Good documentary about an unusual and fascinating person, and the strange rise and fall of Theranos. But it felt incomplete. I want to know more about how everything played out at the end. And to dig more into the technology and see if any of it was real.
This feels like it was written in a board room by marketing executives.
"What's hot right now? Girl power?" Sure, let's make a movie about girls kicking ass! With lots of guns and slow-mo action and neon colors!
"Should we hire female writers and a female director too?" Hahahaha, good one Johnson. No, we need to keep that feminism to a surface level.
Brainstorm time, what are some cool words? "Milkshake!" Sure why not? "Gunpowder!" Fuck yeah! "But why milkshakes?" Uh, cause they meet up in one of those 50's diners, those are pretty sweet right? It's like a magical diner in the middle of nowhere where guns aren't allowed except when they are allowed.
Get ready, I'm about to blow your minds. What if their headquarters is a library, but it's a gun library? Hell yeah! No, dummy, I'm not just describing a gun depot. You see, it looks like a regular library but there are guns hidden in the books and stuff.
This was such a waste of a talented cast. And although there are a few good ideas and fun moments sprinkled throughout the movie, they just get lost in a sea of dumb.
Funny and light-hearted. All five films take a total of 5 minutes.
A throwback 1970's style thriller about an American tourist running for his life after stumbling into a conspiracy in Greece. On the whole it's well made and stylish and I'm glad I watched it, but it stumbles along the way and never quite reaches its potential.
Washington's performance is solid, and at key points he can be very expressive. However, he too often goes for the understated approach, where he's just staring intently or looking a bit lost. I noticed this in Tenet too. It's a better choice than overacting, but I think both these roles would have benefited from a more dynamic performance. These movies are thrillers, after all.
Beckett is supposed to be an everyman, not a super spy. It makes sense that he's barely managing to survive and taking lots of damage. But as an average guy he sure has a lot of success taking down armed opponents. Once or twice can be lucky, but they repeat this too many times. And that final stunt where he Batman leaps four stories down onto a car he can't even see is just too much.
They could have easily told the same story but let him rely more on luck and help from others rather than all these inexplicable heroics. In the final sequence when Lena is following Beckett around Athens, she never once intervenes. She only shows up late to see that he's already overcome the embassy guy, or the special forces lady, or the dirty cop man. The script couldn't have her sneak up behind at least one of them and knock 'em out with an old metal pipe? No, because even though he's the everyman he needs to be the action hero too.
Ultimately it's just another action movie about a super assassin. It's good enough that if you're looking for simple entertainment, it'll do.
Chastain does a fine job and really pulls off the femme fatale role, whether she's delivering spin kicks or trying to make sense of her family history. She's the main reason to watch this movie, but there's only so much for her to work with.
Weixler also turns in a nice performance. Farrell is pretty good, Malkovich does adequately Malkovich things, and Common also appears in the film.
I can imagine the pitch meeting where Chastain agreed to do this one. "You've seen action movies about assassins before, but what happens to their families and the lives they left behind? What if we really explored how those people are affected? Also we'll pay you a whole bunch and give you several months of free hollywood-style personal training."
I'd love to see it. What a shame that the technology has not been invented to somehow "record" this broadcast and play it back at a later time.
I think of this movie as a horror fable. It's a fable in that it's a story with a lot of symbolic meaning, and it's not aiming to be fully realistic.
I loved it! But I can also understand how viewers could be disappointed if they're looking only for a straightforward horror story and they're not interested in unpacking the layers of meaning.
The underground world doesn't hold up to scrutiny. If you start asking, "how does this actually work?" and "how did it go undiscovered for so long?" it doesn't really add up. As a viewer, you can either accept it at face value or not. I didn't have any problem accepting it because the underground is presented as a spooky, supernatural phenomenon rather than as literal science fiction. It was a wise choice to avoid giving too many details about how it all works. (There is a bit of a sci-fi explanation given for its origin, but it's very hand-wavy and short on details.)
The core message that I took away from the story is that the people in society we might think of as different from us are not that different after all. We're all human, but we grow up in different environments that shape who we become and what possibilities are open to us. The big twist about Red's true identity drives this point home. The movie lets us believe the people from the underground world are monsters and that they are sub-human. But then we find out that Adelaide, a fully human character, is one of them! This forces us to reconsider our first impressions of the underground dwellers. Rather than seeing them as monsters to be hated, perhaps instead we should have compassion, and we should ask why they had to grow up in that awful environment in the first place.
