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Jupiter's Legacy: By Dawn's Early Light (2021)
Decent but also a bit cheesy.
I was quite liking it, then the big fight at the end got a bit cheesy and silly. The good guys are getting their asses kicked, one of them has already been killed and the bad guy is about to "go nuclear" and kill thousands. Then the big possible deal-breaker reveal, we find there are members of the team that can kill the bad guy and stop it all with a single punch at any time but (normally) don't because ohhh there's a code ohhh. Not sure i can get past that nonsense. I'll watch one more but it's got some explaining to do.
Modern Love: Rallying to Keep the Game Alive (2019)
Utterly devoid of any meaning.
Basically, it's about a husband who just doesn't seem to care about his wife and she consistently puts up with him and then the story jumps ahead 2 years at the end and we find that he's now a good guy who treats her with respect and they live happily ever after. I rewatched part of the ending to see what i missed to explain any of this but couldn't see it. The performances and general writing were quite good but the overall story was utterly devoid of any meaning.
The Dark (2018)
Over-extended short film
Very nicely filmed, very well played and great looking but at best this is a 30 minute short stretched out to 90 minutes. There just isn't enough content to fill the time and almost every scene is needlessly allowed to carry on for 20 seconds more than needed. This is definitely coming from the Haneke school of film-making. It's all mood and unspoken mystery that never tries to come together in any way. If you're in the mood for that then give it a go but don't expect it to win you over if not.
Creed II (2018)
Cheesy like Rocky IV but without the atmosphere and thrils.
How this gets 7.4 here on IMDB and 84% on Rotten Tomatoes is beyond me. It was an averagely entertaining film but deeply flawed. Maybe i was just in a bad mood because reading some of the negative reviews here none of them point out the problems i had with the film. Basically Creed II tried on one one hand be a very cliched cheesy film but also seemed to think it was a classy, craft-film at the same time. It follows and does many of the same cheesy things Rocky IV did but at the same time pulls back on the musical cues that tell us how to feel and almost mutes the audience reactions during the fights so that everything is subdued. Now Rocky IV is a classic of fun cheese and if you're going down that road then that's how you do it, you can't have your cake and eat it like Creed II tries. The fight shots in the ring were all so obviously filmed in front of a green screen and terribly composited into the crowd backgrounds that it constantly drew me out of the illusion and i don't understand why no one else has mentioned this. As i mentioned before, there's a complete lack of audience reaction and atmosphere during the fights and stirring musical cues were non-existent despite every punch thrown being a silly overblown haymaker that the fighters just shook off. Nothing worked well for me at all, there was no excitement!
I quite liked the quieter moments, that's the true heart of a film like this but as many have stated, Creed just comes off as whiny and weak.
Manifest (2018)
Watchable but frustrating trope filled rubbish.
I sat through the first episode without too much difficulty but was constantly unimpressed by much of what i saw. Lots of tropes and join the obvious dots plotting. The worst thing and ultimately the thing that will make this the final episode i see was the mcguffin of the characters giving themselves advice from the future somehow. The problem being that this advice was always written in the most frustratingly vague way possible, so vague in fact, that it takes the characters exactly 42 minutes to figure out each week. Maybe there will be some good reason for this, but i fear that each episode is going to be a race against time to figure out what this barely helpful advice means. It relies on the audience being to dumb to question the vagueness in the first place.
13 Reasons Why (2017)
Great show but so badly misunderstood.
I'm writing this spoiler-free review because this show has touched a nerve in me and the reaction to it by many people is confusing me. I strongly feel that the story was a very honest portrayal of the downward spiral into suicide and as a result i was affected quite deeply by it. Most of the negative reactions i've read to it are from people thinking that Hannah was just dramatic, over sensitive and self-victimising and therefore had no "right" to kill herself or blame anyone else. If you thought that then you simply didn't get it. What's annoying about it is that that was the exact point of the entire show. It was told from Hannah's POV and was supposed to show how her own emotional weakness and psychological personality were equally or even mainly responsible for her downward spiral. That's the complexity of suicide and the human mind. You can be a great, loving and generous person, as Hannah was, but also be incredibly flawed and lose sight of reality and self-victimise to ridiculous lengths.
I just wanted to advise new viewers to not assume that just because it's being told from the POV of the suicide victim doesn't mean that the writers are trying to say that what she thinks is always fact or morally right. The entire point is that some people are very sensitive, emotionally unstable and deeply flawed and it causes them to make bad decisions at times and these things can compound into suicide.
I'd just like to add that if you had already understood what i just described but still disliked it and thought Hannah was unrelatable and unlikable then that's grand, each to their own. If you didn't however then you really missed a fundamental part of the story about the reality of suicide.