Change Your Image
Slipped_Sprocket
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Law & Order: Organized Crime (2021)
Would have given it ero stars if that was an option What a waste, and a black eye on the Law and Order history
All of the "Law and Order" iterations up until now were among the best written, casted, filmed, edited and produced series on mainstream TV since the series original premiere in 1990. Historically, they provided regular work and career advancement to hundreds of actors in New York City as well as showcasing scores of established actors in cameo roles.
The cinematography and plot development were excellent and the establishment of realistic and even flawed characters with whom the viewer could "bond" made it compelling to watch. The way the previous iterations were shot and staged was far more realistic than virtually any other network series. In fact, when I took my first filmmaking course, I began timing and taking notes on re-run episodes of Law and Order to plan my own shooting schedule -- the way scenes were framed and cut, even illuminated, was brilliant.
And the fact that most of the hour long episodes were self-contained stories (though with the continuity of the character development of the gradually changing cast) made it very satisfying entertainment. There were occasional multi-part episodes but they were the exception, not the rule. And even crossovers, as in several that shared plots with "Homicide: Life in the Streets" set in Baltimore.
I saw many ways in which the success of the Law and Order series (the original, "SVU", "Criminal Intent", and some of the shorter-lived variants) influenced "cop" and "courtroom" dramas in a positive way. They took some of the themes and techniques from prior shows like "NYPD Blue" and even the vintage legal drama from the 60's "The Defenders" to create a more visually and dialogue-based realistic portrayal of crime and prosecution. Even the older episodes from the early 90's hold up well today. It's pretty clear that cable series like "The Shield" and "The Wire" took a lot of cues from them as well.
But then came the CSI series. Honestly, I have been unable to stomach these since they began. They are scripted, staged and shot in a predictable and almost campy manner. Generally unrealistic, filled with imaginary high-tech law enforcement technology, two dimensional characters, cartoonish bad guys, absurd plot twists and constant final second "deus ex machina" saves. Even the set lighting is stagey and fake looking. Little complexity in role personalities or story lines. But they became unaccountably popular.
I had been uneasy for the past couple of years about whether Law and Order (of which only SVU remained) would survive. The gradual departure of many favorite characters was inevitable but was gradually gutting the lineup. And the tendency of the plots to more and more rely on "ripped from the headlines" real crime and corruption cases weakened the entertainment value, at least for me.
I did feel revived hope at the final episodes of last season (the one that wrapped up in June 2021. But I did not care for the first season of the Chris Meloni spin off, with him going undercover with Albanian mobsters. A lot of it felt out of character for "Stabler" and the level of violence and continual threat in it, with no resolution from episode to episode, reminded me too much of the grim crime miniseries that have populated PBS and HBO for the past few years ("Before We Die", "Mare of Easttown", "Beartown", "Wallender","Laeticia", etc.)
Now I find I can't stand either "SVU" or "Organized Crime". Both feel more like more CSI properties, substituting flash and trash for substance. The foundation of the L & O franchise was believability, as well as the examination of the complexities of the law and of human nature. The new plots are hackneyed "black and white" cheap thrills with drama created not by realistic conflicts and situations but by having rushed scenes and outsized villains. The "Richard Wheatley" character and the Byzantine plots around him and his unrealistic influence are a joke. Reminds me more of the stale premises of the "super-hero" franchises with a gang of superhumanly good but personally aggrieved "good guys" battling an even more
"superhuman" evil genius bent on destroying the world. Yawn.
I did set the DVR to record the SVU and Organized Crime episodes, but find I end up fast-forwarding through them or even turning them off. The characters no longer seem real to me. Major waste of a bunch of good actors, who deserve better vehicles to practice their craft.
Downton Abbey (2019)
Very disappointing and shabby production
I greatly enjoyed the TV series and watched its whole run. I admit my original enthusiasm about the film version began to wane when the first previews appeared. The core premise (the "Royals Visit") seemed a pretty weak plot line.
