cherold's Reviews

M3GAN (2022)

9/10

Amazing movie equals/surpasses director's Housebound

3 May 2024

Every once in a while there is a movie so good that I peridically check to see if its creator has made something else. Imagine my joy when I discovered Gerard Johnstone, the director of the brilliant Housebound, had finally made his second movie, M3GAN.

In M3GAN, a young girl, mourning her parents, is given a robotic AI prototype doll by an inventor who hopes she can fix tragedy with technology.

Like Housebound, M3GAN is wonderful at mixing comedy and scares. The story is, as some have said, predictable, but that's part of the fun. We *know* where this story is going, and that makes every weird look or movement of the doll kinda hilarious. This is a knowing movie that plays to people who know the tropes, but if you go in expecting some original story with an amazing twist well, that's not this movie.

The movie flows seemlessly from family drama to sci-fi to comedy to suspense to horror, and like Housebound can hope from humor to scares and back without being jarring.

I was pretty shocked to see this movie only has a 6.3 on IMDB, but then, Housebound only has a 6.7 so perhaps a lot of people just don't know a good movie if they see one? I was torn between giving this movie an 8 or a 9 but when I saw so many middling scores I decided I *had* to go with 9 just to balance things out a tiny bit.

Anyway, if you liked Housebound, watch this. If you liked M3GAN, watch Housebound. And if you like good comedy/horror/thriller/dramas, watch both.

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Not Dead Yet (2023– )

6/10

is this an unfunny comedy or an overly broad dramedy?

1 May 2024

Another review here said Not Dead Yet doesn't know what it wants to be, and that's exactly how I responded.

In Not Dead Yet, a reporter on the obituary beat discovers she gets haunted by whoever she's writing on. A series about someone who can talk to dead people is nothing new (people comparing it with Ghosts have a limited historical knowledge of the genre), and this series does nothing new with it. She meets a ghost, she learns about the ghost and herself as well. Standard stuff.

The series kind of feels like it should be an hour drama. That's how it's filmed, and that's what ghost-of-the-week series generally do. But it's only a half hour. The acting has an exaggerated quality, although the actors themselves are an appealing bunch.

I watched one episode, with Martin Mull as the ghost. It was very dumb, it wasn't funny (although maybe it was trying to be?) and it did have a genuinely touching moment at the end. It didn't seem like something I'd want to re-experience.

The likeable lead, Gina Rodriquez, is known for Jane the Virgin, which was also broad and dumb, so this is in her wheelhouse. But Jane was a little funnier and a little stronger story-wise.

I can totally see this as something people would like. I did think it looked very promising from the trailer. I did like the way Gina kept shouting NO! It seems well-intentioned. But I wouldn't recommend it to someone like me.

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Peter Gunn: The Kill (1958)

Season 1, Episode 1

5/10

I guess this was good at the time?

30 April 2024

I heard this was an old noir-ish tv series so I thought I'd take a look. It's an oddly paced show. It's only a half hour long, and in the user reviews someone said that was a problem because they didn't have the time to develop a story, but the show spends an endless amount of time on a rather dull conversation with Gunn's hot girlfriend so in a way it seems they had more time than they knew what to do with.

The half hour was a weird mix of overlong scenes, short scenes that didn't really go anywhere, and continuity skips that just hopped to the next place in the story. The story itself barely qualified as a story.

The acting is decent, it's got a couple of good lines, and it does have a noir-ish look. For 1958 television it might have been great. Watching it in 2024 for the first time though, it doesn't come off that well.

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Pantheon (2022–2023)

9/10

Brilliant from the first minute to the grand finale

29 April 2024

I watched this compelling, wildly imaginative series in spite of a very unimpressive trailer, because there were so many raves, and it's one of the best decisions I made. The very human moment in the first scene was more compelling than anything in the trailer, and the series did a great job throughout of combining deep felt humanity with high-concept sci-fi and philosophizing about the nature of existence.

The first season was brilliant, and if season 2 had been more of the same I would have been fine with it, but instead, it all grew in imagination and narrative daring, culminating in a final episode that is so sweeping and vast that it's just so wild to think back to that first scene and realize this was where it would wind up.

According to wikipedia, this series was cancelled after one season even though the second season was already finished, but we got both seasons in the end and it's a very satisfying wrap up (I would say there was no place left to go but the writers have proven that their imagination far eclipses mine).

