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VIP

10

The best metaphor I have for the quality of this film is the trajectory of United 93: It starts out great, then abruptly takes a sharp dive straight into oblivion. It's a real disappointment, because I wanted to see it as soon as the trailer came up in the cinema last time I went. (Apparently I don't go to an actual cinema very often…) Now I'm just glad it was a $6 rental on iTunes watched (at least in part) by about ten people, instead of an $80+ trip (not including popcorn) to the cinema.

This movie's crying shame lies in its waste of a compelling premise on flat characters—or even caricatures.

Henry is an incredibly interesting character who gets nowhere near as much screen time as he should. He dies at the end of the first act, but not before Sheila kissing him (romantically) on his death bed completely disintegrates any shred of believability the movie might have started out with. And if that didn't do it, the second and third acts certainly will.

Susan is so over the top with the childish behavior that it strains credibility in every single one of her scenes. (In particular, there is no way any human mother could possibly suggest, except as a joke, that the whole family will eat nothing but dessert for every meal for a week. But she appears to do it, as evidenced by Peter's school lunches.

Christina is really nothing more than a pretty young face, who happens to be a pretty good dancer. Her character has zero depth. There's really not much to say, in part because she doesn't really say much in the whole film.

Glenn is more or less type-cast—the last role I saw Dean Norris in was as the self-appointed sheriff of Chester's Mill in Under the Dome, and Glenn Sickleman is kind of just a watered down version of Big Jim Rennie. His suicide is nothing more than a weak, convenient plot device to tie up the ending with a "twist" of sorts.

Dr. David Daniels (how many Ds do you need, man?) might be the most believable character in the film, though mostly I was just enjoying seeing Lee Pace outside of his role as Joe MacMillan on Halt and Catch Fire (which I also enjoy more and more as I make my way through that series). He seems like a real guy with real care and affection for his patient (and his patient's family), though he's written pretty flat in the hospital scenes.

Finally among the "main" cast, Sheila… I don't know where to start. She's all over the place from the beginning, never establishing any character traits beyond "alcoholic". We don't find out why she is one, at that.

Matthew Lickona, writing for the San Diego Reader, might have said it best: "However hard the talented cast may try, those aren't people up on the screen; they're candles, balloons, and marbles." (https://www.sandiegoreader.com/movies/the-book-of-henry/)

I haven't even touched on the plot itself, only the characters. Suspension of disbelief goes out the window within about 20 minutes at the latest, and by the time we reach the third act… You couldn't even hold up your disbelief with a Saturn V firing at full thrust. Try it, I'll wait.

Done? Good. You see my point.

What starts as a family drama turns into a not-very-taut thriller at the drop of a hat. The tonal shift falls flat, and "bewildering" is the word that comes to mind when I try to think of ways to describe the transition. It's abrupt, it comes out of nowhere, and it's impossible to take Susan seriously when she's telling off Glenn in the woods. Simply impossible.

I already mentioned the weak, convenient plot device that ties up the feel-good ending, but I just have to mention it again: Glenn kills himself when he finds out that someone called Child Protective Services on him. There's no motivation, or even a hint at what his inner thoughts might be, just the act itself and abbreviated aftermath.

If you want a fantastical feel-good story about a smart kid who does something heartwarming for another kid, watch The Blimp Trap (2016) instead. If you want a thriller, watch literally any other thriller. If you want a dumpster fire, watch The Book of Henry (2017).

Actually worse than I expected. This is what I get for letting someone else pick a random movie when we decided to toss one on at 23:00. Some reboot films are merely disappointing, but this movie? I want my two hours back.

Well, not all of it, since I did have fun prying open a bunch of holes in the script. Even pissed off the one who picked this movie, who was trying to take it seriously (seriously?!) and get immersed in the story (what story?!?!).

But the special effects are a joke. I thought the computer-generated fire in The Last Ship's latter seasons was awful, but this movie snatched that crown away handily. So bad…

To top it all off, the "graphic nudity" promised by the MPAA's "R" rating was only an unnecessarily long joke about Zac Efron touching a dead man's penis. If I'm gonna sit through a clunker like this, the least I could get out of it is some pretty tits!

I honestly wonder why any of the actors in this reboot of Baywatch agreed to do it. There are so many big-name stars here, and the script is clearly shite. They (or their agents) must have known what they were getting into, and still did it anyway.

Sometimes a film turns me off and I can't explain why. This time, thought, the reason is easy to put into words: It's too much like Fargo, another so-called dark comedy that made me tune out within the first half-hour. So I guess a good tl;dr would be: Watch this if you liked Fargo, and skip it if you didn't.

I've now noticed that my rating of that other film is far too high, but there's no way I'm rewatching it to assign a more accurate score. Since I don't like changing my ratings if it's been a while since I saw something, it'll just have to stay.

But back to A Dog's Breakfast. Aside from the immediately obvious parallels to another film I couldn't stand, this is just such a disappointment for anyone who, like me, saw Stargate Atlantis and wanted to see David Hewlett play someone other than Rodney McKay. Unfortunately, Patrick is Rodney, but with more neuroses and less intelligence. And sure, in the first few minutes I grinned a little at how similar the characters were, but the amusement passed quickly.

One could argue that I shouldn't even rate this movie at all, because I spent about two-thirds of it playing games on my phone to alleviate the tedium. Even I used to think that way until I realized that such behavior is a very useful hint, to be used when rating.

One of the most blatantly paint-by-numbers films I've ever watched.

Audio throughout felt just a bit off in recording, editing, and dialogue delivery. So many lines had a distinct "punch-in" effect, where some background sound abruptly started and stopped around the words.

Some of the sound issues might have been forgivable if the script and cinematography had held up their parts… But since I've said that, it's obvious that I thought they failed to do so.

Right from the very first shot, all of the camera angles used to show the characters actually performing gymnastics—one might argue, the very point of watching a gymnastics-focused movie—made zero sense. Ceiling cameras pointed in weird directions, capturing an image that was often practically upside down, were the norm for this film… at least, when the camera wasn't focused on closeups.

I'm not sure what director Clay Glen was thinking. The closeups were fine, if a bit overused. I just don't understand why more "normal" shots of the gymnasts' performances weren't shown. Run-of-the-mill broadcast footage of Olympic gymnasts keeps the athlete's whole body in view, so the audience can appreciate all of their technique. Maybe traditional shots would have revealed that the performers were actually doubles? (The credits did list a lot of them.) Even so, I think the production could have done better with the camera work.

