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Ghosted (2017)
Another vote for it becoming The Office, underground
Glad to see I'm far from the only one who hates the sudden change in direction the show took.
It was cheesy, but watchable and had potential for the first 7-8 episodes. The fight scenes were poorly cut and clumsily choreographed, but at least there were monsters and the characters were starting to develop!
Then suddenly the cameras were handheld and the zooming began. The first episode they did it it was subtle, but now it's a full-blown office knockoff. It's The Office, underground. It's so hard for me to watch it now, because, as a film-major, all I see are the zooms! I hate that style of TV so much, if my wife didn't like the show so much I wouldn't even finish the series.
It just got so boring. They stopped fighting monsters after Ep 8. They sit around the office whining about manufactured drama, then, literally as the credits roll, something plot-developing happens. They touch on it the beginning of the next episode, then forget about it and move on to more menial character gossip. Nothing happens!
Family Guy: Lifeguard Meg (2024)
Few good gags; super weak story
Overall it was just two half-baked premises, poorly executed, and peppered with product placement that's barely even satire anymore.
The coffee shop story was just a tired string of played out nonsense. We get it, you have two terrible people running a terrible place for other terrible people to get overpriced coffee. The writing for the show as a whole has become so self-aware that it's not even trying to make clever parodies of the situation. It just presents a poop on a platter and goes "here's things we don't like".
The lifeguard story, while at least an attempt at character drama, was still super weak. A Lifeguard performing CPR would hold a high degree of respect, regardless of it being a family member. And when did it go from a SeaPark to a regular water park?
The kids picking up the pool and leaving was easily the funniest moment.
Family Guy needs to just bow out peacefully.
You Can't Turn That Into a House (2017)
Very creative, good-looking builds, but standard cable nonsense
Overall the series is good. The guys make some really cool creations, really utilizing the limited space and time; but as a whole the series still follows the same cable shenanigans as most other renovation shows. They ham up the minor, staged, setbacks, as if they didn't know the client wanted this extra feature all along; they find a workaround without much trouble, and get it done in their 6-8 day timeline. Everything is staged to either cut to commercial or return from it; which on cable is often. 21 minutes of footage for a 30 minute time slot. Every episode is basically the same format, down to the wording of the client's wishlist.
The brothers are a little more fun and casual than the Property Bros, and Kyle (the contractor) tops it off and makes it overall a fun show :)
Maniac (2018)
A great concept, hindered by...
Maniac had a fantastic concept behind it; although overall I found it hindered by discount-Seth Rogan [aka, Jonah Hill]'s quiet, mumbly dialogue. At one point the audio quality was awful because Hill was so unintelligible that they had to crank up the gain on his mic so high that all you heard was static. There's muttering; and then there's 'acting'. Hill is the former.
Even in a timeline where he should be a lot more dynamic and voluminous in his character, Hill is still quiet and contained. We get it, he has depression issues. We still need to be able to hear what he's saying. Suffice to say I spent this series playing my keyboard volume buttons like a trumpet.
That aside, Maniac was a deep-thinking, often mind-boggling experiment of a series. Refined and honed into a 2 hour movie, I think it could go even farther than it did with this limited-run series. Yes, the series was 4x as long as a theoretical movie would be; but alot of that I feel was spent lingering on aspects and plots of secondary characters.
Overall I finished the series not entirely knowing if I understood what was going on. I grasped the main points, but there were a few things that just felt forced to me, and even a few dead-end story-lines. I couldn't really identify with or sympathize with any of the characters, so at the end it kinda felt like we didn't get anywhere.
Into the Dark: School Spirit (2019)
It's good as a "student film". Falls short as a serious flick.
Right away it's unbelievably obvious that they couldn't get extras to make it seem like a real school-year; so they wrote in the scapegoat of "weekend detention". Although that doesn't explain away the construction fences that you can see in the beginning, clear indication that they got in during Summer renovations. Not a bad idea to secure locations, just get the fences out of your shots.
All the characters are 1-dimensional, with each of them representing a cliche clique in schools. They try to come together, but it seems forced and superficial. You really don't care about any of them, because the characters are either unlikable, or the 'nice ones' never seem like they're really in danger. The one and only faculty member isn't any less of a stereotype.
At one point the director opted to skip the music and let the terror of the haunting try to hold suspense on it's own. It failed. Hard.
At this point Blumhouse/Into the Dark is just giving us monthly classes on how NOT to make horror movies. Get some friends drinking and have a laugh at the incongruities of these, and just enjoy yourselves :)
Into the Dark: Treehouse (2019)
Pretty pointless. And the Zooms! Augh!
To clarify my title - a "zoom" instead of a "push" in terms of camera movement are hugely different things. A push physically moves the camera closer to the subject. A zoom uses the lens to get closer - think old movies and current reality TV. This movie uses them randomly and for no reason. It's the most amateur thing you can do as a Director.
