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Death in Paradise: Episode #13.1 (2024)
Is it all downhill from here?
This series has lost its beat, its rhythm its juju. The potential of an interesting, puzzling and even fun episode of the shooting of Selwyn, the police commissioner is all undone. It's not enough there aren't enough suspects. Or that anyone shot in the back would have an IV from the appearance of the ambulance through the hospitalization. Or that all the clues in the final reveal add up. Or the sluggishness and stereotypy of the actor's reactions. It's the slow, slow, slow pacing: of the cinematography, the music, and most embarrassing, the actors' repartée. Too many long pauses, too long, too slow reaction times. All contrary to the syncopated rhythms of the Caribbean. I kept repeating to myself what my high school musical theater director would say: pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!
Great Chocolate Showdown (2020)
Great Recipes Undone by Overpuffed Performances
How do you stand out from the glut of cooking contest shows on TV? Not by directing your judges and contestants to resort to a low common denominator of overblown, cartonnish, childish, saccharine expressions and rhetoric. It's annoying and most seriously, demeaning to all involved and their well taught and hard won creations. The editing reinforces this unrefined treacle with jump cuts that turn the participant's reactions into sterotypes. For example, take the overcute exceessively repeated «snap» test for well-tempered chocolate. Anna Olsen is the only one of the three judges who manages to speak consistently in genuine, learned, communicative, measured tones. I urge the creators of the show to relax and tamp down the phoney feel of their final product.
Jack Ryan: Bethesda (2023)
A Descent Into A Paint By Numbers Plot
What started off with a very promising premise about some mysterious murders that threatened national security descended into pumped up, a series of trite and predictable shoot-em-out scenes and actions sequences. By the last two episodes, an admirable cast is stuck without mercy in a thriller without any legitimate thrills and with a script that gives out obvious clues about where the secret whatevers are hidden that could blow up the world, and who are the kingpins behind a bunch of these nefarious conspiracies.
One brief example is when Ryan and his A-Team intercede in preventing dangerous cargo from crossing the American border. We're stuck to extremes of boredom watching our main characters watching a number of screens to figure out the carrier and then rushing onto the scene in on more tediously drawn out shoot out, followed by a neutralization of the dangerous stuff. This "we've seen it a hundred times before" plot can't be rescued with its accompanying pounding musical score. Nor can we be rescued from our tortuous embarrassment in watching this fine cast denied of any snappy dialogue and given only a bunch of reaction shots.
In the end, this film needed a script, editing and directing doctor comparable to Jack Ryan, who could figure out how to rescue this plodding and predictable film from ruin.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: A House Full of Extremely Lame Horses (2023)
What in heavens name happened!?!
After last week's all eight cylinders firing, out and out masterpiece of a show, this one tanked and tanked, and then tanked agaun. Yes, there was a theme running through the episode about whether women can really make it on their merits, but it got lost in one scene after another without form, shape or humor. In fact, the humor and repartee was forced to the point of painful. We love the performers, but they were given subpar material, absurd unbelievable situations, such as aptitude tests for 6 year old. Furthermore, the show within a show which began and ended the the episode was painfully unfunny full of corny oversentimentalization. In conclusion, this third from last closer was not thought out especially in the disconnection from one scene to the next. Hands-down, the worst and most embarassing episode of all five seasons, above all, for the actors.
The Brokenwood Mysteries: Shot of Love (2023)
A low in a very disappointing season
A poorly constructed, too transparent, easy to solve mystery, poorly paced. Mike is turned into a pathetic non-assertive man when it comes to love.
Although there are two story lines, the crime solcing one is just drips and drabs with no tension otger than one gaving to guess which of the 3 consprators actually pulled the gun. The cause and result of nurder is too medically preposterous.
The show started off many years ago with intriguing, interesting, well constructed mysteries involving multiple subjects, all happening in the context of New Zealand and Maori cultures. There's nothing distinctive about it anymore.
Inside Man (2022)
What were you thinking?!?!?
Preposterous, implausible and most of all unacceptably offensive. And not just because it's the type of drama where the ending is conceived first, but the writer is incapable of anything other than shoehorning in unbelievable actions from its characters as the plot unfolds. In addition, the overarching theme-anybody is capable of killing someone given the right circumstances-is simply banal. Yes, there is some brief entertainingly light but grizzly banter between a sociopathic Holmes-and-Watson-like duo who are on death row for murdering women. But at heart this is no comedy, not when the precipitating crime concerns child sexual abuse.
I only lasted one episode, feeling dowsed in unrepentant non-creative creepiness. I concluded that the only reason for the vicar's guarding the memory stick with child porn on it was because he was an accomplice to the child abuse. Based upon the spoiler reviews it appears thankfully this is not so. Because if it was, the whole drama would feel even more stomach turning, as much as child abuse pretending to be simply pornographic.
