scramcat-1 Reviews

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Random fragmented sub-plots hinder a touching story about an AI's dream of becoming real

[1/10 · 12 February 2018]

(Starring Ana de Armas, Pinocchio Gosling, and several other stars who deserve better)

While the original Blade Runner followed a group of replicants' quest for full long lives and self-realization, Blade Runner 2049 follows an AI's quest for purpose and meaning beyond her product design.

Joi is a virtual domestic companion to LAPD Officer K who helps him stay grounded after a long day terminating stray replicants (he's a replicant who kills replicants, how meta). Projected as a hologram she engages K in 1950's homemaker chit-chat, joins him at the dinner table, helps him vent, and rubs his weary shoulders as best a trick of the light can. She conceptually understands the world outside the apartment's walls but accepts her isolation from it as her lot in life.

When K buys Joi a portable Emitter (think the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager) the walls fall away from her world. The most commonplace activities like embracing K in the rain or accompanying him to the food court fill her with, well, joy, and a passion to connect ever more deeply with K. She watches him ply his detective skills and survive shoot-outs with scavengers her admiration and love for him grows ever more substantial. Joi even realizes a way to share sexual intimacy with K by enlisting a flesh-and-blood body double.

Now deeply realized, Joi attains a virtue shared by too few humans: Self-sacrifice. When K must go on the lam Joi volunteers to be deleted from the apartment computer console so she can't be misused by the goons hunting the man she loves. Existing only in the portable Emitter she becomes as vulnerable as him and accepts the risk as the unquestioned price of love. And when her time comes she pays that price unflinchingly.

There are several meandering sub-plots that are touched on but never explored and they only waste time and raise more questions. The LAPD police captain fears the discover of a fertile replicant would tear apart society, but her fear mongering has all the authenticity of a click-bait news web site. Bioengineering tycoon Wallace yearns to build more off-world colonies but he can't make enough replicant slave labor and wants Deckard and Rachel's love child so he can learn how to build fertile replicants. Two problems there: Bred replicants would be born as infants but manufactured replicants would be fully grown and ready for the workforce. Also, Wallace was able to build another Rachel so he already has a replicant capable of giving birth, why the murder-filled quest to find the love child? The replicant underground wants the love child because they believe that replicant ability to procreate would lead to their freedom, but there's not a word mentioned of how those dots are connected. When K reunites Deckard with his long-lost daughter it turns out she's been passing as a human for 30 years, so apparently she's not a identifiable as a replicant after all. Why all the turmoil, death, and destruction to find her? The movie could have been trimmed down to a more engaging 100 minutes without all that self-defeating fluff.

Joi owns the only story you'll care about.

Uncle Grandpa (2010–2017)

An homage to surrealism and Golden Age of Animation tropes

[8/10 · 7 April 2015]

I understand how so many people find Uncle Grandpa hard to watch or find it too trippy and hallucinogenic to stomach. But if you know the history of animation and enjoy surrealism, Uncle Grandpa is a BLAST!

Golden Age animator Tex Avery once said, "If you can do it in real life, it isn't animation." Uncle Grandpa embraces that philosophy and runs with it. Every animation gimmick you've ever seen appears at one time or another. Stuff out of the frame (including body parts) cease to exist, perspective gags galore, selective gravity, photo cut-outs, sight gags, visual puns, internet memes, breaking the 4th wall... Don't even try to keep a list, there are too many.

My only complaint about Uncle Grandpa is that sometimes it's a little too NORMAL. I can get normalcy any day without turning on the TV.

Scorpion (2014–2018)

So much wrong... Where to start?

[2/10 · 27 September 2014]

* The characters talk about how socially inept the "geniuses" are yet they're well dressed in hip clothes (even the nerdiest is retro chíc) and cool hats and speak with lots of snarky urban slang and they're more confident than used car salesmen. And they're all rather short for some reason. What's up with that?

* The butthole genius leader responds to every damn question or comment with, "Don't worry, it'll work... maybe" or "It's OK, you'll be safe... probably" or "Of course I'll follow his orders... mostly".

* The writers completely misunderstand that KNOWLEDGE is the accumulation of information but INTELLIGENCE is the ability to organize knowledge to synthesize solutions, explanations, understandings, etc. The genius characters are all data banks of insanely diverse information (sure, I know top-of-head how to break into and start a filthy expensive sports car I've probably never seen in real life and which has a complex encrypted RFID transponder anti-theft circuit) and other minutia that they instantly recite. But they do no actual problem solving.