And finally, the script. It's really generic, despite attempts to add twists to Kelly's backstory. I will make a conscious effort to unlearn anything this film might have "taught me" about gymnastics or Australia, because everyone and everything seemed really stereotyped.

Not sure what's up with the runtime. IMDB says 93 mins, but Amazon's copy and the official blu-ray runtime both come to 96 minutes. So at time of writing, I spent about 3 mins longer watching this than my Trakt stats will reflect. My guess is something to do with PAL vs. NTSC frame rates. That's always a risk with foreign content, since so many more countries use PAL standards than NTSC.

Forgetting for a moment that the conviction of Nic Cage's character was based on a legal myth—which invalidates the film's entire premise of a paroled ex-ranger being "in the wrong place at the wrong time" during a coordinated escape attempt—there's still a lot of crap in this movie to write up. I'm not even going to nitpick; it's just too easy.

Maybe this is what I get for plopping movies onto my watchlist based on a passing mention in someone's tangentially related YouTube video (about the real "con air" service that shuttles prisoners around the United States) and a glance at the cast list. As excited as I was to see him in something else, Colm Meaney's role wasn't really big enough to make the whole thing worth watching.

This also gave me a nice glimpse into why I see so many jokes about Nic Cage's acting. Cameron Poe is absolutely the most generic player on screen for the entire almost-two hours. Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, Nick Chinlund, John Cusack, Steve Eastin, M.C. Gainey, John Malkovich, and even Renoly Santiago (who barely had any screen time or dialogue) all managed to be play interesting characters than our hero. It's especially funny in Malkovich's case, as he was allegedly quite unhappy during production due to constant rewrites making it impossible for him to get a real grip on his role.

I could point out many mistakes in continuity, geography, physics, and other areas—but I promised not to nitpick. Suffice it to say, by halfway through the climax I was trying very hard not to roll my eyeballs all the way around. Are we absolutely sure that Michael Bay wasn't involved in this film's effects work? Jaysus (love you, Colm), every object that so much as tapped another seemed to explode in a ball of sparks and flames…

Enough said. These old, over-the-top action flicks are definitely not my thing. Someday I'll learn not to watch things just because an actor I like is listed as part of the cast.

Deus ex machina films piss me off. A clichéd deus ex machina pisses me off even more. There were elements of the film that reminded me, variously, of a number of other works I've seen prior to this one. Most prominently Frequencies (2013), for the philosophical and quantum/metaphysical feel; and Minority Report (2002), for the futuristic city of 2092. (Had I taken notes while watching the film, I could list several more…but I was busy enough just trying to make sense of this movie.)

I won't say that I dislike slow films. Frequencies stands out as an example of a slow-paced film that really seems like it has a lot to say, and draws me in. I've seen that film now three times, and I'm not sure I've gotten the whole thing yet. But it makes me want to try.

Mr. Nobody, aside from having a droll pun for a main character, didn't manage to pull me in. It somehow managed to be both unbearably slow and confusingly quick, jumping from moment to moment in a disjointed hurry. And yet, it always found time to linger on pretty unnecessary sexual imagery (especially unnecessary given where the film actually takes place, in a child's imagination).

Saying more than that would be difficult. I just don't remember much of what happened in this movie. And that doesn't matter, because it was all a figment of a nine-year-old's imagination anyway.

Pressing the iPhone home button to end a phone call…that's a new one.

Sometimes my nitpicking technical comments make a great segue into a proper review, but not this time. There's no metaphor here. It's just an observation.

Honestly, I only finished this film by keeping busy with other stuff while it was playing. I didn't even watch the screen the whole time. Paying attention to the dialogue was a chore. Detecting characters' motivations was tedious. Figuring out relationships felt pointless.

The only reason I even started this movie is because it popped out at the top of a playlist shuffle. Being me, I couldn't skip to the second entry once I realized how boring this was, so I made do. But you should not watch this. Don't buy it, don't stream it, don't even pirate it. It's just a waste of your valuable time. For the last few days I've consistently picked out passable films at worst, but that streak is broken. This was bad.

Are we supposed to feel sympathy for Al Pacino's character? Should we relish his torment as he begins hallucinating? I don't know, and I don't care. I found none of the characters interesting, or believable.

Final rating: 3.3

Non-stop action! Boobs! Explosions! So, it's a typical action flick.

Or perhaps not.

I've seen good action films… This isn't one. Don't get me wrong—the action is pretty well choreographed, and the fights are decent. There's just no glue holding the pieces together. What we have here is a film based solely on various iterations of "Wouldn't it be cool if ____?" Half the stuff that happens in the fight scenes has no strategic value. Characters make stupid choices every five seconds, in the service of making Cool-Looking Stuff happen.

Do we know why Reed suddenly started killing cops even though he is one? Nope.

Were we shown how Nick survived the helicopter explosion? Of course not.

Hell, the only explanation I could come up with for how Reed even beats Nick to Cambodia is… teleportation/magic/deus ex machina, because apparently he somehow finds out where Nick is going far enough in advance to warn the Thai police dudes that he's coming, show up, meet them, and head back to the airport to intercept Nick 20 minutes after landing. The whole thing is a giant plot hole.

Ugh… Action is great, but it's just meaningless eye candy if you don't tie it together with a somewhat reasonable story. This film didn't do that. This film didn't even tie all the action shots together without breaking continuity.

4.4/10

Presented last month as part of the 2022 Chicago Japan Film Collective, one of their few in-person screenings. This film eked out an audience award win against The Takatsu River and was presented via online screening at the festival's end to celebrate.

Going into this film, the summary did not prepare me for the real music genre. Calling the Seppuku Pistols "a taiko music group that carry on the traditions of Japan's Edo era" is pretty misleading. As their music was presented here, it's not my cup of tea. I'm restricting my rating and review to consider only the film, however. It's not fair to judge a live performance based on its presentation in documentary form, plus I think the style of said film is unfairly coloring my opinion of the music.

All that said, The Seppuku Pistols falls pretty flat as a documentary, to me. Subjectively, too much time is spent hopping from show to show; one gets the impression that the Pistols have only one song, thanks to how frequently similar moments are shown across many different performances. My ears are still ringing from Iida-san's "conducting" with the kane.

