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Gendorius90
Reviews
The Outpost: One Is the Loneliest Number (2018)
A new Xena the Warrior Princess?
When I watched this I started out feeling like she was a Mary Sue of sorts, being able to parry blows from behind and being more or less untouchable by trained soldiers. One moment really stood out to me where an armed soldier, someone who by any right would be wielding a sword, started grappling with her, an unarmored opponent who was busy fighting another soldier. By every right she would have been stabbed.
So to put it short, the episode opens really horribly and I wassure I would not want to watch anymore of it, but the more time passed I stopped thinking "SW:TLJ" and started thinking "This really reminds me of Xena the Warrior Princess" with a strong fantasy heroine with an elf-like descent (sadly she seems to have been given some sort of Macguffin which summons demons(?) when she needs help).
The storyline seems straight forward, a group of seven slew her entire village including her mother and brother and now she is out to get revenge in this fantasy land of knights and parasite-zombies.
However I hope the season gets better because this one was full of stupid things, like a hastily viewed tattoo becomes the hunt for 13 years, her love-interest steps in between her and a troll, despite she being able to one-hit-kill everything, and dies for no reason, the previously noted grapple scene, but she does not feel like a Mary Sue, it just feels like a typical Heroic Knight saving Kickass princess on a Revenge story sort of deal with a bit too much wasted time on a random character (might be a reason for it later).
The reasons I want to see more is because she does start out as a warrior who has more skills than plotarmor (FOR THE MOST PART) and the moment she faces an enemy she has never seen before she is brought to the brink of dying.
I give it a 5 because I like the idea of a new Xena, but the writing needs to pick up, because it is not very good. I would however strongly recommend it for anyone who wants to show this to their kids of 10 years and up, it doesn't show much gore and the blood that is seen is black so it doesn't look too bad. People die in a sort of obvious but fine manner for the most part, even if unrealistic.
The Foreigner (2017)
AAA Movie (Major spoiler-free review)
This movie did everything I expected of it and even more. As someone who grew up with Jackie Chan I enjoyed watching him play a role where he became a mix of Rambo and Walter White and throwing in a serious Chan I have never seen yet.
Playing a former special forces soldier in England Jackie Chans last family member, his daughter, is caught in a new IRA bombing and dies from it. It sounds very typical so far, doesn't it? It is set up to be the typical lone wolf soldier where you follow him throughout most of the movie, but Chan takes a backseat and is more the reason for things going along.
The second main character played by Pierce Brosnan is a former IRA member and a politician who has worked his entire life to prevent things from ever going back to the bloody old days, and with this new bombing he has a lot on his plate since everything is pointing at him or his old friends.
A lot of the movie is played out following Brosnans character, his family and his colleagues how they try to track down this new IRA group at the beheast of the brittish government while having the Brittish police hounding after him, and unlike most movies like this, they are not useless, they actually fulfill a purpose.
Brosnans character finds himself with an asian Rambo on one hand and a plot similar to Sons of Anarchy (Including the irish! Hah!) he has a lot to deal with and little time to do so.
The casting is great, the acting is incredible, and even if Jackie Chan is no longer young, and you really feel it in the acting, he is still great at what he does. The martial arts are kept to a minimum in the movie however, but you can still tell it is him.
I was only able to find a single plothole at first watching, and it was rather minor and it is actually not really connected in any way to rile up Brosnans character even more so I could see that scene cut out entirely or given more time to breathe before coming to a conclusion.
I think The Foreigner is a great movie and I am more than happy to see a couple of familiar faces, and I hope it will not be the last time.
Hardcore Henry (2015)
Not too bad but nothing to remember.
Hardcore Henry was all about that it is like an FPS game, and as a gamer I was curious for sure, even tho it took me about 3 years to actually find and have a look at it. What I found was equally "Yeah this is okay, I guess" and equally "Why did I need to see this?"
Hardcore Henry is basically a faceless mute protagonist like a lot of games have because you're meant to put yourself in the role of them, but with Hardcore Henry it all felt too sped up, it plays a bit like the kind of game where you can slow down and really look around you to plan ahead and such as Henry pretty much ends up using multiple weapons against multiple targets in multiple directions, a lot. But you really get little of the planning ahead, and it feels like a trailer in the sense of that everything that isn't action or story is cut away. Which leaves it to be mostly about shooting, fighting, blood and a little bit of story, which really was my main reason for the first half to look, not because there was alot about it, but because "Jimmy" keeps popping up over and over after having been seamingly killed. So I had to know, how is he coming back over and over? And they appear to be robot clones who he controls from a wheelchair, which ruins things a lot if you think about it, but that was the first half.
