wolfkin

Fantastic show with a few dips. The opening has Luther basically as a rage-monster. But that's not what Luther is. It's how Luther appears. Looking back it feels out of character for him.

Most seasons of this show could be summed up as "Cop has to deal with a crisis at work while someone else is giving him a personal crisis at the same time and neither of them can wait". Most of Luther is pile-on. There's a killer AND someone's trying to blackmail Luther. Things happen and next season he has a reputation for being bent when he's anything but.

Idris even from the jump has a strong screen presence and a slightly awkward posture. One that becomes iconic. I wouldn't be surprised if people walk like Luther. Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) is a criminal I didn't expect to stick around. I thought she was almost interesting in her initial appearance but when Luther took the exceptionally interesting choice of befriending her to keep her under control that was wild. Their relationship isn't like a lot of the other cop-psycho relationships. She's not used as a source or a way to tap into the criminal element. Luther actually does a pretty good job of that himself. Idris gives you a Luther that's always tired, always compelling to do right even when it looks wrong, and never too concerned with what other people think of him. It's as admirable as it is sad how many people close to him end up dead. All over silly nonsense. Pettiness. The casualness with which a Luther-friend will get shot for basically no reason somehow never stops hurting. You feel for Luther having to add yet another tally to his board that he didn't want and wasn't able to stop and yet somehow will be blamed for.

The seasons are short but impactful. I'd want them to be longer but the show would have to restructure itself for that. Still it'd be nice to give Luther some breathing room for a minute.

While the little amount of advertising I saw clearly showed the first posters and tagline to be garbage (meaning they're nothing like the movie) even that first trailer which sold me didn't really reflect the final product.

This movie in any given scene looks like it's going to be something along the lines you predict like My Best Friend Is a Vampire (1987). It's got some similar vibes and certainly Diablo's script and Zelda direction pay enough homage to the 80s even if I would have preferred some more modern synth tracks just for variety to the well worn tones of REO Speedwagon.

But even though it's not what I expected walking in. I can't say I hated it. It's a movie that loves it's characters as much as it loves the 80s. Lisa makes decisions that one might call bad but the movie doesn't hate her for it. She's not a longer constantly bullied by literally everyone around her. She's a girl in pain being bullied by mostly everyone around her. The difference is slight but interesting. Visually it's fantastic. A delight for the eyes.

I've been saying for a long time since I found out how wrong I was about Jennifer's Body (2009) that I wanted to see more Diablo Cody work. Finally I've taken the time to do it and yeah great stuff. Zelda's debut is an excellent one. Should be interesting to see how she fares in the future.

This movie is interesting. It's not the throw away nonsense I was expecting from the trailer. I maintain that Cena and Brie don't have the chemistry you want in a man-woman adventure action movie. But unexpectedly the script doesn't push it. The script does a lot of things unexpectedly to be honestly.

The strange thing about this movie is that somehow in spite of everything in it's premise, from the big strong man my people call 'The American' shooting up a poorer nation ruled by an insane and violent dictator to the jungle poor but honest working people, the movie manages to avoid being the most jingoistic thing I've seen in 5 years. Considering how lazy the other elements of the movie are it's almost as if genuine criticism of typical jingoistic action films was it's real purpose one that it manages to do with a touch of actual heart. One that isn't distracted by a budding romance and sexual tension between it's male and female lead.

All that and still I say if you are the type of person to find Allison Brie attractive, then this is the movie for that kind of thing. Full of The Layover (2017) (https://trakt.tv/comments/155857) moments. Yes she does saucy-sashay her way through the movie which is a hilarious contrast to her character's motivation as being taken seriously.

It's just so unexpectedly interesting. I put this on for a lark. The trailer looked kinda bad and bland. But in the end I think I have a movie that I not only like but that I might want to watch again. Even though it's has tonal jumps all over the place. Unearned scenes of humor. Scenes of gore that come out of nowhere. Editing that in any given scene might just make you want to rewind five seconds to see if that scene even made sense visually. Yet it seems to avoid doing the "same old thing" that most action movies of this type do. Even the ending didn't have the requisite secret backstabber that I expected from the start of the movie.

