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lauravalerietaylor
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Turn Up Charlie (2019)
Awful waste of time
I watched this because I usually enjoy Idris Elba's movies/shows. The first episode was awful, but pilot episodes often are. I thought things would get better with the second episode, but I got to the end of that one and still couldn't find anything not cringeworthy. The kid is a total brat with no redeemable qualities, main character is a caricature, and the parents are useless stereotypes. Even the main character's family is just one big stereotype. Waste of time.
The Office: Lotto (2011)
One of Andy's better episodes
I wasn't crazy about the decision to make Andy Regional Manager, but this is definitely one of his better episodes. In this one, the writers really show him stepping up to the plate. The last five minutes or so where he's honest with Darryl about why Darryl didn't get the job are particularly good - you can really see Andy's potential for leadership here.
The Circle (2017)
Please spare yourself from this garbage!
Amazon Prime recommended this movie for me because I was looking for something in the way of a sci-fi psychological thriller. That'll teach me to listen to Prime recommendations.
The movie started out fine; it's a brilliant (albeit done to death lately) premise: a young woman accepts a job with a tech company that focuses on making the world a more socially connected and transparent place, and gets more than she bargained for when she finds out what the agenda behind transparency is... or does she? Because I may have missed something, but the agenda that she had such a problem with was the same one she ended up supporting at the end of the movie.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'll try to be a little more coherent about the reasons why I disliked this movie.
First and foremost, there's the protagonist, Mae. I guess we're supposed to feel a twinge of sympathy for her from the very beginning, as she's shown stuck at her dead end job with a car that randomly keeps breaking down on her and poor parents, one of whom is chronically ill with MS. On paper, it sounds like a sympathetic situation. Only, Emma Watson didn't sell me on it. Just like everything else I've seen her in, her character was bland and sort of emotionless. Even during those rare moments when she was supposed to be displaying some sort of emotion, it felt forced, contrived.
Mae has a good friend, Mercer, who comes to bail her out when her car breaks down. It's obvious he has feelings for her that are unrequited (not like I didn't see THAT one coming), and though her parents would love for her to make a match with him, she's just not interested in him that way. Which is probably why she was okay with seeking him out and getting him killed later in the film. (Okay, maybe that wasn't exactly how it happened, but close enough...)
She goes to work for this company, and she's pretty much a nobody until she gets upset one night and decides to go steal a kayak in the middle of the night, go out by herself in the dark, and almost drown. Thanks to her new company's creepy all-seeing camera surveillance, she was saved by the coast guard and brought back in just in the nick of time.
This results in the big bosses calling her in to ask her if she'd be willing to be part of a pilot program in which she would become 100% transparent - wearing a camera all the time. She agrees to this and becomes an overnight sensation, not just at the Circle, but around the whole world (even though she does absolutely nothing interesting). Cue a series of non-event events that lead up to her siccing the whole world onto a foreign fugitive and her friend Mercer, who was off the grid and didn't want to be found. No matter; the crowd at the Circle goaded her into orchestrating the hunt for him, which resulted in him driving off of a bridge and killing himself to avoid being caught on camera by a drone pursuing him.
I nearly turned the movie off right then and there, because I figured it could only get worse. Instead, I powered through because I was committed. (I kind of wish I hadn't, because now I feel like I need to be committed.)
So Mae takes three days off the grid to do some soul searching, weeping into the pillowcases of her childhood bed. Despite her parents' protests, she decides to go back to the Circle with the intent of taking down the head honchos. Her plan? To expose all of their information, making them completely transparent. The agenda, however, is still the same, which makes me wonder why she did it at all. It doesn't matter; at this point I'd all but given up on the movie and subsequently stopped listening.
I could go on and on about the things I didn't like, but this review is long enough already. Let's just leave it at this: good idea, poorly executed. Don't waste your time. Not even for Tom Hanks.
Gifted (2017)
An Emotional Ride
I really enjoyed this film. I went into it not knowing what to expect, but I'm glad that I saw it.
From the very beginning of the film, the stage is set to show us what kind of relationship Frank Adler has with his niece Mary. He isn't just her guardian; he's her friend. She trusts him, loves him, knows he'll take care of her, and believes with all her heart that whatever he does is best for her because he loves her (even when it involves doing something she doesn't want to do, like going to public school). Throughout the movie, we get to see little snippets of Frank and Mary's life together, and it becomes evident early on that they love each other very much. What I loved about the film is that you never lose sight of that fact.
McKenna Grace was absolutely brilliant as Mary. She managed to pull me in from her very first line, and so convincing was she that I had to continue to remind myself that she was acting. It was nice to see Chris Evans in a different sort of role, and one that he handled beautifully. As always, Lindsay Duncan was excellent in her role as (as he described her) Frank's "exacting" woman of a mother, and I enjoyed Octavia Spencer's supporting role as Roberta. I didn't particularly enjoy Jenny Slate's role as Bonnie, and I was a bit relieved when they decided not to make her relationship with Frank a main storyline. The focus should have been the custody war for Mary, and it was.
