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Reviews
True Detective (2014)
The critics were way too hard on Season 2
Yes! There was a lot going on. That seems to be the biggest complaint people have about Season 2 of True Detective. Yes, there are a lot of people involved. Yes, you have to THINK to keep up with the twisted plot. When did that become a negative? My only complaint about the series is that my favorite people didn't make it out alive, and that they died because they cared about someone other than themselves. But that isn't a negative for the show either. Not everything needs a happy ending. None of us make it out alive, and few of us do as much to try to make the world better, or care as much about the world as the characters of this show. I'm hoping for a season 3, and I'm hoping it's not made simple for the critics.
Argo (2012)
Yet another inaccurate historical film
This film spends half its time calling Hollywood a bunch of phonies and liars, then makes a phony film that tells a lie. The true story is amazing. This one completely misleads on the actual events, and leaves out some of its greatest heroes. I've seen Ben Affleck on multiple talk shows talking about politics. This film had a chance to tell an amazing story of diplomacy, cooperation and bravery, but failed to tell the story.
I know it's not a documentary, and I know that a director needs to add in dialog that no one could know, but even Titanic, a story about two people who never existed, got the facts right. I'd put this film in the same category as Inglorious Basterds. Entertaining, but insultingly misleading.
The Big Fix (2012)
A well-made, timely film about a continuing problem.
Dan Rather asked filmmaker Josh Tickell why documentaries are so popular in an interview at the Sundance Film Festival. The answer is that the media is letting us down. While Fox, MSNBC, and everyone in between have forgotten about the BP spill, the oil continues to leak, and Corexit continues to be sprayed, pumped and dumped into the waters of the Gulf. Americans are demanding that offshore oil permits be renewed to create jobs, while thousands of fishing jobs are being snuffed out by the worst spill in history, followed by the worst solution in history.
Josh and Rebecca Tickell interview the locals who are most directly affected by the spill, and sneak behind the scenes to catch the criminals in the act. This film should put its creators on stage at the 2012 Oscars.
Ugly Americans (2010)
Dude, pound that!
"Ugly Americans" is smart, funny, and exceptionally well drawn. The characters are imaginative, and the dialog is very unique.
Mark Lilly is a bleeding-heart liberal, determined to make a difference. Everything he does is well-intentioned, but almost completely ineffective. He reminds all men, I'm sure, of the woman who was dangerously crazy, but knew how to keep a guy around with good sex.
Randall is the hilarious zombie roommate. He has held up better than other zombies on the show by paying for skin grafts. His one dead eye is permanently out of service, though.
Callie, the half-demon boss and girlfriend of Mark, is incredibly hot! She's drawn and voiced well, and even her movements are sexy. Think Leela from "Futurama" with two eyes. She sheds her skin, and looks ten years younger. What man, or woman for that matter, wouldn't like to see that feature in a mate.
Leonard, Mark's wizard co-worker, could wave his wand and fix all the trouble in the world. Something, however, has made him very unambitious. Maybe it's the constant flow of magically conjured super-alcohol he drinks, or maybe it's the fact he had VD for 300 years.
So far, after 6 episodes, the show is staying fresh and funny. Let's hope the writers don't run out of ideas.
Up (2009)
Out of balance.
Blockbuster animated films need to walk a line between being eye-catching and silly enough to be fun for kids, while being smart and deep enough to be rewarding for adults. Any violence should be, well, cartoonish. This film didn't balance between being a kid movie and an adult movie well at all.
The animation was flawless. Ed Asner was perfectly cast and depicted. The silly stuff (Squirrel!) was there in painful overabundance. The film was eye-catching beyond description, especially in 3D. The story of the main character's loss of his dear wife, though, was gut-wrenchingly sad, and must have been utterly confusing to children. The fight scene where the too-evil explorer was shooting real bullets at a child with intent to kill him was far too violent and real for children. The villain's death was unnecessary.
Since I won't be showing the film to a child, I looked at it from a purely adult perspective, and found too much childishly silly content to make it a good film for my tastes.