The comparison for this movie is last year's The Lost City (2022). Now if you look at the two movies. The Lost City is going to be rated much higher. I think they put more budget in that. They have bigger not muscle man stars (Bullock, Radcliff, Pit). Tatum and Cena are practically interchangeable in my opinion. But The Lost City is more polished. It's also more shallow. It's more navel-gazey. It's very focused on the characters and doesn't really care about the people in the country they arrive in. In contrast while Freelance isn't as polished. It cares less about the main characters and more about developing the narrative about people of the country. I enjoyed both movies. But I think Freelance has fewer sustained flaws. Yeah there's some awful CGI scenes but that outfit Sandra was in was just awful and that lasted much longer. It's just The Lost City also has greater interpersonal chemistry and the big names are very effectively used. The jokes are setup better and land harder. But still as I said earlier. I kinda want to watch Freelance again where as The Lost City is probably just a movie I wouldn't switch channels from if it pops up on PlutoTV or something.

So security means basically nothing right? Because our hero is ripping through them like they're toddlers. I suppose we're meant to chalk that up to his father's forest training.

I don't care too much about the person he's locating and that's becoming a pattern. I suppose it's part and parcel since the episode structure means we don't know the person until he's found them. Marginal improvement on the first episode. Maybe. Ehh honestly it's structured better because we don't have to do all the intro stuff but the actual tracking is less interesting because he's found right away and this is about escape not tracking.

The convenient full volume surveillance system is as equally hilarious as our tracker taking down two security guards at once with guns. Who leaves audio at such full volume a passerby would think someone was literally inside. i mean why was it playing when no one was there? And if someone WAS there why was it so loud? Honestly that entire room doesn't seem to make any sense. Why is this random house surveilling people? It's supposed to be "Rebecca's house" where the insurance is sent to but why would Rebecca not live on the compound? She appears to live on the compound she doesn't appear to have special exit privileges so why is this house there and playing audio at house party levels.

I can say I've seen it. I can say I laughed uproariously. Because holy wow is this movie awful. Front to back, start to finish. It's so bad you sometimes forget it's offensive too. On purpose.

One of the first gags is that after failing to inspire his new youth male team. He dismisses them reminding them not to steal his catalytic converter. After being called out for it by the black player. The black player drops a saw used to steal catalytic converts. In the next scene he doesn't have a catalytic converter.

There's not so much acting as there is setting up punchlines whether they're awful verbal jokes or pointless (and often too long) visual gag montages. I was going to say something about the imitation indie music and wanna be Karate Kid soundtrack but the credits were still rolling and the song section came up. All the songs are by William Boreing. I don't know if that's Jeremy's son or whatever nepotism nonsense but the music was uninteresting. It wasn't sonic garbage just... boring.

You could spend an hour debunking all the nonsense assumptions the movie makes erroneously. But for my money even from a conservative Daily Wire standpoint most of the movie is just dumb and pointless which is a problem because the movie's only saving grace is supposed to be it's messaging. It's like a Christian Faith movie in that way. Christian Faith movies are awful but they're awful because they don't care about anything other than sending the right message. The art of storytelling doesn't come into it. The only one that matters is the root story. That a team of men's washouts could dominate in women's sports. Ironically basketball is a poor choice for this because the gender differences aren't THAT big. And physical mass isn't everything like you see in the movie. Not when you're playing comparable teams. The women's teams are practiced active teams and our ladyballer are again some washouts who are hanging out just to do this. It's so casually done you never see them practice which is both a reflection of how much this isn't a sports movie and a reflection of what the movie thinks about female players. You see what it thinks at the end of the movie when it has grown bulked out basketball players playing with girl-children.