I laughed at some scenes, cried at others, and became angry at still others. It was an emotional ride that managed to put me in the situation with the characters, feeling what they were feeling and taking the ride with them. I certainly enjoyed it, and it's definitely a film that I hope to add to my collection.
Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Mixed Feelings
Before I start this review, I have to preface it by saying that I am a huge fan of the Disney version that was released in the 90's, so that may have had a bearing on what I thought of this one.
I have nothing against Emma Watson, and though I've never seen her in anything else so I can't testify to her acting ability, I thought she was totally wrong for the part of Belle. She seemed to have only two facial expressions: "Something stinks," and "Something stinks, but I'm going to smile through it anyway." Some of the most emotional scenes lacked the power to move me because I couldn't get past how bland she was.
Something that really bugged me was the quality of the CGI. It wasn't just the enchanted castle staff, either, although seeing them brought to life from their cartoon form was a bit jarring and creepy at times. I was sorely disappointed in the appearance of the Beast. It seemed to me that they tried to make him look too much like the cartoon version, and it didn't translate well into a real-life CGI look. All I could think about every time he was in a scene was how off he looked, so much so that it was distracting.
There were some things I really enjoyed, like the fact that they kept the original songs and even added some new ones. The "Be Our Guest" sequence was particularly gorgeous, and I thought they did a fabulous job bringing that scene to life.
I like that they explained some things that weren't explained in the earlier cartoon version (like what happened to Belle's mother, why they left Paris, why the Prince was so awful in his prior human life, and why no one seemed to remember the castle and its inhabitants). Luke Evans was brilliant as Gaston, and they couldn't have picked a better LeFou than Josh Gad. The rest of the all-star cast (including Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor, Ian McKellen, and Emma Thompson, just to name a few) were outstanding in their roles as usual, but I do feel like Kevin Kline was underused just a bit as Maurice.
In all, it was a decent movie. Because my expectations were high, I was a bit disappointed, and I can't say that it's one I feel like I need to see again or add to my collection. But if you're looking to be entertained and dip a toe into nostalgic feelings, you'd probably enjoy it.
In the Heart of the Sea (2015)
Couldn't Complete It
This was a movie that I'd been wanting to see since before it came out. Circumstances didn't permit me to see it at the theater, but I watched it later, and I couldn't help but to be grateful that I hadn't shelled out fifteen bucks to watch it on the big screen.
I tried to like the movie, I really did, but watching it was so painful that I couldn't even make it more than halfway through the movie. Not even my curiosity over how the story was going to end was enough to make me keep watching it. The two main characters in the story told, Owen Chase and George Pollard, were both, in my opinion, very unlikable characters. Both were fueled by ego and ambition, but there was really nothing that humanized either of them. The entire time, I just kept thinking to myself, "wow, these guys are both jerks. I haven't got any sympathy for either of them." And nothing against Chris Hemsworth, but his accent in this was fantastically bad. I cringed every time he spoke. The only characters I felt that were worth watching were Matthew Joy and Tom Nickerson - perhaps that changed as the film went on, but I really couldn't force myself to get past the halfway point in order to find out. I understand that the story was being told over a lengthy period of time, but to me, the way they switched from scene to scene whenever there was a time jump just made the film seem choppy to me. In the future, would I give it another go?
Only if I've watched absolutely everything else that I'd ever wanted to see.
Stranger Things (2016)
Not surprised, but pleased nonetheless
When Netflix showed me the trailer for this series, I immediately knew I was going to like it. I absolutely adored the movie Super 8, and this felt like a nod to that with a few variations.
Stranger Things did not disappoint. From the very beginning, we were sucked into it with a tense opening scene that set the stage for what sort of series this was going to be. We're introduced to the characters one by one, in a way that makes us understand that each of them is going to eventually play a role in the outworking of the plot. I initially thought that Hopper was going to be a character that I disliked, but that wasn't the case. He was human and flawed, and I loved how his backstory was revealed little by little, up until the last episode, when we saw the culmination of what made him into the man that he was. I thought Winona Ryder did brilliantly as a strained, anxious, just-a-little-shy-of-emotionally-unstable mother of a lost child. And all of the kids were phenomenal in their roles, but I especially appreciated Millie Bobby Brown's performance as El/Eleven. She didn't have much dialogue, and most of her acting was done with her body language, her eyes, and her facial expressions, and it was absolutely brilliant.
There were jump scares, which are to be expected in any movie of the thriller/horror genre, but I felt like they were tastefully done. The series wasn't saturated with them, and there was always a nice, tense buildup to them. The scenes with the monster in them were always delightfully terrifying, even the ones where you couldn't quite see yet what it looked like. I also loved the idea of an "Upside Down", and I thought it was neatly executed.
