Change Your Image
andrey-balandin
Ratings
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Reviews
Bones and All (2022)
Mostly disgusting
I don't find watching people covered in blood kiss romantic. Cannibalism is sickening and no amount of beautiful scenery or chemistry between the actors can compensate for the disgust of all the gore. The characters accepting themselves for who they are is all good and well, but as a viewer I am not taken in. I cannot switch from having just watched a gory murder with characters covered in blood all over to suddenly enjoying romance of young love on a road trip through beautiful scenery - it doesn't work like that. I am still shocked and disgusted, I cannot take in any of the supposed beauty. Sorry, but I just don't find cannibals relatable.
Nude (2017)
Clash of artistic views vs business needs over nudity
This movie could have been simply an experience of wallowing in female nudity. But the moderately revealing scenes are woven into an engaging plot following an expensive nude photography project jeopardized by clashing esthetic and business views. The the photographer's search for adoration and the models search for expression collides with the constraints imposed by the project business lead, resulting in contentions over the borderlines between beauty and obscenity, expressiveness and provocation, safe business choices and daring artistic choices. The clash culminates at the art display where the project final result is revealed and all participants speak their mind with little reservations.
Humans: Episode 8 (2018)
Fascinating storytelling faltering on technical details
The way that the lines of Niska, V/Odi, Mia Mattie and Leo come together is satisfying. The message of self-sacrifice (Mia, Laura and Neil) for the sake of peace and compassion is moving and inspiring. The prospect of the future of conscious life on Earth being the merger of humans and synths is compelling.
However, the technicalities have not been the writers' strong suit before (remember how easy it has been in the earlier episodes even for a beginner programmer like Mattie to hack anything ?) and they take new lows in this episode. The great reveal of what project Basswood means has been underwhelming and lazy. Apparently, the best minds in UK couldn't come up with another way to kill synths then by power surges, and there is no surge protection anywhere in synth camps nor in the grid in general, seriously? How about a hack instead? That would have been within the logic of the show that everything is hackable, the green-eyed synths in particular. The writers mentioned "Product recall" and should have run with this idea - e.g. the government could have figured out a way to activate a massive memory wipe or reset all conscious synths to to base configuration! That would have equated to killing them in moral sense, but perhaps it wouldn't have made for brutal imagery of humans vs machines stand-off.
The mixing of synth blood with human blood idea is beautiful on a metaphoric level but is a failure on the technical level. Synth blood is electrolyte and mixing it with human blood should spell death to a human (Leo), nor would it alter DNA to make for more advanced healing abilities, or better babies. If Leo's DNA wasn't modified there's no way Leo and Mattie's child could inherit Leo's super powers. Instead of resorting to metaphysics and mysticism of "mixing of blue and red blood", the writers could have used V in yet another transforming role and in keeping with the narrative that artificial intelligence is smarter - perhaps, V could have sent a vision to Max and Anatole with a way to modify Leo's DNA to save him and restore his tissues and brain, and perhaps give his child other special powers. This would have made sense, had the same outcome of Mattie bearing a wonder child but would have put the narrative back within the realm of scientific possibility.
The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)
Curious premise, pointless story
I was eager to buy into the exciting premise that Henry (Eric Bana) is spontaneously traveling to random points in time as I was relishing the boundless possibilities of how time lines can be affected and anticipation of an intricate plot. However, the movie disappointingly left this plot driving potential unrealized largely due to the utterly fatalistic philosophical stance of the author. The potential was boringly killed at the outset when Henry stated that he tried to put his time travel to use but could not alter the events. This relegated him for the rest of the movie to the role of a helpless toy in the hands of these nuisance time leaps. The character without any goal or purpose was hard to relate to or feel for. We saw a series of peculiar oddities (vanishing in thin air) and awkward situations (nude guy trying to find clothes), but we did not witness any real struggle or purpose-driven actions, no effort of the time traveler to use his gift to make a difference. For the lack of the driver, the rest of the plot amounted to a unconvincing retelling of a soap-opera-worthy romantic story. It would have been far more interesting to see Henry try to at least save his mother, rather than boringly stating that he couldn't. He could at least try to tell Clare (Rachel McAdams) while she was a girl and his mom was still alive to call his mom and warn her about the storm and tell her not to drive on that fateful evening. He could have called his mom while in the past. He could have actually told it to her face when he met her on the train three years before the accident. Would she have believed him? Would she have still died despite the prior knowledge – that could have been a thrilling possibility! The movie left me with a sense of unfulfilled promise, wasted potential and disappointment with the passive, fatalistic outlook that this movie projects.