In the end this four-parter is an exercise in careless creativity where nothing makes sense in terms of plot, character, mystery and both human or inhuman motivation.
Silent Witness: Body of Work: Part 2 (2006)
A letdown
Two baffling deaths, depicted at such a slow, boring pace that we figured them out first. When the culprits are finally discovered it becomes inconsequential. Spoiler alert: one of the murders reminded us of the superb Chinatown, only Body of Work isn't a very good. In fact it detracts from Silent Witness being much of exceptional body of work. We're now raising our sights that we won't watch another one unless the ratings are at least 7.8 or above.
The Brokenwood Mysteries: Death n' Bass (2022)
It's not how you tell the story it's how you show it
The previous episode was a miracle of revival for the show, with a tight script, a detailed mystery, peopled with multiple eccentric characters. Harkening back to the original few seasons. This one is just plodding, mostly involving people describing their invovement surrounding a murder.
For example, instead of resorting to a lack of imagination in simply showing one suspect interview after another in a small detective room, a more imaginative script writer and director might have shown the details of the eventual crime from the moment the rock show began up to the murder. Then at critical times, one or more of the detectives stops the action and literally pulls a character out of the scene to interview him or her, then puts the person back into the scene. This concept continues until by the end of you learn who murdered the singer. In other words it's important to create an artistic conceit that moves the action along in a typical detective story you've seen lots of times before.
Stranger Things: Chapter Two: Vecna's Curse (2022)
This series has turned into a supernatural science-fiction slasher movie
This series has turned into a supernatural science-fiction slasher movie. Stranger Things has officially lost its way. Than cap it with Soviet Russian Gulag torture plus dungeons and dragons hokum.
Stranger Things: Chapter One: The Hellfire Club (2022)
Excellent special effects don't a good series make
This 1st episode from season 4 experiences a slow tortuous agonizing death from incredibility. Actors18 to 30+ can't pass as high schoolers. Persistent mugging and overacting doesn't work on the small screen. And dramatizing the overwritten, tired cliches of high school bullying doesn't drive the action on.
The creators could have simply solved one problem by situating the young actors and the action in a local college or community college. And if you need a long dialogue-heavy explanatory scene then keep the actors moving on the way to an imperative mission instead of sticking them in a tight interior space with tight closeups of irreparably overemoting performers.
Let's pray the production finds its soul again and neutralizes the faux dramatic monsters intending to rip a previously endearing and chilling show apart.
The Lincoln Lawyer (2022)
Outstanding
It all starts with the writing. Always interesting, detailed, sharp and witty with multiple story lines that work and compelling character arcs. Then add well paced direction & expert movie quality cinematography. The technical crews add value to the series. Then cap it with an outstanding ensemble with Manuel Garcia-Rulfo creating a deeply centered and new interpretation of Mickey Haller. One of the great first season series, ranking among the best.
How We Roll (2022)
The day the comedy died
The day the comedy died. Obvious, unfunny play on words jokes recited in forced inflection, introduced by characters you know nothing about, propped up with a laugh track at a subdued volume that doesn't mimic an audience. As emphasized by Brian Cox in his informative, stirring, laugh out loud memoir, it's the script, the script, the script.
The Weekend Away (2022)
It could've been a contender but...
It could've been a contender but... This taut 90 minute film sped along with good performances, great camera placement and scenic photography plus lots of twists & turns. It reminded you of a modern day Hitchcock with its classic theme: the "wronged man" (Or in this case, woman). Then 3/4 of the way in, it misses with a sequence of sloppy or half-revealed details that a good detective or mystery buff would pick up immediately. Spoiler alert: the "cheats" in the film involve unmatched body types, CCTV and a string of onyx pearls. It's a shame the movie got so sloppy so late in the action. It had the making of a superior whodunit thriller.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Rumble on the Wonder Wheel (2022)
Screwball comedy revisited
Screwball comedy revisited
The show starts off with a bang and never stops. As seen on them Ferris wheel in the amusement park is perfect laugh aloud comedic writing. Multi layered, stacked with eccentric characters all talking past through each other. Fantastic start to a new season.
Sister Boniface Mysteries: Unnatural Causes (2022)
Light but entertaining
For a pilot episode there was enough mystery with multiple suspects and interesting details plus likable and eccentric characters. Very promising. I the Where the main character, the sister, is introduced. A clever conceit to simply have her involved in solving a murder immediately and then explaining a bit about her background. We're looking forward to the next episodes to see if they keep their consistency and avoid getting too broad, preposterous, or easy mysteries to solve.
My Life Is Murder: Look Don't Touch (2021)
Very weak
Not enough suspects, not enough clues, too straightforward, over cute. They've done much better. Maybe just an off week.
Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar (2019)
With more tightening, better staging, and pacing...
With better editing, staging, and pacing...I suspect that the director, having come from the stage, had neither the experience or adequate mentorship to know how to film particularly a mystery. The talented actors in this production are then subjected to variable pacing, most of it slow, which makes a 90 minute production feel like three hours. Instead actors pause and gestures as if they are in a Harold Pinter play. Add the most awkward placing of the camera and the initiating action in each scene. (Agatha lies in bed, holding her head, her lover Max hurriedly enters without knocking then sits at the end of the bed, she joins him and crosses her legs.) All wrong.
Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (2019)
Honest, raw, gentle,kind
Having grown up listening to Gordon Lightfoot and then playing and singing his music on guitar, I'm partial to the wealth and blunt honesty of his songs. There was always a hidden emotional quality to his performances. He was no skilled emoter but oddly, it was all the better. By stepping back, his smooth, rhythmic baritone, his carefully crafted ingenious melodies, lyrics, and arrangements gave you the space to fill in with your feelings, memories and heartbreak.
Just as well, this movie flows along highlighting his great ups and great downs and the "in between" without getting fancy or soppy and without apologies in respecting a true artist. Hid music will be discovered and re-discovered. Canada and the world are better for it.
The Undoing (2020)
This script is guilty for murdering the fine performances of its actors
The story starts off promising and then descends episode by episode into implausibilities, including mediocre detective work, unbelievable court room drama, rinky-dink diagnostic speculation, and unacceptable holes in the plot. (Note: I'm a retired psychiatrist with 40 years experience). The number of lapses in screen writing and depicting it on the screen ruins what are fine performances. Examples: 1. the police do no background work into the past of the accused murderer (played by Hugh Grant), no one inquires how long he was having his affair or what he was doing for the three months he wasn't working. 2. Under age children should not be allowed and aren't allowed in murder trial of a parent and then exposed to graphic photos of the deceased mother. 3. The wife of the accused murderer, played by Nicole Kidman, is found wandering through Central Park in the middle of the night or from her tony Upper East Side home all the way over to the West Side and Harlem. Unbelievable. 4. Pinning the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder on the Hugh Grant character It's not only wrong-headed, It reinforces how shoddy clinical psychologist the Nicole Kidman character is. 5. The last episode has no twists and turns other than those that can be seen a mile away and leads to an obvious and predictable solution to who's the murderer. It just resorts to another clichéd example of the police chasing down a monster. These are just a few examples of a script that should've been sent back for more rewrites to make the plot have, as Aaron Elkin would say, probable improbability instead of improbable probability. To put it in plain English, when you're sitting at home watching the drama unfold and you keep saying "oh come on now, that's ridiculous," you know you're wasting your time on a mediocre product. There are way better murder mysteries combined with police procedural out there that even include family drama (Bosch, for example, does it right). Sadly, this one fails.
Perry Mason (2020)
A complex and compelling story about America at a crossroads builds layer by layer with a satisfying payoff
This series has a sweeping quality to it that borders close to the dream of creating a Great American novel and movie. Alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual perversity, political/religious/enforcement/legal corruption, the Great Depression, racism, mystery, crime, courtroom drama, a love story, spiritual and religious crises, and redemption all rolled into one. Be patient with the first half of the 8 episode series as it lays out a backstory of how a dissolute Perry Mason becomes a legal defender, and how Della Street and Paul Blake became respectively his trusted aide and investigator. What keeps your eyes glued to screen is a remarkable ensemble as well as stunning cinematography. It is also a tribute to the American film and crime fiction It paying respect to everything from Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, John Steinbeck, Michael Connelly, John Ford, Orson Welles, film noir, to "Chinatown."
Hats off to the creators and directors, performers, editor, scene designers, composer, technicians, and a standing ovation to the writers who slaved over getting this tale just right.
The Coroner: Crash (2016)
Too many plots, character arcs and side action packed into 47 minutes
One only episode in this two year series hit its mark: Perfectly Formed in the second year stuck to solving a mystery complicated by every suspects having a seemingly solid alibi but all lying to the detectives. That complicated plotting alone took 47 minutes but used the time todeliver a satisfying twist ending. Overall the show's main characters are engaging and one looks forward to the innerplay between the detective mother and rambunctious teenage daughter. The problem is that the dramatic arcs of the main characters occupies too large a fraction of each episode, hogging the time needed to develop a richmystery. It's sad because there were a lot of positive elements in The Coroner. It simply tries to do too much, leaving the resolution of each episode rushed and thin.
The Outsider: Fish in a Barrel (2020)
Taut but...
