry is exactly what you'd expect from "four lifelong friends who compete to embarrass each other". This is much of what makes their show great along with the fresh new ideas for the "bits" that they do with unwitting strangers. I was worried that the charm of their television show wouldn't translate well on to the big screen but it definitely did. You can't really go wrong with, for lack of a better term, "more of the same" with these guys. Throw in bits of the underlying plot of the film here and there and you've got a movie worth the price of admission. The theater was packed and everyone was howling whether it was at the relentless ball-breaking and banter between the guys, or the organic, real life interaction with strangers.
Don't Let Go
(2019)
VERY good...
12 November 2019
The acting, production quality, story, everything was great. I'm not familiar with this director, the writers or really any of the actors except for the guy who I recognized from Bubba in Forrest Gump, and I consider myself completely neutral and non-judgmental as far as "hoping or expecting it to be good or bad", so I watched and was very glad I did, VERRYYYYY good movie.
Look up awkward in the dictionary
7 June 2019
I'm Sorry
(2017–2019)
A bad trend...
3 September 2017
Recently, truTV has had HUGE success with "Impractical Jokers" and it seems like they're following a certain trend that other networks such as AMC, USA, showtime, starz, etc have done. This "trend" (for lack of a better word) occurs when these networks strike gold with a hugely popular show like the aforementioned Impractical Jokers, or in AMC's case Breaking Bad, once they have tons of viewers tuning in to see the popular show, suddenly there are a bunch of other shows being produced which are almost always boring, bland, blatant attempts to further cash in on the success and ratings that the network is getting because of the successful cash-cow show. In truTV's case these pointless shows include I'm Sorry, Comedy Knockout, The Carbonaro Effect, Adam Ruins Everything, and I'm sure there are AT LEAST a couple others... but the running trend is that they're all mediocre, forced comedy that just doesn't work.
The Twilight Zone
(1959–1964)
Permeates all of our current sci-fi & horror
14 September 2016
After recently gaining access to all of The Twilight Zone I've watched pretty much every episode. And this is after watching 90% of the sci- fi/horror films & television of the past 40+ years. What struck me most is how most of it draws much of its influence from these amazing stories. For example:
No doubt it's a very dated show (i.e. black & white, very outdated production quality at least by today's standards, acting can be sort of stiff at times, etc), but the stories are timeless and simply amazing compared to the majority of film & television we've got nowadays, and I would take that over a film/show with top-notch acting & quality but a boring, pretentious script and some sort of contrived romance sub-plot. Hell... I would rather just listen to the audio of a Twilight Zone episode than watch an episode of True Blood, one of the "Twilight" films, etc
- Before I saw the episode "A Most Unusual Camera" I had seen the film "Time Lapse". Where three people discover a camera that takes pictures of the future. They use the camera to take pictures of the next days horse races and profit from it until things inevitably go sour; which is the EXACT plot of the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode.
- The episode "The Trade-ins" involves elderly people from the future who pay huge sums of money to have their mind/memories/etc transferred to a younger, genetically engineered body. Traces of this can be seen in MANY different places, the most recent I've seen would be "Self/less" and "Surrogates"
No doubt it's a very dated show (i.e. black & white, very outdated production quality at least by today's standards, acting can be sort of stiff at times, etc), but the stories are timeless and simply amazing compared to the majority of film & television we've got nowadays, and I would take that over a film/show with top-notch acting & quality but a boring, pretentious script and some sort of contrived romance sub-plot. Hell... I would rather just listen to the audio of a Twilight Zone episode than watch an episode of True Blood, one of the "Twilight" films, etc
Silent Hill: Revelation
(2012)
Recipe for a mediocre sequel:
22 January 2013
1) A much smaller budget than the original (20 mil vs 50 mil).
2) Jump scares. The original had none because of the great story/plot which gave the entire film a terrifying & unnerving feel. This sequel is so cheesy and pretentious that in order to call itself a horror film there needs to be long quiet pauses followed by doors slamming or monsters making loud noises causing the audience jump.
3) "3D"... throw in some scenes where swords thrust out toward the audience even though this kind of gimmicky nonsense breaks any feel of authenticity the movie might have had, even when watching it without the 3D glasses.
4) Flavor of the week actor(s)... Kit Harrington from the popular HBO series "Game of Thrones" is supposedly a high school student along with the main character, but unfortunately he looks (and is) 26 years old... he just feels out of place throughout the film.
I really enjoyed the original (as well as the games) and wanted this one to be good as well. Unfortunately Silent Hill: Revelation sets out to do two things: A) Continue the story SOMEWHAT from the first film to satisfy Silent Hill fans while having characters reveal story lines piece by piece in "plot dumps" that seem forced and out of place. B) Try to make as much money as the original, but with a terrible script, less money, and MUCH less passion.
