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Vvardenfell_Man
Reviews
The Blackout (2013)
Not sure where the 10/10 reviews came from
I hate to accuse people who posted here 10 years ago of being paid shills for the production, but that seems to be the case with these reviewers. If you've ever seen one of those movies where someone in L. A. just decided to go ahead and make a movie about things they thought would be cool and/or funny without realizing that there's a world outside of L. A. where movies are primarily objects of consumption, you've seen this. Middle-aged weirdos who care too much about their looks and not enough about anything else should be banned from polluting the world of art with garbage like this.
If Quentin Tarantino directed The Hangover it might be good. Imagine if that happened, but instead of Quentin Tarantino they could only get his non-union Russian equivalent.
Metropolis (1927)
Nothing New Under The Sun
There are not words for this. That is the beauty of silent cinema.
There must have been something magical about cinema in the 1920s. The fundamental principles of filmmaking have not changed, but back when they were discovering for the first time the power of this sort of cinematic epic, one needed more vision to see things that had not yet been accomplished.
Maybe Metropolis--that blend of sci-fi and philosophy and filmic technology--was always inevitable in cinema. No film of its kind since its release 97 years ago has contributed as much to urban science fiction. It is a refreshing breath of fresh air to see something like this, but it is also disturbing to realize how little has changed; that we may have slipped closer to the totalitarian horrors portrayed onscreen in this masterpiece, rather than avoiding them as one might have hoped.
House of the Dragon (2022)
Shakespeare Already Exists
Something is rotten in the state of television. Simultaneously a bloated pageant of scenes that take too long to reach their point and an experimental exercise in minimalism that gives you far less than what you expect, this show lacks the compelling drama and relatable human (i.e., quasi-modern proto-bourgeois post-modern) characters that made the first few seasons of Thrones so strong.
If you want this without the suck factor, check out The Hollow Crown. There's a show with good writing. You could waste your time trying to make out what's happening in the dimly lit and unconvincing sets or the strangely cramped outdoor spaces. You don't need to. Whatever you enjoy about this show is present in Shakespeare. If that's too wordy for you, just read some George R. R. Martin. I guarantee it will be more illuminating than these sound-stages were illuminated (see what I did there?).
House of the Dragon: A Son for a Son (2024)
We've been doing this for how long now?
Yawn. I literally chose to go to bed rather than finish this episode last night. All of the same "creative decisions" that never worked but got passes because D&D made excuses that fans bought (Non-diegetic music is bad, lighting that allows the audience to see what's happening is bad, underwritten political drama is the best drama, fan service > story and theme--the list of GoT's errors is long) for years during the run of the original show. Somehow, in the years since the end of GoT season 8, we've forgotten how unsatisfying this whole style of storytelling is. George R. R. Martin is a wonderful writer and I look forward to The Winds of Winter being published (someday hopefully maybe), but when you put his work in the hands of hacks, they produce crap. Then again, that's what hacks do.
None of this is to mention the drab costumes and the characters who are essentially the same: power-hungry, angry aristocrats who ride dragons or captain boats or fight in armies. There is hardly anything to distinguish these people from each other (thank God they decided to cast Black actors and give the audience a way to distinguish between Targaryens and Velaryons--it might be the show's only saving grace).
Maybe it's the 2-year gap between seasons but I just don't care about or remember these characters. Then again, even in season 1, I wasn't satisfied with the constant recasting and jumps forward in time. Maybe this show, which is supposed to have universal appeal to fans of fantasy and gritty political drama, isn't for me, even though I fall happily into both camps.
The Boys (2019)
Not many shows can distract me during a Star Trek: TNG rewatch...
...but then there's The Boys. If you ran Watchmen through a meat grinder and stitched it back together using razor wire thread, the abomination that emerged would either be awful or The Boys. This show nails everything that cynics hate about the MCU, DCU, and comic book superheroes in general. From the way it dissects the narcissism that would come along with superhero status to the way it brings normal human beings to the foreground and makes you care about them more than you do the supes, everything about The Boys is high quality. The entire cast is top-notch and the writing is brutally on point, not afraid to point fingers and never pulling punches. Great show.
