Change Your Image
homsan toft
Reviews
The Leftovers: Lens (2015)
Amazing episode, kudos to director and actors
The family and I really like the series as a whole, but this episode floored me.
Towards the end I was thinking "this director is getting amazing acting out of all the characters, is that someone new?"
And indeed, it was the first episode done by Craig Zobel.
Well done, by the actors too of course, especially Carrie Coon & Regina King!
Bechdel Certified.
Really looking forward to rest of series (and Zobel's 2nd ep in this season)!
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
Quite fun oddball SF, don't get it wrong!
I quite liked the actual Cloverfield movie. It sat well in that small wave of alien-invasion movies.
Skipped the 2nd, since I like Sci-fi but not Captured-in-a-cellar movies. Also, with Cloverfield Lane it seemed clear we should take it more as a production company collection than as a series of related films.
Now, the 3rd movie with that C in its name is back to Scifi, with a vengeance! and without a connection!
Now, I relly like bleak indies and semi-indies like Love (tt1541874) (2014), Moon (tt1182345) (2009), Europa Report (tt2051879) (2013), the Swiss movie Cargo (tt0381940) (2009), Air (tt2091478) (2015), and more far off, Another Earth (tt1549572) (2011).
This movie is not really like any of these, but kind of related -- perhaps it's in the same coordinate space if you will. It is Scifi that adds some twists here and there, though they can't of course completely break out of the Hollywoo stamping molds.
Cloverfield Paradox has elements of one-by-one like Sunshine (2007) and countless others -- though in a flippant way. There is some mystery, some horror feints but neither scary nor comedy - more quirky.
Oddball. And on a space station.
So all in all a decent watch, with all-star cast (Crouching Tiger! IT Crowd! Niki Lauda! ...) doing decent-to-quite-good jobs of their characters. Just don't get hung up on the marketing bits and "C":s.
(I've knocked off a star for cheesy ending, including the trite family sentiment a-woman's-place-is-with-her-children spew)
Semper Fi (2001)
Enlist Now.
Seems mostly marines watched and care to comment on this TV pilot, I guess anyone sensible turned off before half of it had passed. I can't comment on its documentary qualities, knowing very little about details of Marine training, so I will only say how it play as a movie. (here be SPOILERS - but spoilers of what, really?)
Well... It plays as a simplistic recruiting film. Starship Troopers without irony or even a plot. A handful of characters from a batch of male recruits and two from a group of female recruits undertake their US Marine basic training. One guy kills himself, all the others persist through the hardships and pass their tests. All shed tears at the final ceremony and as we leave the tough, big, African-American drill instructor walks the empty barracks with a very slight smile lighting his otherwise stony features.
That's the plot outline. For drama we're invited to a series of highlights where the personal problems for some of the characters are displayed. Both recruits and problems are probably cast to match the statistics; half or more are non-Caucasian, mainly worker or immigrant's kids with few opportunities to get by in the land of the free. Did I mention this is a patriotic show to entice kids to join the US army? Well, the various character highlights are probably intended to illustrate how it's a great character-building experience that really puts you ahead in wisdom, strength and stamina. There is however not much logic or consequence to the scenes - they just follow one after another to fill the itinerary of points the army recruiters wanted to make.
Two scenes stand out as particularly bizarre:
(1) Instructor (afro-am as mentioned) sits them down to discuss "race and ethnicity." There have been some slurs from some white boys. He states that the Marines are not about race, asks for comments. One guy gets up and says (referring to himself) "This recruit is Jewish, sir!" End of scene. Yes, end of scene! One gets a feeling there was more, but it was edited out. The "I'm Jewish" bit just *had* to be left in because at the decoration and crying scene near the end, the instructor's personal words of encouragement and pride to the guy are "Mazel Tov", and this was so good they didn't want to cut just there. What do I know. As discussion of race and ethnicity issues in the US go, it's a little thin.
(2) (SPOILERS) We get to view an afro-am recruit quite a lot. His dad once was a Marine, and decorated for bravery in Vietnam. Yes Siree. But now he's in jail. On death row, to boot. For killing a man, no details given. The kid so wants his father to see him in Marine outfit. The father is set to be killed halfway through the film, but this is postponed. In the final scene in the film (after decoration scene) we see the dad strapped in his chair, about to get a lethal injection. Outside a glass wall, the kid, in Marine uniform, his mother, and a friend from boot camp (the spoiled rich kid who found himself and made it even though he just wanted away from his dad). The father smiles slightly, apparently to die a more-or-less happy man. End of film. This might be an outstanding moment in propaganda history (in spite of the plodding acting). So many troublesome features of US society put on direct display, in the hope that they will thereby just vanish. All racialism in police and judiciary, the gruesome record of killing its citizens (and children, and mentally disabled, and innocents), all that just goes away. The kid made it through the Marines' basic training, now he's ready to be decorated in the next Vietnam, and a prisoner can die happy.
My oh my, why didn't I just go to sleep.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Nope, nope, and, uh... almost
Just seen it w/ 2 friends, and... well the three of us weren't overly impressed.
1. Storyline. Omissions and some changes are always in order. Most of Jackson's changes in Pt. 1 follow the BBC radio version. Fine. Tolkien's pt.2 is fairly choking to me at times - he wanted chivalry, so there's a lot of kneeling and being knighted to serve The King etc. *yuck* to me - but lotsa people like it. Jackson skips much of that, and replaces it with a little bit of "die for the nation". yuck.
2. Characters. The novel has at least some complexity in several characters. They botch up things and pay for it. Good & educational. Jackson skips much of that, replacing some of it with his own invented father-daughter "follow your destiny" - "no I'll follow my heart" conflict. Not good enough.
Some characters are one-dimensional much of the time, but then they just flip to another pose without any apparent reason. Others are just sliced into rather thin cardboard. Gollum is an exception, being explicitly and over-explicitly schizo. Tolkien's creation was racialist (meaning: race determines character). Jackson "fixes" this by making everybody white except the rest, which are monsters. okaaayy... Now in Tolkien the elf-dwarf-man relation would perhaps show that race can be transcended with an effort (at least among good races). Here it's simply inexplicable why they're such good friends. Gollum is perhaps the saver characterwise, but then we move to...
3. Visuals Is this the greatest CGI of all time? Well, it's really good, but last I checked the clock it hadn't stopped ticking yet. The landscapes looked good - though the snow-clad mountain ranges got fairly repetitive. The massed creatures looked good and moved good. The single creature at close range (Gollum/Sméagol) looked like some latex CGI concoction. Not quite there yet, but perhaps in a few year's time. (oh, the trees just looked whacky, but what the heck, the idea is freaked-out anyway)
Then there's the nagging question, it's the most expensive, overwhelming, fantastic project, created by hundreds of talented people working for months... and we get *this*??? Watchable but immensely forgettable.