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The Office (2005)
Pretty horrendous.
Is it really possible to say things bad about this show? Yes. Definitely.
All of the cast commit the one cardinal sin of comedy - trying to be funny. As soon as you try, it's all over.
Add in schizophrenic scripts that just lurch from one pointless scene to the next, a barrage of zoom shots that do not make the banal, on the nose attempts at humour any funnier, and you've got The Office.
It's safe to say that I will never get back the time I wasted on this stale piece of fluff.
So I agree with one earlier review's title; you really just can not rate this 10/10. Or 9/10. Or 8/10. The 3 is very generous. Very.
The Simpsons: The 7 Beer Itch (2020)
Creepy...
The temptress du jour of 'The 7 Beer Itch' is perhaps the weakest of the lot.
Despite being framed as a ~loveable~ figure that has men falling at her feet, she's a borderline stalker who, when her advances are declined, responds by forcing herself on Homer.
Contrast that against Mindy from 'The Last Temptation of Homer', who made it clear that Homer didn't have to do anything he didn't want to.
She was a romantic figure, Lily is just a sexual predator.
To make things worse, the episode tries very hard to be funny, but misses the mark more times than not. The episode was always live in the shadow of its aforementioned antecedent, but this still doesn't stand on its own merits.
A generous 5/10.
The Simpsons: Dial 'N' for Nerder (2008)
Enjoyable
This was a novel outing from The Simpsons' Silver Age.
Anyone remotely au fait with detective shows, especially ones of a certain vintage, will surely recognise the various ways in which this episode playfully parodies their tropes and famous catchphrases.
This was a very charming and energetic outing, thanks to a nice, snappy script, and something quite original for the show. Now, beyond even the show's Bronze Age of the 2010s, after having seen various reworks of the same basic plots (e.g. 'Homer and Marge's marriage is in trouble'), I appreciate these kinds of episodes. Freshness reigns supreme.
The Simpsons: Panic on the Streets of Springfield (2021)
Pure cringe.
I have zero interest in Morrissey and his nonsense, but my God, even I found this episode embarrassing.
Shall we talk about the concert scene? I'd rather scrub it from my mind, but I'll give my thoughts in brief.
It wasn't funny. It wasn't even comedy. Morrissey's parody character just gave an itemised list of the man's beliefs and behaviour. There was no subtlety, no attempt to spin any of it in a humorous way - it may as well have been narrated by a robot.
Considering how quick and sharp The Simpsons can be at its best, this was hard watching.
Best quip:
"But old Sting is bloody gorgeous... and he knows it."
The Simpsons: Catch 'Em If You Can (2004)
The low star reviews are braindead...
Second to the plot? Where's Maggie? Marge wanting to be cool?
All rubbish.
The Simpsons has never been about continuity or logic-driven plots, and I don't know why some people pretend they do. In one of the older episodes, Homer survived falling down a canyon. Twice! The Simpsons has always had an outlandish element.
That writes off the first two criticisms.
As for the third, this episode has nothing to do with Marge 'wanting to be cool'. It was about her wanting a break from her stressful life as the mother of a hell raiser, a gifted child and a baby. Marge isn't a robot. She loves her kids. Yes. She wants to do her best for them. Yes. She's an inhuman washing and cooking machine that never tires. No!
This is far from the first time we've seen Marge be a normal person. Someone who enjoys a bit of time off. We've seen her appreciate a spa day with Homer in one of the older episodes, for example.
Third criticism done and dusted.
As for the episode in general, it was a pretty fun one. The chase sequence at the mid-way point was creatively executed, and there were some good jokes sprinkled throughout.
7.5/10, rounded up.
The Simpsons: The Strong Arms of the Ma (2003)
The rape episode...
It's sad but unsurprising to see that none of the other reviews touch upon the spousal rape here, let alone the fact that it's presented as a joke. You'd know that if Homer had raped Marge, (rightly) nary a review would ignore it.
He was clearly uncomfortable, and started to make an excuse to get out of it, and then Marge delivers the nasty line, "I wasn't asking."
