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stevestuve
Reviews
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
Respectful and uplifting closure to the franchise (I wish more sequels were like this.)
Basically a 5 to 6 star movie, I give it an 8 simply because it was so refreshing not to see a sequel where some old favorite characters are thrown out in the garbage to be replaced by fan-fiction self-inserts by writers and actors who didn't even like the originals. I'd rate this as one of my favorite sequels and closures to a franchise. I'll be re-watching this one with my adult kids if I get the chance. In a world where I often walk away from sequels and remakes disappointed and frustrated, this was a welcome exception. I walked away from this one with positive feelings and a general feeling of hopefulness.
Bill and Ted were Bill and Ted with some wrinkles and gray hair. I enjoyed the first movie and didn't see the second. I had the impression that the actors were having fun doing this rather than being dragged out of retirement to make a few bucks reading lines that they disliked.
For the first part of this movie, I was expecting the worse, but instead most of their problems were due to their naiveté as in the first movie. Much of the humor worked for me. Nothing sidesplitting, but enough for some laughs, grins, and smiles. In hindsight, it wasn't that great of a movie, but it left me with warm feelings of nostalgia which very few movies do anymore.
Serdtse angela (2016)
6 to 9 star story marred by subtitle quality
This review is for the Russian audio/English subtitled version. Overall, I enjoyed this series.
I started watching this 6 hour series one night, paused about 2 hours after my normal bedtime, and then finished it the next morning. Overall, I found myself immersed in the story most of the time. I found the character development and conflict to be very good. Overall, I found myself caring about many of these characters. I thought the acting was solid for the most part. The writing and editing lacked some cohesion at times, but was solid enough that the plot and story lines usually pulled back together reasonably quickly. The biggest weakness in this was that it sometimes seemed like the writers couldn't decide if this was going to be a 4 hour tighter story or a complete 12 to 15 episode series with more individual stories within an overarching season long story.
At times, I lost track of who was who as there were competing groups and individuals that I could not tell apart. I'm not sure how much of that was lack of editing, subtitle issues, or cultural clues (clothing, uniforms, etc.) that a Russian viewer would have found obvious.
Now to the biggest problem. Many people will find the subtitles next to unusable. Slang and jargon were usually translated literally, some grammatical things were missed or incorrect, and my sense is that some complicated dialog was oversimplified too much. The number of typos suggest the subtitles were rushed or done very cheaply. If not for my experience with language learning and dealing with written translations of various quality and literalness, I'd have probably given up trying to wade through these subtitles.