Catspaw57 Reviews

The Sopranos (1999–2007)

The lean parts are excellent, but....

[7/10 · 15 October 2022]

This series can get under your skin and drag you along like a trawled marlin... SOme of the acting is truly terrific, small things (like Gandolfini's little gestures, scratching his chest, while talking to his wife). The back and forth is good. Some of the episodes are really well done, riveting and even realistic... The "but..." comes with what is realistically believable, and what is just irritating, because it is seems taken from contemporary books about parenting.... Yes, the grumpy adolescent children... Tony Soprano's daughter's evolution is smooth, from daddy's girl to questioning adult, though her liberalism does feel a little exaggerated. Her brother, AJ, played by Robert Iler on the other hand is a little too "teenagery as seen from the adult standpoint." He would have needed more color, more nuance.... It seems like someone thought about it too late, in the scene with the bear, he suddenly shows the kind of fright a little boy might feel, runs to mommy.... and one expects some change...

But the series becomes repetitive as the ideas run out.... Suddenly we are stirring up past nonsense, digging up dead bodies..... and the constant flying off the handle by Tony and others becomes a distraction and appears very stilted. Sure, he's getting older, the old walrus syndrome is kicking in... By season 5, I was getting bored with these violent, feral, somewhat uncultured people. You begin wondering what do the women see in this man, whose only position in lying on top of these ladies and crushing them while performing perfunctory sex acts.

You wonder what Adriana wants with that violent junkie of a boyfriend, but Drea de Matteo pulls it off as the somewhat undereducated but very idealistic young woman, starry-eyed, but in a vicious reality.

The small parts often often manage to keep the tension on course .... one-legged., cynical Svetlana (Kliouka) , who essentially breaks off with Tony, the crazy (but gorgeous) Irina (played by Oksana Lada), who is so essentially catty...

It's definitely worth watching, but the series could have gained extra grades by simply sacrificing some episodes (like Cold Cuts...)

The Shield (2002–2008)

As cop series go

[9/10 · 20 September 2022]

The story lines weave in and out and stretch from one season to the next, always leaving a little tension.... The characters are more real in their foibles than one usually expects from television fare, and this is probably what makes the series watchable over a long period. The viewer lives along with them, the ups, the downs, the quirkiness (Dutchboy is a little too quirky)... And the acting and language is by and large excellent. Hand-held cameras make the whole thing immediate.

The positives actually manage to drown out the negatives, namely the unreal emotional instability of Vic's crowd, and the contrived emotional structures... Tina and Julian's interactions are exaggerated (no one would stick around Julian the way she does, and her reference to his gayness is simply too much cherry on top of her lack of tact... As for Julian, he is permanently grumpy and his character is, indeed, too 2D for my taste, he never loosens up).

Maybe it's really like that at a precinct, but the tendency of American producers and directors to want to create supermen and -women and then try to introduce failings in their character appears irresistible. These men blow up at the slightest provocation, and my main thought is "They should never wear guns..." .... That is the star that is missing in the line up.

But these are minor errors, and they are natural for a series that is so long. The characters do at least remain consistent, and that does allow them to grow on us.... Chiklis' performance is excellent. Brilliant appearances by Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker... I wonder how many doors were destroyed during the filming .... I lost count.

The Deuce (2017–2019)

Worth seeing, even if....

[8/10 · 28 August 2022]

Woke folk, avert thine eyes.... I came back to my native city in the 70s, and I lived on the lower East Side in a squat, working hard hours in a town that mixed superrich and superpoor.

So yes, there's a bit of nostalgia there. But the series does manage to portray a world in New York that most New Yorkers ignored for their own sanity.

Series 1 is very good, the acting is amazing and the "courage" it takes for some actresses and actory to bare their bodies is remarkable. I am sure part of the success of the film has to do with prurience, but who cares? It's up in Harlem, not in Hell's Kitchen, but you can't tell.

Series 2, the story drifts a bit, and there are some moments that are too pat (like the whore-become-social worker and the pimps who are, occasionally, good-hearted. This was a tough, violent exploitative business, but when an American looks back at his past, he likes to put on pink-tinted glasses. Also the storyline starts to drift, as if there were rewrites, or elements that needed to be inserted to stretch it a bit... Things like Frankie and the two ((SPOILERETTE)) left shoes is a little unrealistic.

By and large though, excellent work.... for an American series. .

Devs (2020)

Is this a joke or is it serious

[3/10 · 25 August 2022]

I'll admit to being a reluctant SciFi viewer. SciFi bugs me.... because anything goes if needed to force plots into a certain direction. Having said that, there are of course some terrific ones, Planet of the Apes (the original one) I found rather intriguing, 2001 I saw as a 13-year old, and many horror movies I found belonged to that genre...

The sad part about this series, in my books, is that it takes a lot of great photography, a fundamentally good idea, but plugs a banal story into it while trying consistently to hide it behind terribly hip, cool, "intelligent" quotes, long silences disguising the absence of anything really coherent... and then splatters the viewer with quantum physics clichés.... I have an allergy to that.... Actors visibly repeating their lines, contradictions, like a new Lily lover telling her she's funny.... when barely cracks a smile throughout the whole series ... The heavily-bearded Offermann is also typecast as a kind of latter-day hippy (do I recognize a bit of Jaron Lanier, here?) spouting what Colbert would call truthiness, I gather.

The characters are far too one-dimensional, and spare me the "is-she-Finnish? Blond baddy" who seems to have Forest's attention, and you realize, she has his sex drive, and the androgynous Lily and her Samurai who's courage shrivels at the first sign of violence... It reeks of Berkeley's pseudo-intellectualism and political wokeness before its time... I could somehow accept a lot (it's a series made for the budding thinker crowd of the early 21st century, pretending too be deep and intellectual* (watch out spoiler footnote), but the scene in the lecture hall with the "dwarf/deformed intellectual old sexless lady "debating à la Hollywood" (you'll see what I mean) is what made my view tip to the 3 stars... Pull off the veil of long silences, strange phenomena, weird lighting... this was just another crime thriller. And it evolves that way. Here's the deal: A good sci-fi film has to be 60 % believable. This one is not.

* The premise of this movie is simple, that given powerful enough computing and enough data, you can predict anything, and what has happened can be restored... It's an idea that even I thought up years ago (while writing a storyline).

Crimson Tide (1995)

Been there, seen that

[3/10 · 24 August 2022]

As a teenager (early) I really loved stories about the sea. I read the Caine Mutiny before seeing the film.

Somehow, this one doesn't cut it for me at all. Too much forced and fake tension happening without the slightest suspense, sort of as an afterthought, the pacing is wooden. As for the plot and the characters: they are all from Hollywood's cabinet of clichés, to be pulled out for very movie they make, literally. No surprises. If you can do your bookkeeping while following a movie, you know you're in lightweight territory. I actually note at the beginning how the movie will develop. And Hollywood never fails me.