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Reviews
Home Town: Pumped About Laurel (2022)
Ben Should Have Made A First-Aid Station, Too
Love this show! It's entertaining and instructive, all at once. Here comes the "but". In this episode Ben makes a game tabletop out of old aluminum-framed plate glass windows. This is the kind of glass that, when fractured, becomes long razor-sharp shards. All someone has to do is set their glass of sweet tea down a little too hard, in just the right spot, and you have quite a dangerous situation. He even gets a harsh reminder of just how dicey this glass is to work with when his shop helper, Randy, tries to remove the glass from the old frame and it instantly catastrophically shatters. Usually, they, rightly so, work very carefully to make sure their remodels are safe and up to code, so this was quite a surprise. I hope to see, in a future episode, a warning about what they did in this episode, how stupid it was, and an exhortation to "don't try this at home!" Followed by a heartfelt apology.
Midsomer Murders: The Curse of the Ninth (2017)
What's All This About Violins on TV?
This is a clumsy episode. Breathtakingly melodramatic characters, with egos that wouldn't survive 10 minutes in a real-world orchestra. Actors ineptly pretending to play instruments they've never even touched before. Lush orchestral sound purportedly emanating from a tiny clutch of players, which, more than once, is threatened with further shrinkage by rage-fueled expulsions by the conductor. And all this dragged through a dense, gluey plot. The best thing is the actor playing the owner of the music store. He delivers a creepy, reptilian, half-mad character in the grand tradition of Dwight Frye and Peter Lorre. Hugely entertaining!
Temple of Film: 100 Years of the Egyptian Theatre (2023)
Bait and Switch
This short has almost nothing to do with the Egyptian theater. It's mostly Guillermo del Toro prattling on about watching movies. There are a few other people in it that talk about, not the Egyptian theater, but watching movies. Clip after clip of vintage films, in a pastiche that is disorienting and pointless. Every now, and then, three or four seconds of the exterior, or the interior of the theater. Nothing about what it used to look like, in its heyday, or how it has been altered to the mere shell of its former self it is today. What was the point of this? I have absolutely no idea. It's a waste of 11 minutes.
Instant Dream Home (2022)
That's Entertainment
I don't watch this scrutinizing it for what's real and what's not (much is not real or possible), but for how much fun it is. And, boy howdy, there's lots of eye candy here. Are there flaws? Yep. Emmy Award winning performances? Nope. But it's clever and engaging. Except...the host. She adds nothing positive to the show. She is in charge of nothing, yet is allowed to pretend to be. She's staggeringly annoying and obnoxious at toxic levels. And it really looks like she's often in the way, and impeding progress. The show needs a single, central figure to host, but not her or anyone remotely like her.
Radioactive (2019)
Bad Radium! Bad! You're a very bad boy!
An agenda in search of a vehicle.
Ok, the Curies unleashed a horror on the world. (A contention I agree with.) But if they hadn't done it, someone else would have.
Making that point doesn't make a movie.
Neither does pointing out the breathtaking injustices heaped on women during that period. Actions that I abhor even more than the terrors of the atomic age.
The movie uses its high production values to repeatedly bludgeon us with those two points.
As an instrument for an argument, it is a particularly blunt one.
Unpersuasive to those who would disagree with its thrust, and as an entertainment, it's an exhausting harangue.
Shadows on the Stairs (1941)
With a Wink and a Nudge
Wonderful little cream puff of a film. Fast and tight. An accomplished cast that, in workmanlike fashion, delivers a very enjoyable hour, with many rewards for the viewer who'd like to see something quite out of the ordinary.
And keep an eye out for Charles Irwin as the constable. He steals every scene he's in.
What a treat!
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (2016)
Adams in Name Only
Oh, come on. The archly humorous, pithy Dirk Gently ethos is nowhere to be found in this series. It's dull-ly wise-ass without the wise.
The Adams wit periodically sputters briefly to life in the main character, but can be found nowhere else in the series.
These story lines have nothing to do with what Adams wrote.
This is vain, egotistical dreck.
June Bride (1948)
Workaday Hollywood
The Star System produced many films that set the standard for movie entertainment and ingenuity, indelible classics that continue as high water marks for the industry. This is not one of them.
In its glory days, Hollywood frequently provided mediocre vehicles for its elite performers, to keep them working, if not always happy, and counting on their talent to breathe some level of life into a moribund script
This appears to be the set of circumstances that brings us "June Bride". Studio management even threw in a generous measure of cast members reliably adept, as a rule, at keeping comedic momentum up.
Alas, the leads were given to Bette Davis and Robert Montgomery, two otherwise excellent actors that understood what to do with a comedy about as well as a dachshund would know what to do with a microscope or a deck of cards.
This movie is "something to watch". It can pleasantly occupy your time without annoying you, while you listlessly wonder what else is available. But if you start imagining Rosiland Russell or Claudette Colbert delivering Bette Davis' lines, or Montgomery's lines coming out of Carey Grant or William Powell, well, then you realize you could have seen 4 episodes of "Cheers" or "Modern Family" in the time you numbed yourself with the existential analgesic that is "June Bride", and ruefully switch channels.
Murdoch Mysteries: Murdoch and the Tramp (2021)
A Bungled Homage
The more you know about silent comedies, the better this episode is. A clever idea very poorly executed. 5 stars for initiative.
And, as is so often the case, Jonny Harris is the best thing in the show.
The Nevers (2021)
Deja Vu. All Over Again?
Episode One presents like an overblown Rescue Opera with a dense and labyrinthine plot that has been repurposed as an excuse for CGI creators to show off effects they couldn't find any other vehicle for.
It's disappointing to see so many good actors seem to scratch their heads, unable to make sense of vaguely delineated characters doing inexplicable worldly and other worldly things in service of an inchoate explanation, unobtainable in the middle distance, racing towards a narrative vanishing point.
I've lived in hopes of other TV fare being able to pull together disparate plot strings into a satisfying web, only to be pissed-off at writers who trotted out idea, after idea, with no view to any satisfying conclusion. I've got a sneaking suspicion "The Nevers" has the same let-down
in store.
Stay tuned...I guess.
Dad's Army (2016)
Is This Any Way To Run A World War?
This movie has an absolutely first-rate cast, a clever little plot, a decent script, apparently a very generous budget, and top-notch art and production resources.
What the heck happened?!
Instead of being sharp, and arch, and witty, it's woefully aimless and flaccid.
Did someone assemble all of these phenomenal elements, and then just hand the reins over to their nephew who's a first year film student at NYU? (Nothing against NYU. Just picked a city college at random.)
Neville Chamberlin makes a film.