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calvinpulizzi
Reviews
El silencio (2023)
Absolute waste of time
Don't waste your time with this crap. It feels like it was written by a psychology student who read too many romance novels. The initial premise seemed interesting enough. A teenager is accused of brutally murdering his parents, but sparing his younger sister. The main character Sergio, decides to stop speaking for years and is released 6 years later. This is where things start to fall apart. Sergio never admitted to the murders, so the psychiatry student of his mother somehow gets a judge to sign off on creating a team to spy on Sergio 24/7 to find evidence of his guilt. GPS ankle monitor, city wide surveillance, and even cameras inside Sergio's home. Um what? The psychiatrist, Ana, leads the team, which uses super old computer monitors that somehow show 4K quality video. Ana becomes obsessed with Sergio, determined that he's innocent, but never explaining why. She manipulates multiple people, but never explains herself. There's way too many scenes of her just stating off into space. Ana eventually finds a secret room in Sergio's house where his mother had been experimenting on him and spying on him. Somehow this was missed by the dozens of police officers during the initial murder investigation. Everyone on Ana's team is convinced Sergio is a dangerous maniac who can go on a killing spree at any moment. There's a few other subplots that don't really amount to much. The end of the 5th episode shows Ana had adopted Sergio's sister after the murders, which is a pretty big reveal, but there is no way this wouldn't have been mentioned by someone earlier or been able to be kept a secret. The final episode turns into a melodrama of Ana trying to bang Segio, his other love interest showing up to profess her love, the love interest's ex showing up, Sergio randomly attacking everyone at some point but backing off, the cop trying to take Sergio down blatantly abusing his authority to bring in a SWAT team to kill Sergio, and a bunch of other nonsense, including two people getting back together despite a revenge sex tape being released. Sergio claims his father killed his mother in a murder suicide, despite this completely contradicting all of the physical evidence. Ana confesses her love for Sergio while her team, the cops, her husband, and Sergio's sister watch. And then he jumps/is pushed over the balcony and does. This show could have been really good. Sergio could have spent the time trying to find his sister without acting like a psycho, Ana and the team could have investigated why Sergio killed his parents, discovering his mother's experimental treatment along the way. Instead this was a weird show about a psychiatrist who wants to bang the person she's studying. This was a prime example of a show where the creators had an idea of what they wanted to do but no idea how to pull it off, so they just said screw it and just guessed.
Mideunaiteu (2021)
Everyone in this is dumb
Normally Korean movies are really good. I Saw the Devil was amazing. This movie was not. It revolves around a serial killer who chases a deaf woman and her mom after they witness him attacking someone. Both the woman and mom are deaf and mostly mute, meaning they can't hear or speak... until the movie needs them to. The woman can't read lips, but can understand what people are saying to her. The mom develops this ability later on too. The killer chases both of them, but because he is wear a mask, they don't recognize him once he changes clothes after they alert the cops. Police take the two women and the killer to the station, not realizing who the man is. The mom is suspicious of him right away, but decides to not tell anyone because that would end the movie. The mom even sees he has the victim's phone and a bag of knives, then watches him attack the victim's brother. The cops were outside dealing with a drunk but didn't see the fight, so they believe the killer that the brother attacked him for no reason. The cops don't bother checking security footage at all. Sounds stupid? It gets worse. The killer goes to the woman's house afterwards, seemingly kills mom, but doesn't for some unknown reason. Even though the woman knows the killer is on the loose, she opens the front door for someone banging on the door after midnight. Super smart. Turns out it's a relative. After the relative and mother leave, the killer breaks in and then the movie goes full Tom and Jerry. The killer has an ax that he uses and misses the woman. She locks herself in a room but it takes several minutes for the killer to remember he has an ax and use it. The woman jumps out a window after texting the victim's brother, but doesn't contact the police at all. She runs around a bunch and the killer chases but can't catch up. She runs through a crowded mall area waving a knife and covered in blood, but only one person tries to call the cops. Soldiers are nearby and don't call either. Everyone is stupid! The final act of the movie is stretched out more than Lizzo in yoga pants. The woman manages to speak to the killer and the mom manages to screech out the same phrases three times. Eventually the killer is gunned down and everybody is happy and safe. The newest victim is alive despite a gushing wound to her side and left to die in a van for hours. This movie was almost two hours long and should've been 80 minutes tops. The police are either never around or completely inept. There's multiple times where a character could use their phone to call the police but don't for no reason. The victim's brother is the only semi intelligent person in the movie. The idiotic decisions made in this movie make 80s horror movies look smart. I love Korean cinema, but this was probably the stupidest movie I've seen from that country.
