Reviews

The series starts off well in the first season and sets up a few plot surprises. However once season 2 starts the various factions get a bit messy and borderline unbelievable. Some of the political maneuverings are close enough to morden day US politics to be coherent.

One of the key characters Grace Barrows is everywhere despite being unable to decide between 2 of the other lead characters. In one of the last episodes she has to decide whom she likes the most as her life may depend on this ( a bunker awaits) but is unable to do so.

So in that same episode after receiving a marriage proposal (from A) she spends part of the night with suitor B and then expecting to have breakfast with him is surprised to have suitor A at the front door. Just to spice things up she almost has a thing with one of the other leading characters too. It's almost like they couldn't think of a reason for her to be in some of those scenes so made her a romantic interest to get her a ringside seat.

Very frustrating to be floating around on a sea of random romance like that. So even though it is ostensibly a series that includes rocket science there was none of that in the actual script.

Final spoiler. John Noble has a great time playing a hammy villain who literally blasts off into space with a group of malcontents. They think it will let them survive the asteroid but really they are not coming back and the planet is better off without them. So that was a nice touch.

I tried to like this but when the "bad guys" go to Prague to get one guy they create a major incident involving police, commandos and lots of explosions and gunfire. It is hard to believe that almost no-one appears to have died despite the huge number of bullets flying. It is absolutely farcical. If anything like this happened in any city in the world it would be front page news and yet as we know he will the chief actor gets away scot free. What a joke. On the plus side that Evans guy seems to be having fun playing a villain. Although over acting and hamming it up is not the same as acting. At least someone had good time. The various gunfights may as well be fireworks displays. The kid is playing a 13 year old who is 35 but seems ok in that peculiar over written way that passes for acting. I'm sure she is good but really why cast for a 13 year old if the actor is like that. I couldn't watch this to the end.

Leave the World Behind is a slow developing apocalypse movie that suffers from ponderous musical interludes and over done CGI for those animals.

I like violins as well as the next person but really there are a couple of sections where it seems like the director ran out of steam and just maxed out the music as a kind of aural smokescreen.

Thankfully it does have a couple of moments of insight buried deep in the runtime but will most viewers even notice or even get to that part without hitting eject or fast forward? One speech by character/s G. H and one by Amanda played by Mahershala Ali and Julia Roberts shed some light on the films meaning but it was generally too little and too late.

There are a few scenario set pieces such as the racial juxtaposition of the two families. Another concerns the role of conspiracy thinking. Over all this film seems to be a somewhat muddled meditation on what happens to society when a huge external event just stops everything.

It was probably triggered by the events of the pandemic which gave many a chance to pause and reflect on whether the kinds of lives and culture we are perpetuating is a good idea or not.

In the movie the trigger is an external and unknown trigger probably caused by a massive cyber attack that takes out all communications infrastructure. Once isolated, the characters in the film are forced to confront what kind of values they hold true and that is very challenging for them.

Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon get to play against type which must have been interesting.

There are two daughter characters - Ruth who is probably late teens and Rose who is about 12 - a tween-ager. Rose has an existential connection to the TV series Friends and is fixated on watching the very last episode when her internet access is cut off. To be clear all comms are down so it's not just her that is marooned in the present.

By contrast as Ruth observes that the whole of Friends takes place in world that never even existed. A fictional universe - it is a mass delusion that we want to believe in especially Rose at this point in the story.

Leave the World Behind is not as dumb as it seems most of the time. The real world pandemic gave our planet a taste of apocalypse and like some of the characters in this movie we mused about resetting and rebuilding better than before. We were invited to review the past and many of us found it wanting. That is what this movie is about even if it is a bit clumsy about exploring that ennui.

Finally watched this one about 20 years late ha ha. There are a selection of cameo parts from some superb actors and also a selection of hammy over done sequences too.

Bill Nighy's character steals every scene he is in. It must be fun to play a terrible character like that. Emma Thompson is great in everyone of her scenes.

Hugh Grant does his thing. If you like his work you probably saw this years ago. Colin Firth has a part as Jamie who somehow has an epiphany involving a woman who doesn't speak English at all. This leads to the most ridiculous scenes in the movie. They say love is inexplicable but that one is a real stretch.

There was one couple who shouldn't have even been in the film at all. Just Judy and John are some kind of lighting stand-in's for porn although I had to read about that as it is not obvious what they are doing and not a job one ever knew even existed.

