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Reviews
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Too in love with its own premise
I get it. You're not gonna show it. It's gonna be there. It's gonna be happening all around them, but you're not going to show it.
Well, ya did it. You made a lifeless, cold movie about the Holocaust.
We get it. They were living their happy little lives right next to the worst killing camp of all time. I got that from the trailer.
But you gotta connect the dots at some point. Make me feel it. Instead, you fell in love with the smell of your own farts.
As a practice in, "can you make a movie about the Holocaust without showing any of the human suffering?" this movie is a success. But should you?
No, it does a complete disservice to the Holocaust. We learned more about the people running the camp, and nothing about the people who died inside.
Red, White and Blue (2023)
Laughably Cliché
Throw every poor person in rural America stereotype into a blender, hit start, and you'll get the setting for this film.
Single Mom working in a diner. ✅
Past due bills hanging on the fridge. ✅
Doing budgeting math by hand. ✅
Randomly stored cash for a rainy day. ✅
Driving a car from the '70s. ✅
Indiscernible southern-adjacent accent. ✅
Then throw in that it's about abortion and that's supposed to make it good. Well, apparently that worked for the Academy. But it's so abundantly clear that no serious research was put in by the filmmakers. I'm assuming the British writer-director has never actually been to rural America.
And the twist was so heavy-handed as to render it completely ineffective.
Dexter: New Blood: Sins of the Father (2022)
People are idiots. Great ending.
This is literally a perfect ending. The whole arc of the show makes no sense and has no moral fabric if Dexter gets away with it. That was a big part of why the original ending sucked so bad. We were supposed to believe Dexter could somehow change, or something? They strained so hard to wrap things up without Dexter facing justice. This is how it had to end. And this season did it in such a satisfying why by tying it into the character development of his son and their relationship. As it says at the end, Dexter had to die so Harrison could live.
41 (2012)
Truly Awful
I've been binging almost any political doc I can find from the 90s through the present and this one has been the worst. Just an utterly bland whitewash. It felt like something made for a convention, except it was two hours long. Bush says nothing of substance the entire time, nor does the film come to any interesting points. It was genuinely like listening to your grandpa tell old stories.