I saw this film as a kid when it came out, and again recently. Objectively it's not a good movie with a bad script and abysmal science, but there's just something so compelling about it to me.
Could be the strange mix of Disney-like robots and oppressive darkness of the story made a strong impression on me; all I know is that, for me, The Black Hole has this unique quality to SF that you can find, say, in Tarkovsky's Solaris: a mix of dread and awe at the unknown, a sense that the universe is more dangerous and vast and wondrous that you can possibly imagine.
That, plus Maximilian the robot is such a fantastic villain.
What a weird, incoherent movie that was. Starts off great with great characters and a sense of mystery, devolves into a pseudo-Lynchian laboratory affair, and ends with a poor man's X-Men ripoff. Pacing is all over the place, story makes no sense, the twists (Area 51 and NOMAD/Damon) were dumb as hell.
Ending was kind of cool but felt out of a different movie altogether.
A return to form after a few lackluster episodes. Some truly hilarious moments, as well as heaping scoop of twisted pathos as you can expect from a Harmon story.
A movie that falls absymally short of its lofty ambitions. The script SERIOUSLY needed a polish pass to tighten everything and even correct typos and misused words. I think it's the first movie I've ever seen where that happens, and it did at least four times. Not sure why the actors couldn't tell the director his script was wrong, but I digress.
The film is wordy, and it features a lot of people talking at the camera as an exaggerated shaky cam films them at an odd angle. It feels like an episode of The Office without the jokes. Some of the acting is just godawful and on the nose, and the film's structure is a mess. What little tension there is at the beginning gets lost in the movie's own fascination with "Humans Two-Point-Zero" (come ON, people would say "Two-Point-Oh," for God's sake), then it devolves into a weird Cosmos pastiche without any proper payoff.
Too bad this script didn't get some more major polish time, because there were a few cool ideas and visuals in there.
If you've ever wondered what part of Rick and Morty is Roiland's and which is Harmond's, just watch this show. While it showcases Roiland's manic improv, it lacks the character introspection and pathos that made Rick and Morty a success.
Without Harmond's guidance, there's just not much to root for about the alien family. Typically some random shit happens, then things go from bad to worse because aliens. None of them are particularly likable. Some gags are fine but on the whole it all feels pretty skippable.
I think this is the first episode where the high concept just didn't feel original or interesting. There have been boring episodes before (season 4 has been pretty weak so far), but this one just feels so skippable. Some nice jokes, but otherwise pretty flat.
I really tried to like this show because I like the idea behind it, but David Chang is absolutely insufferable. I gave up on the show at episode 3, where he kept bringing up old stories of his mom embarrassing him with her home cooking, then said, to the face of someone cooking a home dinner for him, "Doesn't matter if it doesn't taste good, it's the intent that's great."
Chang also has a weird superiority complex about Asian food, which is weird considering that, according to the way he talks about his mom's cooking, he evidently didn't like it growing up and considered it a source of embarrassment. This is such a pitiful contrast to someone like Roy Choi (from "The Chef Show") who embraces both his roots and his upbringing in LA in a way that is inclusive of all the cultures he meets.
What an ass. He clearly thinks highly of himself and thinks that the only real value of food is as seen through the prism of a Michelin-starred chef. You could see it in the Tacos episode, where, as always, Mexicans are folklorized as poor but honest cooks, while only American-trained chefs can truly coax the maximum out of their ingredients or comment on the greatness of Mexican cuisine.
This is also the guy who, while sitting with a famous NYC pizza chef in a historical Brooklyn institution, orders Domino's to prove some kind of bizarre point. It's all so weird and awkward because you can tell people want to stay polite for the camera.
It's all so sad and infuriating. I can't.
Rarely have I ever watched a show that has provoked such a lack of reaction on my part. It's the fat-free vanilla yogurt of SF TV. It's not poorly done, and the acting is okay, but there's nothing interesting to connect with.
Plus, the VFX is too clean, so it lacks the kind of pastoral, grounded yet whimsical quality that Stålenhag's amazing art evokes.
It's definitely a batshit-crazy story for our times, and I enjoyed the mad ride. However, the producers really had an agenda going into this, and I find myself resentful of their overall editorial approach. A few points:
Joe Exotic is a bad guy. He's charismatic and fascinating to watch, but the show does a lot to gloss over his actions. The series does its best to gloss over what he did and let him express his own side of the story, but come on. The guy was being harassed by Carole Baskin for legitimate reasons (exploiting and breeding exotic animals) and reacted in the most insane way. This is a guy who manipulated straight guys into marrying him in exchange for a steady supply of drugs.