* Lame stereotypes like the genius man-child who get so wrapped up in his math that he forgets to pay the utility bill. They have many other geniuses loitering together but none of them is smart enough to say "set up automatic online bill payment" or "put a Post-It note reminder on the toilet, you'll be sure to see it there".

* The butthole genius leader tried to do a rapid file exchange by connecting to a jet's wi-fi signal as it flew low over the control tower. But if he was such a genius why didn't he calculate the less-than-a second time span the jet and tower wi-fi would be within range of each other, or the Doppler shift, or the time the wi-fi would take to handshake and connect? Or set up a Pringles "cantenna"? Or better still, why not USE THE FAA AIR-TO-GROUND PACKET RADIO DATA LINK THAT ALL U.S. JETS HAVE?

* Pairing the starched, straight-laced Homeland Security agent with the devil-may-care genius who plays by his own rules is the same kind of "oil and water" TV buddy pairing that died with the 1980's and stayed dead for good reason. I can't believe someone brought it back.

* Where did the butthole learn high-performance high-speed driving in a car he's probably never touched before let alone ever driven?

* Why would a passenger jet have such a long ethernet cable on board?

* When the butthole driver tells the waitress to hit the roof release button, why did she slam the roof off with her hands? What part of "button" was hard to understand?

* Why did the flight office have to climb down on the landing gear? Couldn't he have tied the cable to a metal coffee pot or something and just drop it out the hatch?

* At 250 miles per hour, wouldn't the unweighted ethernet cable have been whipping around wildly in the wind?

* If they were in a car that could match the speed of the jet, and could get 20 feet away from the jet, why didn't the butthole try the wi-fi again now that he was in better, faster range?

* How the Hell was a laptop dangling from an ethernet cable able to relay thesoftware package to the tower by wi-fi that was somehow faster than the ethernet cable, then install the flight control software, poll all the tracking sensors and radar, and update the flight status displays, in less time than it took to brake a high-performance car going at 250miles per hour?

What the Hell... the 1960's Batman TV series was more realistic.

Rubber (2010)

For 3rd year UCLA film students, by 3rd year UCLA film students

[3/10 · 28 August 2014]

You know how sometimes you'll go to a party and there's this one douchebag guy who, somehow, has a group of people captivated and just keeps talking and talking and talking? And from time to time he'll pause and gesture that he's waiting for confirmation that he just said something oh so clever, and the crowd will politely humor him with feigned knowing laughter? But you just stand there, blank faced, wondering why the douchebag is still talking and why is everyone humoring him? Then the douchebag looks at you and slowly shakes his head condescendingly and says, "You just don't get it"? This movie is that douchebag guy.

Rubber would have worked as a 7 minute film school finals project. But instead it's like an interminable night at a hipster dive bar with 3rd year UCLA film students who have reached saturation with cinematic storytelling methods, style, conceits, suspension of disbelief, McGuffins, red herrings, and deus ex machina film gimmicks. And one of the indignant students swears that when he graduates and gets funding, his first film will consist entirely of the conceits that lesser directors fall back on when they write their script into a corner.

That indignant film student is Quentin Dupieux.

Waking Life (2001)

Good premise polluted by coffee shop philosopher clap-trap

[3/10 · 22 February 2014]

If you've ever used the word ontology in a sentence and you weren't parodying a self-absorbed monologuing Austin hipster positioning him-or-herself at the center of causality, purpose, and eternity then you'll probably love Waking Life.

For everyone else, to make it to the end you'll have to pause the DVD every ten minutes to run out and sucker punch the nearest undergraduate philosophy student.

It's important to note that there's only ONE black person in the film, and he only has 2 lines of dialogue, and even then one line is a quote from Gill Scott Heron. Black people seldom ramble vainly about epistemology or religion vs. philosophy vs. science so Linklater would have little use for them. I'm pretty sure the segment with the ineffectual angry young men wearing Dickies was an outtake from Slackers.

Hugo (2011)

Cluttered, overbearing, and bloated with its own muchness

[3/10 · 29 December 2013]

I didn't like the movie "Hugo". I can see why many people said Scorsese lost his talent.

After watching it all the way through, I could see the story elements and concepts that conveyed the point of the story. And it was a good point: Life is like a complex machine whose purpose isn't necessarily obvious at any isolated moment, and how we all have a function but sometimes that function is to facilitate someone else's purpose and sometimes it's to pass our purpose onto another person. And even after a set of functions becomes apparent and a bigger purpose is accomplished, the machine keeps rolling forward and we shift into new functions for new purposes, sometimes reawakening previous purposes in a new context.

