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Reviews
Old Dads (2023)
Landed just shy of its potential.
I love everyone who is in this movie. A+ casting. Their acting is all on point too. The film looks good and is paced well.
First act introductions are good and show potential.
Second act starts to fall apart though. Suspension of logic is needed as the 'Old Dad' crew are fired and stripped of their options in their company because of a conversation that was recorded in a rental car?? And the rental car company sending the recorded video to their HR?? And HR firing them over a morality clause that was supposedly breeched because of this private conversation???? And these three men just shrugging and taking their personal items in a box and leaving????
I get it. It's a farce about politically correctness. But I can only imagine that this cluster of improbability is the result a re write of the script that went bad. They re wrote it and turned a blind eye to this stupid turn of events because it was less bad than what was previously scripted.
Sorry to harp on this one aspect of the movie that I otherwise enjoyed but it's what took me out of enjoying it at all.
The Curse: Green Queen (2024)
You can't say that this show had nowhere to go but up...
It was a freight train for 9 episodes, speeding through the metaphors of a couples relationship and efforts to "do good while doing well."
So seeing these two separate at the finale should not be a surprise... in fact the inevitability of their path's separation must have weighed on Nathan's creative shoulders while writing it.
So the viewer, who has been grounded in the reality of the series, might view this as a cop out. The couple, after all, have had to deal with shoplifting, poverty and gentrification, real world issues. The finale is not quite as grounded.
The couple tie up some loose ends before their baby comes. They promote their show (relegated to a website not HGTV's cable channel as they hoped) on Rachel Ray, but their promotion takes the backseat to Big Pussy Bompisaro's alter ego Vincent Pastore's cookbook (the week of this shows premier coincides with the 25th anniversary of the premier of the HBO show 'The Sopranos') not to mention some eco friendly kitchen wipes. So the couple's success is dampened at every turn.
That dampening includes their 'gifting' of a house to the family they have tried to help since the $100 bill curse that kicked off their spiral. The couple show up like a dime store version of Ty Pennington's Home Makeover to tell the Father of the Cursemaker, "you are the home owner now". But the dad is less than impressed, perhaps because he is consumed with bigger problems and can't value home-ownership when he has spent so much time just getting by and keeping a roof over their heads. It seems that the money they offer to pay for the real estate tax is a bigger need than a deed granting him the house.
Before that scene we get one last awkward dinner with the couple. Asher schools Whitney on Judaism and Mel Brooks' 'The Producers' before he tells her his plans to give away their flip house. He tells her that she is "not a material girl" and this act of charity is good from his skewed point of view. We see her react to his words as someone who wants to be charitable, but knows she just took $40,000 from her parents to keep the show working.
The couple wake up together for the last time as poetic license takes over the finale.
Speculation was that The Curse was going to be a penance to Nathan's previous work, The Rehearsal. That he realized that he was setting people up and pulling the rug out from them when the reality show they thought they were on was something quite different.
But I think this show is more personal. I understand that Nathan was married and divorced IRL. The extraction of Asher from Whitney's life/atmosphere/ planet was coming. We saw it coming. But not like this.
The final shot, after Asher has struck his 2001:A Space Oddesy baby pose, is of the couple's mirrored house. The camera pushes in past the reflection of the glass siding that reflects the outside world, and begins to bring us inside. I think that is Fielders way of showing what we just saw was a tv show that wasn't about another TV show. It was about him.
Genie (2023)
Imagine your life was hitting the skids, but a genie shows up with incredible powers.
Now every move you make after that is something that no one would ever realistically ever consider.
Then you sit around.
Your genie is Melissa so she acts like Melissa and while it's funny, it seems like every scene is started by the director with, "okay the script isn't working so just improvise something".
The protagonist's family shows up. One gets transported to Hell. Then they all vanish and that's the last we see of them. No one is flabbergasted or even slightly stired at what they witnessed. None come back to say, "hey that magical Melissa genie girl, I've thought about it and there might be something I would like besides being transported back home."
That would require clever writing.
Quantum Leap (2022)
I'm a fan
Surprised that there are a rash of negative reviews on this show. Perhaps I loved the original.so much that I am being less critical.
But come on, the original was canceled too soon and the fact that this reboot has Sam and Al woven into the plot should mean a lot to fans.
Meanwhile, the production values are good. Acting is above average and the writing is on point.
I hope this show has the chance to grow. The depth of the plot is significant and I really enjoyed the big difference from the original, which is the behind the scenes work being done at the "quantum lab"
Some of the leap-plots in the original were better than others. So it would be hard to make a judgment on this one episode.
That said great potential in this show.
Santa Inc. (2021)
Love most anything Seth and Sarah are involved in but...
Lazy writing. Uninspired scenes. The production quality is pretty high though but that only makes it more painful to watch.
What could have been an insightful twist on Christmas spends the good will of the audience setting up what amounts to a middle school emo gang's drawings on "how I want to piss on the traditional ideas of Christmas."
It has all the heart of a drive by shooter. What it achieves could have been done with a few sentences in a tweet instead of untold dollar amounts in animation.