This show is pretty brilliant, it is both extremely cringey and also a very revealing satire of late capitalism. But it I found it a little too cringey for my mood at the time.
This is a mostly excellent British serial killer drama that manages a lot despite the reveal of the killer as one of the two main characters in the very first episode. The show plunges us into Northern Ireland with a great sense of place and little regard for our knowledge of how these things work over there.
Some particular strengths of the show include moments of tension only bettered in TV by a show like Breaking Bad. I’m serious about that. There incredibly tense moments in this show. Another major strength is the preponderance of strong women characters – there are at least three major female characters who are notably the best at their jobs. In fact I don’t think I’ve seen another show – certainly not another crime mystery / drama – with so many powerful women and so many flawed, partially competent men. It’s utterly refreshing and should serve as a model to future TV programs of this type. Hell it should serve as a model to all future television in this regard.
The rest of this review contains spoilers.
Also, the show wisely avoids the confrontation we have been taught to expect. It teases us to expect it over and over and then nicely subverts the genre.
Unfortunately there are a number of major problems that keep me from giving the show full marks, something which, at times – specifically in the tensest moments – I really wanted to do.
One problem is the scope of the show: it begins as a serial killer drama but soon expands its reach to being also about Belfast political corruption, or so we think. But by the second “series” that aspect has almost disappeared – presumably because members of the cast did not return – and there is no explanation to us as to why. Most of the competing storylines – save one – die after “series” one. And that’s to the shows detriment, I think.
Also, despite Gibson’s status as a “Top Cop” and despite the general competence of many of the police, it seems like this is kind of a terrible investigation. Triangulating the killer’s base of operations occurs in “series” two, whereas my (limited, completely media-derived) understanding of serial killer investigations is that this should have been done the day they established there’s a serial killer. I understand that some of these depictions of the police procedure are located where they are in the show for pacing purposes, but honestly it makes the cops look incompetent that it takes them so long to do some things that crime drama viewers would see as the ABCs.
The killer himself appears to have huge resources, beyond his salary. This is so typical of so many serial killer programs. Very rarely is the serial killer depicted as having regular, human amounts of money. This guy stumbles upon one hideout, sure, but he is also able to rent a cottage and take time off work, and he is further able to seemingly rent or own a garage. How does he do it all? The show doesn’t care to illuminate this and I think it’s just a typical assumption of the genre.
Finally, there is one brief, stupid indulgence of the “Every woman is secretly bisexual” nonsense that finds itself in so many TV shows and movies and this nearly completely undermines the strong female characters. Can’t these women just have drinks at a bar and talk about the case? Honestly. Fortunately, it’s dropped as quickly as it is brought up and we can forget about it.
Despite these issues, the show is almost entirely excellent in every other aspect and is as close to a must watch as any British show I’ve had the pleasure of seeing recently.
Burning Bush is a 21st century version of those unaccountably good European TV mini series which are released in North America as films (often in abridged form). Though we have been living in a golden age of television in North America since right before the beginning of this century, it wasn’t always like that here. But it has been like that in Europe for quite some time – various European countries have been making quality adult mini series for decades. However we have to go out of the way to get our hands on them. My understanding is that, when Burning Bush was shown in theatres (or maybe on TV) here, it was abridged, like so many of these mini series in the past, which is a shame. Fortunately, you can watch the whole thing on DVD.
Though this film is based on a historical event, I have reason to suspect a fair degree of liberty has been taken with some of the details of the characters. Though set in the late ’60s, the lead lawyer particular feels very modern. But I’m not sure these liberties detract from the story, which is well told, albeit conventionally told.
What is that story? In 1968, a Czech student burned himself to death to protest the invasion. (Others did so too, though he was most famous, apparently.) The next year, his mother sued a member of the government who had publicly claimed it was a stunt and he didn’t really burn himself alive. Though I have never lived through anything like that invasion, the film does a good job of getting audience members like me to be able to feel what it must have been like to live through something like this.
The movie uses legal drama tropes to set out expectations a certain way and then the truth of the story hits that much harder. Though the film is fairly conventionally told, the story is powerful, the acting is good and it does feel as though it is a story that should be remembered and I suspect it will remain relevant for as long as people are dying as martyrs and as long as legal corruption exists (i.e. forever).
This is, on the whole, a pretty good murder mystery. It features a compelling storyline that unfolds slowly, perhaps at the speed of a real police investigation, and universally great performances. Also, unlike American shows – and I’d be willing to guess, unlike the American remake – it features people who look like real people, which is always so refreshing.
For the most part, it transcends the cliches of the British murder mystery. Whereas usually, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all, this time there is enough going on, enough backstory, enough mystery that you don’t really notice that, for the most part, the same formula is being played out: brilliant-but-troubled detective, numerous suspects, only Our Hero will be able to solve it, etc.
Unfortunately the final reveal reeks a little too much of the genre, but I won’t go into that because it would contain spoilers.
I must say that when I learned of a second season I was severely disappointed. We can’t leave well enough alone.
In 2014, when Hannibal was in its second season, four different publications listed it as the best show of the year. It made many other Top 10 lists. The first season had made some Top 10 lists as well. In 2015, it was again declared the best show of the year by at least three publications. Two publications claim it is the best show of the decade and a few others put it on their Top 10 list of the decade. The accolades are extensive.
So my question is, what the fuck is wrong with all of these critics? Did they watch the same show I did?
SPOILERS
I mostly enjoyed the first season of this show. I definitely had a few issues – such as how bad the FBI were at keeping out a certain reporter (and anybody else who wants to come) from getting into every crime scene, and how the pathologists also appear to be cops. But once Jenn convinced me to suspend my disbelief a little I mostly enjoyed it. This feeling continued into the second season before everything went off the rails.
Before I get to that, I will deal with the good stuff: This is an extraordinarily pretty show, certainly one of the most attractive TV shows I’ve ever seen. Much of the staging is extraordinarily creative. Some of that is necessitated by the fact that this is a network TV show but that might have helped it be more creative in terms of hiding the gore (at least initially). The soundtrack is mostly great (like, kind of stupendous) ranging from less well known baroque (Bach mostly) and classical music to some modernist stuff and horror movie soundtrack stuff, as well as more percussive music. The cast is mostly excellent and the deep problems with the show are not because of the actors.
So, up to episode 20, I enjoyed it enough. I definitely did not think it was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, but I understand thinking it was “really good for a network show”. And I understand being kind of blown away by the production values, again especially for a network show. It was fine. It might have been better than that. I was leaning to a 7/10, I think.