But I was bored enough at home one night to head to the theater to see it. Julian Fellowes should be ashamed -- maybe he drafted this script on the toilet one day since it comes off as a very rough draft or mediocre fan fiction. The characters, whose complex personalities were so well developed and became so familiar to us during the series, were given vapid lines, many inappropriate to their established personas, and a story line with zero dramatic meat. It was like a watered-down amateur knockoff of the series put on by a high school drama club. Even the scene by scene direction was sloppy, with a lot of pointless bustling, dialogue non-sequitirs, poor pacing and a sense that we were watching a bunch of first takes where people were unsure of their lines. The whole thing felt forced and contrived -- even the plot "crises" were negligible and mainly re-hashes of previous plot tropes like a lady's maid who steals from her employer and another hidden love-child daughter of a family member (yawn.) Oh, and Edith, despite being now fabulously rich, well married as a Peeress of the Realm and even pregnant is still whining about not liking her life. (yawn again and who cares?) Even the exchanges between Dowager Lady Violet and Isobel Merton (nee Crawley) seemed more petty and contrived than clever. Great lack of conviction in any of the script and most of the performances.
I left with the feeling that the film was thrown together only to make a bunch of money, to show off dozens of fabulous gowns and to throw a bone to fans who wanted to see widowed nice guy Tom Branson and depressed gay butler Barrow find perfect love interests, which they do with conveniently uncomplicated ease.
Trivia question: what happened to the baby that Lady Mary was supposedly expecting during the last episode of the series?? Didn't notice any new faces in the nursery and the character was as wraith-slim as ever.
A Quiet Passion (2016)
Script is terrible, story is inaccurate, acting uneven, film tedious and sad
The only positive comment I can make after wasting over two hours watching this sorry mess of a film is that Cynthia Nixon does a creditable job of acting in spite of a lame and mordant script. Most of the rest of the cast for the most part sounds as if they were doing an initial read-through. The direction is stagy and there is an excess of glacially slow pans around candle-lit interiors that contribute nothing to the story line, such that it is. The story told is highly inaccurate. It characterizes Dickinson as a reclusive, shrewish, depressive, neurotically cruel bitch. ED actually had some close and possibly even romantic relationships both in her youth and in middle age -- you would not know that from this selective script.
The script also fails to convey her love of Nature and her quiet joy in life, even when she cloistered herself. In fact she was more widely known for her expertise in gardening than her poetry while she lived, but she is barely shown outside her rooms throughout the movie. There are many imagined unpleasant confrontations and bitter exchanges between characters in the film that have no apparent basis in reality. It's more a contrived soap opera in period dress than bio-pic; "Desperate Housewives of Amherst" might have been a more accurate title.
As to direct contradictions to the truth: Dickinson's sister in law was an acquaintance known to her years before she married into the family -- the film shows her as a stranger being introduced to the family after the marriage. Dickinson also NEVER met her brother's mistress, Mabel Todd, let alone caught them in flagrante delicto, as shown in the film. In fact, Todd respected ED's work and was one of the people who made sure that Dickinson's poems were posthumously published. ED was also not emotionally close to her distant mother, though the film turns their relationship into a sappy cliché. In a final blow to ED's memory, the film shows her coffin being hauled to the cemetery in a horse drawn hearse. In fact, per her wishes, her loved ones placed her favorite flowers in the casket with her and then carried it by hand through fields of buttercups to the family plot.
This film left myself and my companion (a published poet who teaches writing at University level) feeling drained, depressed and disappointed. There were so many aspects of ED's personality and incidents in her life that could have enriched and enlivened this film -- perhaps they were left on the cutting room floor? Honestly, if you have not read Emily Dickinson's poetry before seeing this mordant flick, you are not going to be inspired to do so afterwards.