It's an sour turn of events; Marge had just completed her arc, going from victim to hero, and the episode was fine besides. Given that and what I mentioned above, I wasn't entirely sure what to score it, so I settled on half marks.
The Simpsons: Days of Future Future (2014)
Weak 6/10...
This episode was written by J. Stewart Burns.
To me, Burns is a glass cannon. There's a zany streak to his writing, one that can work for the story's imaginativeness if kept under control. His first two writing contributions (Moe Baby Blues, Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind) were great. They showed a creativity that at most, stretched to the furthest corners of believability.
However, episodes like Days of Future Future are examples of the zany streak swelling out of control, smashing the cannon. Going so far with the eccentricity that it falls into tediousness.
In an episode that isn't a Treehouse of Horror, we have zombies, that Homer thing and humans mating with insectile aliens. (The weird cross-species affairs would be something that Burns used again later on. Weird fetish, much?)
The accumulative effect is something that doesn't feel outright bad-there are even brief bright moments-but for the most part, feels aggressively dull and even a bit of a drag.
So for me, I'll give it a bare 6/10, though 5.5 would be more accurate.
Karen Pirie (2022)
'Baltambre' must be from...
'Baltambre' must be from an alternate universe because none of their depiction of the 90s is close to true. The "vast majority" of homes didn't have a computer in 1996. About 27% did. Tapes were still very much around - CD sales didn't overtake them until around 2002.
Yes, on stuff like this, the show is accurate.
The rest of the show is fine. I think that adjective largely sums up all the show from all angles; cinematography, acting, writing etc. Some of the performances lift it up. Steve John Shepherd, Ron Donachie and Ariyon Bakare in particular stand out.
There's just an inescapable sense of lacking that certain je ne sais quoi.
Coupling (2000)
Not clever, not funny.
'Coupling' tries very hard to be funny, but the subject is one-note and the lines themselves are both clumsily coined and delivered. The performances fall into that brand of American sitcom self-conscious that can only appeal to people with limited wattage upstairs, as it's an entirely ham-fisted way of doing things. 'Comedy' and 'ham-fisted' are by their very natures incompatible, as all comedy, even apparently gawkish slapstick, requires fine skill.
Don't expect to find that here.
It's also terribly dated. There is a brand of feminism included here, but it's of the early 2000s variety; openly and casually denigrating men on a constant basis. Another thing to thank the 80s for.
In short, 'Coupling' is aggressively mediocre like Friends. The only difference is the subject matter. It would be an insult to say this was even close to the best of British comedy - it would have to claw its way into the top 500.
New Tricks: The Girl Who Lived (2012)
The cracks begin to show.
This series kicked off with the absolutely fantastic Victorian episode, one of the best of the entire show, before being followed by a decent episode. Then, came this. Whilst the last episode could carry off from the atmosphere of the episode prior, the introduction of Steve in this instalment really brings home that something has gone, or rather someone. The dynamic that drives the energy has a missing link, so it doesn't work.
The mystery element as per usual, is handled well, which is why I gave this a seven rather than a six, but this truly is the first episode that signals the start of a general downward trend. There were about a handful of episodes following this that rose above the level of this one, but otherwise it's a melancholic decline that follows.
Amor eterno (2014)
Two stars for the atmosphere...
Two stars for the atmosphere and two stars for some decent acting. Zero stars for everything else.
Not much can be said about this film, except that it gets increasingly silly and ridiculous all the way up until the climax, which was quite frankly a joke. We're supposed to believe that a skinny and underdeveloped late teenager can overpower a beefy, fully developed middle-aged man, which is completely absurd - men's muscles aren't even fully developed till 30! Having been a skinny late teen trying to fend off a beefy middle aged man myself, I can tell you the difference in strength is huge. So much so that even though I was giving it my all, I may as well have not been trying. So in reality, the teacher would've dominated any of those teenagers easily.
There's also a subtext of "how dare an older man have sex with a much younger but nevertheless still legal younger man!".
We're supposed to pity or sympathise with the younger guy, but he's quite frankly an idiot with no sense whatsoever. The moral relating to the subtext is quite plainly:
"Do that and you deserve to be abused and tortured."