And then shit went off the rails. Shit had already gone off the rails before, and people who value realism as much as I thought I did would have given up long ago. (That’s not the point of this show, of course. From nearly the first episode realism was out the window.) There are already hints that things were going to make less and less sense, but it’s with Chilton getting shot that I started to lose patience. (Remember, he was already disemboweled.) I have given up on shows for (a lot) less.
The list of things wrong with this show, particularly between episode 20 and episode 33, is so long that I don’t thing I can remember everything. I should have taken notes. The craziest part of all this for me is that it’s the second and third seasons that are the best reviewed. People liked the first season – the one that makes sense!!! – the least! What is going on?!?!
Here are just some of the things that I disliked:
Every season we’re told Will Graham might actually be a killer but we know he’s not. This is the plot of the first season, it’s part of the plot of the second season, it’s part of the plot of the third season.
At the beginning of the second season, they show the initial stages of the confrontation between Hannibal and Jack and then spend the entire season trying to convince us that Jack doesn’t believe Hannibal is the Ripper. That is just terrible from a narrative point of view.
Character development – if you can call what happens to Will Graham “development” – is limited to Hannibal, Will and Jack. Basically everyone else is not given much to work with.
Far more time is spent on the elaborate killings – the raison d’etre for the show, but which disappear by the end of the show, by the way – than on worrying about why people do things. Will is the worst example of this. If anyone can explain to me what he’s doing sailing – sailing!!! – to Italy and teasing Italian cops that he might be actually be a serial killer, please do tell me.
The pseudo-philosophical discussions are not compelling and they get really tiresome the more they occur. Psychiatrists are not the smartest people in the world. (This silly idea is on Harris, but it’s also on this show.) If you want to actually see what psychiatry is really like, watch In Treatment.
Chilton is killed three times and never dies. Most other characters are killed once and only one actually dies. As Jenn says, this is “consequence-free” serial killer entertainment. One major character dies in the first two seasons. Only a few with speaking roles ever die. (That doesn’t mean they aren’t injured, though!) This persists until the finale. Remember, this is a show about a serial killer who is killing more people than anyone in US history.
When the show was tackling generic serial killer investigations, it was reasonable entertainment. Every time it strayed from that, it became incoherent.
Red Dragon is parachuted into the narrative halfway through the third season. It feels like they got instructions from on high to wrap up. (This is actually a blessing but it’s nearly as clunky as when this happened in Rome. It feels like season 3 is really season 3 and 4, stuck together. Season 4 is better than season 3.)
Is Hannibal so charismatic you’d let him convince you to cut off your own leg and prepare it for him to eat? No, no he isn’t.
There’s much more but, honestly, I didn’t take notes.
The complete disregard for coherence and character – in the case of Will and Bedelia, in particular, but also in Alana’s case – would be fine, perhaps even enjoyable, if the show had a sense of humour. But the humour is sprinkled throughout the show, mostly confined to Scott Thompson and the other Canadian’s little quips and their bickering – and those guys disappear for many episodes – and only occasionally popping up in the odd other place. This is a show that takes itself very seriously, as far as I can tell. And it’s utterly ridiculous.
There are many worse shows than Hannibal. And I must admit that I have given up on better shows than Hannibal because a) I knew Hannibal was only 3 seasons and b) Hannibal is on Netflix. But I’m not sure I’ve watched a recent TV show this critically celebrated that was this much of a mess. (Again, mostly for about 13 episodes in the middle.)
5 feels charitable but I’m going with it because I enjoyed the first season well enough and because I enjoyed parts of the second season (though not much) and some of the third season before the dumb climax.
The Americans is a show that I stuck with sometimes in spite of myself, a show that has a lot going for it but struggled at times with believability. I don’t think I quite liked it as much as most critics and fans, but I did end up finishing it, despite having the ending spoiled for me by Firefox’s pocket tool, which showed a description of the climax of the final episode of the show in its preview of an article. Sigh.
SPOILERS
On the positive side of things, the show has an excellent cast and an excellent sense of place.
The cast is pretty much uniformly excellent, and I’m not sure there’s a weak link, certainly later in the series once some of the actors who might have been weaker links get eliminated. I appreciate that the Russians are Russians, and it’s about time that an American show with so many foreign characters trusted its audience to tolerate subtitles.
The sense of place is also incredibly excellent. I’m not sure I ever doubted the time period once throughout the show. That’s a pretty great accomplishment for a show that ran as long as this.
There are moments of extreme tension that are often done very well, not Breaking Bad tension, but pretty great tension nonetheless.
The biggest problem for me is how the show stretches credulity at times, particularly early on. It’s been so long now, I can’t quite remember, but either the season finale of Season 1 or Season two is utterly ridiculous and the kind of thing that would have made me quit a show normally, only everyone kept saying “It gets better” as it goes along.
And, unfortunately, the tension I should have been feeling in those final episodes was undercut by the internet spoiler I accidentally read while trying to navigate to a new site.
Still, there were moments throughout that tested my patience, and some storylines got difficult to believe or take. There were times I thought about quitting but figured I was too invested.
On the whole though, this is pretty well done. And I’m mostly glad I spent the time to watch it.
The show is ultimately about how personal relationship triumph over national interests, which is a lesson that we all need to remember a little more every day.
I have only watched the first season of the show. Why should become clear.
SPOILERS
If you wanted to make a show about a wrongful conviction in the USA, you should probably pick a character who is representative of those people. The vast majority of people in the United States who are wrongfully convicted are people of colour and/or poor. They are not, normally, white and middle class. White, middle class people rarely get railroaded by the US justice system. They do, on occasion, but hardly ever. If this show wanted to make a statement, it would made Daniel and his family black, latinx, or poor, or both poor and not white.
The one thing the show does get right is Daniel is weird. (Well, he’s male. That’s the other thing.) That’s the one commonality Daniel has with all the victims of the numerous wrongful convictions I’ve heard of through listening to Undisclosed (and related podcasts, and movie and TV documentaries). If you’re not black, and you’re not poor, and you get railroaded by the US justice decision, then you’re likely really weird. (If you’re weird and poor or black and poor or black and weird, and you happen to get accused of a crime, good luck.)
Anyway, I think the show would be a lot more powerful if had a better grasp on your average wrongfully convicted American. But that’s not why I’m not going to continue watching the show.
The show is oddly low-stakes. I think this is actually kind of refreshing though I’m not sure I care enough given what I said above. Certainly in the first season, until episode 5, it felt like the stakes were extremely low: Daniel might be retried, he or his family might the victim of some minor violence.
