Change Your Image
a_marciniak
Reviews
The Collection (2016)
pretty good but....
I started watching this because I saw a promo for it and thought it was beautifully shot. I've only just finished the first episode, but these are my thoughts.
The show is, assuredly, beautifully shot. The characters, as written, are definitely archetypes that we've all seen before; it is true. Their personifications by the cast are nonetheless quite compelling, save for Billy who needs to just disappear. Watching him is like taking the orange zest side of a cheese grater against your skin. Awful. Or perhaps that's the point? To show how annoying, presumptuous, and unlearned we Americans are in the City of Lights? TDB...
My chief complaint, aside from the fact that the entire Sabine staff seems completely fluent in English as if it were their first language, is that the ruling family of this couture house are played by British actors, and their delivery is quintessentially British. Yes, they nod to their supposed Frenchness by saying "maman" instead of "mum", but their classic British cold calculated restraint on display is a different animal than the typical French sangfroid. This cultural disconnect between the British actors trying (not trying) to act French is a bit jarring. Compare these three to how Nina and her mother are played to truly see the difference.
Otherwise, i'm intrigued and will ride out the season. Beautiful costumes.
Assassin's Creed (2016)
It's absolutely fine.
I've been working on marketing pitches for this film property for at least 8-9 years, so I had extremely low expectations on it. Oh, lord, another terrible Assassin's Creed marketing deck to put together. Again. If it hasn't caught on by now, it has to be terrible, right? Well, honestly, not really. It's pretty much just fine. I was surprisingly happy with this film, and yeah "for a video game movie", it is pretty good.
Don't read Rotten Tomatoes. If the movie isn't made by a Nolan brother or a JJ Abrams loyalist, they will tank it. If it isn't directed by some indie darling or doesn't star Gretta Gerwig, they will tank it. If there isn't some self-righteous "deeper message" about race relations going on, they will, you guessed it, tank it.
Don't listen to the morons on this board that say it's confusing, either. It's positively, hit-you-over-the-head, NOT CONFUSING. They are just barely functional adults who need reams of exposition to explain every. little. thing.
You don't need to play the video game to enjoy the film either, but just to clear things up, the game is based on the concept of "genetic memory", IE. seeing the past through the genetic memories of your cells (kind of like using mitochondrial DNA for establishing species ancestries and divergences). If I just lost you, then you either slept through high school, or devoted all your energy to actively not learning.
A "bad group" of people are using genetic memories of key descended individuals to retrieve some lost historical relics which could be their key to setting up a new world order. That's the plot. That's not complicated, and it's not confusing.
Go for some cool cinematography. Go for some cool action sequences. Go because you like Michael Fassbender. Go because you don't want to see Rogue 1 or you already saw it. Go because you like the video game and want to see a movie based on it.
It's not "terrible", "badly acted", "confusing", "boring", "overly CGId" (um, that last Hobbit film was atrocious in that area but you all loved that one), or "poorly developed". It's just fine. It's a fun ride, it does some justice to the game, and people are picking on this because they think its cool to pick on this. If you want to watch a truly terrible, uninspired mess of a movie, I just saw Suicide Squad. Now that's an atrocious movie.