Reviews

I'm waiting for the movie that comes out that is nothing but a black screen for two hours. I know it's coming. When it does there will be plenty of pretentious people giving reviews that tell us how brilliant it is.

I wish I could understand why ANYONE would want to watch a movie like this. As many have already mentioned, there is zero entertainment value here. Is it possible that I'm just not high minded enough to understand that a movie is a form of escape, and should have some entertainment value? I bet some of the people giving this movie 9 or 10 scores are the same crowd who play video games and think that video games don't need to be entertaining. I guess we just need to experience misery and then talk about how it makes us feel. Surprise, surprise! It makes you feel miserable!

I guess I should say something about the movie. Thankfully, it won't take long. There's an apocalypse of some sort and the movie protagonists are a surviving father and son. They travel along a road to get to the coast because, apparently, that's where all of the good people live so that's where the good survivors must be. Along the road that's in between the coasts are nothing but hillbilly cannibals because that's who normally lives in between the coasts. The goal is to avoid and or escape the endless stream of survivors while trying to encounter as many of them as possible. When you reach the coast the game.......sorry, I mean movie, is over.

Just in case you are wondering, in addition to no entertainment value, there are ZERO likable characters. Now you could watch this movie for two hours, but I recommend watching that scene from deliverance over and over again instead. (You know the scene I'm talking about.) That scene kind of encapsulates the essence of this movie and you won't have to waste two hours.

Ah, yes. Here we have an obviously boring, depressing, stupid, and pretentious movie, but in the eyes of the people giving it fabulous reviews it is a great movie because it is foreign. If you don't like it, you just don't understand it. This seems to be a mantra for people who love movies like this. They "understand" it, you don't.

The movie immediately starts off with over seven minutes (it will feel like an hour) of utter nonsense and boredom, but perhaps this was done deliberately to make the rest of the movie seem less excruciating. If that's the case, unfortunately, it didn't work.

Be prepared to experience a LOT of silence, barely audible dialog, and people staring at each other. If that's not bad enough, the characters in this movie are all so unlikable that you really want them to be wiped out by a collision with another planet.

Despicable 102 year old man uses his massive wealth to get a heart that could have saved an eighteen year old. He supposedly cheated death, and death is trying to get him. At the end of the episode, after he died, he sees the eighteen year old girl that died because of him at the entrance to the tunnel of light he is about to enter. He asks to go with her, but she says he can't because he is going to a different place than her. The obvious implication is that he is going to hell.

Now there's nothing really wrong with this scenario as far as I have explained it so far, but the problem is that if he was going to hell, and she was going to heaven or some place good, you would think that the force that was after him was good. However, this force, whatever it was, killed an innocent man, and tried to kill the doctor as well. It also threatened more. I don't understand why they did this. It kind of ruined the episode. Maybe I'm missing something and someone else can give a rational explanation for this.

I was pretty high on this show up until this episode. Ironically, I was initially afraid the show might be political like so many others. Just as I was thinking that might not be the case. Whoop! There it is!

It really is amazing that people like those behind this episode think that people in this country are so bad, and that people in other countries are so much better. In this episode they take it a step further. You get to see that even though they think we are so bad, if aliens from another planet come here and want to take over the bodies of our dead, and you don't trust them completely, and embrace that idea, you are a bigot and a xenophobe. You see, we're bad, but any beings from other planets are good, even if you know nothing about them and they demand the bodies of your loved ones. Sick.

I couldn't even finish watching this.

Why was the story changed so much? Why did Bradbury allow them to make so many unnecessary changes to his story? Right from the start they made one change after another, and they were NOT good changes.They removed more than half of the characters from the book.

Instead of meeting Pipkin at his house the other kids meet him at Moonshroud's house, as a ghost? These changes are beyond stupid. It's like Hanna and Barbera are so full of themselves that they feel the need to change everything just to show everyone that they can write better than Bradbury, It's hard to imagine that Bradbury allowed them to butcher his own story.

The animation is terrible, especially that of Moonshroud. Nimoy's voice acting of Moonshroud is also really bad. His voice is so irritating. He would have been better off just using his own voice.

I'm not going to bother telling you what's great about this movie. You can look at the gazillion reviews here for that. Overall I would give the movie and 8.5 to 9.0.

I'm going to use this review to make a few criticisms because no one seems to talk about that in their reviews. One of the recent reviewers had an interesting perspective. They thought that the movie dragged in the middle. I didn't see it that way. I thought the beginning was very weak. I didn't like it at all. The whole scene in the hotel room at the start was not entertaining in any way for me.

There were a lot of little things in the movie that seemed silly to me.

One of those was when Norman was clearing out the hotel room after the murder. The last thing he removed from the room was the newspaper that had almost $40,000 dollars in it. There is absolutely no way that someone could pick up a newspaper with all that money in it and not realize there was something in it. He would have needed to hold it together too in order to stop the money from falling out.

Another was the camera work for the killing of the detective. I know Hitchcock is much admired for his camera work but the close up of Martin Balsam struggling to not fall backwards down the stairs looked ludicrous. In fact it looked very similar to a scene in another Hitchcock movie, Vertigo, except the scene in Vertigo wasn't this ridiculous. It took as much time for Balsam to fall down the stairs in this movie as it did for someone to fall from a tall building in Vertigo.

The biggest problem with the movie by far was finding out that the mother had been dead for ten years and that Norman was himself and also acting as his mother because he had a split personality. One hour, ten minutes, and 27 seconds into the movie, bother Norman and his mother appear in the same scene. I never see where anyone ever mentions this. This is clearly an attempt to make you think that Norman isn't crazy and is not dressing up and acting as his own mother, but how do you justify this? Anyway, I would be interested in what anyone else has to say about this.

A super hero movie with a "You've Got Mail" type love story. It is both heart warming and hilarious. The cast is great. The voice acting is great. The animation is great. The story is great. The music is great. Well, you get the picture. Another plus is the movie is not laced with political messages like Zootopia. That movie was ruined for me by annoying politics.

Megamind has broad appeal and has something for almost everyone. I will confess that I am inclined to like this type of movie, but even after deducting points for bias, this movie would get a high score. I really wish they had done a sequel. The worst thing I can say about this movie is that it was over too quickly.