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Venom (2018)
Sony still hasn't found a compatible host
Disclaimer: My most definite introduction and impression of Venom has been from the 90's Spider-man: TAS. I thought, it'd be a great, gritty anti-hero movie.
After BvS and Suicide Squad I tempered my expectations, I expected nothing. Maybe I was in the closet, when it came to my expectations.
It's an extremely generic action movie, it seems cool for a few minutes, has an Alien type of vibe when it starts, but as it rolls along nothing really unfolds much and maybe it doesn't really need to, because Eddie having the symbiote would be interesting enough. But the movie doesn't do anything with it. The "edgy confrontational" reporter from "Nu-Yooock" is what you get, which I guess was to be expected, judging by the trailers. And it just goes on as this sort of cartoonish buddy-cop flick.
There is no interesting duality to the Eddie Brock/Venom character, it's not even that violent. It often feels like a boy and his dog flick, the symbiote spites Eddie in very generic comedic ways, helps fix his relationships, even starts to like other characters. There's nothing NOT banal or generic about Eddie, the villain and his plans, the symbiotes and "their plan". You can't even spoil this movie. You've seen it. Trust me.
You saw the symbiote talking in the trailer and comparing how that was shown in the Spider-man:TAS, it just dawns on you how not subtle it is. It adds another layer of lame, the opposite of "show, don't tell". Couple of elements of blatant expositions here and there as well.
If it were anymore toothless, thoughtless and generic, you'd probably have Eddie showing Venom a hip-hop song and then maybe at the end teach it to get jiggy or whatever.
The SFX were cool. Venom looked cool, which is probably the solitary idea behind this project.
Let There Be Light (1980)
PTSD is as treatable as the common cold if not easier
I never ever bothered with the review, but with this one, seeing the overwhelming sea of 10/10, I just couldn't let this slide.
This has the looks of a propaganda piece. Which part of this supposed to be a documentary? I don't know if you have to have any exceptional education in psychology (unfinished Bachelor program over here), but this has been made to do a few things:
1) downplay the severity of psychological trauma by showing how apparently easy it is to get all that sorted out
2) and how easy it would be to go back into the world
It gives only the slightest admission to that trauma and readjusting to regular life is a problem, but only to show that apparently you can fix that in a 5 minute talk/hypnosis therapy and then have a group session talking about how you're fine and you can easily go back to normal and, let's say, if future employers might not be worried about a state of an individual, it's pretty much just unwarranted stigma on their part.
I mean, you could even nitpick here about the somewhat cinematic cuts, whether the people there seemed believable and how none of them have any physical scars. Oh yeah, and this film wasn't shot by an independent movie maker, that is to say, there was some favoritism at play probably on how you want to spin this.
Huston seemed to do pretty much everything to NOT make this demoralizing and it still wasn't enough, since it wasn't released until the 1980s.
Ronal Barbaren (2011)
Well, the animation is decent, the rest isn't
My god.. This movie is so weak. First of all - not a cartoon for kids, if you didn't read/know that already. I've never done a review before but given the high grade here, I've decided to have a swing at it and sorry if it's all over the place.
The story isn't anything new and probably anything new wasn't needed - you can still have good fun with a basic story as told in the plot summary above.. but the movie just doesn't have or do anything with it. The writing is so boring and infantile, not even jackass-funny infantile, mind you. Just your some-kids-learned-some-new-curse-words infantile. It tries so hard to be funny and it shows. No adult jokes, just adult language. That's the comedy here and all it really accomplishes is that you can't show the cartoon to your kids (also a little dash of violence). It cheapens it as if the movie wasn't handicapped enough with the hack writing. The characters are forgettable or just boring and at times just so stupid it's just plain annoying (well, the bard in particular).
Since it's a Denmark flick, the original language was probably Danish (I assume) and the dub over wasn't lip-synced, which is not the end of the world, but still - a minor annoyance. Another thing about the dub.. is it me or does nobody there in the dub give a damn about the roles or is it just how the script was written, or is it that just nobody in the movie was really anybody (again referring that most of them are not really memorable)? I mean, even in Disney's, Pixar's or Dreamwork's films you can at least enjoy the acting, the characters are animated and you, whilst still watching essentially a movie for kids, can still sit through it and maybe even be entertained.
It's around 87 minutes, but for some reason doesn't seem long whilst being overall boring and unfunny, so that could be a sort of a plus (?). It COULD'VE been a passable kid-flick, because the animation is pretty good .. well, not putting the big budget companies to shame as other reviewers say here, but solid (and by the many overly positive reviews, you'd think, the directors and actors gave themselves a pat on the back for this "stellar job"). It'd be a solid kid flick if you'd cut out the adult themes, but it's not. Because it didn't. Because the adult theme appears to be added by kids who are still giddy about the new naughty words they learned and the weak slapstick comedy they added few and far between to remember or take notice. (Or maybe there's a good heft of comedy lost in translation, but I doubt it)
So in short - watch something else.