The series does a huge disservice to Carole Baskin. Is she insane? Hell yeah she is. But crazy isn't a reason to send someone to prison. Yeah, she's as obsessed with big cats as the rest of the cast of crazies, but the huge difference is that she RESCUES exploited animals. She doesn't breed them. She doesn't sell them for profit. That the big takeaway of the series is "Well, she is as insane as the rest of them" really does a huge disservice to a significant difference between Baskin and the exotic pet breeders.
The series really overplays the "Baskin killed her husband" angle to prop up Joe Exotic and for the shock of it. It presents a lot of "facts" as-is to support this without exploring the arguments against them. For instance, Don's Power of Attorney included the activation clause for disappearance because Don Baskin was legitimately concerned he might disappear without a trace in Costa Rica.
So. A cool story, overall, and a crazy cast of characters, but it's unfortunate that people are taking this series as definitive documentary truth when it's a well-spun fiction with amplified craziness for the sake of shock value.
Not as great as the first two episodes.
There just wasn't a lot of forward movement with characters and plot, and having Lily fake schizophrenia without the audience being clued in was a weird choice. I do like how they figured out that the flames were fake. It was obviously done in a rush, and it was not meant to be viewed repeatedly with the ability to pause, so I buy it.
Two hours of mind-numbing badness redeemed by 20 seconds of Nicolas Cage completely losing his sh*t at his car.
I give up. Everyone here is raving about this episode, but that's more a statement on how terrible the previous episode was. Honestly, though, this episode had all the flaws that made the previous one so bad.
I could go on and on about why this is terrible, but it all boils down to the fact that the creators seem to care less about this show than the fans. Take, for instance, the moment when the Doctor and Tesla bond over being inventors. It was the most generic, uninspired tripe you could imagine, and fifteen minutes of googling about the psychology of inventors by the scripwriter would have have made this moment pop. But no such luck because the writer obviously didn't care.
It's even worse when you compare this episode with Vincent and the Doctor, with which it shares a lot of themes, albeit in science rather than art. All they had to do was follow the blueprint, but no. This episode could have been extraordinary; instead it's just extraordinarily bad.
If you watch just one episode of "Mythic Quest," make it this one. You don't even need to watch the pilot to understand it as it's 100% standalone. Just keep in mind the rest of the show is in a very different tone.
This particular episode is a heartfelt meditation on the power of a creative vision and how time threatens it. It's also really well acted and written. Funny, bittersweet, and surprising.
I gotta wonder if maybe this is the show the creators wanted to make from the get-go but had to compromise their vision until it became "Mythic Quest"...
As a big fan of both the games and the novels, I was quite disappointed in this attempt at adapting the world of the Witcher.
This is a world that is vast and filled with ancient history, which makes it a huge endeavor to make people care for it on a TV show. In that specific regard, I regard the show as a huge failure. We're thrown into the world knowing very little, which leaves us with characters emoting about places and events we have no emotional connection to.
It doesn't help that the chronology is a total bloody mess. Why the creators decided it was a good idea to tell three different stories stretched across 50+ years without clearly informing the viewer, I'll never know. I could follow because I read the novels, but as an introduction for someone unfamiliar with the world, it's an awful decision.
Compare this to two massive fantasy adaptations that succeeded at making us care:
Game of Thrones started small, showing us the people of Winterfell, then introducing the visiting Baratheons and Lannisters. It made us care about the world of Westeros by first showing us compelling characters, then slowly expanding the stakes to encompass the entire world.
Lord of the Rings had the most epic world-building in arguably the whole genre's history, but again it started small. It made us care about a quaint Hobbit village long before it was time to venture into the greater world.
The Witcher does nothing of this. As a result, when we're shown the massive battle for Cithra in the first episode, it's hard to care even if you're familiar with the setting. It's all just noise and pointless gore.
This tragic misfire carries on throughout the rest of the show. Before we get to experience how awesome Yennefer is, we get to experience her as a misfit whose only apparent redeeming quality is her hunger for power. Geralt himself is interesting from the get-go, but he's all too serious to be sympathetic, at least until Jaskier shows up.
And so, we're left with characters emoting and chewing scenery. It's pretty scenery, sure: the VFX is nice, and the fight scenes are pretty great. But none of this feels lived-in and compelling the way Lord of the Rings was from its very first minutes. The dialogues tend to be arch and clichéd, and the whole affair lacks the subtle realism of Game of Thrones.
And so, as much as I love the characters of the Witcher, I'll continue to look to the novels and the games as the more definitive versions. This is a brave attempt, but as much as it aspires to be top-shelf fantasy TV, it's second-rate at best.
