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Reviews
House of the Dragon (2022)
Turn the lights on PLEASE
The first few episodes had me pretty well hooked, some great actors and a compelling story line of political intrigue seemed to promise much. Unfortunately by episode 6 I found it had slowed into an extremely dialogue-heavy tale of poorly-established new characters introduced in one of many confusing time jumps and the latest episode is shot in near-total darkness to the extent that I honestly cannot see a single thing on the screen. I could be watching an episode of Happy Days for all I know, all I see is blackness accompanied by sounds of footsteps and whispered incoherent speech. I can't tell what's happening, where it's happening, who's doing what or why.
Recommended if you like shows about someone whispering in pitch darkness.
I'll give it one more episode then I think I'm out until someone finds the light switch.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)
Star Trek Discovery meets Dungeons and Dragons
It surprised me that while this show is clearly in direct competition with House of the Dragon, the show it has most in common with is Star Trek Discovery. Take a well-established franchise with a detailed universe, add incredibly impressive CGI and a by-the-numbers plot then sprinkle in a few bland and ill-defined characters the audience won't care about. Just like Discovery there will undoubtedly be a second and third season that no one cares about before it gets buried in the desert landfill of expensive failures.
It's worth noting that the favourable reviews compare this show to the Peter Jackson productions rather than the original Tolien books and emphasise how good it looks. This is telling. If you like to stare at CGI then you may derive some enjoyment from LotR:TRoP but if you're looking for a worthy continuation of JRR Tolkien's work then you will be disappointed.
Overall, 2/10 purely for the CGI. It just feels like you're watching over someone's shoulder while they play a fantasy video game.
Intergalactic (2021)
A Doctor Who subplot stretched out to a whole season of mediocrity
First off, let's address the W-word. Just because a show has a female lead, that doesn't mean it's "woke" or "has an agenda". Intergalactic doesn't portray its female characters as invincible, flawless Mary Sues. Instead they are all very flawed, fallible and pretty much made deliberately unlikeable to varying degress. So let's stop calling this show woke.
That doesn't mean the characters are well-rounded though and it doesn't mean the show is great. Or even good. The acting, effects, plot, script and production really reminded me of the extras in an episode of Doctor Who. Not a good episode of Doctor Who, I mean one of the really terrible recent ones. Perhaps both shows will be cancelled at the same time.
Perhaps the nearest 1980s equivalent though would be Blakes 7, a stolen starship full of renegades, a plot full of clichés and a production full of dreadful visual effects.
For All Mankind (2019)
I lost interest in the plodding, dull soap opera
Every trailer for this showed us images of space travel. Every episode shows us family dinners, relationship issues, boardroom discussions and people walking up and down office corridors in an endless exercise in foreshadowing some plot point or other. The pacing and plot development is so glacially slow I found I could skip several episodes and still miss no major plot points, just a lot of talk and talk and talk and talk.
This is not the show you are expecting. Completely forgettable, uninspired, tedious beyond belief. And entirely not worth the considerable effort of watching.
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020)
Slow, preachy, confused, uninvolving and just DULL
I watched this not having seen the original series so I really had no expectations. What I found was a complete mess of a series - overly long, full of heavy-handed political messaging, stuffed to bursting point with pointless subplots that went nowhere and entirely failing to deliver on the promise of supernatural horror elements promised in the opening scene.
As for Natalie Dormer's multiple character, what was the point of this? Nothing is explained and while her acting and characterisation was always good to watch, the underlying premise was never explained and the show would have been no different had different actresses taken each role.
Oh, and another thing. Why were so many episodes padded out with pointless song and dance routines? Did the producers really want to make a musical? We get long drawn-out scenes of Molly singing, Vega dancing, Vega's nother dancing, Vega's brothers dancing, almost every episode wastes time with an extravagantly-staged musical number that added nothing to the plot but quite a bit to the runtime.
Overall, a boring mess of a show that doesn't know what it wants to be. Directionless, aimless and - worst of all for anything purporting to be entertainment of any kind - BORING.
Under the Skin (2013)
Unmitigated, tedious, directionless drivel
Mark Kermode has frequently said that a major requirement of movies is to be entertaining on some level. Under The Skin falls at this first hurdle.
I really tried to like this film. Really I did. When a big Holly wood "name" branches out into a small independent production I feel I have some obligation to at least give it a chance.
But this was just drivel.
The main "character" (and I use the term loosely as there is zero character development) merely drives round, asks men where they are going, gives them a lift and asks if they want sex. Then there is a meaningless naked or semi-naked scene in which they disappear into darkness, having presumably been killed by Scarjo's alien or monster or whatever she is. It's never made clear. And that's not to say it's mysterious, it's just confused. Not confusing, just confused. As in badly explained. Or not explained. I stopped caring very quickly.
I've said it before, Scarjo is a dreadful actress. She has zero emotional range and no ability to move the viewer. But here even her meagre acting ability is wasted in one hundred minutes of directionless, meaningless, self-indulgent stupidity that says nothing, goes nowhere and leaves everyone feeling like they've utterly wasted the effort of watching.
I persevered for a good hour before giving up and finding something else to do with my time. This is an inexcusable festering heap of nothing. Do not listen to the apologists, this uninvolving and BORING movie is entirely devoid of merit. Zero out of ten.
Fringe (2008)
Formulaic FBI drama with a thin veneer of pseudoscience
There's a lot to like here - Anna Torv delivers a convincing and compelling lead performance, the show doesn't mind splashing a bit of blood and guts around and there's a fair amount of interesting and well thought out back story to her character.
Unfortunately there is rather a lot to not like.