Although the story is a fable, it's important to me that the movie also works as an engaging thriller. The acting is fantastic, the tension builds really well, and I found the doppelgängers truly creepy.
Aquaman seemed to cut and paste its ideas from other movies. It's not too original and often cheesy. But... it was kinda fun anyway, and the underwater locations looked fantastic. Pretty good for DC.
As an atheist, it's funny to me that I really enjoy certain shows about the afterlife such as The Good Place and Dead Like Me. I suppose it's a lot like the appeal of sci-fi. The writers start with a wild hypothetical premise, and then they think it through and explore all the implications and possibilities. And this experience often leads to insights about life in the real world.
At its best, The Good Place takes its starting idea about the afterlife and really pushes that idea to its limit. And when the idea starts breaking down they introduce a new twist every season to take it someplace new. Along the way they explore many ideas about philosophy and ethics, all in a format that is fun, fast-paced and highly accessible. It's almost miraculous they could make this idea work as a network TV sitcom.
The writing is full of clever touches. Janet as the not-a-girl not-a-robot all-knowing assistant is such an original character and a real highlight for me. Chidi and Eleanor are the heart of the story and keep us emotionally engaged despite the high-concept nature of the show. One other standout character is Jason, who delivers some of the biggest surprises just when you think he's becoming too dumb and predictable.
However, the writing of the characters can also be a weakness. They are sometimes drawn too simply, like characters on a children's cartoon show. Chidi is the nervous one, Tahani is haughty, Jason is dumb, etc. The reactions they have to situations often just follow those characterizations, and the attempts at humor are often just references to these qualities. It's corny, unfunny, and at times made me feel disconnected from the story. And this gets even worse for many of the show's minor characters, who don't get much screen time and are defined by their overarching adjective.
This simplistic rendering of the characters may have been a conscious choice by the writers. Since the show is so different and so out there by prime time standards, maybe they drew the characters this way to make it easier for audiences to follow. But it's the biggest shortcoming of the show to me.
The finale is wonderfully done and really satisfying. I can't imagine it ending any other way.
This was a pleasant surprise. It's quite funny and enjoyable, with intentionally corny humor and some fun martial arts scenes. As a middle aged guy, the humor around getting old and feeling your body falling apart really landed with me.
Matthew Page as Carter is terrific. He plays the Tiger's less talented childhood rival who is often the butt of the joke. But he's not just a one-dimensional comic relief character, thankfully. The writing is better than that.
The one part of this movie I will critique is the final enemy they have to face. Although the climactic battle scene is pretty cool, the bad guy is cartoonishly evil and is so overpowered that it strains belief to imagine he would lose that fight. I wish they would have developed his character more and made him more well-rounded. But instead they went with the old trope of Good defeating Evil and overcoming impossible odds.
Pretty corny but enjoyable. It has elements of sci-fi and horror, but it's really more of a thriller.
The characters and the whole story are over-the-top and the teen drama gets to be silly, but the lead actress does a great job and keeps things grounded.
The movie is beautifully presented and the acting is excellent. Despite there being several action scenes, it has a pretty slow pace overall. The focus of the story is mostly about the family and interpersonal dynamics as they come to terms with what makes the boy special.
I was disappointed in the sci-fi side of the story, because there's just not a lot of depth to it. Very little is explained and it might as well be magic instead of science. The only part I really appreciated in terms of sci-fi was the visuals at the climax of the story.
Incredible short film. Beautiful, very well-written, introspective and thought-provoking.
I enjoy many varieties of sci-fi, including space battles and adventures, but this is something very different.
(Available free on YouTube. Search for: Narrow World Omeleto)
A charming short film which riffs on modern influencer culture in a light-hearted, clever way by imagining if the Victorian era had its own version of social media influencers hawking products.
This film is the result of the "Movie Poster Movie Contest", in which young creators submitted fake movie posters, and Zach Braff turned the winning poster into a real short film. It's available for free on YouTube and AdAge.
A silly horror-comedy short. There are a couple good moments, but overall it's forgettable. You can watch it on Youtube if you're curious. This feels like a film student's project, so I wonder what prompted Robert Rodriguez to make it in 2015.
Funny and unique. It's definitely worth watching. NSFW.
I found out how to view it on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/82lsin/what_happened_to_limbo_the_short_film_written_by/