No one expects a vanity project to be perfect. But just because it's a vanity project doesn't mean you get to by pass every narrative concept. Me, You, Madness is awful. This is worse. But that one PRESENTS as a vanity project. This presents as a movie with something to tell through humor. It's not JUST lazy. It's not JUST offensive. It's not funny either. There's just scenes that you know the DW found funny. Scenes that they were dying laughing while they were writing it. But in the end on the movie are just... "ehh oh i see what they were trying to do".

Okay. I'll give it this. Whatever my gripes with the series as a whole, it ended well. Let's talk about episodes 7 and 8. The final pairing.

Episode 7 starts with "Infidelity" and ends with the third strike and a separation between Jane and John. Michaela Coel has what is probably the best line of the series. Which is a shame because unlike say the best line in Ted Lasso it has nothing to do with the show. It's a throwaway line about how "We're not bonding you have a gun on me". It's brilliant. In a world where no one seems to care about telling anyone they are a spy, it makes it very confusing to care about things like when spies take people hostage. Oh sure this time she turned out to be a spy as well but in the next episode the same thing happens but not. The show very clearly doesn't have any conception of what a spy is. To the point where they get missions and pretend they have to keep a secret but then they ... don't. Ever. pretend or keep secrets. This was a solid episode where I liked the interplay between them because they had something to do while keeping up that interplay. Sort of like how YouTubers hold microphones no matter what type or style or situation because they need to do something with their hands. This show needs to do something with it's background plot or the interplay between the leads just feels weird and pointless.

Episode 8 Our finale of course is going to have a lot of big moments. You have your requisite dramatic irony as two character try to kill each other for the crime of trying to kill each other a crime neither committed. It goes on for way way way too long as an audience member but it's balanced well with all the action. It comes to a nice conclusion fight scene wise. We find out who was really pulling their strings as well as who was pulling THEIR strings. And then we have an excellent cliffhanger ending. Once again we have a spy taking someone to extreme levels of violence but this time it's not a spy posing as a civy it's an actual civy. In a show that played this sort of thing for laughs that could be funny but this show has a mise that's fairly serious but doesn't make sense. You can't do that. As a counter example I just watched Jason Statham's Beekeeper recently. That's a movie that's ostensibly about getting revenge on tech support scammers from someone who has never actually seen a tech support scam. What I actually think happened is because of the complexities of the optics and racism they needed to modify the villains so they made them into wall street traders. Which is fine because this is a fairly goofy movie. Contrast that to MMS where everything about it is goofy (Title, Concept, Synopsis, even the poster) except the actual episodes themselves. Those are played far too straight to take with humor. So when the FBI gets a case that involves oval office members and they tell the Secret Service to put it aside? I can take that in a movie where some dude gets strapped to a car and driven off a bridge. But when you hold a gun to a Sotheby's agent and threaten to kill them except "nah it's ok". That's a little harder to take. It's a good episode. Top 3 of the series even, but almost all of the good is due to finale shenanigans. Not literally all but almost all.

I'm perfectly willing to watch a second season. I naively believe now that we have a lot of the awkwardness out of the way there's no way the second season is going to have the same problems that plagued the first. We'll have a more focused story because there's not a lot of story floating. We have direct questions that need to be answered now. I actually need to rewatch the whole thing because I think there's a lot of ending interstitial I might have missed. The one in episode 7 foreshadows some of the discussion about Hihi in episode 8.

Just as confusing as the first time I saw it only now I understand why I'm so confused. If foldableideas's Dan Olson ever gets back to film discussion I hope he talks about the editing in this movie. It's atrocious. Every time Lantern fights Hector. There's no motivation behind it. It's actually what breaks the movie. The movie is going along mostly well until Hal fights Hector the first time. It's not motivated. It's unclear why Hal is there. It's unclear how much Hal knows about what's going on.

