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Love, Death & Robots: Three Robots (2019)
The post apocalypse tourist trap
A very fun episode. The apocalypse is long over and ruins are just a tourist attraction for robots. However, while humanity may have lost out to robots, there is still a species that knows how to put anything else in their place - cats. They are the masters of manipulation and no processor is a match for them.
Bad Sport: Footballgate (2021)
Interesting story, terrible director
The story of the Italian football scandal is interesting enough and deserves to be included in this series. However the direction of this episode makes it all but unwatchable. The first issues is that it is almost all in Italian. I realize that some percentage of the episode needs to be interviews in Italian by the nature of the scandal, but for a series made for an English speaking market, there needed to be more narration in English. It feels like a foreign language film.
The second problem is the repeated, excessive and completely gratuitous shots of people smoking. The worst being a long slow shot of someone lighting a disgusting cigar and smoking it (and not talking) while a voice over of that person actually talking abut the scandal played. There were many other examples of this. I can only guess that the director was getting money on the side form a tobacco company. Sickening.
Junebug (2005)
Uninteresting advertisement for smoking.
I guess you can call this a character piece, or perhaps a slice of life piece. Unfortunately that means, at least in this case, that it is slow-paced, and what happens to the characters doesn't seem particularly important or interesting. While all the actors do a good job with their characters, there is no development, and no backstory, they just are, so it is very hard to feel anything towards them. Several have noted Amy Adams performance, and while she does a fine job portraying an annoying motor mouth, her character is still an annoying motor mouth, that is very tedious to watch for any length. And she is the best thing about the film.
The other things that stick out are first the artist who Madeleine was trying to sign just casually makes bigoted comments which yield no reaction in other characters. And second, if there is anything that does tie the characters together it is smoking, to the extent that I wouldn't be shocked if this picture were bankrolled by big tobacco.
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)
OK movie, horrible adaptation
This is a hard movie to review, because it is difficult to separate the movie from the expectations of it based on the book. The movie itself isn't bad. It filled 2 hours and made it seem quick. The effects were good enough for me, although I'm not a big fan of the trend to make battle scenes done in close-up so you can't tell what is going on. There were a number of little things that just seemed dumb, such has having the waling path go in front of the archers, having Percy's cabin have no walls, etc. But those were relatively minor, if I had not read the book and was not expecting certain things, the movie probably would have worked well enough.
The real problem was the adaptation. I can except and even expect some changes from the book to translate it into a movie, but this was really screwed up. I expected a good job since this was from the director of the first two Harry Potter films, which did a very good job of following the plot of the book, cutting only what they could get away with. This was an almost complete re-write of the story. In the book Hades was set up to be the villain, but turned out to be a sympathetic figure, with a degree of honor. Kronos and Ares were the villains. In the movie, Hades was the villain, with no Kronos or Ares in sight. Think about how screwed up The Sorcerers Stone would have been if they made Snape the villain , leaving out Quirrell and Voldemort altogether. It would have ruined the story. And that's what this film is, an OK movie built around a ruined story.
Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Direct to MST3K
I'm just baffled by all the great reviews here. I know I'm not a big horror fan, but my date was, and we both agreed that this was a cheesy, laughable movie, and not the least bit scary. The plot was so cliché and the music was so over the top foreshadowing, that there was no scare, just laughs when the (LOUD) punch came.
The best use of this movie is to wait for it to come out on DVD, watch it with friends and spend the whole time poking fun at it MST3K style. Even if you haven't seen it before, it is so cheesy and predictable that you can spoof it on the fly. I've never seen a more perfect MST3K movie.
Ginga-tetsudô no yoru (1985)
Dull, preachy and depressing
This review has spoilers, but how can you spoil something that is already rotten? I picked up this awful movie to show to my kids and had to apologize to them afterward. It's partly my fault as I saw Miyazawa and thought Miyazaki, the genius behind Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Kiki, etc. Unlike those movies, 'Night' is completely unenjoyable. From the title and the blurb on the box, I was expecting a fun adventure on a train ride across the galaxy. What I got was a painfully slow story, filled with disjointed surrealism, overtly Christian preachiness, and a depressing ending.
The movie starts off introducing Giovanni as a boy who is struggling in school and is picked on by classmates because his father is late coming back from a fishing expedition in the North Sea. He is also shown working hard for little money at a printer's shop so he can help provide for his sick mother. The introduction section is relatively long and uninteresting, but it could have been bearable if the rest of the movie made up for it. At the end of the initial part of the movie, Giovanni tries to go to the town's Centaurus festival but is teased away by a his classmates once again. He runs off to a field, falls asleep and is awakened by a steam train appearing out of nowhere.
OK, now we get to the part where the poor picked on kid gets a fun romp around the galaxy on a train, right? Nope. They turn a trip through the galaxy into a series of disjointed surrealist images, loosely based on the constellations. You get to see a fossil dig under their city unearthing 1.2 million year old walnuts (why?) An old man catching heron, which apparently taste like candy, and an observatory of Alberio that looks like the yellow and blue stars of Alberio being used as a lighthouse beacon. None of these scenes are very interesting, but they leave you hoping something coherent will happen.
Unfortunately the something that happens that make things a little more coherent is that the movie becomes preachy. Hymns, prayers and stories about how great it is to sacrifice your life. Yech! The box should have had warnings on it for the preachy content.
After a stop at the Southern Cross (heaven) the boy's one true friend who's been with him on this journey jumps off the train. The boy then wakes up back in the field where he was asleep and soon finds out his friend died rescuing another of their classmates from drowning.
So there you have it, depressing, preachy and dull all rolled into 1 bad movie. Don't bother with it, and don't subject poor innocent children to this stinker.