The second half kinda got me hooked by simply having Jimmy play a lot of roles from Punkrocker to WW1 veteran and I feel like the movie was mostly made to have Sharlto Copley mess around on the screen as any amount of character types.
A huge problem for me was the camera works, a lot of shots were blurry and felt like someone held a handcamera while others it was perfectly still just the way a movie is expected to be, but only during the storybits, of course. Every other time the camera kept flipping over, changing position, and I felt quite ill to watch it, it is not a good movie to watch. As an experience? Maybe.
My score comes from actually having 1 = Terrible 5 = Okay and 10 = Incredible, and Hardcore Henry did nothing special for me and I was having a hard time finishing it.
Green Book (2018)
Because I am human nothing human is alien to me. (Spoilers at the end)
Green Book is a very typical film by how you see it, a poor working class Italian is paid to drive a rich black classically trained piano player around the deep south of the USA while it is still normal with racism.
But the movie knows that it's a cliché, and it constantly rewards you for guessing right and makes you smile when it takes a turn you didn't see coming.
The movie is serious in how it is played out and that is what makes it a good comedy to me. The jokes are mostly referring to what happened before.
If you have grown up a little rough you can get the character of Tony and his ways, "It isn't stealing if the rock lies on the ground." and even if you don't get it I think you would come to like him by the end.
The same goes for Shirley who starts off being very aloof and hard to like because he appears so snobby but by the end he shows off a side where you finally understand him to a whole new point and you are happy to see how they end up treating one another.
The racism in the movie feels realistic in that not everyone is a redneck, they are just set in their ways and most people don't go out of their ways to be racist and even when they get angry it is because they have been wronged most of the time.
To me this movies way of treating racism is the best I have seen in a very long time because it didn't take sides and it wasn't about racism but it always came back to it. Just like taxes and death, back in those days you needed a handbook to know where to be safe and the movie really pulls that aspect off.
The music in this movie is incredible and I found myself tapping along with the music in one way or another, the classical, the radio and the bar music.
It had soul and it felt good.
!!Spoilers!!
There was a scene in the movie which sum up the movie in a very simple way where Tony tells Shirley that he is blacker than Shirley because he knows the culture, grew up on the streets and is a worker having to constantly work to pay for his family. It really puts it into perspective that things are not all about skin color, race or where you grew up, it is all a part of you and you are not less black because you are rich, and you're not more happy because you are rich neither. It all comes down to everything that makes you, You. That you can relate to anyone if you only talk to them for a while.
"Because I am human nothing human is alien to me."
Feminists: What Were They Thinking? (2018)
title stuff
This Documentary seems to focus a lot on how bad things were for women who are now old, when they were young, and in an age where the rights of groups have become almost a cold war in some sense this documentary feels like propaganda.
Many shots feel like they could be taken for a movie about feminism then or how the MRA movement today is viewed, and as an example in the movie the line "What are you, some kind of Suffragette?" and the way she speaks of it then is how I see people today treat people who just do the same, but for a different group: Men. Another example is how they point out how "Be a good girl" refers to that you are not a good girl already, but no real thought about that maybe that goes for everyone and not just girls, but because they are girls they only take that point of view even today. As such the movie feels like it is very clearly targetting feminist women and turn things to fit the narrative.
Another example is from the womans march from 2017, did it happen? Yes. Did it happen the way it is portrayed and compared to a march from 1978 being superimposed over it? I severely doubt it, because this decade has made the ideas political and sharpened it to point people out, but unlike a documentary like Casie Jayes the Red Pill there seems to be no selfreflection in the documentary, but instead it doubles down and wants to throw fuel on a fire that is no longer needed in the same way it was several generations ago, and with the problems being seen in the media and the social media there are things that still need ironing out, but instead it gives a really strong feeling of not needing to iron out any flaws but just get a bulldozer and it doesn't matter if some corners are severed.
The documentary actually has several good messages, foremost is: Be who you want to be and shape your life from what you want it to be like and don't listen to what others think the world should be like, and if only the documentary wasn't so stuck on being a feminist documentary there are very strong scraps that could be used to make a movie for everyone.
A rather horifying example is from Fonda where a clip is just used to have her say that we should always be in a revolution without seeming to care for how revolutions have usually been done in history, which points to how western feminists appear to view revolution as their kind of politics. The same goes with that they included victims of the bombings in Japan from the second world war, it has nothing to do with feminism, but everything to do with politics and how you should feel about certain people and certain groups.
Something that very clearly shows how skewed the views are someone left a review that gave a 10/10 based on that "boys should be afraid", what kind of equality is that?
My score is based on that it is decently shot, it is well cut and it feels like it has a point to make, but because of how it is portrayed, as propaganda, it do not feel like it can even be used as an example in 50 years to look back on.