But then episode 5 happens. And this is where the SPOILERs really come in. I have been trying to find out whether or not this “did he? didn’t he?” is a real thing the show is going to pursue. The moment he put Teddy in that chokehold, I wanted to check out. And this is why: every day, Americans are wrongfully accused by police of crimes they didn’t commit. Every year, many people are wrongfully convicted of minor to serious offences and this continues to happen because the police pretty much suck at the job of solving crimes. (There’s a lot of data to back this up.) The last thing any of these people need is a popular show suggesting that a man who got his conviction vacated due to newly discovered DNA evidence might have actually committed the crime. Now, maybe this is not a consistent theme of the show, but even just the suggestion of it I found quite offensive. I understand this man doesn’t know how to behave around people, but surely there is a way of suggesting that better than having him cut off the airway of his step-brother. I have ZERO interest in watching a show that wants to have the audience unsure of whether or not someone who was “wrongfully convicted” might have actually done it. That is the last thing that needs to be on TV.
Other stray things that don’t make sense that I’m just nitpicking because I decided to quit on the show:
Hal Halbrooke’s character says his assistance (or whoever) lost Daniel’s file after he’s already had his conviction vacated! Are we to believe that Daniel’s lawyer has never had any access to any of Daniel’s trial files and still somehow got the conviction vacated solely on DNA evidence? What world is this show happening in?
The diner lady works the night shift. She owns it but would she really work that long? This is the minorest of minor nitpicks, but I still thought it was a little weird.
I think the show was fine, prior to that one scene in episode 5. Maybe it’s fine going forward. I think it would have been a lot better if it had the courage to make the main character and his family less middle class and white but it also might be just totally fine going forward if it doesn’t keep suggesting he might have done it. But, frankly, I’m not interested in finding out any more.
The following review contains major SPOILERS!!! Do not read it if you haven’t finished Season 3.
Even after I had watched only a few episodes of the American version of House of Cards, I told myself I wouldn’t watch a fourth season if they made one. I made that resolution because of a particular phobia I have with shows that run too long. This comes from two beloved shows that were ruined by running too long: the original The Prisoner (not the bizarre remake) and Twin Peaks. Both were limited ideas that were expanded because of ratings (i.e. money) and both were semi-ruined in the process. (Both shows start off excellent, for their time, and eventually have moments that qualify as terrible.) These beliefs have only been confirmed of late, with good and excellent short series being extended simply because they were successful – and sometimes also because the cast just wants to keep working together. These shows are extended past their premises, all to their detriment. I am thinking of shows like The Bridge, Broadcurch, and The Fall. I gave up on the latter two despite really enjoying them and recommending them to others.
And so, well before I ever watched the British version of House of Cards, I knew it was only three “series,” and so I knew the American one should only be three seasons or fewer, really, as it’s already way, way longer than its source.
And now, after watching the finale of the American season 3 last night, I find myself annoyed because I believe that they want a season 4, even if it hasn’t been announced yet. Everyone who has already finished this season has come to a similar conclusion, because if you google “House of Cards season 4” you find all sorts of speculation about a 4th season, because, of course, the finale leaves you with a strong belief that there will be a 4th season – and a strong desire for a 4th season, I suspect, if you haven’t watched the British version. And that’s because this version of the story fails to kill off Underwood in the finale.
Now, I don’t pretend to claim that the end of Urquhart in the original is particularly believable. And I have not read the novels and I do not know whether or not it’s close to the novel. But this show is not particularly believable and, frankly, it’s run its course. The third season of the American version is the least interesting, the least effective and the most directionless. But, despite all that, they still want to make us sit through another 13 hours after that?
I am not amused. Frankly, because I idiotically watched the British version before I got this far, I spent the entire 3rd season waiting for Stamper (or someone else, potentially) to kill Underwood. And instead all I get is a breakup.
Not all changes in source material are bad, but arguably this has already strayed very far from the source and the metaphorical house of cards feels like it is slowly sliding down on to the table, not collapsing as it would – and as it does in the British version.
This is a very, very stupid show about an arrogant and not very good actor and his foibles trying to stay employed in London. But it knows it’s really dumb, and it leans into it fully; it can be very, very funny.
This is one of those shows that milks so much out of so little – the premise is pretty thin but they turn so much of it into effective comedy, whether it’s the voice innumerable and interminable recording sessions or his rivalry with Purchase. I’m not always a fan of catchphrases but this one has some really great ones, none better than “Yes I can hear you Clem Fandango!!!”, which I kind of want on a t-shirt. [Update: got a t-shirt.]
Also, they make pretty good use of their cameos and guest stars. I think the Jon Hamm episode of these might be best but I generally liked that aspect of the show.
One thing that doesn’t work is the musical numbers. The show writers just don’t have a knack for writing songs, though that could just be because I’ve watched too many episodes of Bob’s Burgers and maybe my standards are too high. Though the songs are too brief to really catch on, they also don’t seem to serve much of a purpose. More than in other comedies with musical numbers, they just feel completely arbitrary and superfluous.
And there are definitely episodes which work less well than others, where the shtick feels tired or the story doesn’t feel strong enough to hand the dumb humour on. It’s probably a good thing there are only 18 episodes because it’s hard to imagine them wringing much more out of this.
But, on the whole, I laughed out loud a lot, and I definitely enjoyed the rhythms of the show and its ridiculous characters, even when I wasn’t laughing as much in some episodes as others.
It’s finally over. It took a very long time to get here.
SPOILERS needless to say
Before I talk about the show specifically I just wanted to say that one of the great things about it is the potential it’s unleashed. Now we know the possibilities of the medium. Literature has long been adapted into movies, most of them unsatisfactory. Occasionally literature has been adapted into TV miniseries, but now we see the full possibilities: literature can be adapted into TV shows relatively completely, far superior to a movie or series of movies. The time has come for more of these adaptations and I hope the industry follows through on the potential. (My favourite pet project is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses plays as one TV series though I know it would never get made. [Note: It has sort of been made by the British.]) If nothing else, Game of Thrones has shown possibilities in TV rarely glimpsed of before – the ability to tell the kind of stories only literature was capable of before, full of deep characters and with lots of nuance.
Now on to the actual show:
I am not a fan of the fantasy genre. I don’t like it for many reasons but two of the reasons can be summed up in the way characters are used, both in how they behave and what happens to them. In fantasy, characters are either good or bad. Good characters can be corrupted or misled, and bad characters can be cured of their badness but nobody is normal or real. And then the are the character arcs, where the good protagonist follows a story arc that involves defeating the main evil character with the world being restored to its natural state. It’s the stuff of children’s stories as far as I’m concerned.
But The Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are about overturning or subverting these aspects of fantasy, and many others, at least at first.