Contradictory and confusing evidence causes the local Georgia police force wonder if the murderer of a boy was really the baseball coach. And I wonder if The Outsider is going to be a straight police procedural or a Stephen King-ish supernatural nightmare scenario. We know there's a slim green-hooded figure lurking in the background. More to follow.
John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch (2019)
Write about what you know and this ain't it
This far-from-special special promises to appeal to children using the conceit of an afterschool special featuring elementary kids and tweens. It specifically addresses an important theme: the psychological chasm between kids and the adults in their lives, while also depicting how adults and children suffer similar phobias and fears about death. Finally, it points out how adults fail to comprehend the needs of children and underestimate their sophisticated perceptions of adult biases, pains and unmet needs. With jokes.
But it flops. Over a painful hour one suffers through what appears to be the previously brilliantly hilarious John Mulaney's notebook of unfinished and unfleshed out ideas about childhood. Except for some brief mild humorous sparks this is a painfully, poorly paced, dragged out,unfunny mess (and in one instance it resorts to an abhorrent, callous stab at humor about the imagined death of one of the child cast members). It also misuses the talents of Richard Kind, Andre de Shields, David Byrne, and Jake Gyllenhall, making them try too hard to squeeze humor out of obvious one-idea set-ups. An essential part of John Mulaney's comedic persona is the brash, sarcastic psychologically honest child inhabiting an adult's body. But that doesn't qualify him as someone who can write for children or address their hopes and fears with wisdom or compassion. Instead the youthful cast almost seems exploited because the creator sticks them in his unfleshed out if promising notions. I look forward to seeing the unpredictably quirky and usually spot on John Mulaney's next step. But his current special so wrongheaded, I would recommend his denouncing it and blaming the debacle on Allan Smithee.
Ad Astra (2019)
3 Great Actors Can't Fill the Vacuum of this Noble Failure
Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, and Donald Sutherland try but can't keep this vehicle either soaring through space or landing it back on earth with any satisfaction or exhilaration. And here's the rub: if we've seen these space adventures before, then bring some snap to it, some humor, some unrelenting unpredictability. Take some of the major themes: A father in mortal battle with his son who either invites or rejects his progeny all the while chasing an impossible dream (Star Wars). A character, who like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, seek life beyond the rainbow because he either can't appreciate a real rainbow or can't tolerate the multicolored knottiness of human day-to-day drama back home. To pull off this themes with some life in them, unfortunately the director can't see the galaxy for the stars, and gets pulled instead into the gravity of plodding, unrelentless, and highly predictable dramatic arcs. There are also incomprehensible plot turns that defy explanation, such as the reasons for mayday on a seemingly abandoned space craft or why a whole crew would turn on its captain. Finally, any human intimacy, such as the Astronaut Pitt's marriage is so shallowly depicted, it has no emotional payoff. In the end, the film's elements--its dramatic highlights, set designs, CGI effects--are flattened out by a repetitive pulsing score, which creates one unified ponderously depressing tone that persists throughout the movie and after one departs the theater. I do urge film students to watch pictures like this one and figure out why, which despite all its promising elements, it crashes with a numbing thud.
Museo (2018)
Surrealism and realism veer off the highway to Acapulco
The ultimate mystery of Museo is this: What would make a young adult from an upper middle class household pull off a heist of ancient artifacts from the Mexico City Archeological Museum. Juan Nuñez is disaffected, stalled in his career, emotionally disconnected from all unless he can put down his sister and his passive, sluggish friend. He is the artifacts he steals--but worse. Something within him feels plundered from a sacred past he lost but can't locate, transported in time, offended by modern culture. He is a wandering ghost whose eventually will make all those around him reinforce his self-hatred. Despite this downward slide, he finds a piece of dignity in the end.
I wish the film could keep this riveting plot driving down the road from Mexico City to the country's ancient ruins to Acapulco and back. The performances aren't the problem. Gael Garcia Bernal is always interesting to watch, but he is crushed under the weight of a director who tries too hard to get his point across. The heist scene makes you think you're going on a joy ride ending in disaster. But it's the major highlight of the film. After that it stalls repeatedly, stuck in contemplative or surreal scenes--at times, clearly reminiscent of Fellini at his most decadent and surreal. The movie going on much too long, long after the audience gets it already and is ready to move on.
A good 1/2 hour editing could have turned this movie into a wonder. I would show Museo and Raising Arizona to a class of young filmmakers to understand how a film can either go so right or so wrong.Take the time to see the Coen Brother's Raising Arizona. It was able to connectcrime, the bizarre world, slapstick and the wild unconscious of character, acting without self-knowledge. No, you don't have to simply be like two of the greatest of heist films, Jule's Dassin's Rififi and Topkapi, keeping it light, enjoying the fun of getting away with it. But you don't have to film with a density that sinks project in the Pacific.