Change Your Image
MarcSchmarc
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
One Shot (2014)
After awhile, it was only interesting to see if it was ever going to rise above bad
My wife and I had finished watching something pretty good on N..F x (yes, that can happen), and she then called it a night while I decided to check out some stupid B (C or D) list action movie. I've sometimes been pleasantly surprised. Although usually not. This movie falls into the not category. Or make that NOT.
I gave it a rating of two only because I only give ones when I'm offended. This wasn't offensive. It was just all the other bad and irritating things a truly bad movie can be: boring, pointless, derivative, fake, cheap, slapdash, cheesy, cliché-ed and ... in the end ... barely having any claim to be either a war movie, or a sci-fi movie. I'm usually offended by attempts to become philosophically deep ... scenes thrown in to drive home some drively political "message". But this movie, while it almost tried, made such a lame attempt at it that it was basically inconsequential to the rest. Almost tried, is a good definition of this entire production. It doesn't even try.
This movie doesn't need a spoiler alert, because the ending is so obvious that even the premise and the description of the first 20 minutes gives away the ending.
Take away the so-called sci-fi touches, this is just an American sniper in -- someone suggested Afghanistan -- but definitely some middle eastern country, battling ISIS or the Taliban. His unit has been wiped out, and now he's alone and the only way to escape is to ... stay where he is and scan the desert region endlessly, and watch the camp of the bad guys, endlessly. If you removed the scenes of him looking through his scope and not seeing much of anything, you'd cut this movie down to an hour. Sometimes, just for whatever (to get a bit of food or water maybe) he goes down and attacks the camp, miraculously killing anyone he comes across. Nothing's believable. He's immortal. He can be in a firefight with 20 bad guys shooting at him with automatic rifles, and he takes them out with karate kicks, a pistol, or a knife. He actually gets captured at one point, that that of course was no problem. A slight diversion, and he's rescued.
Just for the sci-fi dimension, he's supposedly on some planet. For some reason, he's supposed to be a good guy, although you're left wondering how the good guys can be that, when they are the ones who have invaded this planet and the people who are there are "insurgents". There's no attempt to deal with this ambiguity. It's all just boo-rah ... including recuperating your dead.
The sci-fi thing is provided by some 2001 Space Odyseey command ship which, like a spy satellite, can watch the sniper's every move. But they don't do anything up there but comment on how great he is, or how he's in terrible danger all the time, and make plans to save him but never can for reasons that no one bothers to really explain. The actors playing the command ship scenes, which consists of some black painted plywood set, have nothing to say but ... well, there he is, getting into a cave, or there he is, running around, or whatever ... and the commander seems to know everything that is happening, including the sniper's motivations and plans. It's remarkable.
And remarkably lazy ... or just stupid ... writing. Some people call this sort of thing uninspired. But that's a term you'd use for someone who is perhaps capable of being inspired? This is obviously the level of writing you get from someone who is only capable of the most cliché-ed ideas. Nothing is original. And the director really can't do anything with it but throw in some lame fight scenes, long survey-the-desert sequences, and drop a few "alien"/human socio-cultural "exchanges. And there's a really bad guy, actually two ... a bad/bad alien guy who looks like he's straight out of Kabul, and the good/then bad human guy, to I guess show that this whole human adventure on this planet is bad? Or? ... And there's a very sexy alien princess this sniper is suddenly protecting, thrown in, to make sure there's SOME reason for the sniper to seem like a hero.
I get irritated when I see this sort of thing. OK, I get it. This provided work for some people. But ... wow ... what gets me is that these types of Netflix filler fodder aren't put through some sort of quality process. The writer of this thing should never be given any more money, ever, for full length movies. There are probably several hundred other aspiring writers who could have provided something more interesting. Or at least not so laughably cliché-ed.
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Watchable eye candy brainless entertainment
Anyone expecting King Lear or Hamlet performances in a film like this, have come to the wrong shop. That said, there could have been a bit more life ... or identifiable emotion or some sort ... in about half the closeups we get of Kristen Stewart. Regardless of what she was supposed to be looking at, an evil queen, a dwarf, a mudsplattered huntsman, a monster troll, a magical elk-dear thing that looked like Harry Potter's patronus, she had the same expression: nothing. OK, true, with a CGI drowned fairy tale adventure/cliffhanger movie, you can't expect much. But it might have been fun if Snow White had possessed something onscreen that would have had some sass, intelligence, or pizzazz. Script wise, there are some head scratchers and inconsistencies. Maybe this was a result of editing? Having to make room for long action sequences (a thundering calvalry charge which seemed so enless and seemed to keep starting back at the same point, made me think of something similar in, I think, some Monty Python bit ... maybe in MP and the Holy Grail ... or am I just confusing it with some other endless thing with a knight running with a cocoanut clicking sidekick?). And one big, huge, absolute fail: how it was only upon learning he'd been tricked, did the Huntsman suddenly go from drunken, sullen, would-be murderer to brave, focused hero protector. Huh??? That's quite a sea change, even for a script where logic and continuity takes second place. Character development isn't in this film. But ... should it be? Maybe not. Maybe it's just a fun, popcorn chomper. Yet ... might have been more of a pure entertainment, without the acting and plot leaps, leaping out from time to time. The cinematic magic on this one just barely works.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017)
Checked off the to-see bucket list ... same way this film was made.
