Change Your Image
joshgerlach
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Grimcutty (2022)
Internet Challenges Can Only Hurt You If You're Stupid.
It's an obvious satire playing on parental internet hysteria; parents who are so plugged in to the "Here's What Your Kids Are Doing Online" neo-Satanic Panic content mill "articles" that they don't realize they're the ones wrapped up in the thing that's unhealthy.
This is just a pretty poor execution. If they had leaned a little harder into it, I guess it could have been something. But I doubt it.
I need 200 more characters to meet the minimum requirement for user reviews, but this is really all I had to say, so here's a big block of unrelated text to fill a bunch of space. Benzylpenicillin.
Black Adam (2022)
What to even say...
This movie is not bad per se.
Interesting story, interesting twist, interesting action, very good effects.
Dwayne Johnson, Quintessa Swindell, Noah Centineo, Aldis Hodge, Mohammed Amir, and Marwan Kenzari all do fine. Pierce Brosnan does excellently as always and I would love to see more of his Dr. Fate.
Two actors stand out as particularly bad; Sarah Shahi, and Bodhi Sabongui. I don't know what caused this. It could be a number of things, but I think it could be boiled down to acting through an accent that was unnatural to them.
Sabongui is Canadian, and Shahi is from Texas, and their ADR was also bad, so the accent is probably where I'd put my money on what went wrong there. They simply do a bad job. Sabongui has only 7 credits to his name, so I can hardly fault him for that, he should have been guided more.
The canned cinematic score was a let down. Some of the rock songs were just weirdly placed, and they feel like an afterthought rather than a choice. Probably to try to connect it better to Shazam and The Suicide Squad, which it didn't really need. Chiseling out an identity of its own would have been better.
4/10 take more risks. If you're gonna make billions globally anyway, it might as well also be a ripping good movie, too. If it's a studio interference problem, tell the studio to get bent.
The Offering (2016)
The Devil is an Irresponsible Influencer
This movie is remarkably silly.
It harbors childlike misconceptions of catholicism, which is mostly funny. Apparently the devil concerns himself with DDoS (Direct Denial of Salvation?) attacks on the catholic church of Singapore, specifically, then posts Criss Angel magic trick videos to YouTube telling people to eat Tide Pods to cure their ventricular tachycardia.
The main actress gives a bland, Dollar-Store-Isla-Fisher performance, Matthew Settle settled too much, I've never seen a child actor give an age-average performance that outshines grown actors before, so that was weird, and all the Singaporean actors seem to be looped by American VAs doing bad British or Australian accents.
This is absolutely a money laundering movie.
This is a weird flick. It's free on Prime. Watch it. It's not good. 2 stars.
In a Valley of Violence (2016)
Could have used some authenticity, maybe.
Look, every director has a vision. What makes a film enjoyable is largely subjective, but every once in a while a movie comes along that has no right to be as bad as it is.
I can't say that In a Valley of Violence is a particularly terrible movie, but I also can't say that it's a particularly good one. It's just kind of... here.
You can tell it had potential, but just fell kind of flat, and only because of a handful of mishandled elements. I'd say authenticity is the name of the game.
Firstly, the town feels weirdly underpopulated, even for a mining town that was abandoned by the mining company.
There's Mary-Anne and Ellen, the sisters who run the hotel. Gilly, Harris, Roy, and Tubby, who are sort of an idiot's posse (if four idiots can be a posse). Gilly's father the local Marshall, who also apparently acts as mayor/governor/shogun. Dollar Bill, the general store owner. The friendly neighborhood bartender which comes stock with every western. Everyone else is just a handful of extras and it makes the town seem like as a business owner you should just move to Phoenix because no one's really here to hold up an economy. Just 10 or so more extras would have made the town feel more "full of people who need saving" as the movie suggests.
Set dressing is somewhat bare. Every space feels like one of those "Wild West Museum Towns" with actors who give winded monologs about their character and the town's history. Just terribly inauthentic.
Ethan Hawke (Paul) was very good in this movie. He's one of it's few saving graces and seems to know what he's doing when it comes to the dialog and action. Aside from Burn Gorman (the Priest), and Toby Huss (Harris), it's difficult to say the same for just about anybody else in the cast. Though, I liked doggy. Doggy good. Good doggy.
James Ransone (Gilly) didn't apply himself to the role as much as he should have. Maybe he's just too modern, he didn't seem to fit. Most of the anachronisms in the dialog belong to him and Karen Gillan (Ellen). It could be a direction problem, but I think the fault lies mostly in the casting here.
John Travolta (The Marshall) applied himself too much to the wrong character and undershot his own. His accent was frankly ridiculous and he sounded inordinately squeaky. He felt more like a character in a Seltzer-Friedberg parody movie than, you know, the Marshall of a remote dusty town which he rules unchallenged with an iron-fist, the impression the movie tries to give. God only knows what kind of movie he expected this to be, but he was sadly mistaken in any case. This is absolutely a direction problem. I've seen Travolta do much better. We all have.