The first thing that appealed to me about Game of Thrones were its characters, so much more nuanced than any I had ever encountered in the fantasy genre. Though it’s not necessarily clear immediately that the genre is being completely subverted in this way – as it feels as though there are good and bad families in the first season – at least the characters are nuanced in ways in which fantasy characters rarely are. One of the strengths of the show is how everyone is flawed, and the characters we initially think are bad or good turn out to be just human and flawed, some more likable than others. One of the great things about the books, which I never finished, is how Tyrion and Littlefinger are introduced, as a sniveling minor bad guy and a sycophant respectively – both introductions feel like incredible sleights of hand given how important they both are to the plot. The show doesn’t quite commit to the same levels of sleight of hand with Tyrion but it still does introduce these two in ways in which you could not possibly anticipate their arcs or their significance. And this is even more true with Jamie, who is so unbelievably evil early on but is sympathetic, despite his flaws, for most of the show. This kind of thing is done mostly really well and is pretty incredible.
But I think I still wouldn’t have fallen for the show if the characters had just been nuanced. What really got me is that moment in the first season when you realized No One Is Safe. It was absolutely shocking and incredible and the moment at which you realized you were watching something unique in the history of fantasy. (Had I read the books first, I’m sure it would have been just as shocking in the book.) The show kept this up for a number of seasons, and I loved its lack of loyalty to major characters. (The books make it clearer who is safe and who isn’t so I actually found watching it first more rewarding in this regard.) For me, such a big appeal was not knowing what was going to happen next, and not having the whole thing completely telegraphed out by a prophecy and the goodness and badness of the characters. (Think about how this kind of thing happens in The Lord of the Rings and you get a sense of how incredibly unconventional A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones truly is. Imagine Aragon or Frodo getting his head chopped off in the Fellowship of the Ring.)
But 8 seasons is a long time and over this time the show has definitely gotten repetitive, frustrating and at times boring. There are a few things which I think were not handled well, especially as the show progressed.
For one thing, there is a lot of people sitting around or travelling and never getting there. Daenerys sits around or takes circular journeys multiple times throughout the run of the show, and we’re never sure exactly why she’s doing either. (And, speaking of repetition: how many times do Daenerys or forces get ambushed per season? I think it’s at least two times per season in the latter seasons.) Many other characters take forever to get places, none more than the White Walkers, who walk slower than the old Ukrainian ladies in the neighbourhood I grew up in. Other characters go on circular arcs like Daenerys, where they encounter similar issues from one season to the next, sometimes in the same place, sometimes in a new place, but always with echoes of previous travails. (This critique obviously doesn’t apply to early on in the show when there were more characters, and when characters were having their first adult experiences.)
Then there’s the trope that really drives me crazy: a particular army or force is presented in the show as powerful and it is then beaten (regularly ambushed) by another force which is somehow superior, even though nothing in the show has indicated that this other force could in any way be superior. This happens so many times it actually starts happening multiple times a season. It’s basically the equivalent of killing off a major character, but using characters we don’t care about, and preserving major characters, which makes it annoying. The forces that (briefly) triumph always appear out of nowhere and feel like Deus ex machinas. (And they feel this way whether or not they are military forces as this trope occurs with the religious zealots too.) And there are always more soldiers after the fact. No matter how many soldiers die, there are more soldiers in their place. Between the general incompetence of the heroes and the infinite number of faceless soldiers that can be rallied to turn the tide of a battle, it’s a wonder anyone we care about is still alive. But the show doesn’t care about this. As the show generally doesn’t care about the logistics of anything – be it creating armies, travel, building ships or (especially) rebuilding destroyed buildings. (Winterfell and the Red Keep sure look good awfully quick after they get ruined.)
Also, the longer the show has run, the more it has leaned in to the very conventions it was ostensibly trying to overturn, and nowhere is this more clear with how John Snow keeps surviving impossible odds. Given that John Snow is one of the least likable of the characters who make it to the final season, this is particularly aggravating.
And just a note about time: when it suits the show, it takes people forever to get anywhere. When it doesn’t suit the show, they get there quickly. The White Walkers are the slowest but humans can be super slow too. And then, all of a sudden, someone appears impossibly, at least impossibly based on the show’s own concept of time. If you think about the journeys throughout this show of many journeys, many of them don’t make sense if the others are to make sense.
Anyway…as I joked on social media, I was on #teamwhitewalker. I wanted the show to truly be an allegory for climate change, one that humans lost or barely survived. That didn’t happen, but I knew it wouldn’t. As my friends pointed out, they did indeed hint strongly that the White Walkers would not win, even if they were regularly presented as being the ultimate challenge to the humans. So I’m okay with this and with the overall ending of the show.
I think most people didn’t get upset until the final season, or season 7 at least, but I was upset well before that. But to just mention the biggest thing everyone is upset about with the ending: This show is so damn long, I think we all could have used more of a set up for the biggest heel turn. And I don’t think the show needed more episodes to do that, I think they just needed to make the change more gradual, or make her “true nature” more obvious (less subtle) early on. I think I have spoken to one person who thinks this heel turn was earned – everyone else didn’t buy it. That says a lot about how this show has handled the last few seasons, even while most people were completely fine with the way it was handled. But I actually found the final episode about as satisfying as I could imagine it being, given how I’ve felt about the last few seasons, and given that I wanted the White Walkers to triumph, so I think this is more a manner of a flaw in the execution of the show, rather than in the story itself, and the heel turn.
It likely sounds like I didn’t like the show but that’s only partially true. I loved the show for its first half or so, and I think it is a great accomplishment. But at some point it just went on too long for me, and its virtues disappeared or turned into vices. I wrote most of this after suffering through episode 4 of season 8, where the show threw logistics out the window to a new degree but also time and sense, seemingly cutting a few shots which would have explained what the hell happened to one of the major characters, who somehow got herself executed. (Also, like so many people I was very annoyed at how many people survived the Battle of Winterfell.) What I am trying to say is that my memories of loving the show have dwindled under the onslaught of mediocrity that was the latter seasons.
If the show had been cancelled after its first season, I think I would have given it a 9 or a 10, 10 for “transcendent” or 9 for “near transcendent” or “great”. The 9 probably would have held through Joffrey’s death, at the very least, and probably significantly longer. As the show went on longer, and the things I liked about it began to fall by the wayside, I was still thinking I owed it an 8, for “very good.” Seasons 7 and 8 really hurt how I felt about the show, even more so than the previous season or two, and I was really leaning strongly towards rating it a 7, for “good.” However, the final episode was the rare final episode of a long-running TV series that did not leave me extremely frustrated. I still had complaints – I thought the small council scene should have been last though I understand that, at bottom, this is about the Starks and they have to be last, and I had a few other quibbles, particularly about a certain chair surviving the Keep getting burned – but on the whole I felt it was as good a job as could be done of wrapping up, especially given the missteps earlier in the season. So I’ve got some goodwill right now.
PS Can someone please put on a fucking hat? It’s cold out there.
