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Reviews
Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs (2023)
Jokes on a high wire
You know that realisation that you've been making excuses for mundane stuff in your life, when something comes along that is truly good? That's what this felt like.
Disarming in its observational honestly, and as natural a delivery of well honed material as I've seen in years.
Shane is the high wire walker who strolls along casually above the critical gaze of the neurotic and obsessive twitterati, seemingly unshaken by the potential fall those joyless hacks would salivate over. It's a win for comedy, and a much needed reminder that to find humour in darkness is an antidote to our neuroses, not the humourless tribal pettines and self-indulgence of faux victimhood we are gaslit into accepting as entertainment. A true talent perfectly deployed.
StartUp (2016)
Should have ended on Season 2
S1 and 2 are compelling and interesting. You're prepared to overlook the premise because the writing, storyline and characters are interesting.
Then season 3 happens and every episode is the same plot. We HAVE to make this product work or we lose EVERYTHING! I have a great idea. Oh that didn't work.
Add to that laughable attempts to dramatise a story that ended last season with overblown music,ill advised ad libbed actors workshop style scenes and it's hard not to be irritated. The more you watch the more you wonder where anything from season 1 or 2 was leading. It's a convoluted contrived mess.
Clickbait (2021)
"This picture, looks like a bookstore - see all the book shelves?"
Detached, faux cool characters, where getting drunk to cope, and a cynical, emotionally fragile persona is to be admired somehow. This is maybe giving too much credit to any level of achievement in building believable, relatable characters in this story. This was not achieved. I disliked every character, making investment in how they fared unlikely.
The idea was quite good - and the discovery of the tangled web pretty coherent. In the right hands there was nothing stopping the execution of a compelling, involving story - it's a shame it applied the style and aesthetic of the Fast and Furious franchise to something entirely inappropriate to the story. Being removed from the story every 20 minutes with incongruent, tacked on stock pop music is distracting even when Dominic Torretto is at the wheel - in this context it comes off even more ill-judged.
If you can laugh at cringe, and are so tired your brain can only take in plot without noticing there's nothing supporting it - like good acting, writing, subtle exposition or originality - then this is the background noise you could run whilst painting the living room or doing your tax returns.
Dead to Me: You Can't Live Like This (2020)
I can't watch like this
OK - I'm giving this season a chance, as despite the cheesy Hollywood agenda that all white men are evil etc (laughably so) season one had the redeeming quality of being clever and funny. Season 2 is so incredibly disappointing it's shocking. It doesn't have the dramatic chops to be compelling, but it has two talented lead actresses who they now force to be total emotional lightweights who cry literally 25% of the time.
The moral and political lecturing on how white people are privileged, men are evil, and women are superior and long suffering - yeah thanks for the broad brush strokes of virtue that I didn't ask to be educated on - but the trade off used to be this was funny and clever - now it's directionless, slow, predictable, cliched, patronising and cringe. Being gross and sweary isn't the all encompassing formula to success - when that's all you've got it just sounds like a plea to be liked.
Love, Death & Robots (2019)
Generic misanthropic yawn fest
...but look at the CGI! Yeah, like a hot girlfriend with no personality. The novelty wears off and the visual appeal just underlines the disappointment of so much money being put through a millennial joke machine, so we, the dutifully self loathing masses can laugh in the right places. A laugh structure dependent on the punchline being a nihilistic, redemption free narrative, that we're supposed to already support, because we're part of the cool crowd.
If you like laughs to be a catharsis that delivers a blow to a cruel world you are being subjected to, because you're an unimaginative, soulless, cynical waste of space, then look no further!
No thanks.
The Good Place: Live Panel Discussion (2020)
Nicely done
If you're a human you'll find it hard not to find this a moving and warm finale. Given they were potentially expecting to run longer they managed to avoid this feeling like a rushed final season with the pacing working just fine to the final credits. I'm guessing there was more than one take for some of the moving scenes in the final episode and some of those tears took some controlling. Nicely done.
The Good Place: A Chip Driver Mystery (2019)
Meh
This season has been mixed with 1 and 2 being pretty uninspired and then picking up through 3-5. This episode however felt like filler, with the comedy leaning on stereotypes and forced sentimentality - a far cry from the original, quirky and deeper character interplay of the better episodes. Feels like they switched out the normal writers with the Disney Junior Channel. The cast however is, as ever, super talented and I hope for their sake the writing picks up to end this show as it deserves to.