it's kind of a silly show but most procedurals are and i can suspend a lot of disbelief for them. also i love trent's actor thanks to agents of shield. i do wonder if this still would've premiered had it not been for the writer's strike though.
also gotta agree with everyone else - the notion that they'd just call him sir forever is laughable at least from the perspective of trauma recovery
this season had some great twists. i really do love what they've done with the book's original content. will i ever recover from the love quinn slander though?? questionable
loved this, but the one thing i still don't understand is why keith tried pulling tess deeper while saying they had to go that direction when the mother came from that direction?? like was he just confused (understandable) or what?
spoiler tags for my opinions on some unanswered plot points. i didn't want to watch this following all the nonsense about the production, but it's a decent movie that would've felt more original about six years ago. i read the spec script 2 years ago and i like this interpretation of it. florence pugh is incredible to watch, it's worth it for her alone. she brought a lot of the same agony and terror to this role that she did her role in midsommar. honestly, solid acting across the board; the only real thing leaving a bad taste in my mouth is what came out about the production and olivia wilde's behavior.
there's plenty left unanswered and i'm pretty disappointed by the ending but it's faithful to the screenplay. some of the things i answered for myself:
why do people die irl when they die in the virtual reality: it's a sci-fi film involving technology far more advanced than any VR we have today. if a person has to be hooked into the system to be able to interact within it, and involves a significant degree of neurological function being either integrated into or controlled by said system, it stands to reason that a traumatic event in the system (i.e., dying) could lead to similar events in real life. this is easily explained away given that it's a trope in other sci-fi films with tech that involves hooking your consciousness up to something else.
why does frank's wife stab him: given what she said, and the "vision" alice has before waking up of jack asking her to stay with him, after he's dead, i suspect frank's wife was also involved in the project and was essentially saying he fucked up, and now she was going to try and keep alice from escaping. her attempt was definitely then a little more nuanced than just sending everyone after alice, but then alice makes her decision regardless.
why do they never revisit the remark about frank's bedroom: pretty sure he's talking about catching them having sex in his bedroom; it's a surprise to jack and one that he looks suspicious about because he didn't see frank, but alice did, hence her generally disgusted look and refusal to linger on it; it was meant to sound like something it wasn't and to me, it just read as alice being like "lmaoo so ANYWAY".
why did margaret's kid disappear: i think this was just an attempt at scaring the general female populace into not going out into the desert near headquarters, and to punish margaret. alternatively, margaret just had no investment in the child anymore because she realized nothing was real and so they... stopped expending technical power on an entire npc.
what was the plane: tbh this one i'm gonna be googling theories about bc i still have no clue. it might be like the earthquakes/lights shattering and just be the system's way of displaying an error or other issue?
what was the point: lmao if you have to ask you haven't seen the bullshit sad little men say on the internet with complete sincerity. anyone who believes that no one out there is deeply into the idea of shit like this or the handmaid's tale is living in a really nice bubble and i'm frankly jealous
gonna watch this just to spite the angry white man in the comments who's upset about black people and gay shit being on tv
there are a lot of people who will benefit from seeing this. i hope they all watch it, and learn something. the way that anthony handles expressing himself and his feelings is something i'm still learning how to overcome in my thirties and something i watched my brother go through, too. an affect like this isn't a sign that there's nothing there; it's a sign that there's so fucking much there that it'll choke you if you feel it.
there are a lot of bad choices in this movie but tbh on a rewatch with the knowledge that this timeline gets retconned for deadpool proper i can almost tolerate it. almost.
mary elizabeth winstead made this the best iteration so far tbh
actually, revising my previous comment.
"In February 2022, it was reported that Blumhouse Television and NBC News Studios had declined to share profits from The Thing About Pam with the family of Louis Gumpenberger."
really? you're profiting off of the man's death and despite the family winning a 3million suit against pam hupp which they'll never see a cent for, you don't see a reason to donate part of the profits to them?
gross.
"i know what i must do" - said every man, about to do something without actually thinking about any of the consequences
i want to give edwina a hug
"actually school shootings are pretty rare, adam" in other 'this episode aged poorly' news
two things make this movie worth it: rebecca hall's performance and ben lovett's score. otherwise it's pretty weak.
the scene after she falls asleep in claire's lap tho. shit took about 10 years off my lifespan i'm still Stressed man i have a heart defect don't do that to me
let's get the important stuff out of the way
onto the actual review:
do you like mike flanagan? do you love incredible actors getting to give intense monologues that make you kind of want to die? are you okay with the fact that literally everything is going to be sad (of course you are, if you said yes to the first question)?
then watch this. you'll enjoy it, no question. just be down for a slow pace, bleakness and intensity, and the usual not-quite-horror vibes. flanagan's work never rests on horror laurels and i feel like it makes his pieces stronger.
also: i spent the entire time leading up to the actual release having no idea that hamish was the Mysterious Charming priest character and spent the whole first episode going ZACH WHY ARE YOU SO SAD AND NOT MYSTERIOUS but tbh it all made sense soon enough.
anyway, for those of you wondering who shouldn't watch this: a LOT of talk of death. alcoholism. small town trapped feelings, and loss of life that gradually picks up pace throughout the series. i'd say skip this if bleak content puts you in a bad place. i also have a relative recently diagnosed with alzheimer's and that made the first couple episodes a bit harder.
since it's pretty obvious from the first or second episode, the rest of my comment isn't technically a spoiler BUT if you like going in totally blind, stop now!!
i think the way this show handles vampirism mythology is actually quite unique. it focuses far less on the vampire lore itself and far more on how easy it is for people desperate for answers to the universe to fit everything from completely ordinary occurrences to an actual batwinged monstrosity into a religious context if they just quote the right piece of scripture.
this is an incredible dramatization of a true crime podcast, 100% recommend it. everyone embodies their roles fully, jj was horrifying as duntsch, and christian slater was perhaps at his most delightful that i've seen him in years. it's faithful to the real story, probably in part because the true story is so fucking heinous to begin with. and the directors for each episode were spot on. three insanely talented female directors, yes please forever. jennifer morrison's episodes in particular impressed me so much. and so yong kim's direction in the court room had to be amazing, considering the performances that everyone gave in there.
