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jrhochstedt
Reviews
The Mouse That Roared (1959)
A late-life gem for me!
I never knew what the book or film were about, but I always noticed te slender novel sitting in all the bookstores. I had nothing to do this afternoon, and saw it was on Cinevault so I tuned in...and was laughing, mostly quietly, for two hours, as my wife kept asking "What's so funny?"
The comedy is played without the broad strokes of the Kubrick nuclear disaster comedy, and it's at least as clever, as a country whose army resembles that in "Monty Python and the Hily Grail", numbering some 20 soldiers, is dispatched to New York City to lose a war to the U. S., and winds up catching a general, a scientist & his beautiful daughter (always a necessity in 1950s sf films), and with them, the Q-bomb which will make "the H-bomb look like a firecracker". So, since they become an unintentional superpower over night, England, France and the USSR, and ever other country declare themselves ready to protect them against the US. As another reviewer says, knowing geopolitics of the 1950s adds to the laugher - even the 1956 Suez crisis comes in for a poke in thenBritish ribs.
Jean Seberg is utterly gasp worthy gorgeous in the film, and funnier than perhaps she was given credit for. I wish I'd have discovered this delighted decades ago, but I'm glad I came across it in my 63rd year. I'm glad to add it to my Shepperton Studios classics.
Homeland: All In (2018)
Russia isn't a 3rd world country
But Americans in general don't know that.
Imagine if a Russian production had the Pentagon sending commandos into CIA HQ at the instigation of a Russian Intel team headed by Putin's chief security advisor. People would roll their eyes.
It makes no sense, either, that Russian intelligence would run an operation against a US President reversing the neoconservative foreign policy fantasies of eternal warfare and perpetual control via global military intervention.
And it makes no sense, of course, that an American intel team would launch a commando raid on a mansion on Russian territory, and then be surprised that the Russians were prepared & would ambush them. And it makes no sense that the Russians would leave the asset in question in the dacha against which the commando team was sent.
It's a shame, because I enjoyed the back and forth this season, suspending disbelief, even with a Vicki Nuland clone introduced into the show. I guess writers rooms are now just occupied by Mary Sue fiction writers.
Homeland: About a Boy (2014)
"Ms Mathison, I believe you're trying to seduce me"
Somehow the soundtrack of "The Graduate":is running through my head (what can I say? I'm old) as I've watched these two really unfortunate ham-handed shark-jumping eps of a series who first three seasons were mostly brilliant & tragic.
The interesting things about the series relate to the humanity, the blunted hopes and dreams of the central characters, and the way they have to thread the ethical mazes in which their profession lands them. These themes were the stuff of the great Cold War spy thrillers of John le Carre, Len Deighton, and others. Carrie's insight, her desperate inventiveness, were constantly challenging in the first three seasons. She does not seem to possess them here. She too easily got hold of the Islamabad station as Director Lockhart proved to be a paper tiger who folds at Carrie's Bluff a couple episodes ago. Saul somehow thinks he can manage to navigate through an intricate ISI plot without a scintilla of protection from the Agency or from the Embassy & is easily taken prisoner.
Ehen Carrie started to lure Aryan at the end of the previous ep, she asked, incredulously, "Is she seducing him?" The sex scenes between the two are cringe to the nth degree.
Jack Ryan: Tertia Optio (2019)
Especially laughing at....
...my wife & I got a big laugh from the woman emceeing the preisdent's daughter's quinceñera explaining the significance of the occasion, which you'd think an audience of ambassadors might know a little bit about. One might also think that it might be known to just about every average American.
....My jaw dropped when Greer, the Muslim, is lying in bed with the Quran propped open on his stomach - so egregious a mishandling of the volume that I had to wonder if the co-writer, a former Marine who served in Afghanistan, had ever met a Muslim, or whether he just wanted to flip the bird at Islam in general. I don't think it was a plot point to show that Wendell Pierce's character is a fake Muslim.