Within a few episodes the show had settled into a formula. Six episodes in it was in a rut. And the supporting characters are so crudely drawn as to be risible. This is especially true of cartoon "mad scientist" type Walter who invariably does something "amusing" (a weekly crude parody of mental illness) then "has a theory" (blah blah dark matter blah blah telepathy blah blah secret research project). This character detracts enormously from the otherwise dark tone of the show. If he was played 10% more seriously and with 99% less idiotic and inaccurate pseudoscience then the show would be ten times better.
As it is, the whole thing comes across like a daytime TV version of the X Files. Samey plots and stupid attempts at quirky characters prevent the series from living up to the considerable promise of the pilot episode.
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
Somehow manages to be worse than all the others combined
... which is no mean feat considering this franchise has been in an inexorable downward spiral since the second film. And I'm speaking as a long-time Resident Evil apologist.
I bought the DVD of Resident Evil: Retribution with low expectations. The reviewers had panned it even harder than the previous RE outing but I thought what the hell, it'll kill 90 minutes and there might be a few cool fights or maybe a good one-liner.
How wrong I was. Nothing about this film is good. Absolutely nothing. The "reset button" plot serves to make a gigantic nonsense of all the previous nonsenses. The action is idiotic. Bad guys shoot a billion bullets and miss. Good guys shoot one bullet and save the day. The acting is so wooden you could knock nails into it and build a tree house. Every action movie cliché is rolled out, every scene from all the previous RE movies are trotted out again in an endless cycle of self-reference, everything you hate about RE is made bigger, duller, more predictable and twenty times more annoying.
Paul W.S. Anderson has never made a good film and he never will but this sets new standards of desperate bottom-of-the-barrel puerility and in doing so even manages to be less watchable than Milla's previous low water mark, Ultraviolet. Even Aeon Flux was a better action chick movie than this. Even Elektra. The entire RE franchise needs to die now. Even watching this on fast forward I was bored senseless.
Think about that for a moment. It's non-stop action and explosions with the world's most beautiful woman in the lead role. And I was praying for it to end.
Special dishonourable mention goes to the ever-irritating Michelle Rodriguez. Every director seems to cast her as "annoying gun-toting mad woman who dies 10 minutes from the end". Perhaps if she had died during the opening titles I would have given this more than 1 out of 10 but I can't say for sure.
Avoid at all costs. I bought this from the bargain bucket and I want my money back.
Prometheus (2012)
Enjoyable ... but with too many idiotic pseudoscience mistakes
Well OK then, let's revive this alien head. Let's put, wait for it, thirty amps through it for starters.
About 0.02 Amps can be felt as a tingle.
0.07 to 0.7 Amps can cause heart fibrillation.
1 Amp can burn tissue.
30 Amps is enough to boil three kettles.
And when the blue guy dies at the start - DNA molecules don't look like that. The "lines" joining the two strands aren't solid, they are hydrogen bonds, just forces of attraction between the molecules.
But hey, it's Hollywood and no one cares about that stuff.
Eragon (2006)
Dull, dull, deathly dull
Released at the height of the LotR/Harry Potter/Narnia fervour, this must have looked like money in the bank and another long and successful franchise of fantasy films. Regrettably, what we end up with is a turgid and uninvolving mess of a movie with wasted talent (Jeremy Irons in particular), a male lead whose acting ability would probably be stretched making a commercial for breakfast cereal and a plot dumbed down to the level of children's television.
Perhaps its greatest failing is that it is simply boring. There's nothing here to involve the young target audience. All in all, a dreadfully wasted opportunity.
2046 (2004)
Beyond awful. Utterly interminably unbearably pointless.
Rarely have I gone to watch a movie with such high hopes only to have them so cruelly dashed in over two hours of relentless pretentious tedium as 2046. Words simply cannot describe the stultifying boredom I felt as I was forced to endure this woeful waste of celluloid.
Thirty minutes into the movie I didn't care if any of the characters lived or died. Sixty minutes in I wanted them all dead. Ninety minutes in I wished I could die to avoid the rest of the movie. After two hours I just wanted my money and my 120 minutes back.
Avoid this movie at all costs. And do not listen to anyone who tells you it has a single redeeming feature. It is utterly worthless and does not even merit the 1 out of 10 mark I am compelled to give it.
Quite simply the worst movie I have ever seen - and by some considerable margin.
Delicatessen (1991)
The only movie I have watched 31 times on the big screen
Surreal, mordantly and morbidly hilarious, understated yet over the top, there simply are not words in the English dictionary to describe the effect this movie had on me. From the opening scenes of a crazed man wrapping himself in paper and hiding in the trash can to escape from the insane butcher through to the utterly crazed finale this is a movie like no other. Every part of the movie shines brighter than anything Hollywood has to offer. Cinematography, acting, direction are so perfect that I always forget that I'm watching a foreign language film and just get swept along with the delightful comic-book lunacy of it all - and I've watched this one so many times I know the script in French.
Just read through all the reviews and see how often the word 'sublime' has been used. Then ask yourself how many other foreign language films people rave about to this extent.
Whatever you may be expecting Delicatessen to be, it's all that and more. Watch this movie!
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Abysmally self-indulgent, slow, unwatchable and pointless
I *desperately* wanted to like this movie. But I hate it! This is a movie that tries too hard to be clever and takes a long time to go anywhere. There are some great moments, especially as Cusak's character settles into his bizarre employment in the seven-and-a-halfth floor offices but these are rare oases in a lifeless desert of self-indulgent tedium. Like Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", this movie needs a good 45 minutes cutting from the middle.
I actually recommend that you rent this movie and sit through every interminable minute of pretentious posturing that it has to offer. Then go find someone who claims it is a good movie and tell them exactly what you think of it. Just remember to rent another movie at the same time to avoid a wasted journey to the video store.
In short - a dull and irritating movie that slowly but surely disappears up its own backside.