Watch this.

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Get on Up (2014)

8/10

a biopic that's actually interesting

28 April 2024

Most celebrity biopics leave me wondering, why was I supposed to find that interesting. But from the beginning, when a lunatic James Brown starts ranting and then looks at the camera to let us know this is his story and he's telling it, I thought, this is actually more than a by-the-numbers biography.

Brown is brilliantly played by Chadwick Boseman, who is all intensity and prickliness. The movie shows Brown's drive and genius, as well as his violence and capriciousness. It also shows how amazing he was in concert - I don't even like live music yet I regret not saying Brown when he was alive.

The criticisms I've heard of this movie perplex me. Some people claim that it *is* a standard biopic, and it seems to have gotten less love than much more conventional celebrity takes like Elvis and Walk the Line. Other complained because it failed to show *enough* of Brown's genius, or musicality, or violence, which is weird because it's a two-hour movie and it's impressive that it manages to touch on as many things as it does.

Anyway, Boseman is amazing, the movie is imaginitively told, and Brown is a legitimately interesting guy, even if he's not always a likable one. Recommended.

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We Have a Ghost (2023)

5/10

Shapeless and shambling

28 April 2024

We Have a Ghost is an ET/Poltergeist hybrid that I guess wants to create that old 80s fantasy magic. In the film, a family moves into a haunted house and one of the kids befriends a ghost in the attic.

The most interesting idea in this is of monetizing that ghost, leading to a reasonably entertaining moment of the story catching fire on social media. But outside of that, this movie is just so uninteresting. Characters run in and out with their agendas, people make faces, the kid gets the ghost to do stupid stuff, there's a chase scene.

The chase scene is where I stopped, about halfway through I think. It wasn't terrible, but like everything else in the movie, it really wasn't anything at all. It was just a lump of inert matter pretending to be a story development.

This is surprising coming from director/writer Christopher Landon, whose movies I check out because the Happy Death Day movies were so entertaining. And while his previous film, Freaky, was not very good, it still had some interesting things in it. But this, this is a film-shaped void.

Don't bother.

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Fallout (2024– )

5/10

slow disjointed start left me cold

28 April 2024

Before I say anything about Fallout, I want to correct all the people who keep thinking West World's Jonathan Nolan created or wrote it. He just directed the first three episodes. That's it. This show was created by a TV comedy writer and a film writer whose credits are generally unexceptional.

Now, on to the review of the first episode, which is all I've watched.

While the brilliant videogame Fallout 3 established the premise and built the world quickly and threw you into an exciting world, the TV series starts as an episodic mess. There's a pre-apocalypse scene that's a decent beginning, followed by 15 tedious minutes of scene building, then some over-the-top violence, then a new, uninteresting character in an uninteresting place, then a tiny bit of plot movement, and finally a little more violence. At the end of over an hour of this, there was literally nothing in the story or the characters that made me want to watch more.

The movie is good looking. The 50s soundtrack does a nice job of capturing the lost-in-time aspect of the world. Ella Purnell seems like she might make a decent heroine.

But it is beyond me why people are so ecstatic about this series. I looked at reviews for episode 1, to see if maybe it was a low-rated episode compared to the rest, but nope, people really liked it. And I didn't understand what they see that I don't.

My recommendation is, play Fallout 3, which is amazing. (Or perhaps one of the others, but that's the only one I've played for reasons that have to relevance to this review.) But I can't recommend this show.

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Rustin (2023)

8/10

The march and the man behind it

17 April 2024

Rustin is the story of activist Bayard Rustin's scramble to create one of the biggest events of the civil rights event, an event that for most people is considered something MLK did.

What Rustin is not is a "biopic," as some describe it. I don't like biopics, because I watch them and ask, would I care at all if this person weren't famous. Yes, there is some biographical info in here, but this is primarily a gripping movie about the building of a pivotal moment in an important movement.

So it drives me crazy when people say this is a "typical biopic." This is not, guy born, finds his calling, goes through travails, triumphs, fades. This is, here's a short electrifying period in the life of a really interesting guy.

The story is an interesting one full of grand ambitions, schemers, heroes, victims, compromises, and deals. It is a fascinating civil rights tale that doesn't get the attention it should.