I did think it was funny when Carol pointed out that as someone who knows Hal their entire life they recognize him in a mask. It's amusing but the mask identity is there for a reason narratively. People like to laugh at it but storywise it has a purpose and when you break that for a joke it does things like make HvH 1 feel stupid. If Carol can recognize him why can't Hector? Hector has spent his entire life wanting to be Hal, knowing Hal and yet when Hal puts on a mask .... Hector sees nothing.

Likewise it's never clear if Hal knows that Hector is the mutated creature. It's confusing and literally everything in the movie after this scene stops making sense. All the way to the post credit scene where Sinestro puts on the yellow ring. I remember being pumped for that but watching it again it doesn't make sense. WHY would Sinestro do it? We've seen nothing to motivate him. We see what motivates him to CREATE the ring but by the time he's wearing it.... why? Might as well ask why HvH 2 fight happens because that again is a scenario when Hal knows nothing, gained nothing and yet goes straight to a fight that was also a trap?

The biggest problem with the movie is the CGI. "CGI" ruins almost every movie that comes out now and it does the same here for the same reasons. All CGI scenes have to be dark. OA is a planet permanently 2 hours past dusk. Why? They have so much power and zero lighting. But what's special about Green Lantern is that rather than give him a suit to wear they put him in a CGI costume and THAT was the worst decision. Because they couldn't do it. Whether money or time it couldn't be done and what remains looks AWFUL. It's like every TV show that doesn't use squibs and instead they just color the film red where the bullethole is supposed to be. The mask looks like a slightly better version of that but it IS a version of that and you can tell. It's almost as distracting and almost never seeing a closeup of his full suit.

It's a shame to utterly junk Ryan Reynolds in a perfect made for him role. With better writing he could have been the Robert Downy Jr as Iron Man of casting. Almost. I mean you'll never find casting THAT good again for a superhero movie but Ryan as Hal could have been close.

The movie just spends too much effort on too much story. Hector Hammond doesn't serve any purpose. He would have been a great sequel antagonist with Sinestro or without him. Parallax doesn't have enough story meaning you don't know what it's motivation and goals are. The Lantern Corps could have used a touch more to do but honestly if it had looked better it wouldn't have mattered. I think Hal's drunk driving story would have been a better first shot. Really sink home the "responsibility" angle.

It says something about how bad act III is that all the way up until Hal busts in on Hector almost 75% of the way through the movie and I would have rated it above average. Probably just a six but still. But on top of the throughout issues everything that happens STARTING with the first HvH fight is just so awful and non stop floating dominoes that it drags the entire movie down to my current rating which is 3.

Okay so let's talk about episodes 5 and 6.

Ron Pearlmen was an utter delight. I can't not say that. He always is. Just is. Even here in this lackluster role. That said the second half of the season is a noticeable upswing. I really like even this episode and what it's doing character-wise. Plot-wise it was nonsense but it's not like it's going anywhere anyway at least now I'm starting to enjoy the ride. The interplay between our leads is interesting even if the again the fact that they are spies is not. What I find fascinating is that there's more narrative flow and consistency in the titles and descriptions than there is in the show. It's like they prepared the show with the titles and synopsis long before they started filming. Because this

Couples Therapy (Naked & Afraid) - Oh, John. Oh, Jane. Our pair have been oh so bad at sharing and caring. Time to call in help -- John and Jane, get ready for: COUPLES THERAPY, what a gas!

Is an entire different level than what even this episode is. This is fun and goofy and comical in a way that not even at it's best the show is. Maybe on a scene by scene basis you might find something worthy of the type of gassing in the title/synopsis but most of it is very different. It's lazier, more laid back, less invested. Which to say yet again I don't put on Maya and Donald. They're solid but the writing and directing just don't care. It's weird to look at this show and say "Well at least True Lies the TV Show tried." I mean the True Lies show bombed like 70-80% of it's run time but at least they were going for something. The jokes were sometimes dumb but they came (a little too) consistently.

