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Pandora (2019)
Poor acting, worse writing; cheesy and clearly cheap.
It's like watching the characters (not the actors) from Red Dwarf trying to do a serious sci fi drama with the budget of the first series. Some of the acting is so bad as to be laughable.
Bosch (2014)
Can't recommend this enough
Bosch is a hard-nosed, brusque homicide detective who doesn't always colour within the lines and tends not to be very well liked by senior law enforcement, criminals, or lawyers as a result, but he has a single-minded focus and is driven to get to the truth. The original author went to great pains to make his descriptions of police procedures as accurate as possible, and the screenwriter and director seem to have carried this attention to detail into the series (at least, as far as a layperson like myself can tell).
As a long time fan of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, I went into this with some trepidation, as is usually the case when watching a TV or film adaptation of a favourite book or series, but I needn't have worried. Not a single character felt out of place or poorly portrayed in any of the five seasons so far (I've binged them in the last week).
If you like a gritty whodunnit series with a few intertwined stories and well developed characters, you cannot go wrong with Bosch. Watch it!
Nancy Drew (2019)
A bunch of 20 year olds acting like 14 year olds, with ghosts
This series is a shocking disappointment so far, and an affront to the original stories rather than an homage. They've made Nancy physically older but, at the same time, mentally younger. She's childish and petulant, and her friends are mostly airheads.
But worst of all is the introduction of actual supernatural entities into the story. From a story about a rational young girl applying her mental agility in solving crime by examining the clues, this has degenerated into a story about a young woman apparently on the edge of madness, questioning real ghosts for the answers to their own murder.
It's a travesty.
The Outpost (2018)
Slow starter with some issues but should have been given a chance
Sure, it had problems at first. It looked cheap, and the acting was a bit wooden, but as it picked up it has grown on me. I'm glad I stayed with it.
As many have said, the style is meant to be cheesy, cheap and cheerful. The story line is unfolding fairly well, and while the protagonist still only has her looks going for her, other characters (the tavern owner, for example) are keeping things interesting.
Worth a second go if you stopped early. Not everything is great from the get go.
Noah (2014)
Call this a fan-fiction?
It's plagiarised somewhat. Those two writers clearly copied it directly from that book by God. Not impressed.
Still, I really like the bit where a supposedly loving god causes a near extinction level event for every land-dwelling species on the planet just because one of those species wasn't working out quite as well as he'd hoped, despite him allegedly knowing everything that was going to happen so it shouldn't have come as a surprise.
That was almost as good as that film where the same loving god sends us his son to kill to save us from the hell that he designed for us as a punishment for us doing something he told us not to do, again despite knowing that we were going to do it anyway.
The Listener (2009)
Singularly the worst TV series I have watched in years
I've watched some pretty awful tripe in my time, but this takes the biscuit. I've started watching season one and managed to struggle through 3 episodes before giving up in disgust.
This is cheesy, contrived and painfully predictable with atrocious acting. The cast members might as well all be made of cardboard for the emotional range they display in their characters. They make Kristen Stewart look like Meryl Streep.
From the on-off like-a-light-switch girlfriend to the distrustful-to- hero-worshiping-and-back-again-in-an-instant detective, with a lead who, despite the ability to find the answer to every case immediately, makes the worst use of his talents imaginable just to draw out some kind of story to fit the 45 minutes required for each episode, this is an agonising and mind-numbing waste of time and effort.
Do. Not. Watch. I have no idea how this made it out of a first season, let alone to four. Better things have come and gone and yet this remains? This is why we can't have nice things.
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)
Not as poor as expected
I read these books after watching, and somewhat enjoying, Twilight. I found the books to be poor on the whole and would probably rate them as follows: Twilight - Reasonable. New Moon - Awful. Eclipse - Mediocre. Breaking Dawn - Laughable. I think I kept reading them for the same reason we slow down to look at an accident on the opposite carriageway.
That said, I'm watching the rest of the films, and probably for the same reason. So far, they're following the pattern of the books. I'd've given Twilight a 7 and New Moon a 1 (2 at the very most) though I have to say that the change of director between Twilight and New Moon was most likely the primary cause of such a despicable result.
Fortunately, they appear to have changed director again, and it shows in Eclipse. Despite the reviews here, I saw it today and, while I wouldn't say I was overly impressed I was, at least, pleasantly surprised to see that things had improved dramatically since New Moon, both in cinematography, screenplay and on the acting front too.
The three stars, Stewart, Pattinson and, er, the kid who never wears a shirt, were still pretty wooden in this, but the overall effect of the film was neither as disjointed nor as cringe-worthy as that of its predecessor. It's still cheesy, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't laughing myself out of the cinema at the end or feeling embarrassed to even be associated with such trash.
If you liked Twilight, I think you'll like this. If you liked New Moon, you're bound to like this but then you're probably not even bothering to read reviews and are most likely about fourteen and female.
Hulk (2003)
Can see why they missed out the word "Incredible."
There's nothing incredible about this film. In fact, to call it "The Mediocre Hulk" would have been inappropriately kind.
This film is a dirge from start to finish with, as so many people have said, a long, drawn-out introduction taking up the first half of the film before anything happens at all. This intro seems to serve no purpose but to show how vicious the main characters are with unpleasant vivisection scenes and the characters making jokes about test subjects' deaths. The intro could have been summed up in five minutes to allow for two hours of the big green giant bouncing around.
That said, in a way it's good that it didn't because two hours of such laughably plastic looking CGI would have been too much for me to take. He moved so fast and jerkily it seemed more like watching Bugs Life speeded up, with a touch of Benny Hill running around chasing big breasted women to Yakety Sax. He didn't have the menace the original Hulk had in the TV series and even his actions as the Hulk seemed to have no point to them at all.
I failed to see the point of the ending, if there was one. Its only purpose seemed to be to give me an excuse to get out and go home and ponder the pile of worthless trash I'd just spent my money and time on. Daredevil, XMen and X2 were all better than this by miles.
The people who've given positive reviews of this film need psychiatric help, there's nothing to give this any score at all. In cases where people have given 7/10, I'm sure they've missed a 0 and actually meant 7/100.
Even that's generous. 0%. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME ON THIS, PLEASE! It's basically a kids' film you wouldn't let your kids see.
Freak