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Accused: Ava's Story (2023)
Unrealistic nonsense
Only two episodes in and this is diving for my "Nope, dump it" list.
Seriously bad fiction, written by people who have apparently never seen how a court works in the US. In this episode alone we had:
1 ) A defense lawyer who puts the defendant's mother on the stand without ever appearing to have interviewed her.
2 ) A defense lawyer who quits in the middle of the case on his own initiative in order to allow the heroic deaf lawyer to take over. A judge would never allow this, as it's grounds for immediate appeal without a delay in the trial, net of an event akin to the death of the original lawyer.
3 ) A judge who decides it's a miscarriage of justice to convict a defendant of kidnapping immediately after the defendant has confessed to the crime on the stand.
4 ) A kidnapping trial that has apparently taken place so fast that the parents of the child haven't had the cochlear implant operation for their child, although they both felt that earlier was better.
Comes across as Judge Judy directed Oprah Winfrey. Feel all the feels.
Seems to want to stand on a soapbox and wave the trendy flags of the day.
One more like this and I'm out.
Vacation (2015)
For when there's nothing else on.
Unusual blend of funny, odd, offensive, gross, dull, unfunny, and pointless.
There were some bits that were worth the time. A few homages to the originals (it was certainly funny showing pictures of the kids from the other Vacation movies in an album, with none of them looking alike). Some truly funny parts that would then veer off in another direction, occasionally to good effect, more often not.
Watch it if you're stuck on an airplane with a broken entertainment setup that won't play anything other than this. If you have a choice, find something else.
NCIS: Hawai'i: Pirates (2022)
Has anyone on the writing team ever been on a sailboat?
Lord, this episode was tedious.
Aside from the remarkable luck in having Jesse's cellphone work on a boat, the entire "Where are they?" theme was ridiculous. The sailboats calls in its position when hailed by the smaller boat. The Coast Guard would have responded immediately. Then, NCIS gets the call from Jesse and they begin looking. They know where the boat was at the time of the call (and could get it from the phones GPS location without the foolish "triangulating from towers" nonsense).
A racing sailboat may run in the 15 - 20 mph range. A same-day training cruise staffed by kids? Maybe 10 mph, more likely 5 mph. They're within a few miles of a major port. The Coast Guard would have a helicopter to the reported location within, oh, a half hour if everyone was out having coffee when the call came in. The boat is within 5 miles of that point. The whole setup was insane.
All of the timing in this episode was idiotic. If the boat went out, got hijacked, didn't send a message, and then they went looking after a day? Yeah, that might have supported the search need. Having the parents being able to be found and collected within what appears to be an hour or so was also unrealistic. Across the board, the timeline in the episode made zero sense.
Then, we have a federal agent (who's remarkably spry for someone who had a 1/2" long chunk of shell in his knee) who appears to be unable to shoot anyone with any of the three guns he had control of during the episode. Yeah, fine, no one wants to be seen shooting at someone after the "Rust" debacle, but Jesse's entire plan appeared to be "Have armed men chase you until you suddenly turn and overcome them". Let's not talk about how he managed to fall overboard and then remain invisible to the people looking for him until he reached shore.
This episode was a waste of an hour. Really awful. Written like a piece of junior high fanfic.
Walker: Defend the Ranch (2021)
Ridiculous. My wife was rating it at "New Amsterdam" levels of stupid.
Last week, we finally cancelled our TiVo's season pass to "New Amsterdam" and deleted the episodes we hadn't watched. It had become that preachy, unrealistic, and, frankly, stupid.
Watching this episode of Walker had my wife commenting that it was just as bad. One or two more of these and it will be gone as well.
Is everyone in this family an idiot? When you are in a house where you have guns, is the first thing you do upon seeing armed men in the front yard is to charge out the door unarmed and run towards them from 50 yards away? Once said family member is shot in the front yard, is there a rule that everyone else must then run outside unarmed as well? If you're being forced to rob a bank but the person forcing you is not there, is there a reason you can't speak to the manager?
The actions of everyone in this story ranged from stupid to brain dead.
And, for everyone wondering what's going to happen between Stella and Trevor, the real answer should be "Nothing", as Trevor is now on the hook for felony murder and kidnapping, so his prospects for getting the death penalty in Texas are pretty strong. Unfortunately, I'm sure the writers will come up with some ludicrous reason why he isn't prosecuted and gone.