As for episode 6? Well honestly it's my favorite episode so far. It's fun in a way that few episodes have been until now. Holy snap it just occurred to me. Part of it is the missing intrigue. As I've said before this is a show with zero guile. I mean they're spies but spies in this world is a gig job. Anyone signs up anyone gets in and the AI runs you like an uber app. It's dumb and boring and uninteresting. But here... here they have to lie. They have to explain translate and keep things up in front of a therapist who, imo, Sarah Paulson made utterly adorable "Yeah! Whatever DID happen to Mya?" I died. She was hilarious. It's amazing how just getting the formula right finally lets everything shine. The spycraft is minimized but it doesn't matter because I'm having a ball watching Maya and Donald rehash their relationship. A relationship I actually care about this episode. "The therapist episode" shows the potential of this series.

Now we look at episodes 3 and 4. IMO. It's still not working as a show. But episode 3 should have replaced episode 2. I actually see them as a couple in episode 3. They bond, they do things together. I get it. I still don't think they have the chemistry of other versions of this story but it's something. It was a really good episode.

Episode 4 represents everything I had about this show. Like what on earth am I watching? Like you guys are spies right? It feels like they twisted their blasé take on man women spy nonsense and made it even more blasé. Because what I'm seeing here is the spy gig economy. Da heck am I supposed to take from this "literally everyone named john smith is a spy" nonsense. I mean part of being a spy is keeping it a secret and that tension of keeping a secret is one of the biggest problems i have with this show. There's literally no secret keeping. They lie about what they do like they're onlyfans stars. They lie about how they met like they met on Tinder. There's no intrigue do it. No guile. It's all practically white lies. Episode 4 took that up even farther. Everyone is flashing the "Org" credit card? Why does the org have such an easily identifiable credit card in the first place? Don't you know you're supplying spies? When Other John showed up I thought maybe this would be a test from the org to see if they're keeping their spy lie a secret properly. When Jane mentioned how much John loves his mom I thought maybe she's going to accidentally reveal that John is still in contact with his mom and that would be the tension with them having to kill the others so it doesn't get back to the company.

Something somewhere to build up some plot and tension. But nah. Everything in this show is just so... casual. Even the blood baths and the shootouts are so casual. I didn't have high expectations for this show but I so very much was hoping to be proven wrong. But even looking at this as it's own show completely unrelated to any previous franchise. This is not the spy romance I would have been interested in and honestly I'm putting it down the writing. I have a handful of problems with the show but the writing is the anchor. The rest I might be able to work around but this just isn't (to use the vernacular of the youth dem) hitting.

I'm watching this in two episode batches. This first batch confirms everything I was worried about regarding this show. The tension in MMS is about spies who are lying to each other but are in a relationship with each other.

Now I didn't necessarily need the same old "our marriage is tired and boring until we revealed our sexy secrets to each other" storyline. It WAS effective in the movie and I'm super curious about the Scott Bakula series which I'm sure is going to be very interesting if I can track it down.

But that tension between them having to pretend for a living and pretend at home is kind the whole point. What we have instead is just spies who have to date for the mission (and presumably fall for each other). And in THAT setup... this isn't doing so hot. Again I like the actors but I don't like the chemistry between them. For my money drop Donald and get Maya someone she can work with and while I like Maya this isn't my pick of a role for her. It's just not the worst and she's slightly better and more interesting than Donald here. There's a little kiss kiss at the end of episode two and even that didn't really break the slow dreary uncompelling pace that doesn't seem to know what it is. We'll see if it ramps up.

Today in Jingoistic Action: The TV series....

Chris Pratt returns to his Zero Dark Thirty Roots. He sells it. In theory you should be distracted by your memory of his more goofy comedy characters but it's more than just a baseball hat he sells his character to the point where you don't really think about it.

Now Sleep...

It's a dark show. Night night time show. But actually it's not awfully lit for what it is. You don't spend episode after episode turning up the brightness on your TV because you live in a house and not a pure black room. Visually it's comprehensive and that's always appreciated. Now in a metaphorical sense. It's also pretty dark. I never saw Zero Dark Thirty because there are limits to how much jingoism I can take. But there's a lot of violence to "salivate" over that exists only for that purpose. It's not torture porn or anything but if there was a dog in this series it would have been killed violently in a way that hurt.