No spoilers here. But, even if they were, they wouldn't really be spoilers because ... in fact ... that would be impossible. You've seen it all before.
Why did I watch this? Because, like many other people, I really liked the first films. Just big fun. And so I figured, hey, they would do that, right?
Disney: evidently when they sat down to figure out why people like the first films, they got lost in their corporate, accountant driven, audience surveyed calculations, and decided it wasn't acting, or storyline that people wanted, but special effects. And that's all this is, from beginning to end. Resulting in, simply, a CGI-generated piece of ... uh ... whatever. With a plot line tidying up (more like scraping up and disposing) loose ends from previous films.
Where to begin: First: Johnny Depp -- who is admittedly the main reason the other films were interesting -- had absolutely nothing to work with in this script. He had nothing more to say. And he was evidently not interested in putting any personal investment into it. So all he did was crack the few not particularly interesting jokes he was handed, grimace a bit, and his principal acting skills went into scenes where he had to pretend he was staggering around drunk. And I'm not sure he was really pretending, because in later scenes, he still moved, and spoke, as though he was hammered. But I'm going to assume Disney had a clause in his contract against that, so maybe he was just severely hung over. Funny no more.
Plot? There was no plot. It was more like an IKEA instruction manual of how to make a (not so) cheap, mass-made and disposable consumer item. Just the usual package of some unlucky souls on an unlucky ship, trying to kill Jack. And the evil regular guys? They didn't even get enough time to be really evil, developing their bad guy thing, with maybe some time for them to develop a bit of humanity to make them a bit interesting. Just ... forget it.
I watched it. Yes I did. All the way to the end. Not expecting anything after the first 10 minutes ... going into a sort of catharsis, not caring, bored, but stuck watching it with the idea that ... what the heck ... I'd seen the others so I might as well see this out to the end. Like paying final respects.
Message for Johnny Depp: OK, you get paid a lot for this. Big, big bucks. But, frankly, you don't need to do this now. You obviously don't get any enjoyment out of it, other than maybe whatever Disney's catering service has to offer. Frankly, unless they can come up with a script that involves actual acting, some real character development or story line, and little or no CGI, let it die in peace.
It's over. I'm done with this franchise. Captain Jack Sparrow has obviously now become just a canned, makeup department effort good enough for keeping alive the Halloween costume industry tie-ins for another year.
The Beyond (2017)
Uh ... no. So bad, it's almost good. Too bad it's not a true Mockumentary.
Pretty bad. Someone called this a mockumentary of a sci-fi film. I honestly wish it had been, because taken only on that level, it could have been simply hilarious, poking fun at practically every known cliché you could think of for this sort of film. Unfortunately, if any irony was intended, it wasn't to be trusted. So I had to finally decide the script was sincere. And it got irritating very quickly, because this was just an opportunity for Hasraf Dulull to showcase his visual effects skills. In terms of the plot, forget it. (Here come the spoilers ...).
First, it throws several different plot ideas together, each which could have been a movie in itself (first contact, androids implanted with human brains, worm hole travel, some sort of maia civilization theory of the universe, human distrust, whatever ...). But when thrown together, caused the plot to go into one dead end after another. A long, long part of the movie turned around scenes based on the necessity to create human-brained robots which could survive (perhaps) wormhole travel ... the creation of the robots, the scientific ideas necessary to keep a brain alive, the specific things the robotic body could do, the dangerous surgical procedure to remove the brain, the social impact of the death of the donor body, and the grieving of friends and family for that body ... sort of interesting in its own way, and Dulull obviously was having a great time developing all that ... but once the brained robot thing was accomplished, that was it. As though, OK, now we can go into the wormhole part of the plot. There was also a shading of dangerous, military application of these robots, exactly the sort of thing you would expect ... with a good guy (gal) android, and a possibly bad guy military android, but that got conveniently brushed under the carpet ... somehow. Didn't develop at all. Just a few shots of "those" people talking bad things. And that's what this movie is all about: things just happen, with no real explanation. Did the wormhole beings "know" and blew him up (after miraculously extracting him from the spaceship)? We're supposed to think so. Again, if this had been deliberate irony, it would have been genius. But ... no
This review is a mess, just like the movie was a mess. And the so-called vaunted effects? In the movie, the image of the wormhole is copy-pasted 5 or 6 times throughout the script, with the same sequence of presentation (a shot, with the ISS in the foreground, with the wormhole coming into focus behind it, dramatically). Most of the "space" shots, were just lifted from old NASA, and overlaid with heads-up display graphics. Same for the "interviews" of potential brain-donors. None of which, by the way, seemed like someone whose brain was particularly suitable for becoming a several-million dollar experiment to become a hybrid robot/human. We do get a couple of "human" minutes, where candidates can get teared up about "doing it for Dad" ... or ...