This is yet another pretty good Attenborough nature documentary. However, there is a strong sense of deja vu. I feel like I've seen these scenes before. I probably haven't but you can always watch so many documentaries. But it's pretty.
My favourite part was the last episode, actually, which was more interesting and unusual for one of these documentaries, given that it focuses on humans. I learned something!
I liked this much less than most people. Not that I didn’t like it, but I find it weird that this is the one everyone thinks recommends the show.
I unfortunately didn’t write reviews of the individual episodes as I went through it. I wish I had done so.
I am the rare person who thinks the show got better when it went to Netflix, I think.
I normally don't write reviews of the reality TV I watch, usually because I don't consistently watch every season of the few shows I like and I half-watch plenty of reality TV Jenn watches. It feels like I cannot really do these shows justice. But I make an exception for travel shows, at least ones I manage to complete entire seasons of. (Never completed any of Bourdain's many shows, so that's why there are not reviews.) I guess that's because I really like travel shows and because many of the ones I find are reasonably short compared to the usual reality TV show episode onslaught.
This is a great one. Travel show, I mean. Imagine the old Top Gear specials (or current episodes of The Grand Tour) with minor British celebrities (many of whom have since been on Taskmaster) and without the silly tasks, and you get some idea of World's Most Dangerous Roads.
[This review only applies to the original seasons, not the revival.]
Each episode, two British celebrities us in North American have never heard of (unless you watch Taskmaster or other British variety shows) tackle some crazy roads in some part of the world. It’s a great concept that I wish they had invested more in. I also think it would work wonderfully in the States, with either celebrities or even just race car drivers, but I feel like this is the kind of content that US insurance companies (who insure the celebrities/athletes) would never allow. (Though some Americans do find their way onto Running Wild so maybe I can hope.) Imagine this show with like, Taylor Swift and LeBron James. That would be a popular show. I know it will never happen.
“Alaska”
Charlier Boorman (of Long Way Round/Long Way Down and now Long Way Up fame) and Sue Perkins drive the through Alaska to the Dalton Highway. Though Boorman, who knows his way around a dangerous road, claims it’s one of the scariest things he’s ever done, Jenn and I ended up thinking this was probably the least stressful drive of the show. We have both driven through whiteouts, but these two didn’t even know to turn their flashers on! (If you don’t know, I guess, you don’t know.) Of all the roads on this show, this is the one I have actually thought of doing (though not that this time of year) and I found it the least intimidating. (If you don’t know, I’ve driven my share of crazy roads though nothing like the ones on this show.) Still, it’s a fun episode.
“Nepal”
This episode, featuring future Taskmaster host Greg Davies and future Taskmaster contestant Rhod Gilbert, is the first of the remaining episodes of the show that we’ve watched where, at some point, we both decided we wouldn’t want to do it. In this case, the hardest part involves landslides. A crazy one but then, they’re mostly crazy.
“Peru”
This one features both insane cliffside drives like Nepal (without the rain) and also incredibly mucky jungle, like the future Madagascar episode. While watching it, you will swear it’s the most dangerous of the series but, then, you’ll watch another episode.
“Siberia”
No sheer cliffs but a different kind of danger: you can never turn off your car because you will never be able to restart it. The danger here is the cold and they stuck in a ditch more than once. It’s far from the most nerve-wracking episode but it’s arguably as dangerous as anything else other than the Alaska episode.
“Ho Chi Minh Trail”
This one made me miss Vietnam. The river crossings in this episode are the stuff of nightmares but, in retrospect, it might be one of the least treacherous drives of the show if only because of the lack of cliffs. (Though there are unexploded bombs everywhere.) Sue Perkins strikes back.
“Ethiopia”
This one has some really crazy cliffs as well as some scary facts about the drivers you meet along the way. (In more than one of these the locals say the biggest danger is other drivers.) I’ve long wanted to go to Ethiopia and this just reemphasized that. Just stunning views. (That’s most of this show, though.)
(IMDB claims there are two more episodes to season two, but I think this is a mistake by the user. Wikipedia lists the usual three and the show I can find covering the episode titles is clearly not this show, but some other show.)
“Madagascar”
Though one of the episodes with the fewest cliffs, along with the Alaska and Siberia episodes, this one has the most epic mud, worse than any other episode, as well as some crazy ferries and river crossings. The mud on these “roads” has to be seen to be believed and we both wonder if this drive might have been the most tiring just because of their pace and all the mud.
“Georgia”
Even before I saw Taming the Garden, I was interested in visiting the Caucasus but that film solidified Georgia as a destination for me. This one just reinforces it. Some crazy cliffside drives here for sure, but absolutely stunning scenery.
“Bolivia”
This episode features the World’s Scariest Carwash in addition to some crazy cliffside roads and an incredible drive across some salt flats.
We loved this show. It’s exactly our catnip. And I’m so happy to learn there is a season 4 (though I don’t know where to stream it) and season 5 is coming any day.
I only have two quibbles:
The first is that each of these episodes could have easily be more than one episode. You can’t tell me they didn’t have enough footage but my guess is the contract was a 3-episode season. But you don’t get as complete an experience as Long Way Round/Down/Up or even The Grand Tour. It would be nice to see more, especially of the people and food.
The second issue is that every single pair thinks their drive is the absolute craziest. One of them is surely right but it would have been cool to see one through-driver per season, where they could have said, “You think this is bad, you should have seen [enter country here].” That perspective is missing, though it’s hardly a huge problem.
Make more of this stuff, TV people. (Especially American TV people, who don’t seem to understand how to make shows like this.)
Metal Evolution is an in depth examination of metal by the man most associated with covering metal on film – though I have yet to see either of his movies.
The positive side of this show is that it is a landmark: I don’t think there’s another documentary series out there which focuses on just a single genre of pop rock music. It’s an in depth look and it’s informative. It’s also enjoyable, which is important for something this long.
The negative: Despite it’s length, it somehow manages to miss a bunch of major sub-genres: There’s little acknowledgement of Black Metal, Death Metal, Stoner Rock/Metal, Grindcore, Drone Metal, Groove Metal and probably other sub-genres which I’m not even aware of. Basically there’s one episode on all of these and it doesn’t really get into much of it at all. And it also feels cursory in its examination of some major bands. I for one was annoyed about how little time was spent on Faith No More but I could understand why nobody else would care about that. Also, the script, such as it is, is awful. Sam says “But what I wanted to find out is…” and various variations of that, multiple times every episode. And there are other stock phrases.
But I think these are minor nitpicks. If you’re into metal, or if you’re into music history, you should watch this.