Return to Oz (1985)
For Some Reason, They Don't Make 'Em Like This Anymore
Remember when James Franco played the Wizard? I, for one, wish I could forget. We have plenty of terribly uninspired and derivative fantasy tripe today. We have very few examples of Tolkienesque post-apocalyptic weird fantasy franchises that have been successfully adapted into feature films, especially in the last 15 years. Remember The Dark Tower? Again, I wish I could forget.
But then you come across something like this and remember what can be fun in a fantasy sequel.
There is a wonderful moment where Dorothy comes across the ruins of the Emerald City, not long after realizing that she's been walking along the ruins of the Yellow Brick Road; there she and her talking chicken find people turned to statues and a gang of psychopathic weirdos who ride around on training wheels and may or may not be robots. It's such a bizarre and beautiful scene. It's what dark fantasy, and sequels to works of fantasy, are all about.
First Reformed (2017)
Schlock With Class
This is high art because of the things that went right: casting, direction, cinematography, and...well, everything else, I guess. It's hard to find a flaw. A premise like this requires either enormous restraint or explosive in-your-face camp. It's harder to pull of the former, as restraint can come off as camp in many cases. How many overacted pastors have there been in the history of cinema, B-movie and otherwise? Rarely does a performance like Ethan Hawke's get the chance to shine like it does here. Films like Silence or Doubt come to mind, both of which are powerful scripts elevated further by performance and direction. First Reformed has a script full of every imaginable cliche and finds something new to say and an interesting way to say it.
Star Trek: Discovery: Life, Itself (2024)
Ugh?
This finale is weird. The ending reminds me of Melancholia. It looks like Book and Michael are having an end-of-the-universe party, not an end-of-series get-the-ensemble-cast-together-one-more-time moment. The Federation seems to consist of Starfleet headquarters and a couple spaceships. Mission accomplished, guys--we're no better off than when we started.
Then Michael and Book kiss on the beach in a shot taken from the ending of Rogue One. Whatever.
The actual action of the episode--I hesitate to call it a story--is just a lot of explosions and video game setpieces. The epilogue is unwanted and unearned.
Good riddance.
Babylon 5: Into the Fire (1997)
Sub-Anticlimax
There's anticlimactic and then there's this. There are disappointing finales and then there's this. There's boring and lazy writing that pads itself with effects shots and then there's this.
What is "this?" Good question. "This" is the end of several long arcs on Babylon 5 and the beginning of several new ones, as well as the middle of many others. It's an important episode. It should be sold a little better than it is. There is a point where our glorious protagonist literally says "get the hell out of our galaxy" to a pair of representatives of ancient races that were just about to blow up all sentient life not long ago. Even more baffling than the fact that this was written is the fact that they listen.
Babylon 5 (1993)
Star Trek writers, take some notes once in a while
This show, man. This show. I'm watching the last 2 seasons just to finally finish what I already understand to be the best televised space opera and things happen that give me pause even though I'm barely paying attention to the plot. Characters start in one place, transition to another, turn themselves inside out, vomit up their old exteriors, and then put them on as clothing-and it mostly makes sense. Is it a Lord of the Rings ripoff? Yes. Are some of those characters portrayed in a very '90s sort of way? Yes. Are those bad things? No. They give it charm. Modern space opera is bad at comedy *and* levity. This show finds levity *in* its bad comedy. That's the soul of tragedy. And this show has it.
Suburban Sasquatch (2004)
Enjoyably Awful
Every single element of the production is flawed, incompetent, and ill-conceived. Why, just now, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that in the scene where the journalist is asking his boss to let him do research, outside the window is a day-for-night social gathering in some kind of big housing or athletics development. Really, really strange. It makes the natural light in the scene that immediately follows seem...well, unnatural. But I guess that's just what happens when you decide nobody needs to know how lighting works and press on with your awful movie anyway. If you like bad movies--I mean if you like being confused by odd decisions and rushed productions--this is for you.
