Reviews

This series almost collapses under the weight of its own seriousness, and nothing would have been lost by chopping the repetitive "it's not enough -- find out more" scenes down to an artful few. The obviously very competent actors have little to work with except to be consistently grim, but they soldier on. And on. And on. It's not hard to see why our protagonist, the chief detective, has ruined all his past important relationships through neglect while he obsesses over his cases. Except that he apparently has lots of time for skeet shooting and birding. (But not for his child, either past or present.)

Sadly, and fairly absurdly, the breakthrough detective moment reveals things that were already known and/or obvious. These were not "aha!" revelations. They rather suggest these are dogged but not very bright people.

This is a show you watch and want to like, but it's clearly more important as a Danish true-life drama than as a piece of gripping television. If you want a really engaging Danish show, go back to 2007's Forbrydelsen.

While I'm not a huge fan of so much violence, I appreciate the non-comic-book realism. The dramatic elements all have their place, and I would have liked a deeper exploration of what soldiers (etc.) face back home, and how they do or do not fit back into civilian life. The characters are almost universally unpleasant but one could argue that that's an interesting approach.

The problem is that every scene is about 3x too long. (Seriously, almost every scene is 5 minutes or longer, which is just forever.) There's just not that much there there, with length masquerading as depth, so the pacing feels glacial. This would have made a much better 5-part miniseries.

I'm going to give the writers most of the blame for what didn't work in this movie, and I'm going to give Jessica Simpson an A for Effort.

What Luke Wilson is doing here is anybody's guess. Mortgage payment due? Lost a bet? Penny Marshall made him? He just wanted one scene with the genuinely hilarious Larry Miller?

I didn't hate this film; it's hard to hate a gentle comic book, but this could have been much more artfully handled. They had Luke Wilson and Jessica Simpson as leads in a movie and nobody saw the possibilities. Shame.

Note to Norwegians: This made Norwegians look like a great deal of fun. Remember, nothing in this movie had anything to do with reality. Enjoy!

This is an odd quasi-documentary ostensibly about Hockney's breakup with his protégé and lover (Peter Schlesinger) and, to some extent, its effect on his painting and on his relationships with his friends and colleagues.

Very unfortunately the result is a mish-mash: some glimpses into what passes for access into the worlds of art and fashion (one particularly long fashion show scene is almost painful to watch); musings on the relative merits of London, France, Italy, New York and California (early-70s New York comes off as truly wretched); contextless vignettes of Hockney's friends and colleagues, who could not possibly be as dull as they are presented here; some actually interesting looks at Hockney's techniques, including "joiner" collages he used to construct elements of his paintings; and all this punctuated with what is supposed to be an examination of the breakup between Hockney and his younger boyfriend. A good bit of gay sex and nudity are thrown in to spice things, and while it was assuredly arresting in 1973, very little of it feels very sensual, and certainly not erotic. Their relationship is left entirely unexamined, so at best one might conclude that Peter is more self-absorbed even than Hockney or that he simply prefers the company of men more his age. Ho-hum.

This might have been a lot more interesting at 45 minutes: you might not notice how inconsequential it all seems.

This is the kind of show (if you like these kinds of shows) that should provide an opportunity to see what regular people do when weird things happen. Other reviewers have cited Heroes, etc., as being similar.

The thing is, with a successful show the audience willingly suspends its disbelief. Truly outrageous things can happen, but if the characters are compelling (meaning they have to react like human beings to the unbelievable circumstances in which they're placed) and if the writers stick to the universe (however absurd) they've presented, viewers can be carried along. Lost was absurd, and people loved it. Heroes was preposterous. People ate it up.

Alphas fails, and fails hard, because nobody remotely believes in or cares about the characters and their circumstance. From the get-go we're presented with guys and gals with extraordinary powers, but they feel like cardboard cutouts following a ridiculous set of instructions. The audience has no opportunity to place itself in their shoes, which is what all great storytelling is about. The "Alphas" do things (especially Mr. Electro-Wizard) that are tediously unbelievable, not extraordinary and exciting.

Think how interesting this show could be if the characters were allowed to have full lives, with all the duplicitous and contradictory emotions and motivations actual people have. Yeah, well that's not happening. These people might as well be extras on "Burn Notice."

Bad television. I can't imagine what David Strathairn was thinking when he signed on for this. He's probably firing his agent right now.

The great thing about this film is the nonchalant and natural way the actors have fun with the film. Matthau, Jackson, Waterston, and Beatty all play their parts with great ease and sense of a good time.

The problem is that the story is simply too thin and the characters don't evolve. There are many scenes, but they fail to build up any sort of complexity; instead they are basically repeats of the same idea over and over. The characters are given no chance to move beyond their initial (albeit charming) characterizations.

Do we know anything about any character after their first scenes? Not really. We're given delightful cartoons and then they are set to work on a plot.

Anyway, the film showcases some great talent, but don't expect to remember much a couple of weeks later.

I'm sure the only people watching this show were college students, but we needed it. All around were the media lapdogs of the Reagan Administration, passing off absurdities as though they were normal.

Only Ellerbee and her colleagues got on national TV and said, "Do they really expect us to believe that garbage?" That it was at 2:30 a.m. made it all the more real.

That the news show was short-lived was inevitable. But for a short time, while we were going without sleep, we believed a dissenting voice might be possible.

And so it goes....

I've seen at least parts of this before, but I sat through it today and couldn't stop shaking my head. Stagey, stilted, and wooden.

Only a few minor actors (viz Jesse White as Charlie Arneg) seem to be at ease and make their dialogue natural. Bacall and Peck barely utter a believable syllable throughout the entire production, so you could really care less if they live happily ever after or get hit by a bus. (Dolores Gray is actually the much more sympathetic character.)

The direction often seems more like choreography, with Bacall or her friends moving about the set in exaggerated or bizarre fashion. Scenes meant to be charmingly madcap (the party at the newspaper; the party at her apartment; the poker game cum theater get-together) are simply manic without being funny.

Maybe Doris Day and James Garner could have breathed life into this film.