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TheElderBrother
Reviews
Slow Horses (2022)
Tedious, slow, and annoying...
At some point, and it is taking a whole lot longer than I think is reasonable, the 50% or more of western audiences who identify as center right are going to start punishing shows that indulge in the incessant, tedious army of straw men approach to characterizing politics. In the first episode they depict a political figure speaking about the problems of illegal immigration in the U. K. in terms that are pretty reasonable, and the writers can't help jabbing at the guy and branding him a fascist anyway. I would be more surprised if it was the BBC that produced the show, but this is Apple+.
Then again, I guess that should not shock me since Apple+ is doing its level best to keep its fat corporate thumb on the same scale.
Gary Oldman is hilarious. I hope when I hit that age I'll be unapologetically drunk, farting, and still the best at what I do. That man could play my mother and be more convincing than she was. I keep looking at him and marveling that the same guy was Winston Churchill, Sid Vicious, Commissioner Gordon, George Smiley, Dracula, and Drexl the pimp from True Romance all in one career.
And he did all of those pretty well. (The Dracula flick was awful but he was still pretty good in it.)
So I'm still watching and hoping it redeems itself, but the show is indulging in The Message a bit heavy-handedly. Hollywood is soon going to have real competition from streaming services and production houses that make more than enough right leaning entertainment to make the old regime irrelevant to much of its audience, so it needs to learn to mind its collective manners.
Slow Horses had such potential and its producers are wasting it. Yes, it got great reviews and plenty of support from some quarters. Those reviews and those quarters seem to be weighted a bit heavily, so if you're one of those terrible fascists they keep talking about, you may find Slow Horses incredibly aggravating and impossible to follow without a thick skin.
Lucky Day (2019)
Watching this movie has been adopted as a punishment for shoplifting in three countries.
I hate watching actors who haven't bothered to learn anything about a foreign language perform a character who speaks that language, but speaks as though he's just guessing what English would sound like if spoken by, for instance, an imaginary French cartoon character.
And I really hate having to listen t that for two hours.
That's about all I have to say about his movie. Crispin Glover is now playing a caricature of himself, and not a particularly endearing one.
Oh, and here's another detail. This is a gunplay movie with the same cartoon-level understanding of guns and gunplay.
If the producers put as much effort into writing the story and the actors put half the effort into acting the parts as they all put into slathering on ten minutes' worth of vanity production company cards at the beginning of the credits, it might be vaguely watchable.
But sadly, no.
Godfather of Harlem (2019)
An appalling, unpardonable, wafer-thin rationalization for declaring a mass murderer a civil rights hero...
I have watched this show faithfully, having been, as an historian, well acquainted for many years with the real facts of Bumpy Johnson's life and the civil rights era in Harlem.
The producers are attempting to rewrite history, a common theme in media, but there is no rehabilitating the reputation of the man who facilitated the addictions in and deaths of legions of his own people. Bumpy Johnson does not deserve to be remembered for any of the good he might have done, incidentally, while he put his boot on the necks of untold thousands of black Americans, and kept them in the gutter, no matter how many turkeys he gave away at the holidays.
His own daughter was one of his victims and yet, he persisted.
Why, we must ask, does the media seem so intent on galvanizing the people by telling us that the rules apply only to some of us? We know, it's true, America took to equality slowly, but the use of the increasingly distant past to justify the incessant violence of today is a sin for which no one can be forgiven. This is easily the most egregious example of trochaic terrorism ever aired by the mainstream, and the Pollyannas who are singing its praises are either too addicted to The Message to see it, or too excited by its potential to tell the truth about it.
After three and a half seasons, this show has become such a deeply shameful reengineering of the truth that it fills me with fear to consider the potential violence that is openly rationalized by the story. It is a hideous spectacle. And you should watch it so you know what to expect, but question every fact presented and do your own homework, because this is a fantasy, and whosever fantasy it is needs help desperately.
Confess, Fletch (2022)
Jon Hamm is trying desperately. hard to appear easygoing...