Except Scorsese really f'ed it up.

The movie was visually ugly. It may have worked on a big theater screen but on TV it was cluttered, overbearing, and bloated with its own muchness. Perhaps in 3D it worked but in 2D it looked gimmicky.

The digital effects were heavy-handed and obvious, poorly matching grain and contrast of the film plates. Old school matte paintings on glass would have fit the period better. Gears and machinery were excessive and gratuitous, other than in the clock towers why were there insane amounts of gigantic gears inside the train station walls? And There was no harmony or flow to how the people and trains moved, for a story about the machinery of life everything should have moved like an intricate dance, instead it was a hodge-podge of random collisions.

The faux red/blue Technicolor effect was gratuitous and botched. Besides being an anachronism relative to the period of the story, the lighting and contrast were all wrong. In 2-color Technicolor, did you ever see anything back-lit or with intense contrast or white glare? No, you did not. 2-color Technicolor had low to medium contrast at best, lighting was even, and white was avoided because it looked sickly.

Ben Kingsley's make-up was an embarrassment. In the flashbacks to when his character Méliès was a movie maker, I couldn't tell if it was a look-alike younger actor under an ill-fitting foam latex mask or a low-res digital overlay on the real Kingsley. And that awful bulbous nose... Yes, Kingsley has a larger nose but between make-up, lighting, and camera positioning it looked like 5 pounds of foam latex covered with Spackle to eliminate every pore or other hint that it might be living flesh. And too often he was shot head-on (for 3D maybe?), making his face look like a lumpfish.

Another big problem was that the Hugo character was unlikeable from the start. In the very first shot when we see him peering through the cut-out clock numbers, he looks like he has fetal alcohol syndrome, dim-witted and clueless. It's hard to shake that first impression. The only time he shows any skill or cleverness is when he fixes the broken clockwork mouse (and even then, the digital effect of the toy mouse in action is annoyingly fake). Other than that, Hugo is clumsy, obvious, and lacks any guile or finesse... the opposite of what you would think an child would become when forced to survive alone hiding in the train station walls.

The story was propelled by a fragile conceit and the movie would have been over in 5 minutes if the principal characters had a lick of common sense. Imagine the former movie maker confronting Hugo at the toy shop this way:

MELIES: Why do you have a notebook full of notes about my automaton? HUGO: It was my father's notebook, we were repairing the automaton together. MELIES: What? You have my automaton? Let's you and I repair it together! (roll end credits)

Too many characters keep secrets that aren't secret at all, or evade answering the simplest of questions for no particular reason. I lost count of the number of times Hugo said "You don't understand!" but never explained anything that would have made sense of his actions.

So many stupid unanswered questions. Why didn't Hugo's drunkard uncle tell the station management that he had to take in his orphaned nephew? Why didn't Hugo tell the Station Master that his uncle, a station employee, had disappeared? Why did the story make it seem as if Hugo had been alone for years when, as we find out later, it was only 2 months? Why didn't the station management notice when the uncle didn't collect his pay for 2 months? Why was Hugo so secretive about the automaton when all he had to say was that it was special to his father and he wanted to keep that memory? Why did the girl refuse to tell Hugo where she got the heart-shaped key? Why did the Méliès' wife freak out over the automaton's drawing and give Hugo the bum's rush when all she had to do was say that it would have brought back painful memories for her husband? Why was it so easy for the wife to say just that after the film historian flattered her looks? Why would a giant glass clock face in a high tower have hinged panes just big enough for a child to squirm through? Why didn't Hugo bring the automaton along with the film historian and the projector when they all visited Méliès' home? Why did no one give Hugo a decent meal or at least a healthy snack?

I could go on all day.

The elements of a very good movie were in there amongst the nonsensical vanity, but the script, director, and designer ruined it. I look forward to the black-and-white real film remake in 10 years by someone who understands that style must never overshadow substance.

Windwalker (1980)

Raised more questions than it answered

[3/10 · 13 July 2012]

Yes, the dialog is in Cheyenne and Crow, and the actors do a remarkably good job with pronunciation, tone, pacing, etc. Yes, the wardrobe is largely authentic, although in many cases the characters wore *way* more clothes than real Cheyenne or Crow would have. Yes, a lot of the Cheyenne and Crow traditions, motives, etc. were accurately portrayed. Yes, some of the children were portrayed by real Navajo kids.

