Everyone raves about this movie, and after watching it, I can't understand why. I also don't understand why people like Woody Allen movies either, so that may have something to do with it. Andy Rooney doesn't make it any better. Hepburn does a great job, as does Peppard.
Many of us have known or have even been in love with someone like Golightly, and Paul's frustration throughout is very well-done. A movie with a more complex female lead was a great advancement in 1961, so I applaud them for that, but I don't think this movie stands up today like it did in 1961.
There is a little bit of comedy that's not racist (like the lady's hat catching fire from the cigarette holder), but it's nothing at which I would laugh out loud.
The whole situation with Tomato is pointless - they get arrested for one scene and are immediately released - it just seems like they did that to force her hand and end the movie. Moon River isn't that great of a song (Somewhere Over the Rainbow is WAY better), some of the overacting is annoying, Yunioshi is extremely off-putting, the plot is rather boring (boy meets girl, she's weird and misguided, she won't love him, he finally changes her and loves him all of a sudden), the ending is rather unbelievable (people like Golightly rarely change in an instant), and the part about her being a child bride is creepy and also rather outdated (except maybe in Utah?). The movie would actually have been a lot better if she had told the cabbie to go to the airport, remaining stubborn, and would have left a much stronger impression in 1961. But, in the end, she's just another female who needs a motivational speech and jewelry to be broken, and that just ruins it for me.
This is a movie that I would recommend everyone watch once as a curiosity, but I don't think it deserves a lot of the praise it gets these days. Sure, it's iconic for its impact on culture, fashion, women, etc. but that doesn't mean it's objectively high quality. I like many older movies better than this and many new ones better, and I've cared a lot more about the characters in other movies as well, which was really missing here. I can appreciate it as an artifact of 1961, but I won't be watching it again.
[7.9/10] This one is fun, albeit a bit uneven in places. The concept is clever as hell, giving us a three stories-esque excuse to see The Dark Knight through the eyes of a group of young kids who admire him and pay homage to other versions of Batman in the process. This one has the same spirit as “Almost Got ‘Im” but invokes for fun continuity nods to the Caped Crusader’s history for good measure.
My favorite of the segments was the 1950s-ish take on Batman. Maybe it’s just that I enjoyed a similar take in the super fun Batman: The Brave and the Bold show. But seeing the stiffer animation, giant props, and outlandish traps and counters, was such a treat. Bringing in an actor who worked on Batman 66 to play the Caped Crusader is superb, and holy hell, I did not know how much I need more of Michael MMcKean as The Joker. The segment in a giant music museum was the perfect playground, and the show walked the line between camp and loving tribute nicely.
I was less into the Dark Knight Returns homage, if only because I appreciated the rawer grittiness of that take, and the show goes for something a little cartoonier. (Honestly, it vaguely reminded me of Samurai Jack for some reason.) There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it wasn’t my speed for an adaptation. It also doesn't help that the DCAU team would do their own, more serious adaption of DKR down the line. But either way, it worked well enough.
I do wish that the show had done one more full-on homage to complete the trifecta. There’s fun little tributes, like the one kid assuming that Batman is actually superhuman in some way. There’s a ten-second jab at the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, which would be fine if they didn’t seem to implicitly slag Schumacher for being gay, which sucks.
Still, the episode’s climax sees the DCAU Batman throwing down with Firefly, in a way that implicitly puts him in the same pantheon as the versions of the character dreamed up by Bill Finger, Dick Sprang, and Frank Miller. It’s a cool sequence and a nice payoff to the kids imagining what Batman’s really like before running into him and even getting saved by him.
Overall, this is a really creative and enjoyable idea for an episode, that feels like it’s a few tweaks away from being truly great.
This may be the most literal film adaptation of a print property we'll ever see, but that alone can't make it half as successful as it could have been. Having grown up with the trade paperback by my bedside, a holy grail of sorts for comic book fanatics, it's almost a religious experience to see these themes, characters and visuals represented so loyally on the big screen. As he did with 300, Zac Snyder has absolutely nailed the look and feel of the comics, breathtakingly, but underneath that dazzling surface is a terrible lack of soul, conviction and character.
With the exception of Jackie Earl Haley, who is absolutely magnificent as the mentally teetering vigilante Rorschach, this is a large collection of miscast characters which never really seem to buy into what they're saying or doing. The words are right, ripped line-for-line from the bubbles and narrative boxes of the comics, and of course everyone looks great, but bland inflections, bad interpretations and a hectic, compressed timeframe strip away the power of the plot's weightiest bits. In a way it's TOO loyal, as it's surprisingly the one major moment that steps away from the guiding hands of the source material - a significant tweak to the story's conclusion - that works the best.
Snyder was ambitious to tackle such a booby-trapped property, and to do so with so passionate a love for its roots is admirable, but there's a reason it was dubbed unfilmable for so many years. There's so much going on at any given moment that even the most familiar reader runs the risk of being bucked, and even at three hours, a large portion of the story is left on the cutting room floor. For Watchmen, those seemingly-dispensible character moments are every bit as important as the heaviest plot developments. A valiant effort, but ultimately a failed one.
The Mandalorian started out OK, but ended up as some half-baked, lazily written show that exist merely to lure parents to justify a Disney+ subscription. Kids get the usual Disney contents, moms get Baby Yoda, dads get Star Wars nerdy reference. The show almost feels like being made by a bunch of fanfiction writers with familiarity of the setting but zero sense of screen writing.
Nothing wrong with liking it, it's just the show appears to be all style and no substance.
Storyline shows no complexity at all. In fact, most of them are fillers. You can skip 4 of 8 episodes and you'll still understand the story just fine. Characters are completely uninteresting. None of them are developed. None of them had nuances: protagonists are morally good heroes; antagonists are one dimensional evils. The show relies only on a cute muppet and flashy action, but has zero substance. Had a potential great world-building with some details, but they chose to abandon it for rule of cool (and cute).
The "it's Star Wars, so it'll be simple" excuse commonly said by the series' defenders doesn't hold up if you actually consider other Star Wars titles such as Knights of the Old Republic, Republic Commando, Jedi Academy, Thrawn trilogy, the original and Tartakovsky's Clone Wars, and so on. Those titles are known for having remarkable storytelling; something that The Mandalorian doesn't have for its poverty of creative vision.