Caprica (2009)
Westworld meets Yellowjackets
This show's cancellation just goes to show: people who liked BSG for the robots and violence weren't interested in the actual themes of the story. I can only assume that this failed to keep the same viewers who lamented the presence of narrative closure in the series finale of Galactica, or claimed that thematic consistency was bad because the themes and sci-fi questions being asked weren't identical to those of Star Trek or Stargate. This is a show that throws everything at the wall and doesn't even bother to see if it's gonna stick. Paint, pasta, the kitchen sink, it all goes up on the screen in a fascinating attempt to create something both totally new and intrinsically connected to an already successful franchise. This is a really interesting show that should have been given more time. We deserve Star Trek: Discovery as punishment for not appreciating this show enough.
Battlestar Galactica: The Oath (2009)
Yeah, This One's Good
Some reviewers here would really benefit from watching something like Battleship Potemkin or The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (or any Caine Mutiny film, it's a classic premise) before saying that this is an unbelievable mutiny. It's not. It builds on established character and world elements, portrays believable character reactions to difficult situations, and is a climactic outburst of violence after a despondend and hopeless episode where people were literally yelling for God to come down and beg for their forgiveness. This is a good way for Gaeta's character to work out his arc: by taking a stand for something after seasons of seeming like a yes-man to whoever was in charge, we see what he really believes. It puts him and everyone else into a different light. Seriously, if you gave this a bad review because of a supposedly unbelievable breakdown in moral and military authority in a military sci-fi setting, you should actually watch a movie once in awhile.
Battlestar Galactica: Razor (2007)
It Died In Editing
I can see why the idea of this thing's format made sense, but in execution it fails miserably. It could have succeeded as well as anyone could have expected. The bones are there. The flesh, however, wants to fall off of them. That is to say, the framing device that contains the actual interesting and new narrative content is fairly dull and adds nothing to the plot of the series as a whole.
What's really frustrating about this 'film' is that it falls short of accomplishing its purpose satisfactorily. All the pieces are present, but many of them feel like they were already in existence. Every scene in the 'present' feels very much like what it probably was: footage that couldn't fit into a regularly scheduled episode of the season and was lost in editing, deleted scenes that almost were--so many that a whole bunch of new scenes had to be shot to justify their cost on the basis of the expectation that people would want more.
Well, joke's on you, SyFy: I bought a used DVD copy of this 10 years ago on discount, which is the best way to get the value of this. I still regret the purchase, but it's saved me the trouble of having to wonder if it's worth renting on Amazon when I rewatch the series.
Star Trek: Discovery: Whistlespeak (2024)
The Worst Kind Of Prime Directive Story
This is just bizarre in so many places, I don't know where to begin. Star Wars was ripping off Frank Herbert's wind trap idea--a technology for acquiring water from airborne moisture on a desert planet--50 years ago. It was a little distressing to see Starfleet's best and brightest explaining to each other how that would work at the beginning of this episode, so close to the season finale. The purpose of the season-long framing narrative is more questionable than ever here. If the recap of last week is to be believed then we're coming off of a cliffhanger, but this week gives us a continuation of action that was happening before the cliffhanger began.
But let's leave aside the banal sci-fi premise and structural shortcomings of the season as a whole. Is this episode good? What mystery will Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys uncover this week? On a world suffering from a terrible drought, but still full of luscious California redwoods with healthy green leaves (just shoot at Vasquez Rocks already!), Nance and the boys disguise themselves as people who communicate through birdsong (but only when offscreen). The map brought them here, just like the Red Angel did several seasons ago. The backpack tells them that they have to fix a weather tower. Boots the Monkey betrays the Hardy Boys and kidnaps the map, though, so Tilly and Burnham have to split up: one of them fixes the tower while the other tracks down Boots. No spoilers for how it ends! But it's terrible.
From now on I will treat every season-long arc structured around following or looking for a map like a season-long Dora the Explorer B-plot. There's no reason to care about any of this. This is neither serialized nor episodic storytelling. It's just a shameless cash-grab shot in the woods in California. The aliens are probably the most uninspired we've ever seen: their entire culture is defined by drought, but instead of intelligently dealing with scarcity intelligently themselves, the writers chose to portray them as religious fanatics who are too dumb to fix the tech they depend on. If it weren't for our white saviors (I know the DISCO has a diverse crew, but I don't know what else to call these people: they're more like conquistadors or privateers than explorers at this point) showing up in the nick of time, these idiots would have died of thirst before their broken weather system fell over on their town.