There's one moment where the TV series shone bright: the striga fight. This had all the markings of what made the Witcher stories great, and it was genuinely terrifying and exhilarating. This makes me think that the first season would have been much, much better if it didn't try to build the entire world across a century of conflict, and instead focused on the adventures of Geralt of Rivia as he hunts monsters. Ciri and Yennefer could have been introduced a bit later, and their backgrounds explored in season 2, when we would all be on board for the ride.
As much as it deviates from the novels, I'd recommend The Witcher 3 as the ultimate interpretation of that world. surpsassing even the novels.
Well, that was fun! I liked season 11 well enough, but this was still a clear improvement. Had a great sense of fun, what with the spy nonsense, plus the alien mystery was interesting and unpredictable. A strong start to the new season.
I particularly liked the Doctor in a tux ("Name's Doctor. The Doctor.") and the unexpected appearance of the Master, although I wish the mysterious aliens were not simply one of his plots. Yeah, if the season keeps up this sense of fun, we're in for a cool ride.
No joke, this single episode is the best Star Wars I've seen since the throne room sequence in Return of the Jedi. I can't think of anything else that comes close except maybe the ending of Rogue One.
I watched episode 7 of the Mandalorian today, so "The Rise of Skywalker" isn't even the best Star Wars I've watched in the last 24 hours.
A return to form after two lackluster episodes. This was easily on the level of the first three episodes of the season.
Not much I can say, except I'm now incredibly excited for the finale.
This is the first episode for me when the show has lost its shine. I adored the first three episodes and thought episodes 4 and 5 were okay, but man, this one was just terrible.
There are a few reasons I can think of:
The overarching plot has taken a backseat. Episodes 1-4 felt connected by the Mandalorian's quest for redemption through his care for the Child. Episode 4 still felt connected to that overarching goal, but with the last two episodes, we're just watching a "job of the week" conceit that neither moves the characters nor the plot forward. It's basically filler at this point.
Bad Western tropes. While I loved the initial "Western in space" feel of the early episodes, the show was still coming up with its own genre conventions and telling an original story. With episode 6, we're getting a pretty crappy heist gone bad story whose only claim to originality is being set in the Star Wars universe. All the turns were painfully predictable and dictated by the tropes of the genre rather than the characters themselves.
Bad acting. The Twi'leks and the horned guy were just awful. The dialogue was bad, but the way they hammed it up was just painful to watch. Watching the Twi'lek girl hiss at the horned guy felt like watching D&D players hamming it up on game night.
Bad writing. The whole thing was just so unbelievable, from the predictable turns to the way Mando eventually betrays his employer using the beacon to somehow trick a bunch of X-Wings from murdering the station. Not a lot of it made any sense. There's, like, six different shots of the droid hunting down Baby Yoda on the ship that add absolutely NOTHING to the story and just go on forever.
It's not that I don't still look forward to new episodes, but with episode 6, The Mandalorian has gone from "must-watch" to "flawed but watchable." It's the kind of drop you'd expect between seasons 1 and 4, not across a short self-contained season, and it's a damn shame.
This is the first R&M episode that did nothing for me. The humor felt tired and most of the jokes didn't land.
Not sure if it's just worse than it used to be, or it's just not as fresh to me as it was in seasons 1-2.
That's what a "Short Trek" should be: fun, fast-paced, and memorable. Enjoyed it a lot.
I was intrigued by the concept of this show, but while the first episode wasn't atrocious, I'm gonna pass on the rest. The idea of the entire story being told in an interrogation room ends up limiting the dramatic possibilities way too much for my tastes. Think about it: there's no chance the person being interrogated is innocent, because then you have no episode. So we're left with guilty people, and the only tension we get is whether they'll confess or not, which we know will happen because otherwise the bad guys win.
And honestly, if this first episode is any illustration of the overall quality of the rest, I'm not interested. The episode is built as if they're racing against the clock and brilliantly lure Edgar into revealing a significant detail, but... the key detail is the patterns of the trunk mat on the victim's cast. A detail which they had from the get-go and for which they didn't need Edgar's admission to implicate him!
So yeah, no. Pass for me. Nice try, but the concept doesn't carry the show at all.
A lot of people here seem to hate Trish... I don't, but I still hate this episode. The problem isn't that it's Trish-centric... It's that it's so goddamn boring and pointless. Pretty much everything we see here can be inferred from the first episode, or when it can't, it doesn't add anything at all to the story. There's no dramatic tension to it. NONE.
A 100% skippable episode. Incidentally, this is Krysten Ritter's directorial debut... Big oops there. Better luck next time!
