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Reviews
Scenes from a Marriage (2021)
such a waste!
A rehash of one of my most beloved films/series from the creator of In treatment, with the marvellous jessica chastain thrown in for good measure, there sure was enough to raise my expectations with this show, announced in venice a month ago... but boy was i disappointed! (this seems to be a theme recently, foundation and american rust and so on and so on....)
what's the problem, you ask? Well, the show is empty, that was my immediate impression after the pilot, and on episode 4 i've decided to stop watching although i know only 2 more episodes are coming and i HATE breaking off a show in the middle (but that seems inevitable nowadayas, like i said, foundation, american rust, also nine perfect strangers and if it weren't for steve martin i would have given a kick to murders in the building too...)
what do i mean with 'empty'? Well, the duration of the episodes is quite similar to the original Bergman serie, later adapted into film format, but it seems like only half the lines are there, and all the relevance and weight of the original is gone!
For example, bergman was criticized for never showing the children, which is true here as well, but he surely talked and showed the PARENTS of the protagonists right from the start (the phone call to the mother in law being one of the most brilliant scenes of ep1), grounding their psychology and behaviour (i don't know whether they'll have the face to face with the wife's mother in episode 6 but i wouldn't be surprised if it was cut to make room for some useless 'modern' reinvention of the original...)
i could give many more examples: the antifeminist rant after going to the theatre to watch Ibsen, gone
the husband shown in his work environment conversing with a colleague, along with the wife and the chilling therapy session with a loveless mother, gone
the confrontation with the 'unhealty couple' which survives in the end, grossly simplified and misrepresented, wasting the talent of corey stoll in the process
gone is the 'cruelty' and intellectual pregnancy Bergman infused in the work, everything here just floats and isn't credible or grounded in anything
take the beating scene in the last episode: it's meaningful and the end of a crescendo of recriminations in Bergman, here it just feels forced and out of nowhere, no real acrimony between the protagonists
also, i'm sorry but the role reversal is ludicrous PC bullscit: liv ullman reading from her diary about her repressed childhood and erland josephson falling asleep is perfectly logical and 'dramatically' fit, oscar isaacs reading a therapist mandated exercise and jessica NOT falling asleep because, hey, she's a woman!, is ludicrous and laughable
again, could give dozens of examples of this rehash NOT working out even on its own, let alone compared to the original, which is INEVITABLE since it's a remake
thank god bergman is long gone, but if modern writers want to confront themselves with some revered texts from the past (this goes for the foundation cycle as well) they should definitely do their homework better to deserve the laudes such an effort surely begets.
The Room (2019)
quite good
You know when, all too often, a movie starts promising and intriguing and ends up a big waste of time? (and nowadays it seems fashionable to pass the 2 hours mark for NO reason whatsoever, even when the flick is good, like marriage story!)
this one does the exact opposite: it starts silly and uninteresting enough, spending almost 20 minutes with the basice premise, which if you are watching you already know (a room makes objects appear), and an unnecessarily long montage of the beautiful couple enjoying the fine things in life (uhm, they just bought a mansion in upstate NY, how bad off could they have been?)
THEN it starts to get interesting, although the 'twist' is very much telephoned AND goes against common sense (the premise is magical, i'm fine with that, but still there are rules, for example how can she possibly have milk in her???)
it becomes more and more interesting going along so that my vote and appreciation is higher than it would have been for another movie with the same qualities but the order reversed (like it's all too common, as i've said)
this is to say the room is not a masterpiece by a long shot BUT it is not overly long and drawn out and makes some interesting points about parenthood and growing up, which is more that can be said about that other mess i immediately thought about when reading the synopsis (the box from infamous richard kelly...)
it's worth seeing, considering also how UNprolific the director has been
Marriage Story (2019)
Masterpiece
Can you make, in this day and age, a movie about a man and a woman and nothing else? Can you present the old battle between Los Angeles and New York in a new light and a have a 'neurotic' auteur male protagonist with his blonde muse appear fresh, more than 40 years after Woody Allen (and his master, Bergman)?
Can you drawn out for well more than two hours what in the end is just a dramatic comedy (the only flaw I would ascribe to an otherwise unmitigated triumph) and not only get away with it but pull from under your hat a career defining masterpiece not just for you but for your two leading actors (hell, three if we count Ray Liotta, and I'm gonna! I'd consider even Alan Alda to have been blessed by this movie if his career wasn't already legendary, although, besides Horace and Pete, this may be his only work really worthy of notice in the last 20 years)?
Well, turns out if your name is Baumbach you can do whatever the hell you want, and then some!
I've long appreciated this underknown master crafter of movies, although his last collaboration with Ben Stiller (and adam driver, who i only got to like in this movie!) left me somewhat cold. But it appears that since he took the Netflix way, UNLIKE some better known big shot director, he is regaling us with his best work since The squid and the whale, well into his fifties (I imagine...).