In a word, what's shown is redundant. We don't need to see the Pistols go through the same motions at each of half a dozen performances. Just because a film is a "documentary", or "non-fiction", doesn't mean it can't have a narrative arc. That was missing from this one. It starts out by introducing some of the key players, somewhat abruptly jumping through a random assortment of interview questions, then gloms onto one answer as a segue into the group's New York tour. What follows quickly becomes repetitive.

Frustratingly, the side story about Matthew's connection to the group feels like it comes out of nowhere, but that theme feels like it should be the through-line of the whole film. Most of the sound bites from random people at their shows don't say much beyond "they rock" or "they're awesome", and that's too bad. Even once I realized this wasn't about quite the kind of taiko I expected, it still could have drawn me in with the kind of human-interest that makes great documentaries more than just the sum of the facts they present. Instead, so much of the film became an overwhelming wall of sound that I had to resist repeatedly checking the time.

Structurally, it would have been better to choose one seminal performance to feature. With that picked out, go in one of two directions: 1) build to the show through interviews and backstory, or 2) intersperse interviews and backstory through clips of the show. In either case, show the audience (most of) a single performance instead of many overlapping clips from all over. Communicating the experience of a live performance art like this is easier if the audience is allowed to experience it. You want the viewer to feel like they've somehow gone to the concert and stood in the crowd, without leaving their seat. That feeling is simply very difficult to evoke while skipping from one show to another every few minutes.

How the mighty franchise falls. I've been a Star Trek fan since catching my first partial episode of Voyager with my dad, during the original run. I followed the broadcasts on UPN (remember them?) for the last couple years leading up to the series finale. Meanwhile, I got caught up on the rest of the shows, and several of the movies. I should have seen Nemesis for the omen it was.

Other reviewers have already covered the flaws in impeccable detail (see https://trakt.tv/comments/90923 by @abstractals and https://trakt.tv/comments/91751 by @andrewbloom for starters), and I don't feel the need to rehash the details, but…

The defining adjective for this film is "muddy". The cinematography is muddy; the writing is muddy; the acting is muddy; the message is muddy. Makes me wonder just how much it rained when they were out shooting on location.

Only a few minutes in, the film's tone goes off the rails and ceases to feel like Star Trek. It coasts along at breakneck speed through firefight after firefight, in space and on land, barely ever stopping to let boring details like character motivation get in a word. As a result, I honestly don't care about anyone. Not a single character. There was a moment on the Franklin late in the film when I thought (for some reason) that Krall had killed Scotty… I was wrong, but it would have been completely unsurprising. Maybe I'd been primed not to care by the dozens (at leasT) of crew members that were shown getting sucked into space as Krall's "bees" tore the Enterprise apart.

Really, it's hard to find a scene in which nobody dies—or at least gets shot, with ambiguous outcome at best—for much of the film. The Star Trek I know really makes you feel the weight of deaths, even if they're "just" redshirts. This…whatever it is…doesn't. It's all action movie porn.

And they can't even stick to how "Treknology" is supposed to work—what starship captain in his right mind would give the order to go to warp after the deflector dish has been destroyed? It would be suicide.

I hope there are no more reboot films, because I'll feel obligated to see them at some point and by now I know I'll just be disappointed.

I really enjoyed the original Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015). It took itself just seriously enough to poke fun at the spy thriller genre, but with tongue firmly in cheek. Though over-the-top in parts, it never went too far. The story stayed grounded enough to be an effective genre buster. Come for the action, stay for the riffs on James Bond.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle, though… There's a certain irony to this film's "Manners maketh man" scene, considering how poor its characters' manners are. The words "fuck", "shit", and so on absolutely litter the script. Sometimes a single line of dialogue manages to cram in half a dozen. I'm not sure even a single character escaped the "Fuck" train. Pretty much everyone seems to say it at least once.

Honestly, the writing just came across as lazy. That's yet another irony, because I'm sure the writers were working harder than ever trying to repeat the first film's formula and create a worthy sequel. Sadly, they failed. Cursing doesn't make a joke funny—unless it's already funny, then maybe a well-timed "Fuck!" can restart the giggles when they begin to subside.

The film's treatment of its female characters didn't help my opinion, either. Everyone doing anything of the "saving the world" variety was a man. Now, I'm a man too, and one of the things I really appreciated about 2015's Kingsman film was Roxy. I thought having a female spy working alongside Eggsy et al was part of the genre-busting, given that women usually only get "damsel in distress" roles in classic spy flicks. But in this go-around, Roxy isn't part of the picture (she's taken out along with all the other Kingsman agents near the beginning) and I'm afraid Ginger Ale—Halle Berry's real character name *gag*—couldn't make up for that.

All of this—plus the cheap-looking CGI—made for a very long 141 minutes.

Allegedly, the next Kingsman film (due out next year) won't even have Eggsy in it. This film killed off Merlin. I'm not sure what results the producers are expecting by replacing basically the entire core cast, considering what happened after they dumped most of them already for this go-around. I'll probably still watch the next film, but I expect it will be as bad as this one, if not worse.

This was such a mixed bag. Tom Hardy's performance was fine, and I enjoyed the overall atmosphere of the film. It certainly did evoke Soviet Russia.

But the pacing is just so off. The movie is slow where it should be moving along to get to the point, and rushes through the good parts. Combine that with underdeveloped characters whose motivations are more or less completely opaque, and you have a recipe for boredom in the midst of what should be an interesting story.

Some elements, like the homosexuality bit that other reviewers mentioned, were simply unnecessary. As a whole, the script could have been much tighter and leaner. And I'm unclear on what happened in several places due to the shaky, "realistic" camera work during action scenes.

I don't understand Raisa. She openly admits that she married Leo out of fear, but when given the chance to leave him and be with someone she does love, she doubles down and stays with Leo? For this character-related reason (and many others), I might have to seek out alternative versions of the story (the book, or the other film Citizen X) to understand it.

5.4 for me. Not quite boring enough to be "Meh", but too poorly paced to be truly "Fair".

