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aleph999
Reviews
The Man from Earth: Holocene (2017)
Astonishingly bad
The first movie was made by and for intelligent people. Like it or not, you had to admit it was daring and clever. This one is almost unbelievably sloppy and idiotic. In terms of tone, plot, character development, lightning and photography, it feels like an amateur porn movie, which only makes it more frustrating because there is no porn, although the slutty teenager characters does put up a reasonable effort. (By the way, is that how American kids really dress, talk, think and act in real life? If so, I fear for the future.) With the exception of John Oldman/David Lee Smith, who doesn't even play the main part and has very little to say throughout the movie, all characters are shallow and hateful, and I caught myself wishing them horrible deaths within a few minutes.
In short, the director has just demolished whatever reputation he had gained from the first movie, which was indeed a small jewel. Therefore, I assume any quality we saw then was in the writing, which is sorely lacking here.
The Interview (2014)
Cognitive dissonance
I usually don't watch American comedies – except when I know the director, when I like the actors or when I have a good notion of what I am about to see – because, as a rule, they are schematic, vulgar and ultimately depressing. Even when they manage to have some funny moments, there is always a point when righteousness kicks in and things start to head towards the inevitably constructive ending. A waste of time.
This, however, is not the case with The Interview. It is much worse than that. I won't insult teenagers by saying that it is for people under 15; it is simply an idiotic movie, with an idiotic script, played by awful actors, with no redeeming grace whatsoever. This is, simply put, a movie for those peculiar people who think jokes about butt-holes and everything that goes in or out of them are funny. There is no point going into finer details than that.
Of course some people will like it. Some may even love it. But what prompted me to write this review is the score of 8.6 from over 66 thousand viewers (when the movie has just been launched!) and the profusion of raving reviews. Aw, come on! Either I am seriously misjudging mankind's average level of stupidity or there is something very fishy here. I can think of a few possibilities: (a) In a masterful move, Sony partnered with North Korea and its dictator and thousands of Korean users were forced to register at IMDb and give good grades to the movie in order to preserve their fingernails. The few ones who could manage some English were also obliged to write ecstatic reviews.
(b) IMDb itself sold out to Sony and inserted these fake ratings and reviews.
(c) Sony devised a clever way to bypass IMDb's checks and used robots to prop up this disastrous movie.
Other than that, I am at a loss here. Some people may have actually liked it, and of course some dozens of people probably have been induced or hired to write positive reviews in order to start it off with a high mark, as it has been usual with most new movies lately (so much so that I have learned not to trust the first 20-30 reviews of any new movie at IMDb). But not in such massive numbers! Whatever happened, it is becoming growingly clear that the interested parties have learned how to load the dice at IMDb and, as a consequence, its rating system has been steadily losing credibility. There are many examples of Web portals that seemed relevant at some stage but then lost their footing and disappeared. It would be a pity if such a large and useful movie database went that way.
The Prince (2014)
Depressing.
This is such a pathetic attempt a movie-making that it is hard to understand how the script was accepted, how the director was allowed to get away with it and how the studio agreed to release it. I've seen my fair share of brainless Hollywood movies and had good fun with many of them, but this simply fails in all accounts. Or perhaps, on second thought, it is some sort of experiment at meta-action movie: you just pack up all the clichés you can think of - bad guys in uniform (red ties for one side, black ties for the other, all of them wearing dark glasses indoors), the inevitable sidekick who is a martial arts expert and longs for a chance to show his prowess by beating the hero up instead of killing him with a gun, cardboard shooters who just pop in and out like in a shooting range, invincible hero that carries a deep sorrow, a master villain looking a lot like Bruce Willis who talks too much instead of doing the deed, and on and on - and attempt to bore watchers out of their skulls in order to convince them to do something better with their time. (Hey, let's try some Fellini, what do ya think?)
But what really prompted me to write this are the positive reviews. Not only positive, but definitely ecstatic. All of them about the same length, all written by people in the United States, most of them on the same date (August 24). I have been noticing lately that many new movies are launched with several positive reviews here at IMDb and then steadily drop to their real potential, so much so that I have learned not to trust any highly rated movie with less than 20 reviews. This time, however, the dissonance between such unbridled enthusiasm and the obvious awfulness of its object is so blatant that it is hard not to ask the question: are people actually getting paid to praise movies here at IMDb?
Django Unchained (2012)
Again: what is happening to the great American directors?
