As a BB fan am I glad this movie got made? I guess so.
I’m not entirely sure we needed to know this part of the story though.
Some things are better never explained.
It was alright. Nothing special, no real surprises, everything you can imagine that happens to Jessie after breaking bad happens. Nothing surprised me here. I'm not sure this movie needed to be made.
An unnecessary and well made epilogue for one of the best characters from Breaking Bad. Aaron Paul is great and I loved getting more time with Jesse Pinkman and some of the other characters.
This has maybe the most gorgeous and realistic CG animation/art I've ever seen. It does pose the question of why not just use real actors instead of the time it must have taken to create the characters in this, but as an experiment in what is possible it's pretty mindblowing.
The story itself is excellent. I got a massive Wing Commander vibe from it all (and, now I guess it would be more apt to apply that to Star Citizen/Squadron 42 - this actually works as a pretty great trailer for that). Samira Wiley was instantly recognisable in the lead role and did a great job. What's most impressive is how engaging the story managed to be in such a short time, with the relationship forming between Colby and her ship.
The dogfight sequence above/under ground was just sublime.
Man I hate that trope they've used in the ending, it's always so stupid and annoying and feels like a cop out. Seriously.
On an unrelated note, think of all the inflation that's going to happen because this huge amount of money just went into circulation. I hope they'll address that in the last three episodes.
without a doubt the one black mirror episode that has deeply, genuinely, without a fucking doubt tore at my soul and disturbed me to the rawest
THIS IS THE SHOW'S BEST EPISODE
the season was weak, but this and USS Callister are genuine GEMS, this build up perfectly, it's a rollercoaster of emotions and has such a perfect ending, devastating but somehow relieving.
A stupidly addictive show. I don't even watch television, so naturally I hold a strong disdain for reality shows. This one came at me like a sucker punch. It captures genuine and mundane moments between people, from intimate conversations to cooking meals together. It's well-edited and well-paced, occasionally interrupted with fun commentary by a panel of comedians. Ironically, for a show without a script, it has it's share of "character development" and twists. All Hail Yuto Handa.
Now we're talking! I especially liked how everyone around June acknowledges how risky the idea is and how she's fresh out of fucks to give. Hopefully Lawrence won't get cold feet once he realizes the enormity of what she's proposing.
And I'm guessing this will be Serena's last mistake. She went for broke while completely ignoring how spineless Fred is and has always been. Given the choice between having power and having a family, knowing what we know about him, betting on 'family' seems crazy... Then again, Gilead is partially her vision, so I shouldn't put it past her.
It's a nice parallel, two husbands being put on the spot and having to choose between their statuses or their wives and their happiness/well-being.
The next callback that should make an appearance has to be Nick and his campaign, right?
Boring AF episode! Nothing happened.
I don't have an issue with lowkey bottle episodes, which this definitely was, but there were such flaws in this general setup. Why would they leave June, a woman who has repeatedly shown herself to be rebellious and against everything Gilead stands for, left unsupervised with ofMatthew and her unborn child? Children are surely the most precious thing to Gilead, so to have no-one in the room with June seemed like a contrivance to allow her to do the things she did this episode.
Also, on a fundamental level, I don't understand how (what looked like) a gunshot injury to ofMatthew's shoulder rendered her brain dead.
This show is definitely on a bit of a messy downward spiral of late, which is a shame. It feels meandering with no overarching narrative direction. It's lucky the production values and cast are so terrific. Hopefully things will turn around for the season's closing episodes.
I have never seen a movie like this before ...it is really fresh n funny but sometimes a little bit tiring ... overall it was ok.
An unexpected gem. To say anything beyond it's kind of about a homicidal tyre will spoil it. The anthropomorphism instilled in the tyre is superb.
I think people will either love it for it originality or hate it because of the concept.
I can't even begin to put into words here but the prosthetic and makeup division is not only good, it is groundbreaking. The bodies on the later stages of radiation poisoning were absolutely terrifying, it literally gave me chills in the spine, when it shows the firefighter and the wife inside the plastic.
At least this one is entertaining. Despite the fact that it mainly warns us about the dangers of adolescent popstar live.
It's also very long to start. Its 1h10 could easily be packed into 45 minutes. The whole Rachel awkard teen's story and how she can so easily be influenced by a toy telling her to believe in herself is way too long. First as usual with this type of character, I have a very hard type believing that a girl that looks like her would be in this situation at school. And it's not like she's even useful in anything as a character. She's just a plot device. She wants the Ashley Too, and she wants to do what she says. That's it. She's such a huge fan and that's her whole character. OK, the fact that she says that when face to face with Ashley that is tied to her bed and just woke up from a coma a few seconds ago, that's funny. But she doesn't do a single thing. She's in a back fangirling while Jack drives. She does nothing while Ashley Too unplugs the real one and Jack is handling the bodyguard. She does nothing at the end while Jack is actually playing with her idol. Such a loooong exposition for a character that has nothing to do after. I mean it goes through all the cliches and then deliver nothing...