I don't even know how I ended up watching this, because it showed up as The Flyboys (2008) until I realized halfway through that the plot so far didn't match up at all and I must have been watching a different movie. In fact, I was. Some filename confusion happened along the way somewhere…

Anyway, this isn't anything to write home about. The average rating already tells you that much, but since there are no other reviews here on Trakt I feel it's my duty to post one, since I've watched the movie anyway. (By the time I realized it wasn't The Flyboys, I'd seen almost half of it and didn't feel like switching films. I spent about 8 minutes more than Trakt thinks, too; the version I had was 1h50m, vs. the 1h42m displayed by Trakt, but I broke from my movie-watching traditions and skipped 4 minutes of end credits.)

Owen Wilson is amusing enough as Drillbit, whose character arc runs in a predictable, boring straight line. I enjoyed Alex Frost's work, too. Filkins might have been the most believable character in the film. Everyone else was super flat (and monogram, too… just kidding), boring, straight archetypal stuff. Actually, everyone was flat; it's just that someone remembered to paint some textures on Drillbit and Filkins.

Honestly I don't even know what else can be said. It's a mediocre comedy, a terrible love story, and a not quite passable coming-of-age tale. Meh/10. (I won't even bother fixing the filename; I'll just delete it.)

This review is primarily a tool for collecting my own thoughts, though it would be a nice bonus effect if the text and resulting rating turned out to be helpful for anyone else.

The trailer for Eighth Grade preceded the showing of Won't You Be My Neighbor? I saw last month. I have a nephew who's entering eighth grade this year, and I thought we just had to see this movie together. Bo Burnham's name had also been floating around, mostly in reference to his work as a comedian, and I suppose that name recognition factored into my interest in the film too.

I hope Burnham's comedy is as entertaining as Eighth Grade's trailer—isn't it odd that I would recognize the name without having seen his work?—and the film's ratings soundly beat every other film my nephew was interested in going to see tonight. (I was surprised to see its scores exceed even those of The Incredibles 2, though I can understand the mediocre ratings of Rampage and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.) It seemed like an easy choice, based on audience reactions, and the large turnout at the cinema reinforced that feeling.

However, I'm not entirely satisfied with the experience.

From an artistic standpoint, I appreciated many elements of this film. The way its segments are punctuated by Kayla's videos is a neat narrative device—though sometimes it was frustrating how the audio track of her would play over muted footage of some other event, blocking out any other dialogue.¹ Throughout, the cinematography was well done. Shots were well composed, and it certainly never felt like we were looking at something unimportant (or missing something important). For technical reasons, though, I wish that Kayla hadn't broken her phone's screen so early on. Given how many times it's shown in place of spoken dialogue, it would have been nice to be able to read it more easily.

Content-wise, though, the film is… tame. Uncomfortable at times, but very tame. Quite predictable, too. For a comedy, there weren't actually that many jokes—and a film with this many awkward, uncomfortable scenes definitely needs jokes to lighten the mood. Burnham's use of slightly-dated slang and memes to make adults seem "out of touch" likely won't age very well. Same for the specific references to social media services like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. The demographics on those sites will change faster than any of us think they will, and leave this movie feeling much older than it really is in just a few years.²

Other reviewers here (so far, @jb4times4 and @nmahoney416) have called out the film as being extremely relatable. I suppose it is, in the way that any stand-up comedian's material is "relatable", but I wouldn't call the writing "amazing". There's a certain feeling of superficiality to the whole thing, and not just because it's a comedy. The movie felt almost like an impressionist painting of the Teenage Girl Experience, or even a caricature. As a twenty-something guy myself, I can't claim any more experience at "being a teenage girl" than Bo Burnham can, but I'm definitely interested in reactions from people who once were teenage girls. Preferably from my generation or younger, just because I think the gap in technology between my parents' generation and mine or my nephew's deeply affects the experience of growing up. Hopefully some of my friends have seen (or will see) Eighth Grade and I can ask for their opinions.³

Ultimately, I can't really put my finger on any single reason why Eighth Grade fell short of my expectations. But the trailer definitely wrote a check that the full film couldn't cash. I'd say 5.4/10, roughly, mostly because I don't want to round up to 6.

Instead of this, I wish we could have had a second season of Everything Sucks!…

1. This was especially noticeable near the end, when Kayla and her dad are talking about something in the car but all we can hear is Kayla's video to her college-bound self.
2. I don't think middle-schoolers use Twitter even now. It's too old-school.
3. It's actually surprising and a little disappointing that in the three weeks since release, this movie has garnered only three (including this one) reviews on Trakt, and all from men. Fortunately it seems the IMDB reviewer population is bit more diverse. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7014006/reviews

Based on the flood of "____ception" memes that hit the 'net after this film came out, I expected… more.

As the cardinal rule of filmmaking says: "Show, don't tell." Inception does an awful lot of telling. It (or its characters) never shuts up.

I will grant this: The visuals are incredible. From Ariadne's first ventures into the role of architect (the street-bending is aces) all the way down to Limbo. It's really too bad the writing wasn't equally nuanced.

Admittedly, Inception doesn't have the worst info-dumps ever. I just watched an episode of The X-Files, "The Erlenmeyer Flask", that had a scientist piling basic DNA science onto Agent Scully (a medical doctor) for the benefit of viewers who hadn't gotten to the DNA chapter of biology class yet. Now that was bad. Inception isn't quite that blatant about its info-dumps, but they do exist.

Putting off writing this review by a few hours really let me get tired, so I'm not inclined to write as much. But, it's also taught me that the plot isn't particularly memorable. The basic idea is simple, and things play out pretty much exactly as expected (broadly speaking). The details aren't that interesting, and the only plot point that surprised me (Dom actually being "responsible" for Mal's suicide) wasn't worth the overly long build-up.

Oh, did I mention this movie is two and a half hours long? It's too much. (About 7 minutes of the 148 are devoted to credits, and can be skipped if you wish, but that's still a long film.) I checked the clock several times wondering just how much longer this ordeal would last. Fortunately the falling van gave me a decent point of reference, so I didn't have to check as often.

Mostly, I'm disappointed at the lack of substance. I expected some real profound shit, based on the hype. I didn't get it. Some people say you need to watch this film several times to get everything that's going on, but I don't think so. This is a one-and-done movie with some pretty action scenes and inconsistent treatment of its own mechanics. (Seriously, why do the gravitational effects from the van swerving around only penetrate one dream level?)

I give this a carefully calculated 5.49/10. Yes, it's not 5.5 so I can "round down" to 5 instead of going up to a 6.