Dollhouse (2009)
Complete misfire
I am a long time Joss Whedon fan. I watched every episode of Angel. I watched every episode of Firefly at least twice. This show should never have gone as far as a casting call.
For one thing, Dushku was the least memorable cast member he's ever had. Amy Acker and Jewel Staite were both excellent candidates for the lead role on this show. Dushku can't act. She's nice to look at, but we love Joss Whedon's work for the TALKING! It was never about the beauty, though his actors and actresses have always had that.
We watch Whedon's shows for the dialog, the irony, the humor, and the absurdity of things like a vampire driven by guilt, space cowboys, pretty girls who can kill monsters, etc. This is just "The Matrix" meets "Alias". It's drivel. It's condescending. It's poorly put together. It's an insult to a slew of fans who are going to ignore this hole of a show and go watch our old Joss Whedon shows on DVD.
Firefly (2002)
Simply the best show ever aired.
This show was perfect. It's about the most amazing collection of people ever assembled. It feels real, and strangely comfortable, even though these people are flirting with death and imprisonment on a regular basis.
The cast has real charm, and real flaws. The ship's mechanic makes a mistake that nearly kills everyone, and that's OK. The ship's badass tries to turn in the only child on board for a reward, even though he cherishes freedom from authority above all else, and that's OK. The captain falls in love with a con artist. Twice. And loses control of everything to her. Twice. But that's OK. The flaws go on and on, but they endear the characters to us.
The attention to detail in the FX scenes is incredible. We never saw the "Enterprise" kicking up clouds of dust or carrying loads of defecating cattle. The shots of Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader in space never went out of focus.
I love the homage to "Blade Runner" in which the characters of this show speak English and Chinese. It makes sense that we'd end up like that, given our symbiotic relationship with China.
The one brush with a non-human in the whole show turns out to be a deformed cow fetus in a jar. Everyone's human. Everyone is fighting for their own place in the "verse" (universe), and no one is fighting as hard to protect their friends and their freedom as the crew of "Serenity".
No Country for Old Men (2007)
2/3 of the most amazing movie I've ever seen
I just finished watching this film. I normally wait a day before telling anyone anything about a movie I've seen, but I couldn't wait to complain about this thing.
I've watched hundreds of movies. The more complicated a movie is, the more I like it. I love movies I have to watch twice because the twists and turns came so fast. Syrianna is a good example of that. If you want me to watch a movie, say "I didn't get that movie." I'm not against films where the good guy dies. I'm not against movies where everybody dies. Hell, I loved Reservoir Dogs. I would have been OK with the good guy dying in this one, but not that way, not without being there to watch. Not without some sense that his death was thought out.
The great potential with this film was for Louellen to kill the assassin. Great pains were taken to show that the assassin was indestructible. He even had a contingency plan for getting into pharmacies to take care of his own gunshot wounds.
Here's how it should have ended: Louellen's wife arrives at the hotel in El Paso just after the gunfight. The jacked up pickup speeds away carrying the last 4 Mexicans left alive. The sheriff walks out and takes his hat off to tell Louellen's wife he has been killed.
The rest of the movie plays out as released until the assassin goes to kill Louellen's wife. She refuses to call the coin toss, and Louellen springs out of the shadows and shoots the assassin repeatedly. The sheriff retires and explains to his wife that they now have a million dollars to spend. Louellen and his wife walk from the flaming house of his now-dead mother-in-law carrying a bag. Fade to black.
The Trials of Darryl Hunt (2006)
A role model behind bars
This film tells the story of a man so decent, so patient, and so forgiving of the injustices done to him, that if it were fiction, it would seem completely implausible. I saw it at the Bend Film Fesitval a couple years ago. At the end of the film, Darryl walked out onto the stage to a tearful two minute standing ovation.
It's one thing to hear a story of a man who is wrongly accused and to be angry with the system that failed him, and quite another to see the man behave in such a saintly manner.
The film is shot and edited superbly, and takes you through the roller coaster ride of hope and despair that Darryl, his family, and the community that called him their son went through for decades. You feel the pain of the people involved, and the joy of seeing that justice is eventually done is tempered by the fact that Darryl lost such a large portion of his life.