I'm not really in the Miley Cyrus demographic, never seen her, maybe heard one song, I mostly have seen her in tabloids stories. But wow, I found her very good. As the cheery popstar, as the depressed ex child star (but maybe they're not such composition roles) and very much as the robot voice. Through the whole beginning the only interesting parts were hers, and the real story starts at Ashley Too's awakening.
This second part was fun, though it looked more part of a teen show than a BM episode.
As for the tech part, it's a lot less dark than usual. There's basically no downside. Previous season had a way harsher treatment on the duplicating consciousness thing. That was a constant theme in last season, with very dramatic to horrific consequences, but here it's like they wanted to show, look, it can be fun too. Very not Black Mirrory.
However it's not like we're talking about every day technology as it is usually the case. Even in this world, the tech used seems to be revolutionary. And that makes no sense in the story. So the aunt, or her company, or people who work for her anyway, manages to map an entire mind, industrial scale, and they use it for... a pop star doll ? Also it was cheaper to have a miniature doll with the capacity of containing and running the whole thing and put a limiter on it, than to just map and put the tiny part you want to use ?
Then their holographic tech, that seems pretty good too. Though weird moment when Catherine is in front of the (probably mostly teenage fangirls) audience and does her Apple keynote, being happy to be back into the most lucrative part of the business. She actually says that. Not at a tech investor meeting, in front of the live audience. Also fully customizable (even her clothes!) and scalable, like that's not the easiest part of an hologram.
And then there's this machine that allows to decipher songs from the brain of a coma patient ! That's fucking amazing. The applications just for medecine, are unimaginable. And the other ways it could be exploited...
I can think of a thousand ways to make a shitload of money with that without needing to drug your niece into a coma ! They litterally invent technology worth hundreds of billions of dollars just to make a few millions out of a teenage pop star ! Pretty weird when the aunt's character is just presented as being driven by money.
And what's with the dad's machine ? It shows a brain, so I thought he was working on rat's brains, but he just has a small rat chasing robot ? And, without knowing anything (it's repeated enough), you can plug a toy, see it's brain and edit the limiter on it ? That was worse than any hacking scene in movie history, but maybe it was a joke on that ? Didn't feel like it.
Anyway, by far the best episode of the season, but that's not saying much. And still not a Black Mirror episode. I rate it 7 because it was entertaning, but if I was to rate it as if it was a BM episode, that would be lower.
A real BM episode would have gone over the spying part of the Ashley Too technology. A lot to do with that alone. And like I already said, all the brain mapping thing, there was a lot of ways to exploit that, though it was kinda alredy done in last season, there were still lots of possibilities.
Kinda liked the suggestion that if you're not kept under hallucinogenics drugs you would real music instead of pop :)
I really wish the season was longer. Really loved how it showed how teens use technology nowadays. Overall pretty great show.
Netflix is really killing it with these international shows. They are 2 for 2 for german shows IMO which is saying a lot seeing how 95% of german TV is absolute shite.
Worst season. Completly superfluous and unnecessary. Plots are fetched and bored.
Too bad...
Worst season to date. Very uninspired and cliche.
The setting is contemporary, judging by the automobiles, but the ambience is decidedly 1950's era spy film noir. As for genre, I'm forced to call Counterpart science fiction, in that it involves parallel universes, but it's really like nothing else within that genre.
The general scenario is this: 30 years ago, for reasons unknown, reality split into two bifurcating, independent time lines. Until that point, all was unified, meaning that every character alive at that point shared identical histories. Now, things have begun to diverge. But there is a doorway between the universes in a building in Berlin.
Again, for reasons unknown, the two sides have been both communicating with, and spying on, one another through this doorway, and this is where our protagonist Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons) comes in. "Our" Howard is a low level functionary in this spy agency who hasn't a clue as to what is really going on until, one day, his counterpart arrives with news that a woman from "their" side has been sent over to assassinate people on "our" side, including Howard's comatose wife. No one knows why, which is the prevailing state of awareness in this decidedly curious story. "Other" Howard decides that "our" Howard is critical to his investigation and, thus, the strange alliance begins.
J.K. Simmons is a phenomenal actor, despite often being cast in secondary roles, and Counterpart is truly his opportunity to shine. He plays a single character, but one with two separate backgrounds despite shared childhoods, a role requiring some subtlety and nuance. He plays both characters to perfection as the similarities and differences between the two create something of a broader character that calls into question our notions of identity.