A Tale as Old as Time...

The story here is compelling enough. It starts out with James Reece (Chris Pratt) losing all of his men in a botched raid. When the higher ups want to blame the dead soldiers for losing control, Reece refuses to go along with the narrative that insults his dead comrades. Eventually he thinks he finds a conspiracy and there's a lovely bit of ambivalence as to whether Reece is imagining it or not. Very like the series Evil on network TV.

It wasn't bad. But honestly I'm very very disappointed this isn't a TV show. I misread the trailer and wasn't expecting a movie. I think this would have been amazing as TV show. It could have done what the True Lies tv show failed to do. It would have done what I expect the upcoming Mr and Mrs Smith show will fail to do. Kaley did a solid job as an action character. She's no Megan Fox in Rogue (2020) [awful movie but Fox was excellent] but she was solid. I'm not her biggest fan but I don't hate her and, respect where respect is due, her acting was more than okay. David however, like the plot, was under-fulfilled. I think he could have done more with his character of the straightman muggle husband. The script just didn't give any room for it. They did have more chemistry than I expected they would. I saw the trailer and in no way did I think I would buy them as a couple 100%, I was expecting maybe 60% buy in, but I kinda do.

Antagonists Bill Nighy and Connie Nielsen were enjoyably bad. Though Connie was under written. I didn't really get that slightly psychotic character from her the way the script seemed to want me to.

The tone of the movie was uneven. You're never really quite rocked out of the mood of the movie, but you've never sitting comfortable in it either. Mr. and Mrs. Smith the movie was very much a sexy spy "kill a bunch of guys" movie with likes of whiplash pans. True Lies the movie was very much an Arnold comedy with a bunch of one-liners and amusing growls. There are others that are more about the romance like say Mr Right or This Means War. Which are all very much comedic spy stuff with a heavy heavy dose of RomCom. The ingredients were there to make this the variation that focused on Romance with a capital R. I haven't seen one of those in a while and like I said they had the chemistry for it. But the movie wants to be an R-rated comedy so it tries to have it's cake and eat it too.

Almost every problem I had with this would have been resolved if it had been a full season length. Heck I might have even bonded with the kids. They could be given personalities and then maybe I'd care when their health is threatened.

Upload Season 1 was fun. Upload Season 2 was interesting. It was so interesting even with that awful missing episode jump it still mostly worked. Upload Season 3 doesn't know if it wants to be a sequel to Season 1 or to Season 2. It tries to be both at the same time. It's like they saw Severance and really didn't want to hit that "oh man it's kinda dull what's even happening here?" tone for even a single moment so it just yo-yo's back and forth between light and heavy, high and low stakes, fun and serious. It has an identity crisis. And yet again it ramps up the stakes at the end and I'm invested on a moment to moment level. But the world building is just so incohesive. Is Lucy bad or Lucy good. Will anyone tell? Is there a conspiracy? Does it matter? What about the plight of the poor is this a serious thing or just a joke that we'll think about later? Hey remember rebels? That was a fun detour. The show is about the dynamic of a worker and a customer so Nora keeps being a worker regardless of if it makes sense for her character. Honestly I gotta give it to Allegra Edwards her Ingrid is somehow one of the most realized characters in the show. I don't like her character but she brings life to every scene. She's putting her heart and soul into this for whatever reason every scene no pauses. I kinda hate Ingrid for most of the show's run but she's a full person and I get her. In part because of how shallow and stunted her character is they don't need to do anything to her and so they don't and they let her character flourish and don't ruin her. Which is a wierd thing to admit they're doing to EVERY other characters. Nathan, Nora, Aleesha, Luke. They're all over the map this season. Highs and lows and askews.

I want a Season 4 but after this I'm not convinced it'll be worth the wait.