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dwasifar
Reviews
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Preachy, slow, and ultimately self-defeating
Let's just consider the ending.
The idea here is that the scientist has convinced Klaatu to call off his destructo-swarm on the grounds that humanity can pull together and change when faced with threat of extermination. So he aborts the attack and leaves in his spaceship, turning off all of humanity's technology on the way out ("You will have major changes to your way of life", he says).
So now we have billions of people left on a planet stripped of communications and the technology needed to feed them. This is not a situation where people organize and pull together to build a happy, green new world. It's a situation where people will be eating each other in less than a month. Klaatu has set humanity up to fail hard, in grinding misery and horror. It would have been more merciful to just let the swarm kill everyone and get it over with. Nice guy. Nice message.
Grandma's Boy (2006)
Better than I expected
I watched this mainly to see Shirley Jones play against type as a dirty cougar granny. (Hint: Most of that made it into the previews.) But it turned out to be a darn funny film in its own right. Typically I find stoner comedy tiresome, but this one is an exception. Joel David Moore deserves a lot of credit for creating a character that's equal parts Nic Cage and Napoleon Dynamite. You have to see it to know what I mean; he's uproarious. I can't believe I'm recommending this film, but: Recommended.
American Horror Story: Traitor (2018)
This is where Season 8 finally lost me
This is where Season 8 finally lost me. Though to be fair, it barely had my attention after the reappearance of Stevie Nicks. Having her show up in Ep 5 and sing a song while everyone else stops moving the plot forward and blissfully admires her was just as jarring this time as it was the first time.
Anyway. The season starts well, with a literal bang, and then throws away its interesting premise in favor of some warmed-over gobbledygook about witches and warlocks. Bringing in characters and locations from previous seasons seems interesting for about five minutes until the novelty wears off and leaves it feeling like a clip show.
The dialogue mostly sounds like it was lifted from a second-rate book of ghost stories for young adult readers. It's a credit to the ensemble cast of AHS veterans that they can deliver some of these ridiculous lines with a straight face. Some of them can't, in fact. Most of the senior warlocks are given really bad lines and can't find a way to make them convincing. Billy Porter in particular seems to have decided that if he's going to have to read silly dialogue, he's going to camp it up as much as he can get away with. There are some excellent performances here, but that's like saying someone makes excellent mud pies. They're carefully crafted but still made of mud.
In the end I just couldn't take it anymore. It's not that I can't suspend disbelief about the supernatural long enough to enjoy a good piece of fiction, it's more that I can't imagine real witches and warlocks talking to each other like their speeches were written by Ed Wood.
Psycho (1998)
Waited 19 years, gave it another chance, still a disappointment
I was unimpressed by this when it first came out, but I thought I'd give it another chance recently and tried to watch it with an open mind. No; it's still not good. And the thing is, it could have been good, if the cast had found something new in the characters. But they mostly didn't, and I think that's because of the extremely questionable casting decisions. Anne Heche in particular seems lost and floundering in her role, and she is not helped by the crew cut that plays up her resemblance to Pee-Wee Herman. Once you see that, you can't unsee it, and it's Pee-Wee as Marion from then on.
Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates is another bad choice. Anthony Perkins' Norman is superficially likable, and when he turns scary, the transformation is unsettling. Vaughn's Norman is creepy from the beginning, so there's no unsettling shift when he turns out to be a creep. Viggo Mortensen's affected aw-shucks cowboy accent deprives the Sam Loomis character of its needed gravity; and Julianne Moore tries hard to convey the steely desperation that Vera Miles earlier brought to Lila Crane, but in the end just comes off as cranky.
Only William H. Macy brings something new and welcome to his role, giving the Arbogast character a refreshing abrasive charm, different from Martin Balsam, but as good if not better. In the supporting roles, there's nothing much to comment on except maybe for James Remar's note-perfect reproduction of the original film's state trooper.
This is intended to be a shot-for-shot remake, yet Van Sant felt compelled to add a couple of needless things. For example, we don't need to see Norman masturbating as he looks through the hole in the wall; it's better if his desire is completely frustrated. And having Lila cut loose with martial-arts moves at the end seems like a gratuitous nod to obligatory female empowerment. In any ordinary movie it would be unremarkable, but in this film, when you know it didn't happen in the original, it sticks out like a sore thumb and you know immediately that it was added for the wrong reasons.
I'd like to see someone else try this again. It's not really a BAD idea. It's just bad execution.
USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2016)
How could a deep water adventure be so shallow?
This movie spends too much time making up or embellishing clichéd stories about its secondary characters. The story of the Indianapolis doesn't need gratuitous character conflicts to be interesting. This is made worse by the film's tone-deaf rendition of the period; most of the cast act like they were dropped into this movie without a chance to study up on how people behaved in the 1940s. And of course we have the obligatory lectures on modern social issues. It's not that those social issues don't matter; they do, but I doubt sailors stranded in the ocean would take time out from dodging sharks to deliver feel-good speeches on those topics.
Cage is predictably over-the-top, but Sizemore seems determined to beat him on that score; the first half of his performance consists of every tough-old-salt trope you've ever seen in a sea movie all rolled into one, and the second half consists mostly of screaming. (Too bad William Shatner's too old to be included; he could have taught them both how hamming it up is done.) The rest of the cast do their damnedest but the script doesn't give any character much depth; just forced, artificial, needless personal dramas.
This film would have been much, much better in someone else's hands; Tom Hanks, for example, or Clint Eastwood. As it is, it takes a gritty true-life ordeal and turns it into a slick package of manipulative formula clichés. Too bad.
Star Trek: The Magicks of Megas-Tu (1973)
Missing the point
I think the other reviewer missed the point. This is not a pro-Satan episode; rather, it denies Satan exists at all. To Kirk, Lucien is just another alien being, not a supernatural force; and the religious stories demonizing him into the embodiment of evil are dismissed as mere outmoded superstitions. The "magick" is revealed not to be supernatural at all, but simply the physics of that region of space.
That a Saturday morning cartoon show, nominally for children, had the guts to tackle a subject of this weight is astonishing. The episode encourages its viewers to question dogma and reject superstition. It's not pro-Satan, just pro-freethinking - though I don't doubt that some parents would call those the same thing, sad to say.
Slow Learners (2015)
Spoils itself for no good reason
The film starts off amiably enough, setting up its two lead characters to be mostly likable in an awkward, gangly, vulnerable way. The story hinges on the efforts by the two leads to change their lives and themselves. In the process of trying, the characters (especially the girl) become so unpleasant that they squander all the viewer sympathy built up earlier. In movies like this, you know how the two characters are going to wind up; you watch it just to see how they eventually get there. But by the time these two get there, you really don't feel like they deserve a happy ending. The outtakes in the closing credits are funnier than the last two-thirds of the film.