In a way, Counterpart is an examination of the concept of self, or soul, but it is also an engaging mystery/thriller. Like its main character, the sum is both greater than, and equal to, its parts.
update after Season2:
They addressed that Mistress May is not an experienced dominatrix and that she didn't have Pete's consent in season 1. In my opinion this had to be addressed and I hope they keep showing what she did wrong, her way of learning to get better at her job and to develop healthy relationships without her domme side getting in the way.
I like the direction season 2 took and hope they will dive deeper into these characters and why they act like they do. Better than season 1 for me. To be fair, I mostly got stuck with this show because I love Pete/Carter, his Roommate Frank and the German man-servant Rolph, but I start to like Tiff as well.
When I wrote my thoughts on Spotlight, I speculated about how knowing the end of the story going in, knowing the extent of the scandal the team in Spotlight was uncovering, may have robbed the plot of some of its punch. And yet, The Big Short is, in many ways, the perfect counter to that.
Almost everyone old enough to watch this film lived through The Great Recession. They know that the disaster all the main characters in the film are predicting comes true, in all its horrible, self-destructive glory. But rather than taking away from the film, it adds to it. There's this sense of foreboding, of doom that hangs over everything.
A film about the financial crisis, especially involving traders and analysts and people crunching numbers in a fund, could easily be too dry. And yet, the fact that the individuals the film focuses on are slowly but surely investigating an economic massacre waiting to happen, and how each step they take reveals another way that disaster might have been diverted, or people who are supposedly in the know digging the whole deeper, means that the entire film is just an exercise in creating that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. It's not a prestige picture; it's a horror film.
It's also a very weird film. It's not so bold in its presentation that it feels unprecedented, but it feels stitched together, disjointed, and unusual, but in a good way. Adam McKay, of Anchorman fame, is the right man for the job. There is a darkly funny absurdity to the topic The Big Short covers, and with his fourth-wall breaking asides, his cuts to celebrity explanations of complex financial consequences in ridiculous situations, and his jumping between various characters acting wild or nutty lends the perfect tone to the movie, one of simultaneous horror at what hell hath been wrought and unavoidable bemusement at the clowns who steered us all into this ditch.
The direction and rhythm of the film is frenetic. It's closest comparison point is Requiem For a Dream with the same frenetic hodgepodge of images and sounds, bleeding and blending into one another, disorienting the viewer and conveying the sense in which the financial world the film depicts is intoxicating, dizzying, and unsettled all at the same time.
Another aspect of the film that makes it hard to compare to other works in this space is the fact that it doesn't really have a protagonist or a plot. Sure, it has a story, and it has characters who take up the most oxygen over the course of the movie, but more than anything it feels like a documentary. It's far too stylized and irreverent to really deserve that label, but it's far more interested in trying to describe what happened, to explain just what mistakes and lies and blindspots led to the global economic crisis, than it is in rising action and resolution, or showing people growing or changing.
That's not to say there isn't an emotional element to the film. Steve Carell stands out by playing essentially a smarter, angrier Michael Scott who grabs your attention every time he's on screen. The parallels between his character's sense that a catastrophe is looming in economic terms that he could do something to prevent, and his guilt over not doing more to prevent his brother's suicide was--while perhaps a little easy--also affecting.
The rest of the cast do their jobs well, but blend together a bit because again, while they're a vital part of the film, the film isn't really about them. The characters in The Big Short are conduits to detail, in amusing and human terms, just what the hell went wrong. Christian Bale is a collection of actorly tics, but he acquits himself well enough. Ryan Gosling does his best dudebro douchebag type, and is sufficiently entertaining in that guise. And Brad Pitt seems pretty reserved, short of his moment where he chastises his young wards for being too happy about what they're making their money from.
But again, the fact that there's not really a narrative means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The film is not really a story; it's an autopsy, cutting up the corpse of our financial system and exposing the bloody innards, the rotten organs at the core that led the USA, and the world, to the dire economic state it was in by late 2008. In that sense, the film succeeds wildly, and McKay manages to tackle something of real significance without losing the absurd madcap attitude he brings to his comedic works, and somehow, doing justice to the insanity of the lead up to The Great Recession in the process. It's a hell of an achievement to make a film this funny, this disturbing, and this great.
Paul, creaks a little here and there, but it's consistent, bold, and appetizing as a comedy with a buddy movie spirit and a good dose of sci-fi satire.
