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Reviews
Das Signal (2024)
big spoiler - worst ending of the century - do not watch
It was all going along fairly well, A family wife, husband + daughter, the astronaut wife gets a billionaire funded job on the ISS and starts to get messages from space, and secretly informs husband and daughter. As usual with aliens coming films, for some reason 'the government' or 'the billionaire' wants to cover it up because there will be panic - er ... no there won't, why would there be? Most people will watch it on TV as just another news cycle, be interested for 15 minutes, then go back to their lives.
Anyway - the movie. So the protagonists get attacked / killed by mysterious forces trying to get the coordinates where the aliens will land. But the time coordinates they obtain are false, they baddies grandiosely nuke the site but nothing had landed. The little girl heroine and her Dad go back at the right time and something does land. It is Voyager - oh dear, many problems with this. Supposedly, Voyager had been playing back part of the Carl Sagan inspired recorded gold disc - because the needle got stuck - I mean, really?
Also supposedly, Voyager had been broadcasting this - but, of course, Voyager was not set up to do that. It was also not equipped with landing parachutes, or any guidance system that would return it to earth. We know it is still drifting through space.
Just contemptible rubbish and a total waste of time, completely undercutting any "message" about humanity needing to come together.
Bull (2021)
deeply sick
A very depressing movie about a bunch of very sick people, the kind of people who should not be allowed to breed, or even live, better they had never been born. I suppose just one more of an endless stream of degenerate films that celebrate and glorify violence of the most outrageous, sadistic viciousness. No one benefits from this crap - everyone who watches it is drawn into a world of mindless filth, where psychopaths - and not very interesting ones at that - pretend to have normal lives, and turn love of children into an excuse for the most appalling behaviour imaginable. Chucking in the frankly stupid notion that there is some supernatural aspect - coming back from the dead - does not rescue the film, it's just tacked on to make the routine, boring and pedestrian plot - such as it is - fit into the "Horror" bracket, because the piece fails utterly as a "Thriller". At least makers like Tarantino or Peckinpah have a point to make, or at least make the ultra-violence visually and dynamically interesting. This movie is more like watching an autopsy performed on living people with a lot of hysterical shouting. It wants the viewer to believe that these criminal lunatics have some sort of code of ethics about their shallow, desperate and petty lives. They might even label it to themselves as 'honour' or 'loyalty', or 'doing what needs to be done in order to survive', when in reality it's all greed, coercion and fear. Unlike other British gangster stories - Get Carter, Lock Stock & Two Barrels etc., Bull has no lightness of touch, no wry commentary on outlaw life, no redeeming feature at all, just an unvarying sequence of dismal and sickening displays of human beings at their very worst.
All the Old Knives (2022)
don't bother - huge plot chasm
Yet another 90 minutes spent on a poorly thought out movie. What is wrong with these film makers? Did they have ex CIA people advising? Don't they know anything about how secret services operate? Perhaps they can explain why an intelligence service would go to the trouble of organising the restaurant for the denouement, such as it was. Closing a restaurant for a night, replacing all the staff with agents, setting up cameras etc - all highly visible, attracting attention and being extremely complex and expensive to arrange. Plus it relied on the victim having the drink, poisoned apparently using Sarin or similar - a highly dangerous chemical liable to all kinds of accidental random spreading, a clear danger to all concerned - not least those administering the dose. As the victim said earlier in the film, trying to scare another agent "You are lucky I am interviewing you here, not in some basement in Romania". The protagonist would surely have ended up in just such a rendition. As to whether an agent would help terrorists in response to a threat against his girlfriend - no. He could simply have gone along with the gang until she was safe and he could set about getting them.
Men (2022)
good if you like horror I guess
I didn't realise it was a horror film before starting to watch. Not a big fan of the genre - trying to portray mental trauma in images is essentially a hopeless task because once you enter a world where anything can happen, where baddies - real or imagined - are un-killable the victim / protagonist can take no reasonable course of action, so all events are arbitrary. There is no sensible progression, you are left with whatever the film maker cares to chuck in - in this case "Green Man" + birth trauma, some gore, some shocks. Also I didn't like the ending - when the friend turns up there is physical evidence the crashed car and blood everywhere, so we are invited to believe that some of the events were "real", when the whole plot has been un-real. Horror films never add up because of their arbitrary nature - anything can happen so nothing has meaning. I prefer less gaudy movies like Polanski's "Repulsion" where weird happenings are clearly in the disturbed protagonist's head, and real violence results in mundane death and the police being called.
The Green Sea (2021)
Worth watching
Captures the atmosphere of the rather bleak coast of Ireland setting the scene for a thoughtful unfolding exploration of grief via a fairly common MacGuffin which is guessable early on but that doesn't distract too much (otherwise maybe a 10) - but the two leads carry it off very well with sympathy and good chemistry between them. Dramatic sequences and flashbacks are not over the top, bloody but not gory. The metaphorical motif is good and is carried through well. A very good sound track reinforces the spooky aspects, again without being over the top. All in all much better than many movies in a similar vein.
Tenet (2020)
basic premise is stupid
The basic premise is that a scientist in the future invents time reversing devices, regrets her invention as too dangerous, so instead of destroying it she decides to send them back in time to out present, where a mad Russian oligarch somehow discovers all this and decides to use the invention to destroy the present world because we are destroying the environment - quite how or why he thought this would work is never mentioned, because it is too ridiculous. That, or we just have to accept that he is mad, or the future people told him it was the only way. He does it because he is dying and his madness makes him think if he can't live then no one else can either - or something. It is not clear which, so pick'n'mix as you like. Time travel movies never work. Never. Basically it's an excuse for a lot of Bond style fist fights, explosions, crashes, car chases, random violence. As with Bond, the baddie has an unending supply of incredibly gullible and stupid helpers all over the world who are quite happy to be killed and maimed on his behalf, and set off these devices on command from the baddie as he lounges on his mega-yacht. Just terrible.
Cowboy Bebop (2021)
pathetic violent drivel
Must have been made by 12 year old boys who never finished school. Cheap retro future where people still use windows xp looking software, manual switches to run a spaceship, solve every problem by fighting and murder carried out with guns and knives. Complete with criminal boss who kills underlings with a sword for no good reason. A casino that floats in space and the hull gets breached relies on someone pulling a lever to operate the safety pressure shutters. Drugs that enable people to withstand bullets. Everyone doing really fake looking kung fu. Just rubbish, I wasted nearly 20 minutes of my life hoping it might improve - but no. Avoid it. How did people get the money to make this ill conceived tosh?
The Counselor (2013)
depressing and horrible
A tepid movie about really depressing and horrible people relentlessly doing horrible things to each other, with trite cod-philosophical nonsense from despicable thugs who in the real world are just murderous, amoral and stupid and drag the world down - just like this film. No stars, would have been better if it had been thrown in the bin when first pitched.
The Accountant (2016)
not a waste of time
Actually pretty good, no big plot holes - and given the average low standard of many modern 'thriller' movies that's high praise.
Inheritance (2020)
waste of time
I wish I had read reviews first - started skipping thru and doing facebook at the same time after about 30 mins when the obvious ending was entirely guessable, only kept watching to make sure I was right.
Oldboy (2013)
terrible waste of time
So many holes in this I can't be bothered to go through it - just don't waste your time
Tau (2018)
waste of time
If you have read the plot synopsis / storyline, just imagine a few fx, a bog standard psycho torturing nerd + evil corporation, a standard robocop / HAL / home help AI gone wrong that wants to be more 'human', and a standard gutsy female lead and you have seen the movie. (I leave you to predict whether she escapes - no spoiler alert needed).