While I can agree with @saint-pauly to a certain extent that the film feels more like an anime than a movie (whatever that means, given that anime movies exist)… the writing just isn't there. If all I know about a character is their name, job, and who they love, they're not a character at all. If I don't know why the character is doing something, or what they want, I might as well just watch ants or something. (Actually, that's not fair to ants…) Movie or anime, I'll hold the screenplay to the same standards, and this one didn't meet them.

This film is amazing as an atmospheric piece. It's so beautiful! And you should definitely read @omegancq's review regarding the original Japanese title and how it relates to the cinematography. Japanese filmmakers really seem to have the art of making pretty pictures (both films & frames) down. Rarely have I ever watched a film from Japan (made in the last 20 years or so) that didn't blow me away with at least a few stunning shots. I just wish that the writing was so consistently great.

As I made my way through this film, I grew increasingly frustrated with the flatness of the characters. Nearly all the dialogue revolves around the film's main romance (love polygon?) and we learn so little about these people despite several time skips. Even worse, I honestly think the female characters' dialogue would fail the Bechdel Test. Realizing that the girls in this movie pretty much only ever talk about their boyfriends with each other just made me even more frustrated.

It's a cute, gorgeous piece of cinema, and I want to praise it! But I just can't rate this without also considering the awful characterizations. They're just so empty that it hurts.

When we first enter Next Gen's world, it has the gleam of the digital city in Ralph Breaks the Internet combined with the cute-styled robots and griminess of WALL·E. At first glance, it seems promising.

The inconsistencies set in quickly, though. While I can forgive the simplistic writing—it's a kids' film after all, despite the (bleeped) coarse language, though targeted at older kids—I can't ignore the technical plot holes. Chief among them: Why 7723 only has the ability to fly until after falling off the highway and breaking its memory? Obviously, if that didn't happen, it would remove the plot's linchpin. (There's no humanizing sacrifice in 7723 deciding to delete all its memories to defeat Ares if the memory core never gets damaged.) But that big hole got me to pay closer attention, and there are many more, smaller, holes scattered through the script. It's distracting.

What this film does do well: Illustrate why Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were a good idea. The robots in Next Gen are entirely too happy to harm a human on command. (This is understandable in-universe, of course, given who Justin really is.) But that's just an idle observation from one guy (me) who loved the Asimov references thrown into Portal 2 entirely too much.

Perhaps the biggest issue with this movie is that it's not a Pixar film. I know I wasn't too thrilled with Incredibles 2 (the last Pixar film I watched and reviewed), but there's no doubt in my mind that this script would have gained a lot more depth if Pixar had produced it. While I don't always like Pixar's animation style, the way they always build layers of meaning and sophistication into their scripts is hard to ignore. Movies made for kids don't have to be simplistic all the way down, but this one—frustratingly—kind of is.

When I impulsively added this seemingly obscure trucker film to my watchlist,* I had no idea it would turn out to touch on the civil issues of today's America. In the era of #DefundThePolice, this blast from the past seems a pointed commentary on the same police issues—overuse of force, abuse of power—still facing us over 40 years later.

Unfortunately I wouldn't call the script or its execution "stellar", but Convoy worked hard to earn my 5/10 rating by weaving the C. W. McCall song in through editing and managing a few good tugs of the ol' heartstrings. Without those regularly spaced positives, I think the level of flat caricature on display deserved considerably less.

A good villain is relatable, but Lyle "Cottonmouth" Wallace is merely a figurative goateed cardboard cutout, "evil" for one reason only: The story demands an antagonist. We don't know why he hates Duck.

Similarly, a good hero has flaws, but Martin "Rubber Duck" Penwald stands on a golden pedestal, a quintessential "hero". Why is he the hero? Because the story demands a protagonist. He always does the right thing, and never makes a single mistake. (This is debatable, I suppose, but so is my entire thesis here.) Duck is "perfectly rebellious in every way", to paraphrase Mary Poppins.

The side characters, too, are painted with only the broadest of strokes. Melissa, "Pig Pen"/"Love Machine", "Widow", "Spider Mike"… every one is a flat stereotype (or archetype) with no nuance. The romantic chemistry between Duck and either of the two women he gets (more "quintessential hero" material here) is just not there. It's even less believable than Sam Malone with Diane Chambers (Cheers), or even Chakotay with Seven of Nine (Star Trek: Voyager).

The nearly one-dimensional characters and shoestring storyline might be (somewhat) forgivable if the production values had been better. But it would be hard not to improve on the sloppy dialogue replacements, awkward editing, and awful fake-slow-motion stunt shots.

It was a good concept. It should have been better. Convoy really could have used another script rewrite (or two), and… I'd say "a bigger budget", but surely $12 million should have been enough for action shots that don't play back at half speed?

* — Bo Time Gaming on YouTube mentioned the film a couple times during one War Thunder match, and references to the song are peppered through the TBLF squad's tank battles when they all roll down streets together. I generally appreciate Bo's sense of humor and taste in media references, so giving Convoy a watch seemed like a good idea. It didn't sound all that different from Smokey and the Bandit—which I hoped this would match for entertainment value.

Featured this week (end of May 2022) in digital screenings from Chicago Japan Film Collective.

Sedate pacing is a staple of Japanese cinema, as are stunningly gorgeous visuals. Arano turns both of those up to 11—with mixed results.

I haven't the words to describe this film's beautiful landscape shots. They could easily replace any tourism advertisement.

This script, however, felt stretched to fill a feature-film runtime. In between those breathtaking landscapes are a number of moments that simply drag on. Presumably this is so the viewer can spend more time with the characters and get to know them, but it didn't seem to work in my case. However, if the intent was for the audience to have ample time to study every single piece of set dressing in the background while the characters disappear off screen, that was successful.

In the end, I'm trying not to be too hard on this film. It begins with an unusual premise, upon whose strength I chose this film as one of five to view from the CJFC 2022 slate. What's hard to get past is the disappointment of knowing so little about these characters despite spending just over an hour with them. That starting premise did not yield as deep and rich a story as I'd hoped.

I must have caught just the last part of this in a hotel somewhere as a kid. Finally watched the whole movie to see what led up to the hockey scene I remembered.

Genius was a fine watch until the script had Charlie not explain the real reason he'd pretended to be Chaz. His silence on the matter undermines the whole message of the film that he just leaves the Franklin kids to think he did it as a social experiment, or to make himself feel superior. There was a great opportunity for him to confide in his new friends about always being an outcast until now.