The cast is solid. Colman Domingo is very good as the fiery, brilliant Rustin, although his performance pales a little in comparison with the absolutely stunning portrayal of Rustin by Griffin Matthews in the 4th season of Genius, and Aml Ameen, who I fondly remember from the first season of Sense8, makes a an excellent MLK.

Ignore any review that calls this a biopic. Recommended.

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Peninsula (2020)

6/10

weakest entry to date in the Train to Busan series

15 April 2024

Yeon Sang-ho has made 3 zombie flicks so far - the incredible Train to Busan, the excellent animated prequel Seoul Station, and now the rather meh sequel Peninsula. Each takes place in the same world at different times, and each has its distinct approach, so you should go into this movie understanding that it isn't remotely like Busan except for having bunches of zombies.

This time around, the approach is action adventure built on a heist/suicide-mission scenario. 4 people go deep into zombie territory in search of treasure, and of course everything goes wrong.

The result is a mixed bag. Some of the action is fun, and the movie finds interesting ways of battling zombie hordes, who run pellmell, including into each other in big pile-ups. The CGI is weak - not only do the zombies look fake - the entire city is clearly built out of mediocre CGI. There are a couple of entertaining kids and an intense performance by Kim Min-jae as a canny psycho.

In parts, the movie is brutal and entertaining, but it's got some severe pacing issues. There's a chunk in the middle that tries and fails to do a little character development and just brings the whole movie to a standstill. Even worse is the final 15 minutes, which tries to milk a tremendous amount of pathos from the situation by making it go on way longer than it should - it's basically a 5 minute scene stretched out until it breaks, so the closest thing it creates to emotion is irritation.

I feel if you edited out about a half an hour of this movie it would be a snappy little zombie thriller that still wouldn't be as good as the two previous films but would be worth a watch. But as is, it's something you can easily skip.

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Zero Effect (1998)

4/10

OMG how do people like this?

14 April 2024

Okay, I didn't know anything about this except from the description on my flight's entertainment system, but a detective comedy is very much something I'm prone to like and it had good stars so I took a look.

The movie begins with a huge chunk of exposition in which Ben Stiller simply relates stuff about his employer, both praising him to a potential client and lambasting him in a bar. This is very tedious and goes on quite a while.

Then we finally meet the genius detective, Pullman, and he is just the most annoying person in the world. Not funny annoying, just irksome and unpleasant.

It was so dumb and annoying that I had to stop. Does it get better? Do the positive reviews here represent that after a really dreadful, poorly constructed, badly written start the movie somehow becomes great? It's possible. But even trapped on an airplane I couldn't watch anymore.

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Unpregnant (2020)

9/10

Hilarious road trip movie

14 April 2024

In Unpregnant, a teenager finds herself pregnant and unable to get an abortion in her state without telling her mom. So she presses an ex-friend with a car into a road trip. And crazy things happen.

There are a lot of good things in this movie, but the best is Barbie Ferreira's hilarious performance as the quirky ex-friend.

During the road trip the two women relive past times in bad and good ways, argue, act supportive, act unsupportive, and meet some real weirdos, including a couple that become involved in a wildly funny chase sequence.

This movie treats the third rail of abortion with a light but persistant touch. The movie is unapologetic - Haley Lu Richardson's pregnant girl isn't required to explain or agonize on her decision - she is a decisive girl who has made a decision and that's just what's happening. The movie's politics are really subtext most of the way through, with the hijinx in the foreground, but it does eventually have some sharp commentary on the insanity of what Richardson is forced to go through.

I imagine if you're pro-forced-birth you will find this film horrendous on many levels, but if you're not, this is just terrific fun that hits the road trip sweet spot of wacky adventures and touching realizations.

Highly recommended.

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Suicide Squad (2016)

6/10

most notably for giving us Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, but generally ok

14 April 2024

This movie has a terrible reputation, but after seeing Margot Robbie's amazing performance as Harley Quinn in two later films, I thought I'd check this out. And while it's not great, it proved to be a reasonably enjoyable movie to watch on an airplane.

The movie centers around anti-terrorist Amanda Waller's project of using psychotic super villains to fight terrorism. This idea proves to be just as terrible as you would expect, and most of the movie is Waller trying to clean up the mess she made.

While the movie has some good action sequences and excellent performances from Robbie, Will Smith, and Viola Davis, it is poorly constructed. The first part of the movie is a series of minisodes introducing the main super villains, which just means the actual movie doesn't get started until maybe a third of the way through. Lots of movies manage to integrate character introductions into the story itself, but this movie can't be bothered.