Jack Ryan: Cargo (2019)
Do the writes have any Russian consultants?
So, for covert ops in Russia, the CIA sends an African-American operative to, what? Blend in wih the Muscovite population?
In the opening scene, where Greer tries to get the policemen to tackle his tails, he uses the word "padrug ", which does not mean "girlfriend" as in "girlfriend/boyfriend," but is used solely between female friends.
And I do believe they had Greer calling Lev Gorn's character "comrade".
That's just in the first couple of minutes.
Of course the idea that Venezuela was bankrupted by a nationalist when they've been under Chavez and Madura for the.past quarter century is absurd. I suppose Venezuela was supposed to be he substitute for Brazil under Bolsinaro.
And the supposed head of the US Moscow Bureau is ludicrous.
No subtlety nor intelligence in the first five or ten minutes. It's all just preachy blather without a jot of subtlety. Not going to go any further with this dimwittery.
Longmire: Burned Up My Tears (2017)
Characters Lost by the writers
So, Walt goes to the bar & demands that Henry take his keys, obviously planning on tying one on. Does Henry keep his eyes on Walt? No, he gets involved in phone conversation & completely ignores his friend downing glass after glass and his employee pouring and pouring.
But evidently, Walt not only had ability to recover from rattlesnake venom, but to wake up and drive the next morning & conduct himself without a headache or red eyes.
Somewhere in the transfer from A&E to Netflix, the writers either lost track of the quietly intense character they had written in the first three years & rewrote him as someone incapable of any self-control whatsoever.
Like a lot of people, I find watching the final season really really painfully embarrassing.
Star Trek: The Omega Glory (1968)
A Vietnam-era cautionary tale
How quickly historical memory is lost in subsequent tumults.
"Omega Glory" was filmed toward the end of 1967 and aired just a month or so after the Tet offensive, which brought to the savagery of an already divisive war to all American living rooms. The possibility of the war widening to al of Asia, particularly to China, was something in the air at the time. Here, we see the warning that such a conflagration could so consume a country that it would be reduced to the condition of the warrior tribes which it had combatted. The civilized power in this episode is that descended from the victorious Chinese: the descendants of the Americans are left with garbled fetishes including incantations deprived of their intended meaning. Roddenberry was of course a Cold War Hollywood liberal, very much alive to the danger of lofty ideals becoming a travesty of themselves.
The maguffin of "parallel historical evolution" is behind several other episodes in the series, and it's purely a storytelling device, rather than a substantive concept.
This episode is notable for Kirk coming up short in the confrontations with the more imposing & dangerously mad Captain Tracy (the same actor who did a wonderful job as Dr Van Gelder in "Dagger of the Mind"). Only by the Spock-ex machina device of telepathic suggestion are they able to come out on top.
The US Constitution being the holy document at the end was probably inspired by Isaac Asimov's "The Stars, Like Dust," which functions ina similar twist at the end.
Making Mr. Right (1987)
Ain't missin' this at all
Now I know why I had never heard of this film back in the 1980s when I was always at the movies: it misses on almost every count.
It is painful to watch John Malkovich trying to play a maladroit roboticist, who wobbles between irascibility and cluelessness. The attempt at physical comedy is waaay over the top, demonstrating again that comedians are good at drama, but dramatic actors are seldom good at comedy. Of course, being saddled with a blond hairdo that does not go with either of the geek or the android might have added to problems in the performance. We should see a sweet geek who nonetheless is gradually revealed as someone who is mystified by emotions, to offset his creation, who despite being programmed, is capable of knowing & expressing his feelings.
Ann Magnuson never manages to hit the target, including in the opening sequence where she is shaving her legs and underarms and applying makeup as she rushes into her ad agency. There is never any crackle to the character; the performance is everywhere leaden with earnestness. During her scenes with Glenn Headley, it was plain that Headley, who delivers during her few scenes, ought to have been cast in the lead female role.