I was a big fan of The Good Wife and I loved the first two seasons of The Good Fight, but holy hell did it go to shit in the third season.
Let me preface by saying I'm a progressive and a staunch feminist. That being said, I still found season 3 unbearable. It's pandering, plain and simple: while The Good Wife regularly plundered the headlines and wore its politics on its sleeve, it still tried to tell a compelling story and presented its ideas in a nuanced manner. The character of Kurt, for instance, was created specifically to represent a more conservative point of view and present a foil for Diane's progressive views. In so doing, it gave us fantastic character drama.
Well, all that is gone in season 3. Now we get flashes of Eric and Don Junior as Diane throws axes to relieve her utter hatred of the Trump Administration. We get Diane arguing with a Trump-shaped bruise on her husband's shoulder, lamenting "Where did the men go wrong." We get Schoolhouse Rock-like interjections featuring shitty music that wink so hard at the audience that the writers must have sprained their eyelids writing them.
Again, my problem isn't with the show's political views. It's with the inane manner in which they've abandoned all objectivity and nuance to give us a bizarre, one-sided revenge fantasy where Diane rages on and on about Trump's existence. It's entertainment for the liberal echo chamber, not a clever discourse on modern politics.
And meanwhile, the characters have devolved into caricatures. If you liked how The Good Wife featured quasi-realistic courtroom drama, tough luck, the courtroom action no longer makes any damn sense.
And so I'm out. Although the first two seasons made it feel like The Good Wife could go on forever, I guess this is the moment I have to say goodbye. You folks had a good run, but somewhere along the way you bought your own cleverness and forgot to tell a gripping drama.
The story doesn't win points for originality, but wow, this turned out pretty great. The use of Vovinam (Vietnam's martial art) makes the action sequences fluid and dynamic, and Veronica Ngo kills it as Hai Phuong, bringing a guilt-ridden desperation to her performance. (And yes, she was totally wasted on The Last Jedi.) Not a groundbreaking action movie, but it's fresh and interesting.
Oh, wow, that movie was truly terrible. Like John Wick's stupid, mean, and lecherous younger brother. Tries so hard to be cool yet just comes off as corny as hell.
I really, REALLY liked it. It does something that's at the basis of my life-long enjoyment of giant monster movies really, really well, and some of the scenes had me bouncing in my seat with joy.
That being said... It's not a movie built along the lines of a modern blockbuster, at least not entirely, and for that I think it's not gonna be a huge tentpole success. People are gonna complain about character choices or dialogues or characterization. It's much more in line with the classic Godzilla formula, and THAT it does really well.
One of the big challenges of a monster movie is always to have a good balance of "monsters fighting" and "humans talking" in a way that builds tension and action, and this one, more than almost any other Godzilla movie, and more than 2014's take, was right on. Monster fights always had clear stakes, and the puny humans buzzing around had clear objectives (even if often it was just 'try and survive in the shitstorm of the century') and felt in their place as supporting characters in the monster drama.
So, in short... If you wanna see a pure, slick action movie, go see John Wick 3. If you want some of that designer-drug concentrated dose of entertainment you expect from a tentpole, you got Endgame. But if you ever felt a thrill watching Godzilla melt the rubber face off of another giant monster, you're in for a hell of a treat.
Well, damn.The reviews for this were good, but even by keeping my expectations in check I still ended up disappointed.
It's really a kids' movie, and not a very good one at that. It's not, say, The Incredibles where you can indulge in the fantasy as an adult and stll enjoy it... It's the kind of kids' movie that condescends to its audience. The Wizard and the bad guys are just terrible, barely on the level of a Scooby-Doo villain, and the entire conflict at the heart of the movie makes no sense.
There's a bit of humor in having a teenager in an adult superhero body, but most of those jokes were shown in the trailer or don't amount to much more than predictable humor. Worst, there's no attempt at all by Levi to act as if he's Billy Batson in Shazam's body... The two characters may as well be completely different people. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle this ain't.
A hard pass as far as I'm concerned.
Better action movie than Endgame. Fite me.
After watching season one, I can say this show is pretty great. I wish the show was more believable, but watching Eve at work, especially when she interacts with the bad guy, is really irresistible. Bit on the light side, but really fun, for sure.
I'm probably in the minority on this, but I enjoy the Villanelle scenes a lot less than I do Eve. She's just over-the-top psycho, and she's not even a decent assassin at that. If this were the real world, she'd get caught after one hit and no one at MI6 would break a sweat catching her. Although I admit, she's great to watch when she gets close to Eve.