Throughout, characters make odd choices, action varies in quality, and everything is just kind of ... not quite satisfying.

Even Robbie's gleeful psycho feels a bit like a prototype that still needs some work - there are just moments that don't feel true to her character, although perhaps I'm influenced by her subsequent roles.

Anyway, there are parts of a good movie here, and even if those parts are greater than the whole, this movie can be genuinely entertaining in spurts and is worth watching if your options are limited because Norse Air doesn't offer very many movies.

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Hellbound (2021– )

4/10

Trailer: thrilling horror - Series: Talk Talk Talk

14 April 2024

I think Netflix did a disservice to Hellbound by making it look exciting in the trailer. That was easy to do, since the opening is full of disturbing action, and while the CGI was only okay and it wasn't a tremendously compelling scene, it was decent.

But after that scene, the episode becomes people talking about morality. It's not particularly interesting dialogue but there sure is a lot of it, with everyone very serious and morose.

Every conversation goes on too long. Then there's the broadcast by some extremist which is super annoying and seems to go on forever. I don't know whether it does, in fact, go on forever, because after what felt about 10 minutes of nonsense ranting I had enough and stopped watching.

The thing is, Netflix should have made an honest trailer showing people talking about religion and morality and justice. And then the people who thought that was a great trailer would have been the people to watch this and it would have a higher IMDB rating.

If you want chat, this is the series for you. If you want something from the director of Train to Busan that in the same thrillride style as that movie, expect to be disappointed.

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Full River Red (2023)

6/10

a perplexing movie that would probably make sense if you were Chinese

14 April 2024

This is a tough movie to get a hold of. The producers apparently described it as a suspense movie with comedic elements, but it is rarely either funny or suspenseful. I'd say it's in part a drama of intrigue, part a mystery, but mainly I'd call it a horror movie because it's got a brutal body count and many deaths are horrifically cruel.

In fact, for me what's most interesting about the movie is how well it portrays a world where the pecking order involves who can kill who, making life cheap as people use murder to impress or jockey for position. It's actually a good example of a systemic issue - it's a kill or be killed world and there's really no way out.

The story involves a murder investigation, at least at first, but there are all sorts of twists and turns along the way. It's convoluted and at times I got lost.

But finally at the end the central driving force of everything is revealed, and it made ZERO sense to me. I had to do a bunch of research to figure out the meaning. Full River Red is apparently a poem schoolchildren learn in China but if you don't know the poem or Chinese history then the denouement is incomprehensible.

I'm not saying this as a criticism - it's perfectly fine to make a movie that only makes sense to the people of the country it's made in. I'm just offering a warning that the ending may not resonate as well if you didn't grow up in China.

Overall, I liked Full River Red but didn't love it. It's genuinely engrossing. The cast is good, particularly Teng Shen and Wang Jiayi. The score by Hong Han is amazing, with all these crazy punk songs that I've read are rocked-out Chinese folk songs. But the weird genre stew, the unpleasant brutality, and the puzzling-until-you-research-it ending made it less enthralling than the best of director Yimou Zhang's films.

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Wonka (2023)

6/10

instead of a sense of wonder, I just wonder ... WHY?

11 April 2024

My first response to the first song in Wonka was, wow, this is a really bad song. Was it the worst song in the movie? Not necessarily. But it was certainly not a song you should start a musical with.

The music is in service of the story of a young chocolate maker who comes to the big city and has various travails that he faces with equanimity and magic. He quickly acquires some powerful enemies and powerless friends and a bunch of not-especially interesting stuff happens.

While I single out the songs, the movie is also notable for the weakness of its world building. You have this town where everyone is paid in chocolate and there's much evilness but none of it holds together.

I always find Timothée Chalamet irritating, and here is no exception. The rest of the cast tries their best, and their best is pretty good, but the only genuinely fun performance is by Hugh Grant, who makes a terrific snarky Oompa Loompa.

Visually the movie is colorful and fun, and there are two good songs - both listed from the Gene Wilder Wonka - and one surprisingly decent number for Wonka's shop opening.

The story is full of holes and coincidences, but this is very much a kids movie and I guess if you're a kid you can overlook a lot. But if you're an adult I wouldn't recommend this.

