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jbstjohn
Reviews
Killing Eve (2018)
Disappointing and over-hyped, but with a strong villain
I felt this series couldn't decide what it wanted to be, and that hurt it. I only finished most of season 1 (which people claim is by far the best) before it lost me. I really like Jodie Comer as the psychopathic assassin, and her interactions with her handler. She has many small mannerisms and mood switches that sell it nicely. I don't understand why people praise Sandra Oh. She has an amazingly *unexpressive* face, and that's not what's needed here.
But back to the problems with the show. First, the writing/plot just doesn't hold up. People do things that don't make sense (and going against their motivations) all the time. Things like pursuing a professional assassin alone and unarmed. Or lying to your husband. Or not caring if a professional assassin knows your name and where you live. In the very first episode, there's this bigger plot point about the someone calling the killer "flat-chested" in Polish -- but she's actually quite full-chested. They could have shown her strapping down her chest as part of a disguise, but they don't. Don't think about it, move on to the next inconsistent scene!
There's also the tone. At some times it wants to be funny and quirky (ha ha, we swear and disrespect our boss at MI5! Hee hee, we approach sex without any passion! Chinese intelligence guy like BDSM, snicker snicker). At other times (often seconds later) it seems like it wants to be 'real' and present how normal people would deal with extreme situations (but sometimes Sandra does silly yelling, sometimes she tries to approach the assassin like a deer in the forest). Are the people average, or are they super-skilled, or horridly incompetent? Is it cartoonish, or realistic? Was Eve close to her boss (swearing revenge), or did she not really care (not taking revenge, not seeming to care)? Does Eve care about her family or not? They manage to do a decent job selling why Eve is fascinated by the assassin, but never convinced me why the assassin would be fascinated by Eve. It seems very clear if the show weren't named after her, the assassin would have killed her multiple times.
My impression is that the show (reminiscent of Lost) does a good job at early hinting at things ("The Twelve", Carolyn's character), but doesn't actually deliver on any of them.
Dracula: The Dark Compass (2020)
What happened? All that was good turned to dust.
Like a staked vampire.
It started in a somewhat promising way, Dracula in the modern world. I liked his recapture although, modern van Helsing wasn't so clever.
The first episodes were great -- I especially liked Sister Agatha, and her sharpness, and her hubris and the punishment for her hubris. You had a sense of menace from Dracula, and he delivered. He is evil, he needs to be monster. He can be a seductive monster, but he needs to be monster.
Already in episode two, they made him too much of a 'gourmet'. Okay, it still mostly worked, and you had the nice conflict and sacrifice of Sister Agatha.
Episode three you get an incredibly stupid secret institute. So bad, you just kind of "lol wut?" He guessed the Wi-Fi password, and then called his lawyers and then they let him out. Lamest writing I've seen in a while.
Never resolve any of the supernatural stuff, just kind bumble around with it -- people are buried alive, people survive cremation, but then sun doesn't hurt (but it killed other vampires?!?) It was all in his head? He's really a nice guy in love? And sorry, club girl was one of the least sympathetic characters ever encountered. Shallow, vapid. Why would scientist boy like her? And of course she's scared of getting ugly or old, but we have to have stupid "You're not afraid of anything, are you?" dialog.
Nothing makes sense, nothing put together, the darkness at the core of Dracula turned into pastel pap. What a disappointment.
Il racconto dei racconti - Tale of Tales (2015)
Beautiful visuals; no coherent story at all
A massive disappointment. I kept waiting for it to fit together or even be interesting. Three stories don't connect, and aren't even stories themselves. Many things are never resolved, or even explored (e.g. With the twins, what was the creature in the cave? Why did it turn into a woman after being killed? What happened to the pair? Or the queen? Was the ogre actually brutal?)
It's also slow, dark, gruesome and depressing. I guess some people like that, but I think that dark slow scenes need to be balanced with occasional energy or light. The movie it most reminded me of is one I saw about thirty years ago, "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover". But that had a story.
The scenery is beautiful -- raw castles, ornate palaces, mystical forests. The music is captivating. But there's no story, and no real chance for characters to show any depth. Salma Hayek spends ten minutes just saying "Elias" while playing with him in a maze.
One of the worst movies I can remember seeing.
Imawa no Kuni no Arisu (2020)
Starts well, but goes steadily downhill
I liked the glimpses into normal Japanese life it gives, and somehow the regular scenes of empty Tokyo were also cool. However, the acting (please close your mouth Asugi?), and the complete lack of consistency later on (once at the 'Beach') just get annoying, ruining any sense of mystery.
Such as -- why doesn't anyone use the resources of an abandoned city? Canned food, comfortable houses, generators. Or weapons, which might occasionally come in handy. There's one 'game' where they manage to beat someone with a gun -- but they don't take the gun after they beat them, which might simplify things for the next fight.
They also seem to have painted themselves into too much of a corner with power of the gamemasters. Lasers from the sky, phones in the lobby, essentially god-like abilities with no apparent limits or explanation. At the start it's okay as part of the mystery, but later it becomes too much. (Did someone take that tiger out of a cage? Bring it to that place, and then carefully let it go, after goading it to be hungry enough to attack? And then come collect it later).
And it tries to be gritty and real, but then mixes in people punching out tigers and bopping about in bikinis in an apocalypse. Nice to look at, but made no sense. If you don't feel there's actually an interesting solution to the mystery, you lose interest in resolving it.
I would have liked a bit more of an exploration. How can you maintain any power structure when you need to go randomly fight for your life every few days? Can those laser punch into the earth? If I'm in the basement underneath you, do you just get killed too? Instead you just get a bunch of over-dramatized yelling at each other. I guess it's supposed to be anime/manga, but it didn't work for me.