The director just had no idea how to make any of these scenes work. At two hours, the film is agonizingly long; no scene propels viewers into the next scene. Maybe it was the success of "Desperately Seeking Susan," which surrounded Roseanne Arquette with a wonderful cast, and was buoyed by Madonna's pop celebrity, that got the director the job.
The film does manage to hit the charm of its promise at the end, when you realize that it's the human, Dr Peters, who goes into space, and is glad to be away from humanity, while the humanized android realizes his dream of love, and this was due to Malkovich's acting, so painfully burdened throughout the long, long, long slog through the rest of it.
Elvis (2022)
Elvis was bigger & better & more enduring than this
The problem with this film is that Elvis transformed every song he ever performed, regardless of who had written it or who he'd seen perform it.
Another problem is that Elvis was far better looking than anyone who has ever played him, including this latest wannabe, who did a good job in conveying the energy of stage shows, from the 1968 special and the sequences following.
He continues to make new fans 45 years after his death, even after the sad final four years.
The attempt to contextualize him or put him in a reductionist framework never gets where it needs to be in the first half, and the structure never comes through at all. Trying to filter him through a narration by his manager, much less "Elvis in his times" , results in a parodistic failure featuring BAZ LUHRMANN with Elvis Presley as a side attraction.
Cobra Kai: Bad Eggs (2022)
Lost character development & a stereotype villain
I love the early seasons, but they've trapped Johnny in a permanent shtick where he knows nothing about anything that happened since the 1980s, which is a pity, because William Zabka has done such a great job hitting all the emotional points in growing out of his past.
The writers needed to get someone for Terry Silver to talk to, so they import the superfemale badder-than-bad, who chews the carpet & is such a parody of a Japanese dragon lady that I'm amazed no Asian group has called Netflix to complain of their use of a degrading stereotype.
Fortunately, Yuji Okumoto has a sure sense of comedic timing to balance out some of the problems with the writing & acting.
The Tudors: The Death of Wolsey (2007)
New writers who didn't even look at history?
It's embarrassing to see a great series descend into absurdities so excessive, especially having Wolsey commit SUICIDE.
Also, the author of the Beggars' Supplication, a pamphlet that prompted Thomas More's Supplication of souls, is shown as being burnt personally by More, when he died of plague after having been charged by the Bishop of Wareham. Nor could More have exhorted the man being burnt to recant, as he was NOT a priest.
Nor was Henry an advocate of the Protestant doctrines he had condemned only a few years earlier, but rejected the position of the pope to rule over all national churches.
These aren't trivialities, but harm the drama of the actual history. Which is unfortunate, because the first nine episodes were entrancing (mostly).
Father Brown: The New Order (2022)
Nothing to do with Chesterton
So, on a layman saying Fr Brown broke the seal of the confessional, Father Brown is immediately put into civvies and an investigation which is going to be taken "to His Holiness in Rome" is immediately launched?
These and other absurdities - an African priest being sent to a village in England in mid-20th century - are so utterly gaga, so religiously illiterate, as to male the show utterly unwatchable.
Byron (2003)
Misconceived
I pulled up "Byron" from the profile of the screenwriter, Nick Dear, who did such an amazing job in compressing "Persuasion" into two hours in 1995. I looked forward to seeing his handling of the more difficult & complex character & works of Byron.
Whether it was an incompetent production team or director, there is no baseline from which to spin out the story. Apart from the remarkable resemblance of the actor to Byron's facial appearance, neither actor nor director appeared to give any thought at all to the man behind what masks he might be donning successively. He almost seems like a travesty of his own hero-manqué, Don Juan. Those elements of his character which made him notable as well as scandalous are missing, none of the irresistibility or wit. The eroticism is singularly banal and vacuous.
Perhaps they redeemed this mess in the second part, but I was so indifferent to it all that neither I nor my wife were inclined to jump into the trash again to look for a gem. Or as Samuel Johnson said "I do not expect, on picking up a web (of a tapestry) and finding packthread, to discover, further inspection, embroidery."