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Reviews
Hope Street (2020)
A Cliffhanger With Probably No Answers
An entertaining diversion. However, after all episodes, the story ended with several cliffhangers out there and, assuming there is no season two, we'll never know how it ends. This is not the first BBC series where I've seen this happen. Home Fires ended season 2 with most of the main characters in a house hit by a crashing plane. No season 3. I also couldn't wrap my head around a town of obviously pretty good size with a three-person police department. Otherwise, OK.
Shetland (2013)
Good procedural with an interesting location
We spend hours binge watching British police shows. We only recently started this one as we just got Britbox and are finding ourselves losing sleep.
Once the series got away from the two-part episodes it began to get slow in places as writers had to drag a story out for six hours. It also can get a bit confusing as characters may pop up we are supposed to remember from earlier seasons. But we have become rather addicted.
One thing we found really confusing that I was able to resolve by researching on line. Britbox shows six seasons but the list skips season two. As, when we started season three, there appeared to be some events in characters' lives we had missed, I was rather upset about them dropping a season. However, my research showed season one was only two episodes. What Britbox has done is combined seasons one and two, showing the episodes as season one and having no season two. Go figure.
Hugo (2011)
You have to read the book
The Selznick book is considered a modern children's classic. If you read it, you will see how it inspired the film. The opening paragraphs of the book are, almost word for word, the script for the opening scene of the camera soaring down from the sky into and through the railroad terminal. The book, itself, is a very unusual construct. Some pages have only a few sentences of text followed by pages that advance the story with nothing but drawings. Scorcese was very true to both the visual and textual style of the book.
The film, itself, is full of great film and stage actors in small rolls that are pure gems. There is more depth to the characters than in the typical family film.
As to the 3D, the director shows how it can add to the film without distracting from the art of telling a story. Some reviewers seem underwhelmed by the 3D because objects don't jump off the screen, but that's the point. It adds depth to the story, but does not drive the story. The scenes, especially those set among the clockworks, would look too busy and confusing without the 3D camera layering the moving objects. The Scorcese technique of following his actors down hallways, up staircases and through crowds becomes stunning with the 3D camera. If you want to know how good this 3D is, see it as I did, in a theater that used the opportunity of an audience with 3D glasses to precede the feature presentation with trailers for a half dozen current and upcoming 3D films. Watch those, then watch Hugo, and see how Scorcese has, as James Cameron has said, advanced the art of 3D beyond any place it has ever been.
A Mighty Wind (2003)
A funny improv.
Saw this tonight at my local arthouse after watching the PBS folk reunion over the weekend. It is sometimes hard,in these circumstances,for fiction to be funnier than truth. They managed to do it. The theater was mostly populated with younger,hipper people than I,who remembers sitting in Charles Street folk lofts in 60's Boston. They laughed louder than I did.