Well, that was pretty terrible. Emma Thompson's character is an awful human being without any redeeming value, and Mindy Kaling plays a bubbling woman whose defined by exactly two traits: 1) she's a woman of color, and 2) she loves the boring, unfunny show the story is about.
What's particularly egregious about this movie is how dumb it is with its politics. It REALLY wants to make a point about diversity and the domination of white men, and it does so with the subtlety of a Buzzfeed top ten list. It's just awful.
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.
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 don't know what it is exactly about this show, but it's just not compelling TV. I loved the comics (it's one of the best comic series ever), but whatever magic was there didn't translate to the screen despite the series sticking pretty close to the tone of the original material.
I watched 4 episodes and I'm just... bored. Agent 355 is interesting, but only marginally so. Yorick, while charming in the comics, is like a Shia Labeouf imitator who goes "No no no no no!" every three sentences. And so far, it's mostly just people walking from point A to point B through the woman-only post-apocalyptic landscape.
I'm chalking this one up to another proof that creating a faithful adaptation doesn't always mean you capture the magic of the source material. Read the comics instead!
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.
Yeah... This is working for me.
It's got this cool focus on the food that the original Japanese show had, and it wastes no time with BS rivalries the way American reality TV shows usually does. It's fun, the chefs are respectful and crazy inventive, and the food is really out of this world in inventiveness and creativity. Some of the personalities (like Dominique Cress, my favorite) are big and boisterous in the most fun way possible.
My only complain, and it's a small one, is that I would have preferred to be a clearer underdog dynamic with the challengers and the Iron Chefs. Sometimes the contest just feels like two chefs going at it, instead of this basic idea of a contestant facing an impossible legend. This was most apparent with Samuelsson, who looks to be an amazing chef, but who played the underdog card by invoking how he came from humble beginnings. I know everyone in there is happy to be on the show, but I prefer the near-mythical contest of underdog versus legend that the original Iron Chef went for.
But that's a small quibble. The show is entertaining, Alton Brown and Kristen Kish are on point, the food looks amazing, and the rivalries are light-hearted and food-centric. This feels like a legitimate Iron Chef show.
(Plus, bonus, no Bobby Flay in sight...)
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.
I love this show! High production values, great acting, and the characters are really compelling and well developed. The show is very Spanish in that it references a lot of Spanish culture and history, so a lot of it went over my head, but the show was still super-enjoyable. Highly recommended.
Weakest of a great season. The drug scenes went on too long, and when it transitioned into that whole catfish society nonsense, it just felt weird in a bad way. The emotional core is good, but the episode was a crap way to explore it that broke the usual tone of the series.
Season one (the heist in the Spanish Royal Mint) is superb television. Tense, full of action and character drama, and exciting plot twists at every turn. Sure, it's sometimes over the top or unbelievable, but it never stops being fun, and all the characters are fantastic and flawed and crazy.
Season two is utter crap and shouldn't have been made.
Note on episodes: the episodes listed here on Trakt.tv are for the original play order from Spanish TV. Netflix recut the episodes from season one and broke them down into two seasons or parts. The 15 episodes listed on Trakt.tv constitute the first two parts available on Netflix, made up of 13+9 episodes. These two parts are sometimes called "seasons," too, just to add to the confusion.
In other words:
Season 1 (15 episodes) on Trakt.tv = Seasons 1 (13 episodes) + 2 (9 episodes) on Netflix (aka parts 1+2)
Season 2 (16 episodes) on Trakt.tv = Seasons 3 (8 episodes) + 4 (8 episodes) on Netflix (aka parts 3+4)
Amazing show. I'm not a fan of rotoscope animation, but the writing and an amazing main character more than make up for it. Smart, meaningful, funny, poignant... A fantastical portrait of a mind unraveling. Highly recommended.
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.
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.
Loved most of the season, hated the damn "You cannot abort that child because it is the future of both our races" clichéd ending.
Fun little show that doesn't overstay its welcome. It started REALLY strong, but it meandered more as the seasons went on.
My major negative comment on this show is how Sharon and Rob experience conflict... I didn't expect the show to be all love and butterflies, but Sharon and Rob have a way to fight that's just mean and cringe-inducing. I think it's because, often, the conflict stems from them getting irrationally angry at each other and saying overly mean things. The result is that the two mean characters act shitty to each other for a while, severely diminishing the fun of the series. Also, as the show progresses, Sharon gets more and more self-centered and cringey, which I did not enjoy.
Other than that, though, it's a hilarious good time. Carrie Fisher in particular is just great whenever she's on screen.
I've rewatched this series 10 years after it aired, and boy did it not age well.
It's just a bunch of nothing happening to uninteresting characters and it goes on and on and on... Nothing happens for entire episodes, only for movement to take place in the last 10 seconds to set up the next episode. There's also a LOT of plot happening with religious factions fighting each other and I... don't... care...
I like some of the characters: Zoe is great, and I like Joseph Adama and Daniel Gladstone. The rest of the characters tend to be mired by boring plots that really don't move the story towards any kind of satisfying resolution.
Someone should re-edit the whole thing into a 2-hour movie and it would probably be fine. As it is, it's 100% skippable even if you're invested in the BSG universe.
Started with good momentum right out of the station, but by episode 4 it just started to go off the rails. The initial episodes were okay, with some intriguing potential, but flat, predictable writing means that promise was never realized.
If you've seen the movie, there's really no reason to watch this show.
This episode was not as exciting to me as the previous two. The finale wasn't as emotional to me because it felt very derivative of the Doctor Who episode about Van Gogh, and not as well done.
Overall, the weakest season of "Black Mirror" so far. "USS Callister" is awesome and "Hang the DJ" has its moments, but the rest is pretty forgettable. The last episode, "Black Museum," is just downright mean-spirited.