Prohibition is the shortest Burns mini-series yet, and I am tempted to say it is the best, or at least the most consistent of the mini-series he has helmed to date. It also feels the least mythological, which is refreshing coming from Burns, a man who can never avoid mythologizing or re-mythologizing his country’s history.
Though I knew a fair amount about the era, it’s safe to say there is still plenty to learn about it in such an intensive treatment – it is about 6 hours long or thereabouts – and, as always, Burns provides interesting personal stories and interesting insight from people who have thought about this a lot more than you or I.
This era stands as a lesson to pretty much anyone who wants to change behaviour and it feels particularly relevant given the moralizing of a certain portion of Americans, who are always trying to tell other Americans (and the world) how to live. The fact that they constitutionalized this moralizing and it was an abject failure should have convinced people that these kinds of moral crusades don’t work. Alas.
Anyway, it’s well worth you time.
Let me be clear: I didn’t want to make it one season. However, since I got the show from the library and I figured since I had it, I might as well…
But from the very first episode I knew this was not for me: silly interpersonal drama and ghosts – in the very first episode! (Of course, it’s a new ghost every episode, so that’s necessary…) This is just one of those shows where we’re expected to get attached to all the characters – though one of them is rather awful – and then enjoy their adventures every week, with guest-stars and guest-ghosts (and the mysteries therein).
As I said, had this been on a streaming service, or had I other movies from the library, I wouldn’t have watched another episode after the first one. But it was something stupid to have on while I uploaded podcasts and did maintenance on my website.
PS The things this show thinks are creepy are rarely, if ever, creepy, as they’ve already been used a bunch of times in better movies.
Danger 5 is a delightfully, deliriously absurd take on those old puppet adventure shows, only it’s live action. It’s set in a permanent WWII, where, every week, the gang have to try to stop the Nazis and kill Hitler before teaching us how all to make a cocktail. The show may take on easy targets, but its the sheer volume of those targets – and their insanely absurd interaction – that makes the show not only funny but rich. This is one of those shows where there’s too much going on to play spot the reference. The levels of ridiculousness mean that, if one of the parodies doesn’t work for you, well, at least one of them will. This is an intensely ADD comedy for our intensely ADD age.
But where the show really hits its stride is in the second season, when it expands its reach to everything ’80s and, eventually, seemingly everything the creators can think of – including science fiction films, fantasy films, sit coms, high school dramas, and video games. Nothing is safe, at least nothing within the world of low brow culture is safe.
Just wonderfully bonkers.
I am reviewing the first season of Bron because I have no intention of watching future seasons. (Though I have heard the second season of the American version of The Bridge is very good so maybe if I do try the American version, I will get that far.)
The following review contains spoilers.
What starts off as an enthralling, entertaining, if unrealistic, crime thriller slowly deteriorates into a ridiculous, dumb, cliched cop movie. Though I had a few reservations initially, I must say I enjoyed the first half – probably even the first two thirds – of the first season. But the last few episodes are ridiculous, none more so than the big, dumb, stupid climax that feels ripped off some terrible Hollywood cop movie. So here we go…
Aside from the problem that the villain is entirely too organized, too resourceful, too well-planned, too smart, etc., the show has a lot going for it initially:
Martin is bumbling-but-clever and very endearing. He’s the show’s heart, you might say. We experience the excellence of Malmo’s police – and their super-cop, Saga – through his more humane persona.
Saga is a pretty wonderful creation. She is arguably more of a realistic sociopath than the current Sherlock, as she is a lot more committed, and a little less brilliant. (I’m actually not sure if she’s meant to be a sociopath, or someone with Asperger’s, or what have you.) The problem is that Saga is too entertaining, and the show never gets that right. One of the strengths of Sherlock is that, much like Conan Doyle’s original stories, they are not entirely serious – it’s entertainment. The most obvious problem with this show in the early going – aside from the super-villain at its centre – is that Saga feels like she belongs in the Swedish version of Brooklyn Nine Nine or something. She’s the comic relief of an otherwise very serious show, and sometimes it feels like they do not know how to balance the comic relief with the very serious cop drama around her. But that isn’t really the problem.
The problem, rather, is that once the super-villain accomplishes his “5 problems” things go totally off the rails. It becomes personal for Martin and, to a lesser extent, Saga, and, unbelievably, nearly everything the villain does gets less complicated, less elaborate. Everything he did at the beginning was ridiculously complicated. But once his identity is revealed – and, consequently, his motive – everything goes stereotypical cop-has-personal-relationship-with-killer mode and the whole thing just becomes unbelievably cliché. During all this Saga is shot (twice!!!) and Martin is clearly bat-shit emotional, and both of them are allowed to continue heading up the investigation because, you know, that makes sense to everyone involved.
It’s like a different crew made the last few episodes, honestly. It’s been a while since I watched something this long go off the rails so quickly. (I feel like maybe I felt this way about the end of the third season of Boardwalk Empire, but I don’t remember at this point.)
All I can say is that I was so disappointed by the ridiculous “top of a building” style ending that I pretty much instantly vowed to give up on the show.
I haven’t made it through the entire series and I doubt I ever will, because this thing is horrible. I can imagine the conversation that started it…
“You see, we put these future humans back in time, on an earth with dinosaurs. And then we introduce standard TV drama cliches into every episode – murder mysteries, parenting challenges, alpha-male head-butting – instead of building drama out of character development and the real challenges that people would face, were it ever possible to be in that situation. And of course the cliche plot devices will be resolved within 44 minutes. They must be! It’s brilliant! Give me the largest budget ever given to a TV show! Don’t worry, the CGI will still suck.”
That is apparently how Terra Nova happened. I can barely conceive of how someone decided that an idea such as this – with such a large budget – should be a vehicle for third-rate TV cop-drama plots and the like. It makes no sense.
I had heard very mixed things about this show – both that it is excellent and that it is terrible – from both critics and regular people. I had always hoped to watch the original version first, but found it was much easier to get hold of the American version, and so I have watched the first season. I have given up on the show due to some SPOILERS!!! I will complain about below.
The show is absolutely a mixed bag:
On the one hand, the acting is superb, absolutely superb. And the chemistry between both the detectives and the parents of the dead girl is a wonder to behold – I am really impressed by these things. The parents in particular are, mostly, just awesome. There are some extraordinarily powerful moments between these two actors – some of the best in recent TV history, I would say. And the detectives do a great job of the cliche “two partners who don’t get along and are forced to work together” trope that has been absolutely done to death by American movies. And these two relationships off-set each other and allow you some balance in what is an otherwise pretty bleak show.
And there are a few really brilliant directorial moments, like when Richmond takes the shot for $5 million and we cut to commercial. That’s just fantastic stuff. And they do it a few times.
