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ewanashford
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Rain Dogs (2023)
Tries to be a modern Withnail And I. Fails.
Sat through one and a half episodes and gave up. The show exists inside its own fever dream of what it believes "reeel loife" is like in London but nowhere else. I honestly believe the creator pitched this as a modern take on Withnail And I, but then fell down a flight of stairs onto their phone and the resultant nonsense became the scripts for the show. The actors are cosplaying as 'poor people' or whatever stereotype is needed for the plot to happen. Eccentric artist - check. Mentally ill rich gay criminal - check. Shocked to see Adrian Edmondson in this, but I guess he's got to pay the bills like everyone else.
Monster Family 2 (2021)
Forgettable
Hadn't watched the first one but we needed a hallowe'en movie to watch as a family. The animation is top notch, however, the plot is a mash of generic monsters in peril, so cliched it's probably ironic "oh no we're monsters again?" inciting incident and uninspiring vocal performances. I think it's one of those productions where the producers need to sell it to different territories and with different voice actors, so you don't get any identifiable facial expressions or tics. The worst example is Nick Frost as the Dad. Usually the animators have the voice cast's performance to use as a guide but I'm sure here the voice cast were hired during or after production.
All in all it was a forgettable 90 minutes with a weird mix of too much plot and not enough storytelling.
Desperate Hours (1990)
What happened?
I watched this last night, first time in nearly 30 years when I saw it on home video. It's a giant mess of a film. It's like watching great actors attempt a live uninterrupted play with no time to rehearse. The same goes for the cinematography, by turns beautiful then ridiculously clumsy. Again like it was a bad take that they ended up using. The performances are all over the place. And the music, whilst beautiful and cinematic, belongs in another film. Every cue use in this film is completely misused and creates the wrong mood compared to what's happening on screen.
The Emoji Movie (2017)
Terrible. Just terrible.
This was one of the worst films I have ever seen, and definitely the worst film I have taken the kids to for one simple reason.
My kids didn't laugh once.
They watched it, quietly. They even smiled. But no laughs. None.
In fact, there weren't any laughs that I could hear from anyone else in the cinema.
The plot, wafer thin as it is, centers on the notion that getting what you want, rather than need, is what matters. The main example of this is the High Five character (perfectly voiced by James Corden, and this is not a compliment BTW). His arc is to be adored and popular again, but there is no conflict at all. TJ Miller's "Meh" follows a similar flat-line progression of "characted not happy, expresses what they want, gets it"
The hacker character also has little to no driving action either.
And the simultaneous real-world plot involving a boy and girl? Forget about it. I think the filmmakers did and then remembered and hastily crow-barred a useless race-against-time final act that (SPOILER ALERT) in itself, makes no sense whatsoever (i.e. a kid that can't wipe their own phone? C'mon!)
This was a colossal waste of talent (apart from James Corden) and deserves to be consigned to the bargain bin.