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The Portable Door (2023)

7/10

Harry Potter and the Entry Level Job

11 April 2024

In The Portable Door, a nebbish gets a job at a company where at first no one will explain what the company is or what he does at it. Turns out it's a sorcery shop and all the executives seem to be out to get each other.

It's all very light and amusing, with good performances. At the same time, it sometimes seems to be trying to hard to be quirky for the sake of being quirky, and in the second half things get a little jumbled and there were elements I couldn't follow and only figured out far past when they should have been clear.

I'd never heard of this movie when I found it listed on an airplane's entertainment system, and only watched it because I liked the title, but I did really enjoy it overall and would recommend it even if you're on solid ground.

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Constellation (2024– )

5/10

story more intriguing than the people

10 April 2024

The first episode of this series about an astronaut caught up in a space mishap just barely got me to watch the second episode. It began slowly, as you watched uninteresting characters do and say uninteresting things.

But when the mishap came it brought just a little life into the procedings. And the weird end made me curious what would come next.

In the second episode there was a little more intriguing weirdness, a little more interesting mishap drama, and the same amount of draggy parts and bland characters.

If this were a movie, where the plot points came more quickly (from reading the wikipedia synopsis there are lots of plot points), then perhaps the bland characters wouldn't matter much. If I cared about the characters, they would help propel the story. For that matter, if the series didn't keep thinking I *should* care about their cardboard characters and just spent less time trying to generate feelings of caring, I might have given this another chance.

But ultimately the lack of any interesting people combined with the insufferable slowness is more than I could take.

Not recommended.

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Don't Look Deeper (2020)

8/10

engaging sci-fi that deserved more attention than it got

24 March 2024

Don't Look Deeper is a solid entry in the people-who-discover-they're-actually-robots genre. The story is well told, as Aisha figures out what's going on and deals with friends and enemies. While I didn't realize it until after I watched it, the series was created by the guy who created the terrific teen angst sci-fi series Impulse, which is slightly similar to this.

Don't Look Deeper was one of the series on the short-lived streaming platform's Quibi. These series were all made up on 9-minute episodes, and watching this in 9 minute chunks isn't ideal. But the series was edited into a 2-hour movie and watched that way it moves very smoothly - I rarely thought, ah, there's the 9-minute transition.

The cast is very good, the story moves quickly and has some interesting twists and turns, and the ending is quite good for a TV series setting up its second season.

Unfortunately, Quibi folded so that second season never happened. But it's not terrible to end this way, since the outlines of the future are clear.

This is really enjoyable, and I feel like the low rating is probably mainly a function of people not liking the weird 9-minute format. But watch it as a movie or binge the entire season at once and it's a really excellent sci-fi drama.

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Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

6/10

intriguing moments

23 March 2024

Maya Deren's films are generally either surrealist non-narratives or dance/motion films. This one is a bit of both.

The film starts with Deren in what is essentially a cameo as a lady with some yarn, but it mainly follows a young woman wondering through a puzzling world. The highlight of the film is an extended party scene. It's a dance based on the way people move when they're at a party, pushing through, greeting people, moving on. Perhaps it's wrong to say it's a dance - it's a study in movement, and it's not until you see that movements are repeating that it's really clear it's choreographed.

There's dancing that's closer to what we think of as dancing after that, but that was only mildly interesting.

Honestly this probably would have been a better film if it had been nothing but the party. But it's genuinely interesting.

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At Land (1944)

7/10

Interesting

23 March 2024

Maya Deren's second film is closest in spirit to her first, the brilliant Meshes of the Afternoon, although it has a less ingenious structure and didn't strike me as deeply. Deren plays a woman washed to shore who goes on an Odyssey through space and time - I guess, it's hard to really know. It has some very striking and curious moments and is worth seeing.

I'll say two things about my reaction to the film. First, I came across a version on Youtube that had been rescored. That score is to me less evocative than the original, which I found later on the Internet Archive, where someone has uploaded all her works. Had my first experience been with this score it might have affected my overall impression.

Also, I saw Meshes when I was a twenty-something film student and I saw At Land as a sixty-something guy. I might have had a stronger reaction in film school, but this film just never crossed my path.

My point being that a younger me might have liked this better, but still not as well as Meshes.