Normally I wouldn't bother commenting such an awful movie or even watching it to the end. But this after all was the great Tarantino, who directed some of the most brilliant movies in the last 20 years or so and invented a style of his own, so I soldiered on and hoped to be surprised. In the end, I felt more than disappointed, I felt embarrassed for him. This is not the meta-trash he specializes in, this is just pure unadultered trash: no intelligence, no originality, no irony, no second layer of meaning, no redeeming grace. It is badly written, badly directed, badly shot, badly cut. The actors - with the notable exception of Cristoph Walz - are laughable. This is the gory mush a dumb semi-illiterate teenager would produce if you gave him a few million dollars and told him: go write and direct a movie.
So I must repeat the question that has been daunting me since Poseidon by Riddley Scott and Black Horse by Spielberg: what is happening to the great Hollywood directors? Has a zombie plague stricken them all?
War Horse (2011)
What happened to the great American directors?
A few days ago I watched Prometheus by Ridley Scott and barely managed to get to the end of that unbearably fake movie with its idiotic script. Now I had to endure this mushy B-rate melodramatic complacent trash by Spielberg. Not a drop of intelligence, originality, passion, what you will. Just a tiresome, miscast, aimless compilation of clichés. It is quite embarrassing, really. I felt ashamed for Mr Spielberg.
Apparently all intelligent life has fled Hollywood, which was taken by storm by a bunch of CGI guys, and took refuge in TV series, some of which are actually written by adults for adults.
On the other hand, there are some pretty nice sunsets.
Prometheus (2012)
So bad it is even funny
Was this really directed by Ridley Scott, the same guy who gave us Blade Runner (arguably one of the best 10 movies of all time), The Duellists (an underrated gem), Alien? There are three possible answers: (a) it wasn't him and he only lent his name to sell this junk; (b) it was him, but he didn't direct those previous movies; or (c) it was him, but he is just playing an epic prank on us to see how gullible and stupid we have become.
Nothing in this movie makes any sense. Dozens of plot holes and inconsistencies have been pointed out in other reviews, but I have a few more to add. The planet has no oxygen, but the crew carry WWII flamethrowers and things actually catch fire. The ultra-expensive and mysoginistic (it won't operate women) surgery machine pretends to apply anesthesy for a major surgery but the patient feels the pain all the same (and she keeps wearing the underclothes she had been wearing all along; can't have a naked woman here, can we?). The alien has the same DNA as humans despite being twice as tall. The alien breathes oxygen, but after the crash he seems to forget this and goes after the woman without a helmet.
After a while, it all gets so absurd that it becomes funny. And please, please, since 2001 (made in 1968, for God's sake) any SF movie worth its salt refrains from making spaceships roar and rumble. No air = no sound. How complicated can this be?
Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010)
From epic to melodrama
Season 1 was great: bold, fresh, an impressive accomplishment. The prequel (Gods of the Arena) was clever and tight. Season 2, however, is a big disappointment: flabby, meandering, so pompous that it verges on ridiculous. The writers lost focus; gore and sex became a means in themselves; both heroes and villains became unidimensional. The main flaw, however, lies in Spartacus himself. Where Andy played him gracefully, with the gravitas, sadness and self-doubt the character deserved, the new actor, whose name I ignore, carves a sneering, humorless, self-righteous, vengeful, fairly dumb and ultimately boring man. In fact, we care more for Crixus or Lannicus now than for Spartacus himself. Add to that the lack of good & believable villain and you will have a recipe for failure.
The change is so striking that perhaps it is intentional. The sad fact is that Spartacus went from an adult series to something with the same depth of an "ultimate fighter" video game for teenagers.
The American (2010)
Awful
You are a killer on the run. So you hide in a picturesque Italian town with 200 or so inhabitants, all of whom know you as "il Americano". How clever can you get? You pretend to be a photographer, but you're never seen around with a camera. A killer arrives to get you early on, a local citizen is murdered a few steps from your door and a horrible mess ensues, but you stay put assuming that (a) the first killer didn't tell anyone where you were hiding; and (b) none of the dumb locals will link this murder to you. In fact, apparently they don't even care. You get an envelope with a newspaper clipping about a previous mess in Sweden, something only your pursuers would know about. You still don't budge. While you await your fate, you fashion a sophisticated weapon out of garbage. When you finally deliver the weapon, you fail to warn your client that it was rigged to explode. This client was hired to kill you as well, but she couldn't finish her job because of a busload of kids; so instead she chooses to do it when you are in the middle of a crowded procession. And so on and so forth.
Don't be fooled by the slow pace and the music, this is not a character study of any sort. It's just a movie about an unbearably dull & remarkably stupid hit-man chased by a bunch of amateurs. All of them deserve what they get.
The photography, however, is wonderful.