The movie is shot with a very wide depth of field, which leaves many backgrounds partially in focus, when they should be out of focus. It gives the whole film a very flat appearance. Maybe they couldn't afford very many lenses and prioritized the ones they needed for the bulk of filming, but I think if they had employed the split diopter technique, and some focus tracking, they could have shot with a shallower depth of field in some very important cases.
There's not much color grading to speak of. It's either very subtle or they stopped at basic color correction. Desert scenes are usually graded with warm tones. They could have used a haze filter to bring in some more midtone, and stacked a neutral density filter with it to crush shadows and bring detail into the midground. It seems to me all they did was throw a polarizer on it to bring the sky down into the exposure setting so it wasn't blown out.
There's one odd sequence in the movie that's halfway between a nightmare and a memory, it's shot handheld and lit only with a flashlight. It's... a sequence, anyway... I suppose it's meant to look dreamlike and frantic. Personally I wouldn't have used a camcorder flashlight because it has a distinctive halo and might bring someone out of immersion to think "Hey! That's a flashlight!" which was my experience. I just feel like it steps on the sequence in an unfair way. I would have used a more radial firelight and also handheld a wide-angle lens so it looks less like run-and-gun handicam footage in a YouTube video. There are many techniques to make a bizarre dreamlike image, the one this movie used would fit in a more modern period story.
The Mandalorian: Chapter 5: The Gunslinger (2019)
Stop saying "the fandom is toxic" every time there's valid criticism of a bunk episode
It's an interesting episode but maybe shouldn't have made it past the conceptual stage?
Amy Sedaris' acting was atrocious. I didn't mind Cannivale as much as others seem to have hated him, he wasn't great but he wasn't terrible. Sedaris was truly and honestly terrible and didn't seem to convincingly live in the world. Her delivery was basically "Reference!" and "Nudge!" It felt like she belonged more in a Disney Channel original sitcom.
It seems unwise to piggy back off of a bounty when you're a supremely wanted man. It also seems unwise to blast someone all-to-hell who's holding a child you just went through hell and back to protect.
All-around the episode didn't make much sense from a contained story perspective, let alone an overarching story perspective.
Some decent action and a fun swoop bike sequence, though.
Patient Zero (2018)
Not good.
I see a lot of user reviews misidentifying the infected as Zombies.
Allow me to set the record straight and give this movie a fair cop:
Zombies are reanimated corpses, or people put under the spell of a voodoo witch. They shamble and groan, and not much else.
These bizarrely chiseled freaks are just a shameless ripoff of Danny Boyle's Rage Virus Infectees from 28 Days Later. The only differences are apparently these guys can crunch numbers and also have the time to do sit-ups.
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
Hesitant to say genius, but enjoyable nonetheless
The story is intriguing, but due to the turbulent nature of production, some of the performances are extremely uneven, particularly Peter Bogdanovich, who alternates between grounded confidence and nervous ham sandwich.
The idea of the footage coming from several different film and audio stocks woven together to present the narrative works to the film's advantage, especially in preserving the original performances (particularly John Huston's, which is of course excellent). It benefits the film as armor against any criticisms of visual and audio quality, as well as perceived composition issues.
Parts of the art-film-within-the-art-film are edited with out-of-place, slightly modern techniques (note the whole nightclub scene), and the whole thing is processed with a bizarrely clear, almost digital quality, with clearly modern sound design assets (the sex scene features some extremely vulgar wet-sounding copulation squelches they could only have gotten a way with in our century). The footage as a mechanism for backstory to the main plot is incredibly nuanced for the era in which it was conceived, completely unbelievable for the time.
Very much of the movie is stupidly real, notably the character motivations and dialog, even if the acting can be hokey at times. A movie like this had never been done before, but Welles' interviews about the movie seeded the idea, and now many movies with a similar aesthetic can be seen. Even though it was released in 2018, it still gets points for originality.
This film is an excellent lesson in salvage and preservation.
Batman: Bad Blood (2016)
Decent, aside from the obvious.
We get it, Batwoman is a lesbian. Can we stop treating that as special somehow? Big whup. Shouldn't we treat lesbians as people instead of window decoration or Virtue Signal clout-generating poker chips? People flip-flop between a realistic character and "Representation." If your character isn't "lesbian enough" or "too lesbian" then it's bad rep, I guess. So striking that balance by throwing in a couple of clunkly "I'm So Very Gay" and "God Is a Woman" lines are the vertiable Flex Tape™ to this particular bisected boat? Looks bad, Phil Swift.
Aside from that, decent film, well-acted. Strahovski is a joy as Batwoman, Sean Maher is great (as always) in his role as Nightwing, and Jason O'Mara continues to be a good choice for Batman (watching Bruce's relationship with his son Damian unfold has been really, really entertaining). Gaius Charles is a good addition to the Batman, Inc. cast of characters, he did an excellent job in his role. Didn't expect Ernie freakin Hudson as Lucius Fox! Legendary.