And there are the obvious problems:
There are way, way, way too many red herrings. I get it – they are trying to have this unfold at the speed of a regular police investigation, going after the strongest leads and eliminating suspects and so on. But there are a number of problems: First it’s the kids, then no, they raped someone else. Then it’s the teacher, then no, he kidnapped someone else. See a pattern here? I’m not sure any real murder investigation uncovers so many different people up to other criminal behaviour. But far worse for the show, in real life I think those kids get arrested or even worse. Honestly, in reality most people are convicted (or charged at the very least) on far less evidence. Witness Serial.
But the other problem with these red herrings is that it makes the cops look incompetent. For example, they check Rosie’s bank account 10 days into the investigation? Even though they find the shoes right off the bat? Seriously. I mean, The Fall has its share of moments like that, but at least it’s not throwing us “Who really is the killer?” nonsense every other episode.
The relationship with Linden’s on-again off-again fiance – which is also on-again off-again in the plot – feels completely unnecessary. Her entire family life feels like padding. It’s as if this show was taking a 6 episode show and stretching it into 13 episodes. Nearly an entire episode is devoted to looking for her kid. Seriously? (Shockingly, the original show’s first season is 20 episodes long, so I have no idea whether something got lost in translation or the original show is full of this filler too.)
And then there’s the kicker, the moment when the show loses all credibility: After assembling an air-tight case against the real killer, we are told, in the final moments of the season finale, that he did not do it. And we are told this, I assume, solely to prolong the narrative into a new season. I actually said “Fuck you” out loud to my TV when this happened. Several times. Seriously, fuck that shit. Talk about bullshit. Whatever Holder was getting paid for – that’s too much. That’s two characters you build one credible persona for and then reverse it when it’s convenient (the other being Richmond, obviously). That’s just not fair. I am supposed to trust you, Omnipotent Narrator, unless you make it clear from the beginning that I cannot trust you. And you did not.
So this is dirty pool. Fuck that. I will not be watching any more unless someone really, really presses the case.
This is a moderately amusing satire of modern concepts of Wellness and recovery and the like, along with a satire of corporate America. The best satires are ones where you cannot tell all the time whether or not it’s a satire, and I strongly believe that.
But I’m not sure that’s the problem here. I think the problem here is whether or not White has the balls to make his characters the butt of the satire. I think sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t. See, there’s an earnestness here that I think undermines the satire at times and I cannot always tell whether or not the show is sincere in its satire or sincere in its message that attitude can make a world of difference.
And it’s because of what I feel is this mixed message, and because I didn’t laugh as much as I hoped, that I will not be watching future seasons unless somebody I know is absolutely raving about them.
2013 after 3 seasons: Spoiler alert!
I try to wait until I finish a show before judging, but I can’t this time. I’m not sure I’ll make it further. We’ll see when it comes back for its fourth season. But I’m just not sure I want to now.
I have generally enjoyed Boardwalk Empire, but I don’t think it’s a great show. It seems lacking in additional-meaning department that so many other great “cable” shows excel at. I think you can easily view Deadwood, Mad Men and The Wire and even Breaking Bad as allegories, and a show like Six Feet Under has enough going on in it to not worry about whether it could be allegorical.
I don’t get that with Boardwalk Empire. It’s just a story; a story that is reasonably well told, filled with good-to-great actors, and with high production values. (Albeit with too much obvious CGI for my tastes.)
But after finished the third season last night I don’t know what to think.
Thompson was set up for us as a corrupt politician. He was, out of necessity transformed into just a bootlegger but, with the exception of the second season finale, we had few-to-no hints that he was a “gangster” in the sense of say Al Capone (both the character on the show and the real person).
When they try to kill him, suddenly he is a real gangster. And this goes on through the remainder of the season. I feel like the behaviour of Thompson with gun in hand and Thompson without gun in hand are pretty much irreconcilable.
But this change happens because the show went from being occasionally violent to action-movie-violent in the blink of an eye. This in part happened because of Thompson’s third season foil, Rossetti. Rossetti wasn’t a real person, so the writers had greater creative license. And they made him more insane than most successful mob middlemen might conceivably be. Sure, it had to end in violence.
But 50 bodies? (In the finale alone!) The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as far as I know the most violent day in the prohibition gangster wars, resulted in five deaths.
The show was never exactly historically accurate but this is a new stretch. The problem is that the State Police would have showed up, the FBI would have showed up, maybe even the Army. (They have been called in for less.) 50+ people don’t just get killed and nobody notices.
And there are other problems: we barely see Mellon, but we do get a sense of this man. But in the finale he goes from wanting nothing to do with Thompson on a personal level, to personally intervening to save his hide by a method which would destroy Thompson’s use to him. Maybe we will learn how this is resolved in the 4th season, but I am sceptical as to how it could be resolved satisfactorily. It just doesn’t fit with his character.
There were a few other nit-picky things as well – including the mayor’s montage to open the finale – but those were the biggest problems.
And I feel like the show is so much the worse for these last three episodes. It doesn’t feel like the same program at all. I am not sure I can suspend my disbelief any more. I’m not so sure the show jumped the shark – it’s not like Jimmy is back from the dead or anything, but I just don’t know that I will enjoy it any more. I feel like it’s a little lost.
And then, what I wrote at the end:
Had Boardwalk Empire premiered in 2000 instead of 2010 – hell, had it premiered in 2005 instead of 2010 – I think we’d think about it very differently. (Or, at the very least, I would think about it differently.) It’s a show full of great actors, with great costumes and sets and a fantastic sense of place. If the CGI is sometimes a little weak, it would have been totally acceptable in the early century.
I think we would have forgiven the complete lack of depth in the writing because everything else about the show is so good. We would have been okay with the massive deviations from history too.
But this show didn’t premiere in 2000 or 20005. It premiered in 2010 – over a decade after The Sopranos began to irrevocably alter the television landscape in terms of production values and “realism” and long after both Deadwood and The Wire set up the idea that dramatic TV shows could, nay should, function as allegories for bigger issues.
Boardwalk Empire heeded the lessons of The Sopranos but not of Deadwood, The Wire, Mad Men or even Breaking Bad. And I guess that’s why I would have forgiven it a lot in 2000 or 2005.
I haven’t seen the first three seasons in quite some time, so it’s hard for me to pinpoint exact moments that disappointed me – with one exception, which I will get to in a moment. I just remember constantly waiting for it to get better. Constantly hoping that the show would be about something more than just bootleggers during the Prohibition Era. And I kept up with it until the end of third season, when I worried that maybe it Jumped the Shark, at least in the mildest of terms. And so I quit the show for a while.
People told me to come back to it and I did. The fourth season felt rather repetitive only this time it was White who had the foil, not Thompson. Other things continued on as usual; too much as usual. It’s like we were reliving everything.It also felt like they were trying to stunt cast their way out of a lack of new things to say: Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Wright, that guy from The Killing.