Controlling the hockey players' entire bodies with one "microchip" affixed to a single skate didn't help, either. The graviton-assisted shenanigans aren't even internally consistent; sometimes the affected Rumson players act as if only the chipped skate is being manipulated, but other times their whole bodies follow the actions of whoever's controlling them from the lab. (A gag where two Rumson players were forced to kiss in midair would have distracted from the plot, so I'm sure the opportunity was intentionally ignored.)

Surely my opinion would have been different all those years ago. But I'm older and a little wiser now, for better or worse.

And speaking of watching this well after its release, I now have the ability to see that Emmy Rossum as Claire looks a lot like Nico Parker as Sarah in HBO's The Last of Us adaptation. Most viewers of Genius up to now will have had no chance at all to make that association.

Obviously, the headliner here is Patrick Stewart. Goodness knows he's the reason I bothered with this adaptation. And he does fulfill that role, imbuing his role with the gravitas we have all come to expect from him. After all, this is Great Performances—the production must live up to its name.

The other actors do well, too. I particularly liked the performances of, in no particular order: the porter, the doctor (and by extension Duncan, for the few minutes of screen time he gets), Macduff, Ross, and Malcolm. In all of their parts, they clearly applied every measure of training and craft to their moments on screen.

Having grown up in Minneapolis, home of the Guthrie theater, I am no stranger to oddball Shakespeare adaptations. Whether 'tis Polonius being shot through a curtain in a Nazi office or Valentine and his friend Proteus gallivanting about a mock 1950s TV set, transporting Shakespeare's characters into a new time period can breathe new life into their words and make those tired old books we all read in high school fresh again. The Guthrie is pretty well known for its sometimes "out there" production concepts, but they are equally recognized for their shows' vitality. It is an experience to see a Guthrie show.

Well, I could say the same for this production of Macbeth, with different tone of voice. It certainly was an "experience", that confirmed the gut feeling I had in the first five minutes of the film: "This is going to be a slog."

I'm not sure what actually did it. As mentioned, the majority of the actors put in phenomenal performances. Cinematic framing, for the most part, served every purpose and looked great doing it. The script was, word for word, the same as any faithful production, done straight or adapted. So why did I keep checking the time?

One major offender that kept repeating was the way director Rupert Goold set up the witches' scenes. They started out fine enough, when Macbeth first met them, but later descended into herky-jerky fast-motion. Their chants became avant-garde musical remixes, grating on the ear. In an ordinary production, the witches may be creepy, or funny, or however the actors play it, but one thing they are not? Irritating to the viewer. Through his directorial choices, Goold managed to make the witches' scenes downright irritating to watch—and did so in disservice the the overall production.

Another directorial gaffe, in my opinion, was the intercutting of historical footage with the recreated Soviet-era scenery. Things like plopping grainy, monochrome snippets of a locomotive's wheels in between shots of the train's interior were more jarring than effective in conveying the setting. The train and its movement were obvious from several other elements that fit the rest of the production. Less jarring were the intercuttings of Soviet soldiers marching…but that leads me to the main issue that I saw with this adaptation.

The setting was not believable.

A good Shakespeare adaptation, in my experience as a theatre-goer, takes roughly equal parts faithfulness to the original script and willingness to tweak little details in pursuit of creating a compelling world. Understandably, much of the fabric of Macbeth's world is woven from titles: kings, thanes, earls. Adaptations often must recast the titles in Shakespeare's plays to fit a modernized setting, with a wink and a nod to the audience when the dialogue refers to the original name. If done well, you'll never notice. In this case, the recast roles don't feel right. It breeds a disconnect between text and setting that grows wider and wider until the characters become no more than talking heads in a strangely appointed English abbey. (Sidebar: Parts of the abbey remind me of the buildings in Half-Life 2, which were patterned after Soviet-era architecture. So it seems at least the location scouts did their jobs well.)

And it is to the credit of actors like Michael Feast that I cared about what they were going through, even a little, in the face of that disconnect. I'm honestly disappointed that the venue for their great performances was so underwhelmingly conceived. But I suppose the ultimate lesson here is not to assume that anything with Patrick Stewart in it will be good.

Post-posting edit: Holy shit, I spent an hour writing and revising this. What am I doing with my time, writing long reviews of bad movies?

Could not take it seriously with the robots' abilities that don't even exist in the year in which this was set, let alone the slew of appliances with "PAL Chip installed" that could do completely ridiculous things. Not one of these devices should have been able to pose a threat, unless they were intentionally manufactured with features that would never apply to any intended use of the product.*

I can ignore little details that are embellished or ignored for the purpose of telling a better story, but when the entire premise of a film set in the present rests on impossible and unrealistic technology? Pass.

Even better, no one thought of just… finding another PAL retail store when the mall's router was destroyed with the upload at 98% complete? This film's entire spectacle rests on its characters' poor decision-making and lack of forethought—including the defective robots that join the gang and tell them about the solution.

I'll admit that the story is a bit heartwarming, but it's nothing new. It's also trying too hard regarding commentary on the influence of technology in today's world. Several lines of dialogue are extremely heavy-handed, as if the writers expect the audience to understand nothing and need to have the "moral" of the story handed to them.

Ugh. I wanted to love it. At least I can steal some playlist entries from the soundtrack.

* — See: Furbies that spit plasma beams, laptops that could close on your hands and crush them, refrigerators that walk… I could go on and on about that mall scene.

What smartphone just up and turns off with no warning when it runs out of battery? It would display "Shutting down", at least.

It started as just a nitpicky observation, but I guess that detail is a good illustration of how the whole film is put together. The shape of the plot is all there, but the follow-through is half-baked. There are elements of character development, but it ultimately falls short.

Having come to the film with no expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by the parkour (which Chrome stubbornly refuses to acknowledge as a real word) sequences. As far as production value, the parkour scenes are pretty well done. It's too bad that the scenario is only half there.

I did enjoy seeing Marie Avgeropoulos in a role other than The 100's Octavia. It's hard to say which role had more depth, though. Octavia doesn't get a lot of time to grow independently from Clarke et al in The 100. But Nikki seems to have more depth than Cam in Tracers.

In the end, this film is an enjoyable watch, if a little mindless. If you turn your brain off and just enjoy the parkour, it's fun. Just don't try to make sense of the hokey, contrived scenario. The plot holes (like when did Cam quit his job as a bike courier, or make a deal to get his car back from the Chinese?) will make you crazy if you actually think.