I'm really hoping we get a second season of this, because there are so many questions I have that I'm hoping are answered. In the last scene of the last episode, we see quite a few of these unsolved mysteries: Will still being infected with whatever held him hostage in the Upside Down, the truth of Eleven's whereabouts after she kills the monster (also where that monster came from and whether or not there are other monsters out there), what happens to the Hawkins Laboratory and how will they deal with the open doors to the Upside Down, whether or not Terry will ever find out about her daughter, and most importantly, will Nancy stay with Steve or will she go with Jonathan? :) The one thing I felt could have been done differently was Barbara. I felt she got a raw deal, and I wish they had made her survive her time in the Upside Down, too. Other than that, I thought it was a great series, and I will definitely be watching it again in the near future.
The Jungle Book (2016)
A refreshingly different spin on an old classic
Simply put, I loved this version of The Jungle Book.
Why'd I love it? Allow me to tell you.
The casting was absolutely perfect. Idris Elba was a terrifyingly good Shere Khan. Every time Shere Khan was on-screen, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Bill Murray as Baloo - one of the greatest decisions ever made. Ben Kingsley, in typical Ben Kingsley fashion, made everything that Bagheera said and did regal and dignified. Christopher Walken surprised me with his spot-on King Louie, and I was also pleasantly surprised at the gender change in the seductive Kaa (played by an equally seductive Scarlett Johanssen). And Neel Sethi (whom I hadn't seen in anything prior to this) - I don't know if I have the words for just how impressed I was with his portrayal of Mowgli.
It was also visually stunning - the way that it was filmed at times made me feel like I was actually there, running with Mowgli and his friends and family. I was surprised to learn that most of it was filmed in a studio set, and that the rest was basically CGI. It's amazing what they're able to do with technology.
Unlike its 1967 cartoon namesake, this Jungle Book was a bit more dangerous and edgy. We keenly sense the danger that Mowgli is in as Shere Khan makes threats against him, and we realize that there is really no one that can completely protect him from that threat. And so begins Mowgli's journey; it starts out as a trek to move far away from the danger he's placed in, but ends as a journey of self-discovery.
I thought it was a nice twist that the end of the movie saw Mowgli, not being led away by a little girl from the man-village, but once again becoming part of the only home he has ever known - the jungle. All in all, it was a fantastic movie, a wonderful throwback to my childhood and an enjoyable gem in my adulthood. :)
Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Fantastic Movie
So good I saw it twice in one day.
I have to admit that Cap's story has probably been my favorite to follow out of the Marvel character series. From start to finish, the story lines have been fantastically carried out, and Civil War was no exception. Even though there were a lot of characters packed into it, the movie didn't feel stifling or overcrowded. Each character, I think, was given enough screen time to match their purpose in the movie.
The Plot: I haven't read the Civil War comic; I only knew the gist of the story and the issue within. And knowing the issue within, I went into the movie with a bit of bias as to which side of the issue I was inclined to support. As the plot continued to develop and other information was brought to light, however, I found myself a bit more sympathetic to the other side of the issue, even though my stance never changed. That was due in no small part to how wonderfully the movie was paced. We weren't given an overload of information in the first thirty minutes; everything that was involved was slowly unraveled for us, even down to the very last part of the movie. It was a heartbreakingly emotional movie that made you feel something for each of the characters involved.
The casting, as usual, was right on point; I was pleasantly surprised with the additions of Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa/Black Panther and Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. I felt they both completely embodied their characters and brought something special to the film. I'm looking forward to seeing more of both of them.
Overall, I thought it was an excellent film - visually stunning, riveting story line, superb acting... it even had those wonderful little moments of humor in the form of lighthearted snarkiness and wit. Very rarely do I feel good about spending fifteen bucks on a movie, but this one was so good that I saw it twice.
The Ranch (2016)
Does this get better?
I couldn't even make it all the way through the first episode of this. From the start, it was campy and predictable. The jokes were crude and not at all funny, and Ashton Kutcher and Danny Masterson's "country" accents made me cringe every time they opened their mouths. The laugh track just made things doubly uncomfortable. I really wanted to like this, as I'm a huge fan of Sam Elliott and I loved the idea of Masterson and Kutcher reuniting on a show, but it was so bad that I can't see myself watching any more of it. Another thing that bothered me was how they tried to cram all the family history into the first ten minutes of the show, using a few typical lines. The whole thing just felt sort of forced and recycled - not to mention that the way it's filmed seems mismatched with the content and premise of the show.