I really wish this had had a true, mockumentary format, like This Is Spinal Tap. It might have saved it. But no. Scene after scene, you're left going: really? really? They used THAT canned cliché, too? The only thing missing was a massive meteor shower threatening all life on earth. Oh ... wait. Yep, that was included. But, no, sharknado evidently missed the final cut.
I watched this movie, because the A-list sci-fi movies are so few, and the B-list movies so canned. And my hopefullness was mainly rewarded with irritation.
The acting, though, is professional. I don't know how Dulull managed to convince such good actors to sign onto this, given what a paper-thing, dog's dinner of a mess the plot is. OK, so, yes, I do know how he did it. Actors who are not on the A list, need to work. Period.
But this must have been a hard choice even for them: with all the campy but not campy enough situations, finishing with a pseudo-humanistic expression of how we have to learn to manage our resources, come together as a human environment, and not screw up the opportunity give us by aliens to start over again on a new world made just for us (and conveniently just next door ... of such size and proximity we would probably have 200 foot tides ... but, never mind, if I wanted to start going into all the remarks where suspended belief is strained by improbabilities, this review would be three times longer).
Sorry about that sentence, but bad gets so bad, that thinking of one thing sparks another.
Seriously, don't bother. Just as I shouldn't have bothered writing this. Except that I really, really hope Dulull sticks to visual effects ... and doesn't waste resources as a "writer" that could be given to someone who has talent.
Darkest Hour (2017)
A great Churchill
I read an immense amount of history. I've also read just about everything that's been written about, or by Churchill. So I was reticent about this film going in, and not in the least in wondering how in the world Gary Oldman could possibly take on the role. Not that as an actor he would be incapable, but that he simply is so far from the physiognomy. I guess I'm really out of touch with what makeup artists are capable of these days. The result was immediately believable and the rest was pure story telling. As some have noted, there are moments the script strays. It's perfectly acceptable to have moments of humor and personal reflection, but they began too seem too punctual, as though we needed reminding of the humanity within the unfolding of terrible events ... somewhat like how calibrated novels repeat certain types of scenes every 50 pages. That said, this is a tremendously good movie, both enjoyable and while telescoping and using movie-making liberties (Churchill knew exactly what he was doing, when he flashed a reversed V sign), it is a faithful rendering of the knife-edge a danger the world was in, and how Churchill rode above the politics of the time, and showing why one man, alone, making the difficult choices others can't or won't make, makes the difference. And goes down in History. A movie about real heroism of another sort.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Result of Real Writing ... a great film
I only give 10s to films I watch over and over and over. This would come close though: characters with actual depth, personal problems, nasty quirks but somehow managing to be sympathetic. This could have so easily been turned, in other hands, into a standard, tear-jerking melodrama ... but because of great acting, and the decision to have everyone speaking dialogue that resembles what people think but never say, it turns into a roller coaster of black humor, pain, anger, misunderstanding, and love ... and in so doing defining a form of truth. It does deserve awards in many categories, but surely for the script.
Defective (2017)
Watchable entertainment, easily could have been better ...
In general, it hits all the buttons of dystopian suspense, i.e. you quickly realize the plot is scratching along a well-mined seam. Some here whammy the acting, some the directing, or both. I think the directing and editing of closeups deserve the most criticism ... leaving actors, who are struggling with the concept of how to look stunned, confused, frightened ... or just thoughtful ... hanging up there on the screen for seemingly endless moments. Action movies need their moments of painful introspection, but this was out of control. Even in the midst of a hairy shoot-em-up you have people staring into space. A serious incomprehension of timing. Otherwise, yeah, if you love watching movies, and like sci-fi, I'd recommend this. Mediocre, yes, and it would probably deserve a 6 ... but when I find myself becoming aware of directing flaws while watching a movie, it's automatically down by 2. (BTW ... how in the world can people use a sci-fi flic as a launching pad for their political woof-woof, is beyond me. This site ain't FB.)