Final rating decision: 6.1

I heartily believe in the message of this documentary, but the tone is awfully childish. It's a combination of the reliance on animation, the fake doctor-character asking questions, and the general simplification of the subject matter. Maybe that's a good thing—the younger someone is, the more likely they can change the way they eat and completely avoid the consequences of poor diet. But if the film could cater to all ages, in the style of Pixar films, it would be an easier watch.

At just 74 minutes, Carb-Loaded is shorter than many children's films. But it's harder to sit through, even for an adult (young though I may be) interested in the subject. Getting a kid to sit through this would be difficult, even though kids appear to be the target audience (PG rating aside—incidentally, I didn't see any reason for this to get higher than a G). An updated version in the near future could probably be much improved, both by newer statistics and by tweaking the style to hold attention better. This is really important food for thought (pun slightly intended), and it would be great to make it as easy for kids to watch as possible.

Obviously, Lathe and Eric have a passion for this topic. I applaud them for putting this out, even as I point out ways in which it could have been done better.

Final rating: 5.9

I can't shake the feeling that I watched this before a few years ago (before I joined Trakt) but forgot. Lots of déjà vu throughout.

But if I did watch it once before, it's not really surprising to me that I'd forget. Like most of the (admittedly few) French films I've seen, this one isn't particularly uplifting. It's actually becoming more and more depressing, the more I think about it.

The soundtrack is quite nice—probably my favorite part of the film, though a couple of places where the music switched mid-scene from non-diegetic to obviously diegetic (like at the club, when Marie and Floriane moved to the dance floor) broke the flow. I would award the cinematography a close second to the soundtrack, if not a tie for first place. There are some beautifully framed shots in this movie, balanced out by the scenes in drab back hallways of the swim center.

Oh, and I must give a shout-out to the metaphorical title. It just ties together so many of the film's elements.

If the film's point is that teenagers are assholes, it was made. I can't honestly say that any of the characters were likable. The two protagonists (Marie and Anne, for clarity) aren't actually assholes, but everyone around them is. From this stems the dispiriting tone of the film. Though I have to admit, how would one go about writing an uplifting film about teenage angst?

If I had to summarize how I felt after watching this film using only one word, that word would be "underwhelmed".

Maybe I went in with inflated expectations, but this live-action addition to the "Winnie-the-Pooh" film franchise carried over little of the cartoons' charm. It honestly failed to convince me that the stakes were really that important.

Pooh and his friends were not… quite… real. Yes, I know they're really stuffed animals (or most of them are), but I'm referring to the production's technical side. I haven't been able to decide whether they fell into the infamous "uncanny valley" by being too realistic, or just weren't designed well as character models. Pooh in particular never seems to look like he's properly talking, which is a problem when he has the most lines of all the Hundred Acre Wood residents. Actually, I found most of their lip-sync distracting because it was "off".

How the animals looked and moved definitely pulled my attention away from the good parts. There are a number of genuinely funny lines in this movie.¹ Eeyore gets most of them, which meshes with what I remember of the animated installments. (He's got to have something to make up for that dark cloud he lives under, right?) Christopher's heffalump fight and pretty much everything involving Pooh in London did have me grinning, despite the aforementioned animation issues.

As for structure, I thought the use of chapters (complete with "In Which…" titles) in the beginning was great. It was frustrating that most of the film seemed to be one chapter, after burning through something like eight of them in the first few minutes (showing how Christopher Robin goes from childhood to working father). More of those line-drawn animation inserts would have been really nice. Perhaps they could have helped connect the story a bit better; as it was, the plot felt a bit disjointed at times.

I have my own theories on why this is, starting with the fact that there are two "Story by" credits and three "Screenplay by" credits, all separated by "and". That indicates a possible dilution of vision, since so many people touched the script.² It's the opposite of "Written and Directed by", which is akin to publishing a book without an editor's help. A second set of eyes can really help tighten a story, but too many pairs of eyes can melt it into a puddle of conflicting creative visions. It doesn't usually result in an awful script (though it can). Rather, having too many writers involved more often limits how great a script can become.³

I'd actually love to ask the writers if they considered devoting a little more time to explaining how Pooh ends up in London. The Hundred Acre Wood's connection to the real world is kind of just… there, but I think it would have been interesting to explore how the tree tunnel works a bit more. (Fantasy elements are much more fun when we question them and push their limits!)

Christopher Robin was definitely not as great as it could have been. It was enjoyable enough, but it didn't earn a spot in my "Rewatch Over and Over" collection next to The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh (1977).

1. How funny is up for debate, since I can't actually remember any of them less than 24 hours later…
2. In film credits, "and" between names usually means those writers worked separately, i.e. writer 1 finishes, then writer 2 is hired to rework it independently, etc. Teams who worked together simultaneously (and presumably collaborated) are joined by "&" instead. These conventions come from the Writers' Guild of America's pile of rules for who gets credited and in what order.
3. It's implied, but bears restating in relation to this specific assertion: This is entirely my own opinion based on observations, not fact.

This was OK, I guess. It was better than I expected. That said, my rating is still rounded up to 6, not down.

On the plus side, I only caught one continuity error: The Amazing Reappearing License Plate. (Stretch removes the limo's rear license plate in one scene, but it is back in a later shot of the vehicle being towed. A short shot, but not so short you'll miss it by blinking.)

What impresses me most about Stretch is the filming budget. With $5 million, Joe Carnahan pulled off a half-decent thriller with respectable production values. Nothing about the movie felt especially low budget—and while I realize that $5M is not pocket change, it's not uncommon for this kind of film to cost many times that amount. The quality of the visual and practical effects was pretty damn good for such a relatively low-budget movie with several big-name actors in main and cameo roles.

I was less impressed by the humor, but reading the IMDB trivia gave me the most probable reason: The film's original writer (Jerry Corley) used to write for The Tonight Show, which I never found particularly funny. Just not my brand of humor. That's not to say I never laughed during Stretch; just that a lot of the jokes did fall flat for me. The ones that landed were good enough.

Ed Helms' character ("Karl with a K") was my favorite, and he didn't get nearly enough screen time. Fortunately I watched Tag (2018) not too long ago, which featured Helms in the primary lead role, and was pretty good. The bloopers run during the credits for Stretch gave me a bit more of him, too. (They could have almost sent out the blooper reel instead of the film; it was that good.)

