orr101 Reviews

A Matter of Trust (2022)

I trusted the movie to make sense, and it mostly doesn't

[4/10 · 21 January 2024]

Ok, so the movie is 5 stories and seems to be centered on trust between people. That is not an excuse to break MY trust that if I watch it till the end the stories will make sense.

Not only do the stories remain totally unrelated (so, really 5 short movies with random jumps between them), but in at least 3 of them the audience never finds out what the story IS. We get hints, but left in the dark both about the characters's past and background, and about their future. There is a lot of Atmosphere, but not a lot of plot.

This is not a movie - it is 5 separate impressionistic paintings, in movie form.

Be warned.

Snowpiercer (2013)

A mediocre slave-rebellion film hiding in a weak science-fiction shell

[3/10 · 10 May 2022]

So, the premise is that a misguided attempt to solve global warming backfires, and the entire earth goes into an ice age, but survivors Ride ONE train, that runs continuously, and the people on it are separated by class and privilege, with lords at the front, and low-status near slaves at The back. Slaves revolt and fight their way to the front.

As a slave-revolt film, so so. Maybe a parable about our society - if you want, you can see it as such, tough the film does not work hard to show this.

As a Sci-Fi film - this sucks. The whole thing makes no sense. You need to suspend ALL logic. Any detail you look at will be unexplainable.

WHY would survivors be on a constantly moving train? What's the advantage? How do they heat the train? Where do they get fuel? And food? Who maintains The mechanics? The track? Where do they get the tens of Axes they show at one point? Di someone at the middle of the apocalypse say "I know, we'll stock a few dozen axes, they will come in handy, trust me!"... in fact - why would the "lords" up front even keep pulling the back section with all the plebes along? The movie gives no real reason what role the plebes play and how they are needed.

In short, there is no "SCI" in this movie, and the Fiction side is preposterous.

Abandon all thinking, you who come to this movie.

Cypher (2021– )

SO. Many plot holes ... ruins the show for me. Other than that seems the standard 'skilled guy fights BIG conspiracy'

[5/10 · 28 March 2021]

This would have been a pretty standard formulaic guy with a skill (code breaking in this case) gets pulled into a conspiracy and fights it For his life and his family. However, this is TOO formulaic for me (how come all protagonists of these kind of things always have a hacker Friend who get hack anything?) and the plot is full of holes.

E.g. The main device is a printed code, using a lot of weird symbols, from many alphabets and cultures, that everybody wants to break, Deriously?

A PRINTED cypher? Supposedly also designed by a computer guy who wanted to be sure he was the only one who could read it. Hello? Computers?

Encryption, anyone? And along the way someone even states that one of the section is "Caesar code" - are you kidding me? At his is THE simplest, Weakest code I know if (well, maybe pig Latin is weaker). The supposedly genius "computer guy" who designed a code that has to be printed , instead Of a good encryption algorithm, has used CEASAR's code?

And the supposedly smart protagonist never seems to ask the simplest questions, such as how his supposedly friendly mystery woman knew where To locate him? I could add more, lost more, but bottom line is that toy have to not just "suspend disbelief", but also out your logic and desire foe internal Logic in pause.

Better Off Ted (2009–2010)

Funny & Sarcastic

[10/10 · 22 August 2020]

I love this underrated, intelligent, funny and sarcastic show.

To illustrate: in one episode the Protagonist brings his going daughter to the company provided childcare. The teacher asks the kid: "do you like art? Today is our big art project!", Then it turns out the project is repainting the white lines of the company parking lot.

I find this funny. It is a pity there are so few epidodes