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JohnRausch
Reviews
Reacher (2022)
Jumped the Shark - A small One
Have you ever watch something that utilized technology you are a expert with? Especially computer stuff. It pretty much spoils the entire movie of series. Poorly research technology is rampant in Reacher. Sure, it's fiction, but not science fiction where outrageous things are expected. It happens with books too.
Those unfamiliar with technology and history might be immune, but it does imprint capabilities and facts that are not true. Might even influence conspiracy theories.
A Quiet Place Part II (2020)
Movies with no ending
Most movies with sequels have a definitive ending or leave you thinking about what's next. They might not have a sequel, but that's okay, use your imagination. This is a common way to end movies, and it's good to walk out of the theater thinking about what you just saw. You could not see a sequel and still be pleased. Or you might see a sequel that was obviously made only for the money. The Star Wars movies are a good example of movies with good sequels - most of them.
The Quiet place movies end as if someone forgot to play the last reel. No ending at all, just "we ran out of time", or money or ideas for what's next, etc. Not only that, but QP 2 starts off where QP 1 should have (sorry, we forget to tell you how the bad stuff started in QP 1), then assumes you had seen QP 1, and then moves at a snails pace.
Someone dropped the screenplays and didn't pick them up in the right sequence.
1917 (2019)
Like watching someone play a video game.
If you read the previews saying what this film is about, well -- that's it. Two hours of following the two soldiers, then one, try to get the extremely important message to save 1,600 lives.
It is intended to look like one uninterrupted take, but is actually a bunch of longs takes (longest was 9 minutes) stitched together perfectly at points where detail was not critical, like following William running from the other side of a fragmented wall, in the dark.
The good:
Outstanding set. Pristine, spotless mostly, even beautiful, but not realistic.
Cinematography. From a technical point of view, outstanding. I can't imagine better, given the one-shot requirement by the writer/directory. But, boring after the first long fast walks through trenches.
Special effects. Excellent, I think, which means not obvious -- most of the time.
The bad:
1. There is NO story. Let's just say one, get the message to the commander about being ambushed. 2. Way too many narrow escapes. All those open shots at William and not one hit him. Most of them not even close. 3. Everything dead except a cow. Plus a bucket of milk fresh enough to drink and no one around to milk the cow. 4. Planes flying over that could have easily dropped a message to the commander in a short length of time, but no, let's do it the nearly impossible way. 5. A beautiful woman with someone else's unexpectedly in the basement room where William ducks into while being chased. And, guess what, he has a canteen full of milk. The baby coos and makes happy noises though starving. There goes the one long take. 6. William walks up on a huge group of soldiers with one standing in the center singing and no one notices or questions him, even after several minutes. 7. Plenty of time and skill to tiptoe across the broken side of a bridge and jump 5 or 6 feet from one narrow (6 - 7 inches) beam to another. I wonder how many times that took. One screw up and they have to start over at the beginning -- one shot. 8. Clean cloths, clean, shaven faces, nice perfectly white teeth. 9. Zero character development.
I could go on and on.
I couldn't wait for it to be over, but always expecting it had to get better because of all the reviews. Two stars for cinematography and set design.
Country Music (2019)
Too Much About Too Few
I finished episode 8 last night. I am not very impressed by the series. Tons of research, and the beginnings were covered well, but somewhere in the middle things went awry and started jumping back and forth in time, telling me about what I had already seen. The biggest disappointment is the large amount of time devoted to so few artists. I'm not sure if it was the Hank Williams, Carter Family, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, or Johnny Cash bios. When I though I had seen enough about Cash, episode 8 was close to half about him.
They went on a lot about how the style of music went from bluegrass to Garth Brooks' rock style stadium fillers, then back to more basics, but stopped abruptly in the late 1990s not even mentioning Allison Krauss and the many artists in the 2000s who first came back to old style bluegrass and then took it in a new direction using the same, or nearly same, string bands, but playing dropping nearly all of the twang of the old stuff. Most call is newgrass or progressive bluegrass. Nickel Creek, Crooked Still, and 100s more. Artists like Allison, Bela Fleck, Alison Brown (her Compass Records changing the way albums are produced), Steep Canyon Rangers, Doc Watson (!), and so many more. There are huge bluegrass festivals that encourage this new style. Merlefest, in Wilksboro, North Carolina and started in 1988 by Doc Watson in honor of his son, Merle, being perhaps at the top of the list. The list of artists is endless, but the story stopped.
The Firm (2012)
Poorly Researched Computer Technology
It's hard to believe that what is possible and not possible as well as how long things take for computers to perform some functions are not accurately researched. It ruins many shows when things are moving along okay (okay is as good as The Firm gets) and some a completely ignorant computer situation comes into play. Same for some other technology.
The episode where the hacker is working frantically to crack the code on a hard drive before having to give it up is so bad. It is a simple task to clone an encrypted hard drive, bit for bit and work on decrypting the copy. Made me feel like I had wasted hours watching the many previous episodes.
Hey writers, there are a whole lot of us technology savvy people out there. At least come within reason for some of this stuff.