As for the sub-MacGuffin of the week: Sci-fi needs to move beyond Chariots of the Gods plots. Stargate did it to death already. The Chase did The Chase already. Why are we doing any of this?
Battlestar Galactica (2004)
A Perfect Show (I Hate The Distributors, Though)
Edit: Less than a week after I posted this review the series shows up as an included show on Prime. The original review was just a complaint about the lack of streaming availability of this classic series.
I'm going to address only the finale, though, because that's where a serialized multi-season story arc's ability to stick the landing comes into play. This show annoyed many viewers at the time--the dumber ones, I like to think--by consistently and intelligently addressing themes of faith and personal identity. Westworld made the same mistake, although its ending was muddled in a way that BSG's never is. It was never a story about clear-headed atheists doing space atheism--that was Star Trek. This was always a show about people doing things because they believed them, or got stuck in a corner after manipulating other people into believing something. "Who are you when you have only your own lies?" is a question that this show dares to ask, and it also offers an answer, which is refreshing in an age where prestige television tries to take all possible philosophical positions (especially in areas relating to religion).
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Subspace Rhapsody (2023)
Strong, Wrong, Fabulous
This could be an episode of The Orville. I mean that in the best way possible. It has the sensibility of a ridiculous send-up of the best things about Trek with a format that would fit well on a Seth MacFarlane show. This is much more fun and interesting than anything Discovery has managed to do in 5 seasons (not to mention Picard's better-left-unmentioned first 2 seasons and Swiss-cheese 3rd season). It's a fun hour of sci-fi musical comedy with light stakes and a plot that is advanced by the meta elements of the musical (singing about how weird it is that they're singing, for example). It's bold and it's brash and it most certainly DOESN'T belong in the trash.
Enterprise: Demons (2005)
Hard To Watch Today
The idealism at the heart of Trek is on full display here, although the themes it chooses to tackle have been addressed better elsewhere already. "Human supremacy" is a thinly veiled metaphor for white supremacy and with the way America is going in 2024 it's a hard thing to stomach. Where DS9 managed to actually have some depth with its outings like Far Beyond the Stars--which may be the best episode of Trek--Enterprise found a way to shove race relations in at the tail end of its run. In a world edging toward totalitarianism, it's hard to watch something produced at such a pivotal moment in modern history have such an innocent naiveté w/r/t all of this. In the world of Jonathan Archer, people who try to overthrow governments in the name of legalizing prejudice immediately face justice. We can only hope that the future follows this example more than the recent past and present.
Enterprise: These Are the Voyages... (2005)
Oh
Chef is Commander Riker, it's all a holodeck program, yadda yadda yadda. Everyone knows that this is the worst part of the episode. This should have been a 3- or 4-parter that followed directly, chronologically speaking, from the last non-Mirror Universe arcs that the show explored. The whole season was structured to lead up to the formation of the Federation. The letdown is the way it's addressed here. Instead of giving the NX-01 a proper sendoff, the writers chose to lean on the goodwill of TNG fans. What we got was, honestly, more contrived than season 2 of Picard. It would be one thing if the Riker segments showed us things we didn't already know. Daniels accomplished that in the third season, though, when he told Archer why the mission to destroy the Xindi superweapon was important and showed him the future. So who cares!?!? I seriously don't understand the rationale behind this. Maybe Frakes just wanted to run around in his uniform again and Marina Sirtis probably just wanted a paycheck (nothing against her, actors are workers and this was probably an easy gig; she gave everything the performance required). All in all this is pointless and embarrassing.
Enterprise: Bound (2005)
Nothing New
This is a plot-heavy season with multi-episode arcs all over the place. Its weakest episodes are the monster- or villain-of-the-week plots that are probably recycled from earlier series like TNG or TOS. Who knows how many Phase II scripts are still lying around, unproduced, waiting for a good doctoring? This could be any episode of any series of Trek, which is interesting given its place at the tail end of ENT. We've spent 2 seasons watching things develop toward the utopian future of the 23rd and 24th centuries. The Andorians, Vulcans, and Tellarites are canonically the founding species of the Federation so it's gratifying to see their progression toward unification.