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Argylle (2024)

4/10

a bold, terrible vision

18 March 2024

Some movies are bad because they're made by bean counters, but Argylle is clearly the distinctive vision of director Matthew Vaughn. Unfortunately, it's a really annoying vision.

The movie starts off well enough - sure, the look is the lowest of low budget action but it moves pretty well. It's a prologue to the actual story about a spy novelist and her uncanny-valley cat.

If you watch the trailer, you can get a good idea of how this movie could have been done. There's an action scene on a train that looks entertaining, and would, in fact, have been entertaining if Vaughn didn't do this confused multiple-reality thing (that the trailer editor wisely left out). A little of that might have worked, but there's a LOT of it, and in the next action scene, there's a lot more.

The movie also almost immediately doesn't make sense. I don't just mean the central premise, which is actually appealingly kooky. I mean that the spy is really just horrendously bad at all aspects of the job except fighting, which is weird. And the way he connects with the writer is inexplicable. And the bad guys are - I don't know what was going on there.

Anyway, I gave up around the "why aren't you crushing skulls" part of the movie, but I looked up the plot in wikipedia and it seems that the nonsense I saw is the least nonsensical part of the movie.

The cast is pretty good. There is clearly enough material to get a good trailer out of this. But ultimately this is just a disaster.

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Madame Web (2024)

3/10

the great mystery of this movie's existence

18 March 2024

There are movies that, even though they are critically and popularly condemned, are pretty enjoyable, like The Marvels.

This is not one of those movies.

It's really hard to think of this as being a "movie" at all. That implies a level of thought and effort that I don't see. It's not just that the scenes are lackluster and nothing much happens. It's not just that the action scenes are rare and unexciting. It's not even that once I decided to just keep skipping forward looking for action scenes (because everything was just so boring) I realized that like half this movie is a bunch of teen girls bonding or something, it's not that the movie doesn't seem to have an ending, just a setup for a sequel that will never take place.

I think mainly it's the sense that no one involved was interested in making a movie. No one was trying to come up with a story, or characters, or interesting events. The movie is the equivalent of a quarterly financial report written at the last minute by someone who just got fired and its their last day at work. It's just ... no one seems to have wanted to make this.

It's weird, because there are movies that get pulled by studios where the makers are really upset, but you can't imagine anyone complaining if this had been scrapped. Everyone would have been, oh good, one less terrible thing on my resume.

This movie isn't even fun bad. It's just the absence of a movie.

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Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

7/10

A middling movie with a couple of really good performances

16 March 2024

Rebel Without a Cause is a classic movie, but it was never a really good movie. It's just a 50s teen panic movie with a little extra gloss.

The film begins in a police station where all the cops seem like helpful social workers. After a brief look at James Dean we get a tedious scene of Natalie Wood crying about her father that drags on forever, but when James Dean starts chewing the furniture it gets a little more interesting, and Sal Mineo keeps things going as a sad little psycho.

These three introduce the basic concept, which is teens are miserable and don't quite know why.

That's pretty much it for the internal lives of these characters - angst and anger - but it's more than the adults get. Their role is to simply be object for the teens to interact with, and they have no internal lives of their own. Sometimes you can guess what's going on - Natalie's father is clearly freaked out by her puberty, but you get that from the script, not from his performance.

Perhaps that makes sense - it's a teens-eye movie, so like the Charlie Brown cartoons adults are just things that go waa-waa-waa and have no purpose outside of childraising. But it's a clunky construct.

Anyway, James Dean can't make friends, Natalie is in a gang that picks on him for no good reason, and Sal seems to want Dean as his daddy, since the real one is gone. There's some fighting, a famous "chicken" race, Dean's dad in a frilly apron, and Dean's mother looking directly at the camera and saying "you never realize something like this could happen to your child" in a "THIS IS THE MESSAGE" kind of way.

The characters are poorly developed, and while Wood's animalistic pleasure in the violence is rather fascinating her character overall makes a series of absurd left turns that makes her almost as much of a prop as the parents.

But none of that takes away from Dean, who yes, can be a bit much, but who is a riveting presence who fully commits. Without Dean and Mineo this would be just another forgotten teen exploitation film, but with them it's worthwhile.

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Sanditon (2019–2023)

6/10

badly written

12 March 2024

The English period piece Sanditon starts as the genial Charlotte, played charmingly by Rose Williams, helps someone and is inexplicably rewarded with a free trip to a resort. There she meets a few people, one of whom is an old rich lady who goes on a seemingly endless rant, and goes into the water.

