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tylerchrestman
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The Witcher: Reunion (2023)
I did not understand the bad reviews until this episode.
I was reading episode reviews as I went through the first two episodes and I did not get why they were so negative. This episode changed that. The story is a mess.
Ciri is the worst. She is irrational, ungrateful, and annoying. She is supposed to be one of the leads but she is the worst part of the show and so much of the narrative is driven forward by the idiotic decisions they wrote for her character.
It is like they were writing out Cavil before they had to. He is not in the episode very much which is a shame because he is still the best part of the show.
The overall narrative is doing a game of thrones type thing, but unlike that show you do not care about many of the secondary characters. Just not as good as the first two seasons.
Ted Lasso: The Strings That Bind Us (2023)
I do not see why they keep focusing on political issues.
This show is great, but this season has been so annoyingly political. The subplots of Colin and the entire Jack debacle are completely unnecessary. Roy and Keely are just not going to be addressed in any of the mid episodes this season? It's crazy to take one of the best dynamics on the show and make it completely irrelevant.
This episode just does the pandering again with the Sam subplot. They want to paint any position that says illegal in migration is bad by making some caricature of a person be the bad guy. It is insulting and dumb. It is ridiculous and makes this entire thing not enjoyable anymore.
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
A Missed Opportunity
I read the book and was interested to see how they would adapt it into a film that was both, true to the source material and would appeal to the mass market. The filmmakers may have been attempting to do both, but in trying to please everyone, they seem to have fallen short on all accounts.
The lack of faith to E. L. James's novel is noticeable right from the opening scene, when Christian Grey is shown with his shirt off. Grey's lack of comfort ability being shirtless is a rather major plot point in the book and the movie completely writes off a major part of his backstory immediately. This details sets the tone for the divergence from the book right from the opening.
The casting choice in this movie was the most talked about thing in Hollywood for the past year. Despite the high profile search for the leads, they managed to cast two characters who just never found their mark. Dornan does a decent job inhabiting the character, but his American accent is atrocious and he never manages to capture the magnetism that Christian Grey possesses. Dakota Johnson is just terrible. There is nothing much I can say positive for her performance. She appears awkward with the dialog and uninterested in everything around her. The worst part though, is the fact that the two leads seem to have zero chemistry. Nothing about their on screen time together feels genuine. The whole thing feels forced and rushed. So much emphasis is placed on innuendo it can hardly be called subtle and becomes more of a joke than anything with sex appeal or intrigue.
The soundtrack feels like a parade of high up celebrities and though it has some excellent songs feels distracting. The music becomes memorable as opposed to making the scene itself something that burns in your memory. More of an emphasis on the score would have better served the director.
The decision was made to go for an R rating as opposed to a PG-13. This decision typically limits an audience, so the decision should seem worth it. Unfortunately, despite the R rating the actual sex scenes were tepid at best. The film displayed a poor display of BDSM knowledge. (The first book does not dive into anything too deep BDSM related, but the movie does a terrible job displaying even the light work.) Lastly, the Hollywood double standard of nudity is ever present. Dakota spends a fair amount of screen time topless but the make lead never does. For a movie that is marketed as a steamy romance this movie appears to fall short and comes across as shy and unsure of itself.
The movie does not deserve a 1,2, or 3 star. Those people are just judging because they do not care for the trendiness of the material. The movie is not terrible, it just fails to shine. A missed opportunity to make something great and possibly expose a larger audience to what healthy BDSM could look like.