Seriously, our prospects for continuing to watch this show are hanging by a thread.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
I had forgotten this existed . I wish I still did.
I saw this in the theater with my then girlfriend at first release. I remember thinking that it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen (battling with Bobby Deerfield for the top spot).
I remember then ending. I remember some girl sitting in the row behind us dinging along (badly) with the lyrics. Past those two tings, all that left is a memory of a long period during the showing of wondering if it was going to start making sense, followed by an even longer period of wondering how much more I was going to have to endure.
Now, if I can just manage to forget it again ......
Blindspot: The Gang Gets Gone (2019)
Down the rabbit hole and off the TiVo record list
Blindspot has been threatening to start circling the drain all season with the Madeline-as-an-evil-genius storyline, but this episode turned straight down the hole and didn't bother to circle.
Stunningly convoluted story line that made no sense (Hey, she's framed all of us! Let's go off to someplace in Iceland to thwart a power shutdown. Let's open the door of a jetliner inward at altitude. Let's do exactly all those random things she predicted we would do at just the right time).
This was just all lazy writing and ludicrous coincidence driving. Madeline going from being in jail to at a press conference was asinine. The whole aw-shucks-country-lawyer routine is overdone. The episode played like fan fiction, and bad fan fiction at that.
Deleted the season pass on the TiVo as the show ended. My wife reached "I'm done" status about 10 episodes ago. I'm right there with her now.
Counterpart: Twin Cities (2019)
Had been waiting for the backstory, but the poor science in this spoiled much of it.
The issue of the backstory has been hanging out there since the first episode, and I would assume that most viewers were waiting to hear it. Seeing it promised to be even better.
Sadly, it fell very short.
Yanek's divergence from himself was unexplained. In the first encounter, both he and the prime version of himself behaved exactly the same, up to and including dropping the flashlights so that they fell in perfect unison. Both fled up the stairs in exactly the same fashion. Yet, when he returns with the fire axe, the two versions are now out of sync.
The "I'll destroy the tape / you don't" experiment was pointless. Both sides were already diverging over minor issues just from the two being on the same side for any length of time. Other than the external storytelling need to give a reason for one to fall into despair while the other did not, it made no sense that the two did not see the divergence.
Yanek's continued entry into his other's life was equally foolish. Sure, a woman can carry on an affair without her husband knowing, but she needs to know that she's having an affair. Yanek may get one interlude with the other's wife without the prime version knowing, but more than that and with more than one family member is ridiculous, and both versions would know it.
Expecting the two worlds' immunities to diseases to diverge in anything other than the local Berlin area in anything under several lifetimes is equally inane. The bulk of the world is unaffected by the crossing, and the immunity of the bulk of both populations would remain effectively identical for generations.
Even the political background was bad. Yanek was an East German researcher. His experiment goes wildly bad, to the point where the staff needs to be put on furlough, without anyone from above him in the food chain bothering to come by and see what is happening. He self-selects four friends, who on their own authority manage to establish an effective shadow government over the crossing in one of the most invasive police states that existed at the time.
Left completely unstated is how the daughter of the murdered Yanek, made out to be delusional by "Management" was able to build and infiltrate both staffs on both sides of the crossing. She certainly would not have been left unobserved as events moved forward after her father's death.
As it turns out, I ended up dropping an additional point after writing the review. It was that disappointing.
Salvation: Détente (2018)
Watched 75%, dumped the Tivo pile, and cancelled the automatic record.
We watched the show for the first season and looked forward to seeing how it would pan out this season. Turned out it was a dry hole. We watched 75% of the episode, looked at each other, deleted the rest of the recordings on the Tivo, and cancelled recording any further episodes.
Lord, this episode was bad. No one is responding to situations in any way you would expect from a real person, let alone government officials. There's no sense of reality watching the show. Everyone acts in a "Ready. Fire, Aim." mode.
It was escapist fun last season. The first episode and this one were so bad we just walked away.
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
"Fierce, powerful women" ??? Were we watching the same movie??
Awful movie. Trite, badly played humor. Meaningless romp subplot in the middle. The usual "why are they the only ones to survive" moments scattered throughout. Clear "make sure there's enough female pilots" quota.