The story was an OK telling of the life of a man and his family, shown in both forward and backward chronology. But for me it raised too many unanswered questions to make sense in the end.

How are we supposed to cheer for a brash douche-bag of a young Cheyenne who steals enemy Crow horses as a dowry without considering the horrible impact it will have on himself and all the people around him? What year was it, anyway? Horses didn't come to the New World until Spanish settlers/invaders brought them in the 1600's, and they didn't reach Cheyenne territory until the 1700's. One of the Crow wears a Hudson Bay blanket jacket, but those didn't make it past the Great Lakes until railroads arrived in the 1800's.

What was the deal with the central character having blue eyes? The actor who played the old man wore tinted lenses, clearly visible in close-ups. James Remar, who played the same character younger, has naturally blue eyes. In the book does the main character have blue eyes too? Was it even necessary to the story? If the actors are in colored lenses, why not brown ones? How does an old man, just risen from death or near death, kill and skin a bear? And how does he tan the hide in a day? And (this isn't a question) no Cheyenne, Crow, or other Native American would leave the blood of his enemy on his own skin after a fight. That's sort of like willingly turning yourself into a voodoo doll for your enemy to abuse.

Likewise, Cheyenne women would never be as passive as they were portrayed. They'd be fighting fast and brutal along with their man, no hesitation, no hiding.

The story? Kind of OK, nothing special, but mostly it was a vehicle for sumptuous tableaux showcasing beautiful Natives against nature's golden splendor. You know, stuff you'd see airbrushed on the side of a customized van.

Brave (2012)

Mediocre and strictly by the Disney rule book

[4/10 · 22 June 2012]

I suffered through the endless parade of BRAVE trailers for months. So many months. I began to feel the movie had already come and gone. And the trailers told me the single most important thing about this movie: Pixar hired a crack team of PhD mathematicians, created 5 new fields of modeling mathematics, and bought 27 BlueGene supercomputers just to render the girl's hair.

The hair bounces. The hair swings. The hair toussles. The hair drops stray locks here and there. The hair compacts. The hair billows. The hair responds to the wind. The hair responds to momentum and interia. The hair responds to humidity. The hair reflects every known shade or "firey lass" red along with previously unknown shades the computers postulated and shades the human mind cannot grasp.

And the hair is wrapped around a familiar, mediocre, largely predictable story that you've seen several times before in several other "girls can do anything boys can do" movies and TV sitcom episodes.

Don't let Pixar's technical expertise and visual humor distract you from the cold hard truth that the underlying story is pretty pale. The visual styling is dazzling and inspiring, the attention to detail is mind-boggling. Pixar makes unprecedented use of technology to create a previously unseen richness of environment.

Which may explain why they had no energy left to craft a story you'd want to sit through.

You've seen each fundamental step of the story anywhere from a million to infinity-minus-one times before. Puberty-straddling girl wants to be a free spirit. Girl complains that NO ONE UNDERSTANDS HER. Girl uses various tricks and ruses to try to demonstrate she's capable but only demonstrates that she's impatient and devious. Girl resorts to a dirty trick to manipulate parents who JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND HER. The dirty trick back-fires and girl spends most of the rest of the movie trying to undo the harm she caused and mistakenly comes to the conclusion that cleaning up her mess proves she's as cool as she thought she was, and isn't a stubborn, willful, spiteful, selfish, manipulative, deceitful, self-absorbed little bitch, not even a little.

Remind you of an episode of "That's So Raven"? See BRAVE at a second-run dollar cinema. Or wait and see it on NetFlix.

Fairly Legal (2011–2012)

By-the-numbers attempt at flattering women by misogynist writers

[3/10 · 26 March 2012]

You know how just before a new TV series airs the female star will hit the talk show circuit and gush about her character? "I was immediately drawn to (character name) because she's smart, and strong, and sexy, and (character name) believes in truth and fairness, and (character name) has the courage to stand behind her convictions and is't afraid to be herself in a man's world!"

And you cringe because you've heard that same tripe again and again and again from every crappy show that's doomed to fail after 3 episodes.

Add Fairly Legal to that crap heap.

Sarah Shahi as Kate Reed is always right, everyone else is always wrong, and every conflict or solution must be her way or the highway. Seriously, it's 20 freaking' 12 and writers still equate "ball buster" with "strong woman" and "self-absorbed" with "determined"? Seriously?

Women deserve better. Viewers deserve better.