Martine McCutcheon was a nice surprise although well known to others but not to me as I don't watch TV soaps. But she was funny and seemed like a real person.

Liam Neeson is now so well identified with his fictional role in those nutbar films where he goes OTT crazy it is hard to even consider him as a grieving widower which is what he plays in this movie.

Thank goodness for Bill Nighy who I think gets the tone exactly right. Cynicism with a sense of humour.

There are 3 extended jokes in this series. After the first episode it all wears a bit thin. Having seen other comedians play the mock interview against the "straight interviewer" many times it loses its appeal. That is the first running joke and the main one that gets repeated for 5 episodes. Some of the experts are better than. Others at playing along although apparently they were told not to.

The second joke is playing Pump up the volume for 20 secs or more in each episode. It's their version of Rick Rolling and they add some new sub titles each time.

The 3rd joke is that Cunk pretends to be incredibly stupid and quote her stupid mates as sources. She also purposely mis pronounces names, place names and the like.

It is funny for the the first episode but just repeating the same joke on multiple times each episode gets a bit tedious. I'm sure some people will like it much more but in my view you are better to go and watch Comedians in Cars getting coffee if you have such a short attention span and at least there are a range of jokes in that.

This was included in a film festival. It has Juliet Binoche. I've heard of the director before and seen some of her movies before. Usually all reasons to take a chance.

Unfortunately almost nothing happens in the first hour of the film and then things take a violent but cliched turn. I don't consider rape as entertainment. That is when I walked out. It is a rare thing to walk out of any movie especially a film festival pick but trust me this is a disaster.

There might be a target audience for people who like watching Robert Pattinson with his shirt off. But you could have painted a smiley face on a rubbish bin and the acting would have been more convincing. The guy is a walking prop not an actor at all.

It might be that the film miraculously gets better in the last half but I have better things to do like sleeping.

As for Juliet Binoche I tried to watch "Clouds of Sils Maria" and "Slack Bay" on Netflix and I found them unwatchable too but both of those are miles better than this turkey.

Rather late to this but glad I finally checked it out. Watched the whole series over a week. Series 1 & 2 are best. In many ways the new Frankie the fixer is still the fixer. He is much smarter than the locals and works out a way to get what he wants despite being supported and staffed by a crew who cause almost more problems than they can solve. Folksy is not stupid but often played that way. A direction mistake in my view.

I was thinking he is a big fish in a small pond when it was suggested he was a shark. He does start as more of a shark but is disarmed by what we imagine is the folksy charm of Norwegian ways.

Van Zandt as Johnny / Giovanni / Frank has the most expressive face. At best his expressions carry whole scenes. Although at times you can see he is thinking WTF like when his crew beat up the owner of a green car. Except the car was red and his lead sidekick is colour blind.

Although there is an extensive core cast most of them don't develop their characters much at all. The character Jan is too much of a parody of correctness so when loses the plot it is no surprise. That character only has one mode in which he thinks he is a slapstick god. He is not. He is so hopeless that we lose any sympathy we have for him as he deteriorates.

Attitudes to women are not good and although Norwegian society is better than that, those more positive attributes are only played for laughs.

Johnny is much smarter than the rest of the cast and although this is a kind of mafia series the mob aspects are mostly played for laughs. The mob are shown to be incompetent and stupid. Various protagonists try to better Johnny but they all meet highly unlikely endings.

Series 3 is not as much fun. I didn't enjoy any of the Brazil episodes and I don't think they added anything really to the plot. If they wanted to get the Alex character to Norway they could have done it much more easily.

A new mob character who turns up after a failed assassination attempt is clearly much more astute than the other petty criminals but not smart enough to recognise that subtlety is required.

There are some cameos from Sopranos and Springsteen himself appears briefly. The series is at its best when it is a parody of the mafia relocated to small town Norway. And that face is truely priceless.

There is a clever story in this film but it takes so long to be revealed it becomes an anticlimax. A bank president has done bad things and keeps the evidence in a safety deposit box.

There is an awful lot of planning going on to make it look like the equivalent of a postmodernist bank robbery.

The problem is no one can connect with the hostages or the robbers because they are wearing masks over their faces most of the time. The police lead investigator thinks he is in a stand up competition looking for more comedy bits for next set.

In a word the whole event is kind of anonymous with very little to connect to so when the story progresses we just don't care.

Update 2023: Just rewatched this after forgetting most of it. Very much the same result. There is a cunning plan in there somewhere but by the time it gets to the end we no longer care if we ever did.