(that ending line though, tv and film has to stop reminding me that capitalism is hell and we suck at taking care of our citizens, it's not great for my mental health)
legitimately such a visually stunning and fun entry into the action genre. the number of times bullets run out is one of my favorite aspects of the action sequences, but also there's a scene later on that, combined with mary elizabeth winstead's increasingly horrifying deterioration, puts this on my body horror list. it's not a horror, but it's pretty and there's bodies being horrific, so it works. i'm really digging the recent action films that use just enough stylistic choices borrowed from video games to bump up the immersion.
when i was checking on who the stunt coordinators were i saw some Highly Bitter articles calling this a john wick clone but honestly every action movie follows a formula because the formula works and being poisoned with radiation is a great reason for revenge even if it didn't involve a dog.
also, i don't even fucking care i loved that ridiculous car chase scene
honestly not that bad for a netflix horror. with each movie in this genre though the concept gets a little less scary - and then i remember the real life versions of events like these and want to live in a panic room for the rest of my life. so it's pretty evergreen in that regard.
also, once you've watched the movie, look up the kathy rowe case - thats what the true events card at the beginning is referring to. but THEN, also look up the otto sanhuber case. this movie combines both of those - and pretty well, tbh.
honestly better than i expected. it didn't feel contrived or unhinged like a lot of movies that address these kinds of theories. i'm not convinced that the mandela effect isn't just false memory and groupthink at work (my background is in psychology after all) but i definitely remember it being berenstein but pronounced berenSTEEN when i watched the animated show and i'm just. so mad about it whenever i think about it.
my verdict on this is that it would've been much better as a narrative-driven video game. not a tv miniseries, not a franchise, just a well rounded video game with a decent story and fun game mechanics.
don't expect anything mind blowing and you'll enjoy this. it's a generic sci fi movie and there's not nearly enough of dylan o brien's cute face to level it up from there. some dialogue is silly, the cgi varies from excellent to passable (i wonder how sick of rendering breaking glass these vfx artists are) and there's a lot of weird plot holes and nonsensical physics going on that never get explained. if it's setting up for a sequel, okay i guess.
i think this is worth a watch for some of the cast members. jason mantzoukas mostly, i mean. mark wahlberg is so wooden in sci fi, he must just not act as well when there's a lot of cgi and he has to interact with green screens and props instead of reality? because he's been pretty decent other times. i also just don't like him though.
i find it strange that the director of this film reportedly claimed that though this was intended to be based on the manson murders that it wasn't actually being directly named.
because i could see there being a decent horror about a home invasion loosely inspired by the real life manson cult story. i mean, something in the vein of the strangers but make it ari aster would be something i'd watch. and while no ones claiming ryan murphy is a moral compass for the ages, he's done a fairly decent job of balancing the exploitation of true crime for entertainment with original content and twists (i mean i think i wrote a group therapy session among different fictional villains once and the serial killer dinner party in ahs hotel was basically the grownup version of that but STILL). so there's space for horror based in truth.
this was not loosely inspired by the tate murders. this took an entirely real, terrible tragedy with awful consequences and pasted it into a film with pretty people. having a mid credits roll that shows the actual photos of the people and reviews the aftermath isn't "loosely" following reality. this movie took everything down to the type of restaurant that the friends ate at prior to the murders and put it in their film, and then they tried to spin it for entertainment with a former scream queen lead and a scene basically making light of the fact that the groundskeeper didn't hear a single sound because he was listening to music. i don't understand who does that and thinks it's not exploitative.
don't watch this. i watched for the leads, expecting a very loose manson connection and a campy horror. instead i got a weird 4k hd reenactment of the tate murders wikipedia entry that left me unhappy and vaguely wanting a shower. i don't honestly know how two women with successful television careers would agree to a film as shitty as this, it's not like they're in desperate need for work.
god i love how awful the cgi in this show can be
i was able to finish it, so it's watchable. the acting is decent, and there are some great moments of realism (the amount of recoil shown when the daughter uses a shotgun most of all, honestly refreshing in a horror film) and up until the ending happened this could've been a 6/10. watchable up until the final scene, so just bail at the fade in and you'll probably be able to tolerate it.
i wouldn't classify this as science fiction as there's no definitive proof for anything occurring within the setting. not enough screen time for the poor horse considering it's a movie titled horse girl tbh.
most importantly: i would watch the tv series within this movie in a HEARTBEAT i mean its flawless procedural trash very clearly making fun of supernatural. when is netflix gonna make that??
acting in this episode was just so bad wtf
noah in that opening scene, man. i hope this kid gets more acting gigs in the future because my heart ached.
very silly and difficult to suspend disbelief at times but still a fun horror flick.
like others said the twist was very easy to see coming (although some moments had me doubting myself - namely the pets?? jesus christ????) but the pacing was good and it's nice to watch documentaries where the police are competent. also tony kava going "it's what nerds drink instead of eating" about soylent, i'm crying
overall mediocre but it had its moments, most of them involving john cena tbf but also wes telling dean "if you just tell erin the truth, she won't hurt you" after the anecdote about his broken arm on halloween.
i agree with everyone on ice being the better version of this episode formula but ngl the guest stars are a fun bunch to see together
haven't seen the chinese version but as number one body horror fan i fucking loved this episode
ranjit's actor's monologue about the war was incredible tbh