Jon Hamm has the Curse of Adam West, in that the TV character he is best known for very well may overshadow his entire career. He's making a profound effort to distance himself from Don Draper, but his Fletch is too deliberately staged to compare to Chevy Chase's smug, glib Fletch, and he doesn't have a lot of hope of distancing himself far enough from Draper to have him keep from tainting Fletch. (Chase's flowing, constant smarminess came to him naturally because he wasn't really acting all that much. Chase is like that in real life, and Hamm isn't, so he has to work entirely too hard at it, which means it hasn't come off at all natural, and that spoils the character, even for people who aren't fans of the 80's films, or the series of novels. Even if you have no idea that Fletch isn't a new character, you get the weird feeling Hamm is the wrong guy for the role. You can't take a guy once considered to play Superman and stick him in a Fletch picture expecting any good will come of it. He's entirely too pretty and nowhere near sleazy enough...)
And it doesn't help that they stuck John Slattery in the film, as though the producers are shouting, "See! We got two guys from Mad Men, but neither of them is playing Mad Men guys!"
Slattery plays Slattery no matter what production he is in. He's the Dean Martin of his generation.
It's written well enough, and the rest of the supporting cast is mainly okay, except for Marcia Gay Harden as the Contessa. She too is working entirely too hard at putting on a cartoon caricature of an Italian social climber. Even at her age, she's still attractive enough to make the apparently appalling suggestion that Fletch sleep with her seem unappealing. It's one of the more ham-fisted choices the producers made that takes you right out of the film.
I would love to see more Fletch films, but they need to find actors who do more than appeal to movie-goers who respond mainly to stunt casting instead of good story and good acting.
I didn't even wait until the third act to write this.
Paydirt (2020)
I love Val Kilmer too much to let this dreck afflict my memory of the man.
This is a dreadful piece of schlock, and you should skip it. The fact that they could dub a voice in for Kilmer does not justify subjecting him to material this badly inspired, poorly written, or abysmally directed. The story is stupid. The characters are caricatures of bad cliches, and the voice they dubbed in for Kilmer is dreadful.
I stayed with it out of respect for Kilmer, but this movie is hideous, and it should never be aired again. If you can see it for free, skip it. If someone offers to pay you to sit through it, know that no amount of cash is worth the damage it will do to your psyche to be subjected to filmmaking this hideous. They should use forced watching of this movie as punishment for shoplifting.
It was good to see my hero Val Kilmer up and acting again, even if this project should be buried in the desert, so I gave it three stars. Dreadful.
It is at least that bad, and I'm probably being generous.
1883 (2021)
Boring and unbelievable...
Wish fulfillment is the order of the day. We meet American Indians who all speak flawless English as well as the languages of all their neighboring tribes, which makes them all magic Indians. Our heroine is a 19th century Mary Sue, a staggeringly gorgeous teenager beloved by everyone who knows all, is imbued with the wisdom of the ages, never misses when she shoots and rides like she's Wyatt Earp himself. The show's entire purpose is to explain how the Yellowstone Ranch came to be founded, and they take nine episodes to begin to hint at it, when all at once they drop it on us like a ton of bricks in a story so reliant on a deliberate misunderstanding of medicine that it is clear that 1883's heroine has been Taylor Sheridan's self-insert all along, in a story so appallingly stupid that it's as though they produced a mediocre work of fan fiction.
Yes, there was racism and sexism in 1883. And that is apparently all there was. Nothing else seems worth the story's attention. We see nothing else. And it bores us all to tears to be preached at so constantly.
Sam Elliott plays the same guy he always plays, apparently subscribing to the Al Pacino School of Cinema. Isabel May is lovely, but her performance is comprised of of an endless smug, hyper-floral narration and glamour shots of her riding horseback in period-inappropriate garb. The rest of the cast is... okay.
It's a cultural phenomenon, but don't get your hopes up. The hype preceded the show itself, and it cannot survive its airing to audiences with IQ's above room temperature. Anyone with the intelligence of a a bushel of cabbage will find that intelligence being insulted on a regular basis.
LaMonica Garrett is great, though, and the show is visually stunning, but if you want to see beautiful sunsets, look out your window or travel. Television asks too much in exchange for its visuals.