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zhuber13
Reviews
Dear White People (2017)
I Really Wanted to Like This Show
Like the title says I really wanted to like it, and I'm not going to lie, I did end up watching every episode, but the show just isn't very well written.
The dialogue is kinda preachy and really unnatural, comes off like a "woke college student's" term paper, and the show just straight up steals jokes from Hannibal Buress, like, come on.
The show DOES do a really good job of showing the complexities of race relations in the context of an ivy league school, and the dynamic between the all the characters is what I really found myself coming back for. I love how well the show deals with so many relevant topics and honestly I think it does a good job of offering up multiple diverse perspectives that I found very informative.
But come on, stealing jokes from Hannibal? Come on!
Loiter Squad (2012)
Do not listen to these negative reviews!
Not sure why there's so much hate for the loiter squad, but after seeing it I felt obligated to leave a review and clear the air. The people that hate this show and deduce it as simple mindlessness I can only assume are either no where near their target audience or are such comedy snobs that they saw 1 episode and stopped. This show provides us with a good amount of funny social satire that revolves around popular TV and black culture, and it has a fun, engaging all black cast. There's a fun do-it-yourself charm to this show that almost makes it feel like these guys are your friends putting videos out on youtube. It mixes together sketches, stunts, reality segments, animation, and concert footage constantly keeping you on your toes. The snobs that dislike this show may not want to hear this but the loiter squad is honestly the closest thing our generation has to Monty Python's Flying Circus with its absurd sketch comedy, cold openings to start the show, and their way of ending sketches in the middle of them most the time with animations is eerily reminiscent of Flying Circus. This is a great show worth the watch.
Ta'm e guilass (1997)
Some nice messages but overall BORING
After reading about Iranian culture and cinema I have to admit I was intrigued and pretty excited to see Taste of Cherry. However to be perfectly honest I found this film incredibly boring and tough to sit through, mainly because of the cinematic strategy used throughout. The film implements a lot of long static takes, most of which are in the same location, which elongates the time and space of this film to give it what I would describe as a real life pace. That combined with very little to no extreme time jumps makes it feel like we are simply watching a complete day of this man's life, which in terms of making this film feel real helps a lot, but making it entertaining, however, hinders it quite a bit. It seems obvious to me that the director, Abbas Kiarostami, wanted to draw importance to his messages by making the situation they're framed in as real feeling as possible, but when you sacrifice entertainment value to do so it's my belief that you're only preventing your message from getting across to the audience.
The film has a pretty ambiguous ending; we as an audience are left to wonder whether or not Mr. Badii really killed himself followed by behind the scenes footage of Kiarostami and his crew making the movie. While it's my belief that he did kill himself, I can honestly say that at the end of the movie I couldn't have cared less either way. Kiarostami does little to nothing in terms of characterization to get us to sympathize with Mr. Badii, and the fact that we as an audience aren't made out to root for Mr. Badii as a character is what fuels my belief that he did indeed kill himself. It also keeps the audience from wanting to engage in any discussion over the material, which I'm sure is not what Kiarostami intended on. I assume the behind the scenes at the end was some sort of reminder from Kiarostami that we are indeed watching a movie (maybe as some sort of disclaimer?). However I agree with Roger Ebert in his review of the film when he said, and I'm paraphrasing, something along the lines of "we don't need to be reminded at the end that this is a movie because the slow and boring pace throughout is reminder enough." At the end of the day I understand what Kiarostami was going for and applaud him for trying to make his film feel as real as possible, but it's the lack of entertainment value that kept me from truly enjoying it, and after all we are in the entertainment industry.