Most of that first episode is devoid of dramatic tension and is pretty but dull, but right at the end a little tension clumsily bursts into view.

In the second episode, there's loads of dramatic tension and the old lady inexplicably insults an heiress she is eyeing for a relative. I don't mean an insult in passing, I mean she literally harangues the young woman at a table full of horrified guests.

While the blandness and the lack of interesting things is my main objection to Sanditon, I want to spend a little time discussing exactly how badly written the old lady is, because it's truly extraordinary.

That rant in the first episode was long and dull, exposition the audience neither needed nor wanted. The dinner part scene is utterly perplexing - it's not just mean spirited by tactically inept.

And yet, while it's hard to say for certain from only two episodes, I don't think the old lady is meant to be an idiot. I think she's meant to be one of those say-what-they-think old ladies like the one in Downton Abbey.

But not only is her dialogue tedious, but she fails in the area that makes mean old ladies appealing in English period pieces - all insults must be filtered through an English upperclass passive-aggressive sensibility. But Sanditon's old lady is just a dumb boor.

The cast is good, especially Williams, and really, I don't blame the actress playing the old lady, because I can't think of any sort of acting that could overcome such a badly written character.

The series has the lovely look of a proper period piece, but it veers from tedious to infuriating with nothing in between. It is not worthwhile.

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Saltburn (2023)

6/10

sharp satire, good performances, bad plotting

4 March 2024

Warning: Spoilers

Saltburn tells the story of Oliver, an awkward young man who befriends a rich guy at Oxford and meets his odd, entitled family.

At first, the movie is quite good. Barry Keoghan is ecellent as the awkward working class protagonist struggling to keep up with the upper classes. Jacob Elordi is appropriately charming. The folks at Saltburn all do great playing different flavors of odd - I particularly like Alison Oliver as the sister.

The movie is perhaps at its most entertaining when it first gets to the rich guy's home, a crazy mansion at Saltburn filled with snotty, gossipy, and profoundly weird characters. At the same time, I think that's when things start to go off the rails, because up until then the people felt fairly real but the family is quite cartoonish. It's the time when I started wondering - what exactly *is* this movie?

The bigger problem turns out to be the character(s) of Oliver. It's not that he isn't who he seems to be - that's a perfectly acceptable and not especially shocking twist. The issue is that his character shifts in weird ways. He's awkward and shy. He's weirdly mesmerizing and powerful. He's nice and friendly. He's creepy. And he just switches from one to the next and back with no one seeming to think it's weird or wondering why he's a totally different person than he was five hours ago. They should all be saying, hey, do you think Oliver has multiple personalities? But they don't. (And he doesn't - he's just badly written.)

Then there's the actual story, which culminates with a lot of death that no one finds suspicious and that, judging by the "big reveal" sequence at the end, writer/director Emerald Fennel thought was a lot less obvious than it actually was.

There are several problems here. First, the whole crime part makes no sense - there is no way no one these weird consecutive deaths wouldn't raise suspicions, no way Farleigh or the weird butler wouldn't at some point lay the sequence of events out to the police. It's ludicrous.

The crime section of the movie also drags things out much too long. There is a creepy scene in a graveyard that feels like the emotional endpoint of the film, and while stopping there would have left a lot of questions unresolved, it still *felt* like an endpoint. So everything after that feels like a really, really long coda. And this coda seems to move in slow motion, as though the director really hated to let go of the movie.

If the graveyard scene had ended the film, people would have wonder what happened after that, but this would have been far better than seeing what happened after that and thinking - Jesus, that was stupid. If you wanted to fill out the end, you could have had a quick series of newspaper clippings showing more death and Oliver's inheritance, and while it would still seem unlikely, at least it would be so quick we could see it more as a toss-off joke.

Fennel did a really good job with Promising Young Woman, which was dark but was *coherently* dark and had some depth. Perhaps since the main character was misunderstood, she decided this time around she would explain *everything* in great *detail* at the end, telling you everything that happened and how everyone really felt about everyone else, so that this time there would be no false assumptions.

Hopefully she does not do that again.

This movie, in spite of being genuinely entertaining and engrossing in parts, stumbles so badly at the end that it takes the whole movie down with it. So I don't recommend it, although it really does have good stuff in it.

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cherold

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