But what is surely signs of mental projection / Mary-Sueism is all the people raving about how fierce and powerful the female commanders were in this movie. Really?? What movie were you watching??? In the one I saw, the female commanders took a small fleet of 3 cruisers plus support ships and managed to kill everyone except a small number of people who can all fit into the Millennium Falcon. Last time I looked, losing every single ship in your fleet as well as >99% of your personnel was a sign of massive incompetence. Well, I guess it was OK because they looked so regal doing it.
A final note on Carrie Fisher's performance. It was terrible. Yes, it was her last role, and yes, we're all sad she died, but this was terrible. She sleepwalked through the whole thing. No life in her voice, no life in her performance. Looked like your maiden aunt after 3 drinks at a wedding. Just dull.
Should have waited for it to go to video.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Kitty (2014)
Two episodes like this back-to-back and I'd stop watching permanently
Oh, dear Lord, was this episode awful. Trite, cut-from-the-headlines PC trendy, full of glaring technical nonsense, led by an unpalatable new character, and clearly a pilot for a "circling the drain from day one" new series. The lead character is a prime example of that most irritating of tropes, the human lie detector, capable of detecting the minor tics, sweating, and surreptitious glances so that she can almost read the mind of the suspect. This was trite when Frank Herbert did it with the Bene Gesseret in Dune, and it hasn't improved with time. Typically, the character will come across as an arrogant know-it-all, and Patricia Arquette nails that result. To show a simple (but spoiler explicit) example of bad plot development: the FBI agent releases a picture of the house of the woman used as a model for an online avatar, thus "exposing her" to the antagonist. Apparently, we are supposed to believe that the "cyber criminal" can create a full human response computer avatar, but cannot figure out where the woman whose image he is using lives. Seriously watches like something written as a bad piece of junior high fan fiction. Utter waste of time. You should feel stupider for having watched it. I certainly do.
Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter (2008)
Fair episode at best, rushed through
I found this episode to be deeply disappointing. Poor character and story line development, coupled with the actors barely above phoning it in.
The story was far too rushed. Grab them up, generate a daughter, get Martha kidnapped, and we're not even 5 minutes into the story. Martha's attachment to the alien was never really developed, they just started hanging out together and she went over the top when it was killed. Jenny's ease at giving up being a soldier was too quick.
The "20 generations in a week" concept was interesting, but the grizzled old general either should have known what the real story was (he didn't), or they're positing a 5 day or less life span for the generated colonists.
The back flips through the detonation beams section was silly. It was stupid in Britney Spears' "Toxic" video, and was ludicrous here.
At the end of the day, it looked like they didn't have enough script (or inclination) to make this a two-parter, and tried to jam 1.5 episodes into 1. I seriously hope this is the low point of the season. Any lower would start a trend to "watch it when I have nothing better", rather than a "make time for" show.
Forbidden Zone (1980)
The reason the Fast Forward button was invented
I first saw this when it was picked as a suggestion from my TiVo system. I like Danny Elfman and thought it might be interesting. On top of that, I'm a fan of Max Fleischer's work, and this started out with the look and feel of his 30s cartoon. With both of those, I thought it would hold my interest. I was wrong. Just a few minutes in, and I had the fast forward button down. I ran through it in about 15 minutes, and thought that was it.
Afterwards, I read some of the other reviews here and figured I didn't give it enough of a chance. I recorded it again and watched it through. There's 75 minutes of my life I'm not getting back.
I can't believe there aren't more bad reviews. Personally, I think it's because it's hard to get to the 10 line comment minimum. How many ways are there to say this is a waste of time?
The movie comes across as though it was made by a few junior high kids ready to outrage the world and thinking they can with breasts, profanity, and puke jokes. The characters are flat. The parody of "Swinging the Alphabet" is lame, essentially cobbling the tune, getting through A - E, hitting the obvious profanity a "F", and then having no idea where to go. The trip through the intestines to the expected landing doesn't work the first time, let alone the following ones.
Across the board, the entire movie is what you would expect from someone trying to "out-South Park" Stone and Parker without the ability to determine what is and isn't funny. This might be amusing if you're high. Otherwise, it's not.