Spy (2011)
Hilarious and Witty
I think Hulu originally recommended this show for me because I'd watched The Wrong Mans (Matthew Baynton is the common denominator in both series), and I wasn't disappointed with the recommendation. The show is hilarious and witty, but also has the right amount of those serious moments that keep it from being too cheesy. I love how each of the characters goes through their own bit of character development throughout the show, but especially so with Tim and Marcus and their relationship with one another. One of those shows that I'd definitely recommend if you're looking for something light and funny; it also helps that the episodes are short, so you can breeze through them pretty quickly.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013)
Hilarious
I'm a fan of Andy Samberg, so when I found out that he was going to be starring on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I was super excited. For some reason, though, I've only recently begun watching the show, but I'm already hooked. This show puts me in the mind of Parks and Recreation (another comedy that I loved), in which the main character is a strange and sometimes irritating but altogether lovable person, working with a team of people that, while they have their own oddities and idiosyncrasies, ultimately work well together. It can be a bit predictable sometimes, but I think that's what works about it: what you see is exactly what you get, and regardless of whether or not you're expecting it, it's still funny.
Parks and Recreation (2009)
Still One of My Favorite Shows
Few things have made me sadder than the series finale of this show. It wasn't that the episode itself was particularly sad (although there were some bittersweet elements and memories of the series as a whole), but I was definitely sad to see the end of such a good thing.
I first started watching Parks and Recreation long after it had been established as one of TV's best comedies; I think they were already halfway through the last season when I began binge-watching it on Netflix. I was quickly drawn into the world of Pawnee, Indiana - Leslie Knope and her team at the Parks and Rec department became some of my favorite people in the world. Every show was something to look forward to, based around some challenge that Leslie had to overcome. And she did, most times, no matter the odds. And then there was that occasional show where Leslie lost, but the outcome was still good because most times the reason Leslie lost was because she was unwilling to compromise her character and her morals. That's what I really liked about it - Leslie was something that we can all aspire to: no matter how strange we are, it's okay to be that way, because you can still be a good person with a solid group of good friends and a list of accomplishments.
Neverwas (2005)
Pleasantly Surprised
I was really surprised by this movie. The summary of the movie itself doesn't reveal a whole lot about the plot, and I'd never seen any trailers for it. I just happened to stumble across it in movies Netflix thought I would like.
Thanks, Netflix.
From the very beginning of the story, I was hooked. I love Ian McKellen, and of course he delivered a flawless and brilliantly heartbreaking performance as Gabriel. Aaron Eckhart did a fine job of convincing me that, though he'd long since grown from Zach Small, that little boy was still in there, still vulnerable and still seeking answers to things that he didn't understand. Brittany Murphy was a surprisingly pleasant addition to the cast as Maggie, and though her screen time was limited, I thought Jessica Lange perfect for the role of Zach's haunted mother.
What I liked about this film is how it tackled the issue of mental illness. It let us into a little secret: sometimes, the best place for a mental patient is NOT in a mental hospital. Of course, there is a fine line with that notion there, but for Gabriel, the only place he was really able to thrive, was the only home he had ever known... Neverwas. And for the ending to put Gabriel exactly where he belonged was touching beyond measure.
As usual, Alan Cumming was phenomenal in his role, small though it may have been. I would have liked to see more of Vera Farmiga in her role, but as these both were side characters, it's understandable that they would have limited screen time.
Overall, I thought the film was excellent, with the right elements of several things that make a good film - depth of emotion, suspense and mystery, a little adventure, conflict that needs to be resolved. I'll definitely be watching this one again.
Not Another Happy Ending (2013)
Funny, Quirky Film
I wasn't quite sure to expect when I started watching this film, but I'm a fan of Karen Gillan and thought anything she's in is worth giving a try. It's always my policy to watch at least twenty minutes of anything; if it hasn't sufficiently caught my attention within the first twenty minutes, it's not worth wasting my time to watch the rest of it.
That being said, I was hooked almost immediately. I can identify with the plight of Jane the protagonist; I'm a writer who tends to put strong elements of the autobiographical in my work. I also know the plight of, as Tom puts it early on in the film, "worshiping my pain." I thought the acting was good, really good. Karen showcased a host of different emotions seemingly effortlessly. Stanley Weber (whom I'd never seen in anything else) also did well exhibiting a host of different emotions, especially when it came down to the parts where he started to realize that he was in love with Jane and it dawned on him just how badly he'd screwed up. Iain De Caestecker was absolutely brilliant as Roddy. I liked the dynamic between Jane and her father; though things started out rocky between them, and though I'm not usually a fan of happy endings (pun intended), I'm glad that, in the end, they resolved to work on their relationship and mend the things that were broken.
I thought the character Willie was unnecessary and irritating, but I suppose Jane had to have something initially preventing her from being with Tom, and another man in the picture is as good of a reason as any. I did think that having Darsie, Jane's character, was a good addition to the storyline. Overall, I thought it was a good movie, something fun and romantic to watch on a rainy day, and I'd definitely watch it again.