Aside from a couple of 'musical' numbers that seemed a concession to his stars and aggravated the already vexing screen time, the only other small blemish I could find in an otherwise perfect script would be that, despite a very conscious effort to present a very balanced, UN-kramer like scenario, in which both the man and the woman are very good parents and essentially good people who only want the best for each other, but still, against their better judgement, end up making each other miserable, the movie still seems to me to favor the woman in the end, if only slightly (55-45 let's say).
That may also be the reason why Scarlett Johansson is generally considered to have given the best performance, even though it seems to me the most dramatic scenes were given to Driver. That may also have to do with something cognitivists call the frame problem: while Adam Driver has almost esclusively appeared in artsy dramas, Johansson can be considered a somewhat bogged down version of the very character she plays, an actress known for a commercial movie in which she shows her boobs.
Funnily enough, the only nude the real Scarlett ever did was in an artsy scandinavian film that nobody saw (aside from the salient ten seconds...), but aside from that she may have given the best actorial proof in her career just because she never challenged herself all that much, not because she suddenly channeled Liv Ullman like many seem to think.
Driver, on the other hand, doesn't do here anything he hadn't already done in the past, beside being likable (no small feat for him! kudos to Baumbach once more).
All the rest of the cast is in a state of grace as well, from Laura Dern to the already mentioned Ray Liotta and Alan Alda as the combative lawyers of the protagonists. I may have chosen famous names for other roles as well, namely Nicole's mother and sister, instead of casting Wallace Shawn in a pretty forgettable and useless character.
Mr. Robot: 405 Method Not Allowed (2019)
i cant believe
EVERYONE who writes in here is a stupid fanboy! I mean, really, this was the most stupid and forced GIMMICK ever!
It's a fricking GIMMICK people!!! Nobody talks for half an hour, big whoop! It's forced, it's ridiculously self-conscious and, most importantly, it's f--cking BORING!!!
Which, after the snoozefest of episode 4, is particularly unforgivable...
I had a bad feeling about this final season since that 'third one' nonsense, followed up by the incredibly stupidly named deus group (AND la mort heureuse, and murnau dry cleaning and so on and so forth, how incredibly self conscious and in love with himself IS this esmail guy? jesus, get your head out of your ass already!)
now i can see this is going to end worse than got, what another gigantic waste of my time....
IO (2019)
I can't believe such a low rating!
Yes, this movie is slow and possibly overdrawn, yes not much happens throughout, but still!
First of all, does nobody here know and appreciate the wonderful Margaret Qualley from the hit show The Leftovers? We need more young, stunning actresses like her who only ever choose quality and different projects to showcase their talent in! Most of her movies here on Imdb have low ratings which are totally unwarranted (ok, the one with bill camp was pretty useless...).
She reminded me Margot Robbie in Z for Zacharia, the difference being the latter went on to do Suicide squad, bleah!
Secondly, this is intelligent well thought out science fiction for a change. Yes, the apocalypse is an abused theme but here they are actually rooting for planet Earth, they are trying to adapt and remain, which is an unusual angle. I've read the excellent post detailing many scientific inaccuracies, but still, to an uneducated watcher (i do have a degree in engineering btw, so more educated than most watchers probably), this film appears refreshingly well-written and well documented. The issues about biology, evolution and trying to repopulate the planet with bee colonies are well presented, if probably unrealistic. The overarching theme of human connection, survivors guilt and the dangers of hope are also very important and used more as a subtext than a source for drama (for example, it would appear the mackie character wanted to kill the guru scientist? but he was already dead, which was pretty clear early on, so no big conflict).
The only cheesy thing about this movie would be, for me, the finale, in which not only she's able to breath heavily polluted air (thanks to the bee punctures? i didn't understand that bit, since the bees themselves weren't immune) but of course she also got pregnant after one magic night with a total stranger, who in these conditions would probably be sterile...
BUT, the main point is that this kind of films, ADULT scifi based on IDEAS, are rare and distant between, and need to be appreciated by a discerning public, otherwise we'll just get starwars 34 from now on!
Collider (2018)
Terrible!
If you ever envied people working at Hollywood watch this movie, youll be happy to be a janitor. Yeah, it IS that bad! And im a sucker for time travel movies but this is beyond stupid, faaaar beyond!
Capsule (2015)
God this stiiiiinks!!!!
Whoever thought this could be a movie??? How do these things ever get made, I demand to know! I've seen my fair share of stinkers where NOTHING happens, nothing whatsoever minute after minute after f... minute! But this is the worst! Who are these 500 people giving 10 and 9 who made me waste one hour of my life with this S H I T??? I want their names! I want to know where they live! Jesus Christ is this one of the most useless pieces of s h i t ever committed to film or what?. I could see the writer drinking another Pepsi, belching and going back to sleep. AWOID AT ALL COSTS!!!!!!!!!
OK another line: this is the plot, a guy up in space discovers nothing on his capsule works, for no reason, and he has oxygen for few minutes, for no reason, and speaks on a creaky radio with a bunch of voices only slightly less annoying and ridiculous than his one. AND IT LASTS 91 FMINUTES!!!