Before I get into any critiques (given below in the same order I thought of them), I just want to disclaim that my rating has nothing to do with the factual content of this film. When rating documentaries, I look at production quality and creative decisions made—how the information is presented, rather than the information itself. It wouldn't be fair to rate an awful documentary 10/10 because I agree with it, nor would it be fair to rate an impeccably produced documentary 1/10 because I disagree with the viewpoints presented.

That said, this documentary is very clearly against Wal-Mart. It's clear from the title alone. I don't agree that all of the misdeeds presented herein are actually Wal-Mart's responsibility, but I do agree with many of them. However, the only pro–Wal-Mart viewpoints shown were in footage of the CEO speaking at an annual meeting, and I would argue that Robert Greenwald could have balanced the opinions presented a bit (a lot) better.

There's a whole section in this documentary on Wal-Mart's health insurance. The Affordable Care Act was signed into law four and a half years after this documentary came out, and that accelerated the upward spiral of health insurance costs. At first, when they started talking about healthcare, my first thought was, "Is this still accurate?" But if anything, the likelihood of Wal-Mart changing its approach to providing its workers with healthcare is unlikely to have changed. Meanwhile, health insurance costs have done nothing but rise since this documentary came out. I doubt Wal-Mart's company policies have gotten any cheaper (or even stayed the same price) amidst the rising tide of market rates.

One technical/creative decision that bothered me over the course of the film was the choice to "add variety" to the shots by using mirrored footage of interviewees. When some of the people talked for "too long" and there was no relevant footage to cut away to, the interviewee's image would be quite literally mirrored on the horizontal axis. That meant the background flipped, and any jewelry or accessories the person might be wearing would be suddenly on the other side of their face. It was honestly quite distracting.

The other recurring creative choice that got on my nerves was the "freeze frame and fade to black and white for text" effect used in nearly every segment. It really disrupted the flow, I thought, and the same facts and figures could have been presented over other shots. Freezing the video and forcing the viewer to focus only on the text itself feels a little insulting, like the director doesn't think the viewer can pay attention to the text if anything else is happening on screen or in the audio track. The one where the text was placed in a cardboard compactor with motion tracking and masking to follow the video (which didn't freeze-frame that time) was marginally better. That said, the facts presented in context, during the "Actual Wal-Mart Commercial" bits, were the exception to this complaint. Those worked extremely well (and realistically could not have been presented another way).

Honorable mention goes to the relatively short, but repeated, instances of obvious audio desync during certain interview segments. It doesn't happen most of the time, but during the interviews when it does it should have been easy to fix during editing.

In the segment on China, it really bugs me that the subjects' names are translated into English nicknames of sorts in the lower third. Their names should be transliterated, but not translated; the translations aren't really relevant. A name is a name, not a word, and shouldn't be treated as a word. The original Chinese audio is also much too quiet compared to the translator's voice, in my opinion.

It has nothing to do with the film itself (and thus, no impact on my rating & review), but I question the decision to release this documentary in HD on Amazon Instant Video. It clearly wasn't filmed at particularly high quality, and the image quality is downright awful for most of it. The extra pixels do nothing for the film—and screenshots I've seen of the original DVD release actually look better.

This review (expanded from the one I wrote for MyAnimeList: https://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?id=282934) is based on the version of Fireworks screened in American cinemas during the first week of July, 2018. I might revise this review if I get a chance to see it again and take proper notes, and/or watch the live-action film that came first.

Uchiage Hanabi was simultaneously engrossing, cringe-worthy, beautiful, and shallow. It's quite the accomplishment in its own way.

The art is gorgeous… with the unfortunate exception of some truly awful CGI scenes. (One of these, showing a staircase at the school, is used repeatedly throughout the film). When SHAFT puts in the effort to deliver a properly animated shot, it shows. Unfortunately, it also shows when they don't. I didn't really notice the character stiffness mentioned in other reviews I've read on MyAnimeList or Trakt, but I definitely felt that CGI was overused. With that in mind, I decided to award the art 8/10 based mostly on the non-CG segments, so as not to let the CGI drag the traditional animation down too much.

I have no doubt that the soundtrack contributed immensely to my enjoyment of the visuals. DAOKO is now on my radar solely because of this film. (Kosaki Satoru was already familiar from his work on the Suzumiya Haruhi franchise, OreImo, and others.) With no aural equivalent of CGI to detract from its score, the music earns a solid 9/10. Foley and environments sounded above average to me, so that doesn't hurt either.

However, I'm afraid that's where my praise must end. The story and characters were beyond shallow, earning just 3/10 and a pathetic 1/10, respectively.

I couldn't keep track of any of the school boys at all. Even Narimichi blended in with the group for the first third or so until the plot ramped up, and without him around the other four guys were just interchangeable cutouts to me. Nazuna was just a generic moeblob with no personality to speak of. Her desire to run away from home seems unmotivated by anything in particular. She's not doing it to avoid being torn away from anyone, and her home life seems perfectly fine. It's really just there to kick off the story, much as the boys' conversations about whether fireworks are flat or round merely give them a reason to walk to the lighthouse.

Sadly, it's also not much of a story at all. I would go even further than other reviewers and say that the whole film can be summed up in two words: "What if…?" That's the only character motivation I saw, and the only thing driving the plot (if one can call it that) forward. I was planning to watch the live-action film at some point after this, and I probably still will—but I'm not excited to do so any more. Without stunning anime visuals to lean on, I guess the soundtrack is all I can hope for.¹

The most disappointing thing about the script is something all too common in the anime world, and in cinema generally: wasted potential. What could have been a deep, philosophical, existential reflection on the nature of reality turned out to be just another shallow teen romance. Steins;Gate, this is not.

Hell, I'm not even sure if he got the girl or not. That ending could spawn an entire review of its own, but I've prattled on enough already.

Despite the story and characters, I did find the ride worthy of an 8/10 Enjoyment score, borne on the backs of the art² and sound departments alone.

Rating breakdown

Overall: 5.8 (arithmetic mean of the ratings given to each element)
Story: 3
Animation: 8
Sound: 9
Character: 1
Enjoyment: 8

1. And maybe a super-cute lead actress…
2. DIGITAL@SHAFT cuts excluded