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gamester80
Reviews
Easy (2016)
Interesting but unrewarding
Easy is filled with excellent performers giving excellent performances, but, ultimately, each episode has the feel of a good (but not great) indie-style character study. The series centers its focus squarely on relationships of all sorts: functional, dysfunctional, romantic, platonic, lavishing attention on details major and minor in an exhaustive effort. Ultimately, it even sacrifices the telling of an engaging or even simply complete story in service to an (admittedly) engaging performance.
Taking each episode on its own, this leaves a fairly satisfying experience, but as a series, the lack of plot progress can be draining at its worst, and merely disinteresting at its best. The rotating cast of interconnected characters can function to draw the viewer in, but signifies nothing of importance to the individual story lines each indicates.
Nuanced performances abound, though, from a collection of very talented actors, giving some sense of excitement as episodes progress and the cast is revealed, but without a worthy story to drive the action (as it were) forward, even this grows stale rapidly.
Better Watch Out (2016)
As unsure of itself as a 12 year old hitting on his babysitter...
So often a film achieves the dreaded "middle of the road" by being well made, but uninventive, unsurprising but consistent, forgettable yet enjoyable. BWO instead finds itself ending up dead center by wildly vacillating between moments of truly fascinating tension and intrigue and stretches of unfathomable incongruency, dull, self-congratulatory exposition, and outright stupidity.
The "twist" in this Xmas-themed home invasion, is that the "invasion" is fake, an attempt by a lovesick 12 year old to gain the affections of his 17 year old babysitter. It takes a while to get to that point, though, and along the way we are treated to not ineffective tension building moments (that will, of course, fall flat on repeat viewings) intercut with his painfully useless bids for affection. Once his sinister nature is revealed, one keeps expecting him to throw off his veil of immaturity, and he does, only to repeatedly and randomly re-don it with the kind of irregular emotional instability one expects of a hormonal youth. Is he a cold- blooded sociopath or gleefully violent obsessive? The script never decides, instead choosing to focus on congratulating itself on how smart it thinks it is. Too bad it isn't. Stellar performances provide a saving grace, but don't expect much.