Unfortunately, there are some bruises on this banana; Morena Baccarin can, has, and should focus on doing better than this performance. John DiMaggio and Steve Blum reach into their shallow bag of gravelly voices for their ancillary roles, as per usual. It's nothing against them, really, voice acting can be an extremely demanding career, but as an audience member hearing the same 8 voices film-to-film gets pretty tiring.
Travis Wellingham picked a safe performance over standing out one way or the other, and I can't really complain about that. It's a smart choice in any acting gig, kind of like ordering chicken strips at an unfamiliar restaurant. (Doesn't hurt that he's an absolute beast of a man and I don't want to say anything bad about him for fear of my corporeal form coming to some kind of harm.)
Batman and Harley Quinn (2017)
Not Enough Reviewers Complain About Loren Lester
I feel like reviewers are giving Melissa Rauch too much flak. If she studied the Arleen Sorkin voice a bit more and pushed her impression past a cheap facsimile, it'd be fine.
However,
Loren Lester is atrociously cast as Nightwing. He reads his lines like he's in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Was Sean Maher busy? Neil Patrick Harris? Literally anyone other than a 57 year old man? His performance didn't capture the character at all, because he's simply too old to play it.
Fart jokes and Harley raping Nightwing aside, this movie has tremendous flaws in casting and story direction.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)
Jack Over-Reached
The first Jack Reacher was decent. It had a decent script, it was decently acted, decently edited, decently scored. All- around decent.
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back has none of those things. The script feels like it was cobbled together with fragments of incomplete ideas with no resolutions, which makes the pacing seem disjointed and the story unfocused with no clear plot motivators. The acting is disingenuous, with a surprising weak link in Cobie Smulders, who has proved herself more than capable in the past. Here she isn't very commanding in her role as an authoritarian Army Major. Danika Yarosh's abrasive, unlikable Mary Sue performance is especially weak. Perhaps Yarosh's nominal talent is best reserved for rubberized CW Dramas. Tom Cruise seems to want nothing more than to not be in this movie, an inference that's clear in every bland-as-paste read he gives. The Jack Reacher in the first movie was at least relatable and --to some degree-- likable. This Jack Reacher is a boring jerk. I saw a better performance from him in The Mummy. You would expect that the main character of the film would be able to keep the intrigue of the audience, but Cruise seems more invested in the paycheck than the character, which I'm sure is a symptom of the weak script.
By far, the absolute worst transgression of this film is the score, which seems cut/pasted from every other cheap "high- intensity action-thriller" made-for-TV. It sounds terribly unoriginal, ill-fit, and often times doesn't make any sense where it queues up. It tries too hard to build tension, but isn't written well enough to do that, rendering it disinteresting, dissatisfying, and ineffective. It feels off-the-rack, rather than tailored. This film is so boring, I couldn't even find a way to make this review funny.
Dreamcatcher (2003)
King ruined the movie... By writing the book
Dreamcatcher had a lot of missed potential, and unfortunately that all has to do with the fact that Stephen King's signature lackluster dialog made it into the script, which gave the actors hardly anything to work with. It's most notable... Well, throughout the film. Every bit of dialog is read as if they're teenagers in a high school play.
The cinematography isn't anything we haven't seen before, and the "weasels" simply look like deformed lampreys. They're not huge criticisms, and these two things didn't really bother me, but the overall lack of original iconography leaves something (icons) to be desired. The Shining had brilliant cinematography, and wonderful acting, both of which spawned countless iconic images in popular culture today. IT had Pennywise, at least. What does Dreamcatcher have? Name one thing, I dare you.
In my opinion, Donnie Wahlberg gives the best performance the entire film has to offer. He plays the --marginally offensive-- character exactly the way he needed to be played; he reads the lines exactly the way they needed to be read, his physicality has the exact rules they needed to have. Every mark is hit. What little screen time Donnie has is all the movie is worth, which amounts to about 4 or 5 minutes. Everybody who is not named "Donnie Wahlberg" must have had a hard time getting into character, because the lines are read with such little conviction they could have plea-bargained down to time served plus 500 hours community service.
The group's in-jokes, "F--karee", "F--karow", and "F--k me Freddy" --which are never explained-- are things that no human being who is not named "Stephen King" would ever say aloud for fear of being beaten half to death by everyone around them --that is unless they're paid to. While the sayings might work on paper, they don't translate very well to actual, real human vocalization, and leave the viewer wondering if they've had a stroke.
I just don't even want to mention the flashbacks to the group's childhood. I'm sure those kids were doing their best, and I hope they had a lot of fun filming their parts. I wish King would stop inflicting his flashback sequences on the child-acting community. Typically, they aren't good sequences when adapted to the screen. Just stop it, Steve. Stop.
Whatever those young actors are doing now, I certainly hope it's better than Dreamcatcher.