2) Jump scares. The original had none because of the great story/plot which gave the entire film a terrifying & unnerving feel. This sequel is so cheesy and pretentious that in order to call itself a horror film there needs to be long quiet pauses followed by doors slamming or monsters making loud noises causing the audience jump.
3) "3D"... throw in some scenes where swords thrust out toward the audience even though this kind of gimmicky nonsense breaks any feel of authenticity the movie might have had, even when watching it without the 3D glasses.
4) Flavor of the week actor(s)... Kit Harrington from the popular HBO series "Game of Thrones" is supposedly a high school student along with the main character, but unfortunately he looks (and is) 26 years old... he just feels out of place throughout the film.
I really enjoyed the original (as well as the games) and wanted this one to be good as well. Unfortunately Silent Hill: Revelation sets out to do two things: A) Continue the story SOMEWHAT from the first film to satisfy Silent Hill fans while having characters reveal story lines piece by piece in "plot dumps" that seem forced and out of place. B) Try to make as much money as the original, but with a terrible script, less money, and MUCH less passion.
Sunshine
(2007)
One of my absolute favorites, but with a large caveat...
14 January 2013
Warning: Spoilers
Let me skip the preamble about how great Boyle/Garland are, because most people who've seen "Sunshine" know this already. The cast/acting are top-notch, and the movie looks spectacular as if it cost a heck of a lot more to make than it actually did.
After the initial scenes where you meet the crew of the ship and learn their story/mission, the rest of the movie is so tense and gripping I've never really encountered anything like it. I may just be a sucker for the sci-fi/thriller genre, but the situation these people are in and the fates they're presented with (not only death, but the death of all mankind) are so oppressive the viewer can't help but experience some of the fear for themselves.
Fictional characters have often held the fate of mankind in their hands, but usually in unrealistic situations (i.e., some super-villain threatens to blow up planet Earth and a superhero must stop him). Sure, we can go back over statements and situations in the film that could be proved false or unrealistic, but anyone who isn't an astrophysicist will have an easy time believing every second.
The only issue I've got with "Sunshine" (spoiler) is how it ended with Captain Pinbacker sneaking aboard the Icarus II and attempting to sabotage the mission as he did with the Icarus I. I won't go through all my thoughts as to why it seemed unrealistic; it just seemed like a bit of a cop-out. As if, when Garland was writing it, he thought "Ok the crew have just experienced all of these tragedies, and are now on their way to complete the mission, but we've got to throw an even bigger and more intense tragedy in there to spice up the ending." I'll never be close to the greatness of Garland as a writer, and I won't claim to have any ideas as to how it should have ended. I will say I wished he'd have taken after Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous With Rama" where, after a vacant, ominous spaceship appears in our solar system, the story ends with the spaceship simply using the suns gravitational field to slingshot away toward an unknown destination... the story itself was good enough that it didn't require a super-villain assaulting the main characters to make for a suitable ending.
After the initial scenes where you meet the crew of the ship and learn their story/mission, the rest of the movie is so tense and gripping I've never really encountered anything like it. I may just be a sucker for the sci-fi/thriller genre, but the situation these people are in and the fates they're presented with (not only death, but the death of all mankind) are so oppressive the viewer can't help but experience some of the fear for themselves.
Fictional characters have often held the fate of mankind in their hands, but usually in unrealistic situations (i.e., some super-villain threatens to blow up planet Earth and a superhero must stop him). Sure, we can go back over statements and situations in the film that could be proved false or unrealistic, but anyone who isn't an astrophysicist will have an easy time believing every second.
The only issue I've got with "Sunshine" (spoiler) is how it ended with Captain Pinbacker sneaking aboard the Icarus II and attempting to sabotage the mission as he did with the Icarus I. I won't go through all my thoughts as to why it seemed unrealistic; it just seemed like a bit of a cop-out. As if, when Garland was writing it, he thought "Ok the crew have just experienced all of these tragedies, and are now on their way to complete the mission, but we've got to throw an even bigger and more intense tragedy in there to spice up the ending." I'll never be close to the greatness of Garland as a writer, and I won't claim to have any ideas as to how it should have ended. I will say I wished he'd have taken after Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous With Rama" where, after a vacant, ominous spaceship appears in our solar system, the story ends with the spaceship simply using the suns gravitational field to slingshot away toward an unknown destination... the story itself was good enough that it didn't require a super-villain assaulting the main characters to make for a suitable ending.
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