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lucius-drake
Reviews
Reacher: Fly Boy (2024)
Simple Mistakes...
I enjoyed season two of Reacher, but nowhere near as much as season one. I think it is a problem of scale. It's too big and a little too rushed for the amount of details.
I noticed a few silly mistakes in the final as well, Neagley's rifle doesn't appear to have any kind of suppression on it (simply a long barrel and a flash hider) but makes Hollywood "silencer noises" when fired.
Then, when the middle-man is shot, his entire torso is covered in bullet wounds when one might assume that four ex-military people would all shoot for centre mass out of training and habit.
Overall, I think it was a good effort, but there are a few things that could have been done better.
Scripts: OK.
Acting: Good.
Actor Chemistry: Good to Great.
Miss Scarlet & the Duke (2020)
Actors are NOT better than the script - they're both terrible!
I was unable to complete an episode of this show.
The lead actor is made of wood, the script is weak, the setting and costumes (while lovely) are lazily shown off with insipid cinematography and some of the worst blocking and choreography I've ever seen.
It feels like it has been produced by people who have only ever heard, second-hand at best, what good television should look like. I could cut this a lot more slack if I knew it was a student film, but as a prolonged series with so much in the way of strong period dramas to call upon, it's really bland and forgettable.
I definitely won't waste any more time with the series as I prefer to enjoy what I'm watching. This wasn't even cheesy enough to be good. It's just blah.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023)
Watchable, but not good.
The script is just continual spoken exposition and delivered by better actors.
Why is someone at the National Museum of Immigration authenticating classical artwork and surrounded by dinosaur bones? Why isn't it the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Natural History Museum? Someone wanted a set piece battle on Ellis Island, that's why.
In fact, this entire movie, like all the "live action" Transformers movies is just a collection of giant set piece battles with a thin excuse for a plot to link them.
As an ooooold fan of Transformers, I kinda hate that 'Mirage' is just Jazz, but with Hound's powers. (Yes, originally Mirage was going to have the holograms, but then they wanted to sell more toys, so they gave Mirage invisibility and created Hound).
Dream Scenario (2023)
Great concept, weak script, terrible ending.
This could, and probably should, have been a straight horror mixing the nightmares people have about Paul with a descent into madness due to the reactions of people in the waking world.
The ending (vapid and incredibly disturbing "influencers" promoting products via deliberate dream invasion) was awful and felt like it belonged to another movie entirely. I wanted to see Paul driven into seclusion and insanity by the way the public came to treat him due to factors over which he had no control!
Nope. Just some has-been trading on his 15 minutes of fame to sell books and media appearances and the normalisation of brain invasion by marketers. It's pretty horrific in its banality, but it wasn't the sort of horror I had hoped for on hearing about this film.
White Noise (2022)
Thought-provoking in that I thought "who greenlit this rubbish?"
Not as clever as it thinks it is but still massively smug and pretentious.
I do think that films can be art by themselves, but I personally require something akin to a narrative or a plot that isn't just pseudo-inellectual masturbatory nonsense.
It plays like a profoundly stupid person's idea of being profound.
You know, the kind of drivel that every intensely mediocre student believes that they, alone, are the first person in history to understand while they regurgitate misunderstood phrases written by dreary & overblown thinkers of centuries past.
In short, this movie feels like the kind of blithering idiocy that spews forth from the mouth of a stoned first year uni student who has literally never encountered an original thought.
JoJo no Kimyô na Bôken (2012)
Massively Overhyped
Dialogue is only ever yelled.
Characters are lucky to have one dimension.
Plot is entirely predictable.
I honestly couldn't get through four full episodes of this anime. The fans of the show talk about it like it's legendary and unmissable, but it's mediocre and very missable.
The OA (2016)
Deep and Mysterious (for people who don't know what those words mean)
This is pretentious garbage that confuses vaguary and nonsense for depth and mystery.
If the only way to make sense of something is to invent one's own meaning for it, spare yourself the awful writing and atrocious acting of the OA and invent a deeper meaning to something with a well written script.
Have you ever been annoyed at how eye-rollingly awful a writer self-insert a character is in a show? Now imagine that the actor playing that character also co-wrote the show.
If this show amazes you, may I suggest the time-honoured practise of getting high and pretending that the Dark Side of the Moon album syncs with the Wizard of Oz?
Midsommar (2019)
Clichéd and Entirely Too Predictable.
If this film had been a drama/horror about the sister's mindset leading up to her awful end, I think I could have enjoyed it.
As it was, there are no reasons given for anything except perhaps to infer that the protagonists are stupid and near-catatonic on drugs the whole time.
Two old people throw themselves off a cliff. One of them survives and is murdered by several people with a maul. The protagonists accept the "oh, this is our custom here" speech given by a village leader, not exactly calmly, but without running like hell and calling the police as soon as possible.
There's not a lot of subtlety to be found here. Every point in the film is clumsily foreshadowed. If we are to believe the apathy with which the protagonists meet their fates, it would have been nice to see some sort of gaslighting or emotional numbness.
What we have is a group of people each of whom behaves like a normal person, if a little one-dimensionally. Except for when circumstances would cause a normal person to flee for their life. Then, they scream and cry a bit, but continue drinking down that precious Jonestown Flavor-Aid.
Ugh. When I writing this rambling nonsense of a review I had given Midsommar a 3/10. I'm revising that down to a 2. The setting was beautiful, much of the cinematography was gorgeous. The sound design was adequate but not of any particular note. The writing was terrible, the concept was The Wicker Man, but with 100% more Swedish, the actors were aimless and uninspired.
The 6th Friend (2016)
Definitely an F-Grade film.
This is not the worst film I have ever seen.
I would consider it to be a strong contender for the worst film I've seen this decade.
The writing is bad, the acting is worse, and the camera-work is nauseatingly wobbly. It might be intended to feel organic, like we're watching through someone's eyes, but if that's the case the 'camera/person' is very short and dangerously drunk.
Absolutely every one of the main cast feels wooden and unconvincing. They deliver lines in ways that would make a high school drama coach despair.
Seriously. I have seen school plays with better acting.
The lighting and sound are clear and the director of photography has framed a lot of the shots normally. The editing is mediocre, but serviceable. The plot is a mash-up of several horror tropes, which is fine, but I cannot tell if the dialogue or overall direction is the worst thing about this.
The Lego Batman Movie (2017)
I expected very little and was still disappointed.
LEGO Batman took the one-trick pony of Batman from The LEGO Movie and tried to make a self-aware LEGO-based parody of superhero tropes that both kids and adults can enjoy. It fails at this, instead resorting to wacky caricatures, silly noises, and rapid movement to at least keep the attention of the under-10s.
If self-aware parody and Batman together are required, do yourself a favour and get hold of the Adam West/Burd Ward Batman television series.