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aleks-wells
Reviews
The Resort (2021)
Pretty formulaic, but I still watched it through
I didn't know anything about the movie before I watched it so didn't have any expectations. The premise for the movie is an haunted resort jobbie with a ghost enthusiast wanting to visit the place out of professional curiosity.
For: the film is short so doesn't drag too much. It's relatively watchable and although the dialogue is inconsistent, it's still digestible and the effects are OK. It's a knock off version of the movies Grave Encounters and not as good but if you enjoy the genre, you may like this movie.
Against: Apparently, there is very little information about the resort, but Alex's vlog / podcast contains a ridiculous amount of information and footage of the resort, the rooms and the ghosts. It's a silly exposition that just didn't quite work as it was too literal. The dialogue is inconsistent, sometimes very stilted, sometimes, OK. Why is Alex so shy about getting into the pool? She's a grown up yet behaves like a shy teenager; it had no relation to the plot and was a bit of a waste of time. The film has some potential but I think the editing and the plot just let it down a bit. The hauntings do come on too strong too suddenly and too late. Nothing is happening until everything is going wrong; the pace felt a bit off. I think if they layered the creepy more effectively, the movie would be better. The security guy - who looks as if he was undergoing a regular check as we know he does from the video blog - appears and then disappears but we never know why on this particular night and his only role in the movie appears to provide a car ex machina. Why did he die on this particular night? Why is the lift working if there is no electricity? Why can't the half-face girl follow her into the lift if she's a ghost?
It's a shame but the movie could actually be relatively good if the plot was tidied up and the editing done more carefully.
The Devil All the Time (2020)
Form over substance
I felt like a peeping Tom watching this and not in a good way. I'm not that twisted. Overall I felt it was form over substance. Well filmed, wonderfully acted but somehow void of any meaning. Full of gratuitous sex and violence, it never really got anywhere. The acting was really strong, one fantastic actor after another but in a way I got lost in the flashbacks, and who was who and I cared for noone but that young boy eating his berry pie and his grandma but the older him felt like an entirely different person and I didn't root for him. There were repeated scenes showing the depths of human depravity but that wasn't substantiated through character development and felt gratuitous. Sex with dead people, killing animals, seduction of the young by people in authority, who has imagination to come up with twisted scenarios like that, one after another, after another. I struggled to get through it.
Benji (2018)
Disappointed
Nowhere near as charming as the 1974 version which had me glued to the telly out of nowhere. I loved how in the original we learned about the dog and his routine and it was all relatively plausible. Here, Benji is too much like the missing father substitute and human more than dog. He's basically hitch hiked his way from some rural area to the urban area but he adjust extremely quickly and effectively. That's just not really realistic. There was quite a lot of gratuitous violence and sad scenes involving dogs that I found unnecessary to the story. I felt the narrative arc was forced with the explanation of how Benji came to be on his own.
The best thing in the movie are the dogs themselves as they're cute.
Dog (2022)
Poor for dogs
1. There is no subtitles option on Amazon. And You Tube. For us, funny about hearing people, it's a major issue. The film is supposed to cost ten pounds! Shocking. Shocking no subtitles are available. It's not expensive to get them.
2. I thought that any Belgian Malinois could carry off any movie! But it turns out a bad script can't save a total crapfest. To the degree that even channing Tatum can't save this poor attempt at a movie.
3. A movie is trying to flip from comedy, to Wolf Creek horror, to indie good feel but achieves nothing really.
4. The poor dog is grieving and they're still approaching it with the toxic masculinity K9 style although it very clearly tries to be woke, 2022 style. It's confusing, not funny, and smacks of cruelty to animals.
5. I thought the premise was Channing was meant to also grieve for his mate soldier but it all got too tangled.
6. It's year 2000 trying to explain itself to year 2022.
7. It's really a story about the soldier finding himself and the dog is just a metaphor. There's nothing in this movie that is about the dog really.
8. The drama elements are too crazy to be in any way believable and or realistic.
Overall, a poor movie, extremely weak script, and the make-believe was broken so many times I just didn't want to watch this any more. But I had to finish watching it so that I could leave a review of 0 stars on Amazon.
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
Historically inaccurate, rushed, and just completely missing the point
I've seen pretty much every Jane Austen adaptation out there and have read many, many books on the history of the writer and the era in which her books are placed.
The 2005 adaptation with Kiera Knightley is so ridden with inaccuracies that it's simply impossible to watch with any degree of serious attention.
It seems that the director was hell bend on making his film as different from the faithful, calm, and witty BBC 1995 adaptation rather than actually filming Pride and Prejudice.
The second main reason for me why the movie just doesn't work - and by that I mean nothing works, the dialogue, the editing, the costumes, the characterisation; it's all poor, poor, poor - is that there doesn't seem to be much by way of a plot.
If I wasn't familiar with the story, I'd struggle to follow. Mr Wickham appears and disappears, key events and people are reduced to mere sketches, or eliminated, lines are rushed, and I just couldn't settle into the story.
The characters are treated with the robustness that is not period accurate or even attractive or interesting. The dialogue, so witty, clever, and character appropriate in the book, here has been reduced to rough and unrecognisable expositions of the plot and character's feelings.
Charlotte's speech to Elizabeth: "Don't you dare judge me!" is an example of telling rather than showing disguised as showing. It tells us how we should feel without taking the trouble as to why that would be inappropriate and why it would hurt Elizabeth so much.
Overall, the story is not coherent. It seems cobbled from fragments of various other movies, and stories, but it completely misses the point of Pride and Prejudice, the book.
Key characters that expose Elizabeth to her own feelings, and her journey to maturity and true understanding is just not here. In which case, what is the point of the story. A washed down, weak love story.
The social rules of conduct that guided the behaviour of the people and which showed them up to other characters in the book and to us as readers, are ignored.
The book is shrewdly written social subtle satire full of totally on point observations on human nature.
There are some pretty scenes, dinners with candles.
No lady would walk in the rain as Elizabeth seems to after the church conversation and during which Mr Darcy proposes.
Mr Darcy: "Are you laughing at me?" - No, but I am at this pathetic adaption of one of the best stories in the history of literature.
This adaptation is just badly made and by ignoring the very point of the story - the journey of Elizabeth and Darcy to each other in the environment fraught with challenges, both internal and external - it rendered itself pointless.