This whole movie is like some rich kids got some cameras and went "let's make a movie with social commentary", complete with the "girl next door" in jean cutoffs, plaid shirt, and heel/wedge sandals. Their location is so hidden on it's own gated hillside, that in what view would you be able to see the house next door, much less notice when the power goes out?!
There's not really any "scandal" that sends this Chef Ramsey wannabe running for the safe-space of his family home that apparently he hasn't been to in years, but someone (not him) still pays to have taken care of? He gets home and there's suddenly a sister there; but you can't really tell whose house it is. They stand/sit around the dining room so unnaturally that you can tell the crew didn't get permission to use the full house and don't want to mess much up.
And frankly, for the size of the house, some of the kitchen scenes feel pretty underwhelming - like they just shot it in Jimmi Simpson's home (the chef Lead). Who, BTW, is billed 6th on IMDB. Not a good sign when your lead role is billed 6th. Seems like one last chance to drive the feminist message of this movie home.
That message basically being, 'men are pigs and will get what's coming to them'.
There's really no scandal here. Is he actually married? Is he divorced? The daughter seems like she'll be a big part of this, then is sent away with the P.A in the first scene. Yet somehow, when some women comes over and he plays the apron-wearing host, he's still the bad guy because...one of them likes him? I really didn't understand any of this. Very little story to grasp on to.
They allude to some actual treehouse a few times, like they want to make a parallel storyline, then simply don't. Not even sure if the treehouse is actually on the property, because he came across it during a several-mile run! A run that somehow leads him back to his neighbor, even though he's still on his secluded property? Does this chick just lurk around there all the time? And how much land is there that you can run down the road and still be in your backyard??
Swing and a miss, Into The Dark. Did you even swing? It's more like you missed at a bunt!
Dark Was the Night (2014)
Blue. Very blue. But a decent rainy-evening movie.
A synopsis and billed actors that gave some hope of a fairly good horror/mystery. Nope.
It's the kind of movie where you end up questioning the reality of the choices the characters make - all the way down to leaving your car in the road while you investigate a dead deer. What if someone comes up behind the car?? ..Things like that are not something you would be concerned about if you were sucked in to the story. And the stereotype of "looking at the person who tells you they saw something flick by, tell them there's nothing there, then finally look over and confirm the nothingness", is more than infuriating at this point in cinema! Of course it's going to be gone when you wait 2 minutes to look! Btw, you had a car. You easily could've driven it the direction the kid saw it go and search with your massive headlights, rather than get out of the car and poke around with your flashlight like you're feigning looking for a pet cat you know got run over last week.
The B-story of 'everyone knows something about someone because it's a small-town' falls really flat. Two Native-American (I think?) characters just bully and demean the Sheriff, and then later want to kind of help? They really can't decide what role they want to play. And btw, you're really going to try to bully a 6'4" Sheriff?! I don't care how much grief a man has gone through, Kevin Durand would still throw you through that wooden wall!
"Dark Was the Night" is a bit of a misleading title, as half the movie is shot during the day and simple colored blue. Like, not in a good, "filmic", subtle kind of blue - everything is blue. It's like Film School kids shot this and didn't quite know how to do "day for night"... Or color grade properly. Everything outside is completely blue, and even alot of the Sheriff's (Durand) house scenes were unnecessarily blue colored.
I thought the monster FX were really good, especially for the budget, and obviously being a B-film.
If you're really bored and want something to do, watch this. You won't be thrilled, but it'll get the job done.
Safe Harbour (2018)
Very difficult to point out all the holes in this series without doing a spoiler review..
So, I tried to make this as spoiler-free as possible. I had this on my Hulu list for a while before I finally decided to give it a shot. It's a good thing it's a short series, because I'm not sure I could've taken many more episodes. Most of the plot was basically "white people being easily frightened". CinemaSins would have a field day with this!
Production value was pretty good. Although the music could've used some work. Several times I mentioned to my wife that the music was added in to create tension in scenes that otherwise weren't really going anywhere. We even agreed that even the main title sequence was over-the-top dramatic for the atmosphere actually created in the show.
Very little emotional impact was made by the characters as a whole, nor did it take much to "send their lives spiraling". And the side-story drama was absurdly thrown in. 'Some of the things happening to other characters somehow affects the strained relationship of two long-lost lovers'?
Really?
There was even a scene that had two characters fighting, then never gave a clear picture of what had happened, because of course it's a past event.
No real crucial backstory was even given to the asylum-seekers! Did they all come from the same place? Why was their destination so critical?
The ending lesson, albeit a positive one, really feels undeserved based on the preceding events.
Overall: Good actors, terrible characters.