The Mother (2023)
Bad and forgettable
This movie is one that sounded really cool on paper, got filmed, but nobody looked at it to see if it looked good on screen. This definitely would've been better in print rather than a movie. Jlo tries to be a bitter hardened war vet but comes off as a person trying to play a mannequin. She refuses to answer questions of other characters, giving vague answers or redirecting the conversation. The cinematographer must've been a student of Zach Snyder. There's a ton of scenes that focus in on one character but the rest of the background is blurred and out of focus. I thought it was part of Jlo hallucinating or something. Some of the action scenes sound cool but look more unbelievable than cars in space from Fast and the Furious. Jlo uses an AR build rifle with a non zooming sight to hit perfect headshots from over 500m away. Nope! There's another sequence where she's on a motorcycle running away from bad guys, more on that in a second, reaches out to grab her daughters arm, and swings her onto the bike. Again, sounds cool, but it clearly looks like the daughter is standing still and jumps onto a non moving bike. As for previously mentioned bad guys, despite having both their targets in front of them, they don't chase either of them after Jlo blows up a car and speeds off while her daughter runs away on foot. They literally just stand there and watch. The editing is choppy as hell. Scenes randomly stop, camera angles switch for no reason. One scene has Jlo seeing a truck for sale in a diner parking lot, then handing the waitress cash for it. No explanation that it's the waitresses truck or anything. How do we know it wasn't just parked outside the diner? There's also a complete unnecessary sequence showing them flying from Cuba to Moline Illinois, just to rent a car and drive to Cincinnati. It's really hard to tell if this is an official FBI operation or not. Jlo's daughter flip flops between love and hate each scene, which is extremely annoying. Child actors are tough to get right, and this girl would be better suited on a CW show. The soundtrack works for a night out in a quiet club, not an action movie. The villian is able to spot a white mine in snow using binoculars right away, like he knew exactly where it was at. Characters are able to move silently at will depending on the scene. The fight between the villian and Jlo has so many cuts I got dizzy. It was like watching a Bourne movie again. There wasn't one thing in the entire movie that made me go "That was really good". It was either bad, dumb, or boring.
The Night Agent (2023)
Inoffensive but boring and blah
The series as a whole isn't bad, but it's not great. Everything about is just mid level enjoyable. It starts out with an interesting mystery. Why were two seemingly normal people killed and who did it? Obviously this turns into your usual political thriller, minus the over the top political messaging moat shows have these days. The action scenes were good, but there could have been more. People showed injuries after them. There wasn't any messaging that I could see leaning one way or the other politically which was nice. But other than that, the show was just there, not awesome or amazing. Coming from the guy who made the Shield, one of the best shows ever, we got this giant bowl of blah. The last episode descends into Fast and Furious levels of suspension of disbelief. The main character should have died six times over and yet doesn't. Overall it's okay.
Old Man (2022)
90 minutes of boring dementia
This movie was so bad I had to create an account just to warn people away from it. It makes 90 minutes seem like an eternity. It took me three tries to get through this slog. It seems simple. A young hiker, Joe, stumbles upon a cabin in the middle of nowhere and meets the Old Man. It's obvious right away the Old Man is crazy and Joe is hiding something. The dialogue is rambling and vague. No one would talk like they do. The actor who plays Joe delivers his lines in the same monotone confused drawl that reminds me of the "What" guy from Pulp Fiction. Stephen Lang is wasted as an actor here. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that Joe is just a figment of the Old Man's crazy mind. But it takes almost the entire movie to come out and say it. The last 15 minutes turn into an indie psychedelic movie complete with color changes, hallucinations, and mysterious music. Long story short Joe/Old Man came home, found his wife screwing a Bible salesman amd killed them both. Old Man is stuck in a repeated dream/hell where he meets Joe and unaware that Joe is a younger version of him. There's also a character called Rascal that is played by the Joe actor, but they tried to cover his face a bunch to draw out that reveal. They never really explain who the Rascal personality is. Overall it was a huge dumb waste of time.