If you believe that's a good moral to go by, then I guess you'll enjoy this film, so long as you have unbreakable suspension of disbelief.
The Simpsons: The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson (1997)
Beautiful.
The mark of a really great piece of writing shows itself subtly in the form of feeling effortless, and that what's this episode did. It took a relatively simple premise, jacked it up with superb writing and its famous satire, creating something unfailingly slick and entertaining.
The episode left us with one of the most memorable pieces of humour in Simpsons' history ("No pizza, only Khlav Kalash!") and more other golden jokes than you shake a stick at.
Despite the higher-res, broadened colour palette and higher levels of consistency of the show's newer animation style, this episode did particularly well in highlighting the beauty of hand-drawn animation and how much more expressive it can be.
The Simpsons: The War of Art (2014)
Disgustingly shameless padding.
As ideas started to run dry, The Simpsons writers got lazy and decided to fill in the time wherever possible, something they've admitted themselves. It appears in the form of exceptionally long couch gags, and in irritating drawn-out "humour" which usually revolves around dragging out a simple, one-dimensional joke which might have been funny had it just been a moment long, for as long as possible. In this episode, we get three such moments:
1) Lisa running around the guinea pig rescue home's place shouting "OH MY GOD", "AWWW" and other such prattle for nearly two minutes. Two minutes of nothing, no plot progression, nada! For a show that's only 18ish minutes long, that's a considerable amount of fluff
2) Another half a minute of nothing but Homer going "woah woah woah".
3) Kirk going "errrrr" for a dragged out length of time in response to a question, and then the same scene recycled to the question followed.
None of these were funny, they were downright annoying and cringeworthy. When the series packed a massive punch in its heyday, it's literally painful to see the team trash it like this.
The final painful nail in the coffin is the 'moral' at the end; it doesn't matter whether something is a forgery or not, only whether it makes someone happy. That's neither a lesson nor a moral, that's morally bankrupt nonsense.
Without the original vision of a given artist, there would be nothing to copy, and therefore nothing to make people happy. So yes, forgery does matter. It's wrong, plain and simple.
A passable plot and passable humour that could have scored a 6/10 if it hadn't exemplified so exceptionally well the series' fall from grace.
The Tiger Who Came to Tea (2019)
Some good, some OKish.
This title was no doubt beautifully animated and some of the cinematography was wonderfully creative, but the story itself was just passable, even by the standards of child-orientated TV. Where The Snowman had a fully formed story with considerable creativity and poignancy, The Tiger Who Came to Tea really is just what it says... a tiger comes for tea, goes, and that's it. By the time the end came, all I could think was:
"Was that it?"
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
Terribly inaccurate.
For a movie that's supposed to be a biopic, there was far too much embellishments and alterations to the truth. Everything from the firing of the manager to the addition of Mercury to the band as well as his diagnosis was vastly different from the reality. The movie was less about facts and more about creating a more dramatic fiction. In this hot mess, some people's names have been dragged through the mud when they actually did no wrong.
Greats sets and accurate costume designs are a small compensation for a corny movie that irrevelantly rewrites history under the guise of poor scripting and mediocre acting.
Hopefully the positive reviews are merely hype at its peak, and that people will look back on this movie in the future and realise it was all hot air. The critics were dead on correct about this movie after all.
The Flash (2014)
Quite shocked.
Not one for these live action uncanonical series, since they dramatically de- power superheroes to ridiculous points. Never realised that it would do so as much as it did but well, that's the way it is.
I never could anticipate how cringy the whole affair would be though. For example, a recent episode showed a very hoary scene of the Flash helplessly struggling to break free from King Shark's claw; the very one that Superboy one-shotted in canon. Despite the Flash having light speed reflexes and speed, the gap of time between him turning around to a not-so quickly moving arm and being caught was apparently not enough for dodging. And they can happily disregard the fact that the Flash can become intangible.
It's moments like those that really make me want to screw up my face, because it's where bad acting fuses with directly contradicting events. Much lower power, much higher senselessness. But I'll give it a couple of points for some pretty SFX.