And though the fifth season feels like Thompson (and others) have undergone some major character development – though they don’t appear to have aged much – and the story seems to finally be significantly different than “Thompson fends off another competitor to the Atlantic City Syndicate” version 5 – at least until they kill off Patricia Arquette’s character and everything goes back to normal – they don’t appear to have come up with enough of a story, as we get flashbacks to Nucky’s childhood constantly and the only reasons I can think of are either because they do not have enough ideas for this plot, or from some kind of misplaced sense of narrative completeness – which is what happens with the dumb finale.
It says something that my favourite moment of this entire show was “Mueller” saying “I for one refuse to be ruled by fear” and then running to heed his wife. It says something else that when Chalky died I didn’t give a shit. I mean, I knew I was supposed, but I just didn’t. And it really doesn’t feel like the right guys come after Nucky. I mean, other people hated him more, right? It really doesn’t make sense. And, finally, the wrapping up, the tying up, whatever you want to call it, feels really laborious. Especially the scene with Gillian.
After two seasons I was going to give it a 7, but can’t even bring myself to do that.
This is a somewhat awkwardly structured and edited film that still manages to do one of the major things I want from a sports documentary: it makes me wish I was there. I lived through Linsanity, but obviously not in New York. Fernandomania was Linsanity well before Linsanity – and with a better player – with so much more meaning given the terrible events that led to the building of Dodger Stadium.
I would have a preferred a film that explored the social aspects a little more than this did – frankly I think a feature-length would have easily been possible with the subject matter here – but on the whole this is a great story, and the awkward telling of it is easily forgiven since the second half of it really made me wish I had been alive during his arrival.
This is a compelling, moving portrait
of what it was like to be from an upstart country in a sport, shocking the world,
and what it was like to be an early European player in the NBA,
and what it’s like to have your country torn apart by civil war.
It’s also a compelling portrait of the loss of a young athlete.
Unfortunately, the narrator is also the lead interviewee, which not only makes the film awkward – from a technical standpoint, how does a narrator introduce himself? – but leads to easy accusations of bias. I have no idea if it’s biased or not, as I didn’t care about basketball until years later, and I am no expert on the Yugoslavian wars. But, regardless, it’s a poor choice to have Divac both narrate and be an interview. That choice undermines what might otherwise have been one of the best films in the series.
I hate the Red Sox. I mean, I fucking hate them. Though not as much as I hate the Yankees. But I feel like I remember this series like it was yesterday. (But I more remember where I was than the actual moments of the game.) Among the best baseball playoffs I’ve seen in my adult life. (There have been a few that were better in my mind, such as Diamondbacks / Yankees, but not many.) This was a great series and the film does a good job of getting us to understand how incredible it was, in part by focusing on the players, for the most part. Millar in particular seems to have had boundless confidence and it helps that the players documented it themselves.
One huge problem with the film is its self-importance. The opening credits are ridiculous – and rival pretty much only June 17, 1994 in the series for ridiculousness – and the music is often utterly over the top, not to mention cliche, it actually descends into parody.
Another weird thing is the teeny tiny bits of Bill Simmons “interviewing” comedian Lenny Clarke, I guess trying to provide context for those who didn’t watch it, but they’re so brief and so intermittent that’s hard to know why they included them instead of, say, narration. (Well, we know why, Simmons is the exec producer. But still…)
But this is another one of those films where the subject matter overcomes clunky direction. What a great series.
This is a fascinating look at a little league team that became the pride of a nation, had the “greatest upset in Little League history” (supposedly) and was nearly destroyed by the attention it got. It’s a great cautionary tale – because imagine what it’s like for kids today – Mo’ne Davis – if it was this bad for them in 1982. It reminds us that, no matter how excited we might get over kids’ amateur sports, these are still children; they are still very impressionable and they don’t have our thick skins (though many adults don’t either). Honestly, I feel for these kids. I wouldn’t have wanted this either.
What should be one of the best of the series is hampered by some really cliche narration – oh science that script is terrible – and this weird decision to put some kind of effect on the digital video, as if to try to make it less obviously different from the Super 8 the archival footage was shot on.
Still very much worth your time, just not quite as good as it could have been.
It’s tough to talk about the content of a film like this without talking about the concept of “student athlete” and how the NCAA (and others) have essentially brainwashed the media and most of the United States into believing that it is immoral for “student athletes” to be compensated for the performances that drive the insane amount of money that the NCAA and these universities make. But let’s try to put that aside.
Regardless of whether or not you think the NCAA is a horribly corrupt, exploitative institution, they do create rules, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. And, unfortunately, if you agree to play by certain rules, you have an imperative to follow those rules (in most cases).
This is a very in-depth film about the flouting of the rules that allowed Southern Methodist University – a very small school, relatively speaking – to become the best amateur program in the United States. Some effort is made to put this into context:
“everyone else” was doing it,
and a media war meant SMU was the target rather than another school.
All that’s interesting.
Unfortunately, as someone else has pointed out, this film is too long for the subject matter – or at least it’s too long for the way that subject matter is presented. And I think it’s the presentation that’s the real problem, and it doesn’t surprise me that this man has never made another feature.
This movie is overly edited – at times there are a number of crazy jump cuts per minute and the cuts never really stop – and it’s odd that a style befitting an action film was adopted for a story about “corruption” at a University.
The relentless cutting and the length of the film make it hard to take, no matter how interested I was, and the tale as one of morality, rather than an investigation into the deeper reasons as to why, make it less interesting as well.
Also, any film that relies this much on Skip Bayless for its credibility has problems.
This is not a perfect sports documentary - despite having Freeman as narrator and despite the power of the subject matter, the film feels little too much like your typical talking heads/archival footage documentary.
But the subject matter is so powerful that you stop caring about the conventional, paint-by-numbers nature of the documentary. If you have ever wondered about the importance of sports, if you have ever thought that sports don't matter, that they're silly, and so forth, watch this film. More than perhaps almost anything else I've ever seen, this film captures the power of sports as a uniting force for people of different backgrounds - in this case, people who felt like they were enemies.
Wonderful.
This is an interesting documentary about a fascinating athlete who got really short shrift by the US sports media. (But then, who doesn't?) However, the film is marred by the bad narration, and the personal involvement of one of the directors, who keeps trying to let you know he knows the subject personally.
On the upside, this is as personal as a biopic will ever get, as it's very, very rare for a celebrity to let someone in this much and to allow the film to be made - rather to give his blessing to it - despite the rather brutal honesty of a number of the interviewees.
It's worth watching even though the film-making itself is rather clunky.