Then we get this episode and the Orion slave girls show up. There's really not enough space on the television screen for all the T&A that wants to be on display here. In another format--maybe a differently exploitative one, like pornography or '70s grindhouse cinema--they might have been less intrusive. Plus, we saw T'Pol's bum and have heard people talk about it for 4 seasons now. There's enough skin on display here to give any Puritan whiplash.
The Ring (2002)
Watch The Original. Please.
This movie sucks. Things just happen for no reason. The narrative just throws things at the wall to see what sticks. It has few of the positive qualities of the original Japanese film. Take out the fundamental context of the mythology--i.e., Japan--and the story is weird and unsettling but lacking in substantial content. Naomi Watts screams a lot and people die and bizarre occurrences occur bizarrely. Big whoop. Seven days? More like seven minutes--to being totally bored out of your mind! Maybe not all the way out of your skull, but definitely out of your mind. It's just fundamentally not something that needed to exist.
Franklin (2024)
If You Have A Problem With Subtitles, You'd Better Speak The Language
The number of posts on here that complain about the presence of subtitles in this multi-lingual production is maddening. Apparently closed captioning makes things unwatchable. And apparently the only possible way to improve this show is to stick a fake nose and wig on Michael Douglas, judging by other reviews that don't make as much mention of subtitles.
Deal with it. This is a great production. It looks beautiful and the performances are good. The story is relatively timely, too, managing to draw effective parallels between 18th- and 21st-century ways of conducting diplomacy.
Seriously, if you have a problem with subtitles, go away.
Star Trek: Discovery: Mirrors (2024)
Another Week, Another Clue, Another Opportunity To Wonder: Who Really Cares?
Back to the mirror universe, or something. Or to an interdimensional rift that a version of the Enterprise from the mirror universe is stuck in. It's not the Defiant from ENT s4; it would have to be Archer's enterprise. So I guess we now know what happened to that ship after the events of Mirror, Mirror. Because we all cared so much about that.
Maybe we could have an episode that consists of nothing but our protagonists talking about what the technology they're seeking could accomplish, or what they'd like to do with it when they got their hands on it? Or the antagonists, hell, I don't care--seriously, I don't care. I'm not invested in the story here. I don't think there's been any forward progression all season. There's a little in this episode, coming in the form of Mall and Loch's (sp?) backstory, but it doesn't give us much. Over-the-top performances by human characters, acting like they're just 21st-century people who happen to live in the 25h century, continue to ruin otherwise decent scenes. We're still chasing the same people, looking for the same clues. The guy from Battlestar Galactica and the guy from RENT are good, as usual.
Enterprise: Cold Station 12 (2004)
Reprehensible Premise
A few ENT episodes have felt atavistic on this rewatch. This one calls back to debates about genetic engineering, abortion, and stem cell research that this show has delved into before. Unfortunately it handles them with the intelligence of a rabid dog. There are hamfisted attempts to comment on the 'grey' area of genetic research, but only enough to let us know that in the end it was good that bioconservatism won out. In an age where this sort of technology is possible, but laws threaten to prevent its use in cases where it could be medically helpful, this episode lands like a wet fart.
Let me be clear: this episode doesn't so much say that CRISPR-type tech, used with the intent of creating a super-race, is bad bad. It does seem to say that attempting to cure genetic disorders is bad. There is something repugnant about this future.
Enterprise: Storm Front (2004)
Nazi Aliens? Hell Yes
This season has had its ups and downs. This episode certainly doesn't. It's cheez wizz all the way through: time-traveling aliens have come back to help the Nazis conquer America. Naturally, the only possible way to save the day is for Captain Archer to work with a couple of Brooklyn thugs and this episode's love interest to drive fascism and futuristic particle weapons from America's heartland. This is B-movie heaven. I always love media that takes its time and waits to throw the Nazi twist in. It's a staple of '70s and '80s B-movies. The fact that Enterprise waited this long to do this premise shows remarkable restraint.
Best moment is definitely the part where the Nazi alien says "When we get back, you'll never have existed!" and then the mob guy kills him. The alien costumes are outstanding.