Great documentary! However, after watching the Hulu version, this version seamed disjointed with it's back 'n forth style of storytelling. The Hulu version is more a linear timeline, digging into who Billy was before the festival and some of his other failed companies before telling the viewer about the Fyre Festival. The Hulu version also has interviews with Billy himself as well as his girlfriend which are even more revealing.
Also, it's good to know that the Netflix version was produced in coordination with the social media company which put on the Fyre Festival - F**K Jerry Media. I found it interesting how the Netflix version mostly glossed over their involvement while the Hulu version had an interview with the actual designer of all the social media elements from FJM. He gave a lot more insight into their involvement, which is very interesting.
All in all, I'd recommend watching the Hulu version first, and then watching this version.
WHAT?!! NO BROWN COATS??!!!!! What a gyp!!!
So, is it overly feministic? No, it isn't. I'd say Wonder Woman is more so than this film. It holds it's character strongly and does not diverge the audience's views when watching. The undertones are there sure, but it isn't in your face. Just thought I'd get that out of the way because some around me were wondering that themselves.
Carol Danvers is a great addition to the MCU. Not only has the studio thought long and hard about her placement, but also on how they can make her a defining character for our day and age. No doubt that in the future she will grow and see stronger days herself. But for now, we are left with a very fast paced story with Carol herself, not seeming quite right. There is something off about Brie Larson's performance, and I think it's because of the quick cutting of emotional stages she goes through. I know they are making an amnesia story (with a slim amount of tropes I might add!), but for some reason, she can't seem coherent enough in emotional performing to make this character fully likeable. Then again. it's an origin story. The way she is blunt with others is a plus though.
The villain is complicated here. While I'd say one of the better in the MCU. There are some drawbacks to how they interact with Carol. Not much I can say about them. But having a movie set in the past with a big threat like in the 3rd act was kind of stupid in my opinion. No stakes at all.
For the technical side of things, shots were nice. Too much cutting than I would have liked in fight scenes in hand to hand. The final fight was greatly done though. The music didn't stand out much and was unneeded in some scenes that would have benefitted from silence or a more subtle tone rather than an orchestral track. CGI was fairly good. But, Captain Marvel's powers make her look really fake when flying.
Young Nick Fury and Captain Marvel are, of course, the main highlight to take away. Like a buddy cop movie, but with more superpowers and cats. The chemistry between the two was funny and well put together. The final line said by Carol in the mid-credits scene is a nice callback earlier in the film to cement the two.
So yes duh, there is a mid-credits scene and an end-credits scene. But you could leave after the mid-credits. As the final scene is just a cutesy one. But if you want absolutely no spoilers at all and are the type to even avoid trailers for the new Avengers. It may not be the best play to watch the mid-credits.
Captain Marvel is a good introduction to the strong female lead Carol Danvers. A fun journey with a duo I'd love to see more of. As well as more of Carol's flaws in a visual medium, not vocal. It's no Iron Man, but I see a bit of that Tony Stark spark in this promising character.
Second Viewing Update
So after another look because of uncertainty. I can say now that I was frustrated with the lack of actual character build. Before I remarked the amnesia story being an excuse for the lacking of visual storytelling. But now it was getting to me. Carol Danvers deserves better. And I hope in Endgame she gets it. I have faith in the Russos to give her better development. If not, other instalments will hear our cries for giving this amazing promise, flaws. Downgrading my rating a bit as for a movie about this character, it focuses more on her abilities than her as a person.
7.2/10
6.8/10
Check here for my MCU rankings.
https://trakt.tv/users/corruptednoobie/lists/my-mcu-rankings?sort=rank,asc
Not my usual choice of film but I actually really enjoyed it! Very very funny and even though I'm not a batman fan I followed all of the batman related jokes with ease. Want to re-watch.
Wonderfully animated, funny take on the Batman universe with characters you expect to see and many you don't, hello Jaws! A lot of the jokes will fly over kids heads but the constant bombardment of wisecracks means this doesn't matter. It seems the Lego movies will run and run (on tiny blocky legs) if they match the quality of this film, where everything is indeed awesome.*
Beautiful ending to an amazing series. Definitely one of the best shows out there.
Is there a word for when you're relieved, happy and a bit sad, all at once?
For me, the best shows are the ones that leave you wanting more, and this will definitely be the case here. The story is finished in a satisfactory way but I also think that the side characters were so entertaining that their stories could have been told as well. At the same time I'm also relieved these stories weren't told since it's hard to keep it balanced in a way that it doesn't start to drag on for too long, meaning that the show gets to fade to black at its peak.
Thanks to everyone involved that made this happen - even Netflix, for listening to reason and not denying us a proper farewell.
Good, but not quite there, i think it could had a little more thought making this to fit what the viewer wants and expand the choices to not be a dead end and have to go back.