Wiener-Dog (2016)
Smug, juvenile and lazy film-making, don't waste your time
In a year that's been sorely lacking in films of any substance and creative or emotional depth, I was really hoping to be satisfied with this one. I let the endorsement of it being screened at Sundance (what were they thinking?) and an impressive roster of actors seduce me into going to see this regrettable and tasteless pablum.
Before you scoff at my condemnation of it, let me give you some background. First, I LIKE, in fact LOVE, quirky and even shocking films. I've been a student and fan of cinema my whole life, starting in the 1950's when my dad used to borrow 8 mm projectors from Boston University (where he was an instructor) and screen classic films and documentaries from all over the world on our dining room wall. I took film courses in college and even studied filmmaking and produced my own short films. I'm not an aesthetic elitist and will watch just about anything -- my favorites run the gamut from experimental efforts made on a shoestring to big studio extravaganzas.
Yeah, I do have my prejudices and admit that not all highly vaunted films and genres match my taste. But no matter what my personal tastes might be, I do know quality when I see it, and "Weiner Dog" is a lazy piece of cr@p. Yeah, the director used a trash bag full of Film School 101 "I'm so avant garde" clichés to try to appear clever: long pans, off balance static shots, sustained closeups, dysfunctional characters, gross-out imagery that adds nothing to the story, ad nauseam. And mild nausea is the result, at least in this viewer (and the fellow film lover who went with me.) Don't get me wrong -- I don't object to being disturbed by a film. In fact I do appreciate, even relish, a film that's creepy, dysphoric and even violent. One of my favorites last year was Jonathan Glazer's "Under the Skin" (which, by the way, uses many of the same techniques Todd Solondz attempts in "Weiner Dog" but Glazer executes them successfully.)
The fact that "Weiner Dog"s Todd Solondz could not coax effective performances from a roster of such seasoned good actors is a testimony by absence to the importance of directing. The single major accomplishment of this waste of time is that he managed to make veterans like Ellen Burstyn, Danny De Vito and Julie Delpy come off like blundering amateurs, or, at best, B grade hopefuls at an initial blind script read. And the lesser known actors come off even worse. I've seen high school video productions that had better scripts, continuity and more convincing performances. The script, pacing and editing would have earned a C minus in any film class. It's telling that the "climax" vignette with De Vito is a snide put down of film schools. Ironic that Solondz has such a sour grapes attitude towards them -- since he teaches directing. I wouldn't pay this guy to direct a hemorrhoid cream commercial, let alone expect him to teach anything of value.
His Wiki blurb describes him as being "known for his style of dark, thought-provoking, socially conscious satire." Meh. Producing condescending and inane stories that exaggerate stereotypical and cynical views of people with limp dialogue, poor direction and a few grotesque scenes of violence and excrement thrown in for shock value is a lazy, immature and cheap way to get attention. And the dilettantes that fall for this kind of insult to the viewers intelligence deserve to waste their time on it. I won't do so again. Solondz has been added to my list of smug cinematic hacks to avoid.
Promised Land (2012)
Lame standard Hollywood cheese with no credibility
Three of us went to see Promised Land (PL) last night and I hate to say this, but the movie was not only shoddy standard Hollywood fare, it failed completely in being even moderately realistic as well as failing to clarify the issues involved with both fracking industrialization of rural areas and the genuine short and long term impacts involved. I don't know what rock the film's scriptwriters and producers have been hiding under, but the average person in the street knows more about fracking and it's implications than they did. The manner in which the leasing agents were approaching property owners was false, the town's individual and collective reaction was pure fiction and the premise (that there was a mole "double agent" in the employ of a huge gas corporation passing himself off as an environmentalist) is patently ludicrous.
I know landowners in the middle of the rural fracking boom in the northern tier of the state who have been in the midst of the real site of this ongoing crisis since it began 4 years ago and also know people who work in the shale gas industry so I am pretty familiar with how the process works.
First off, unlike the way it is portrayed in PL, the leasing agents are more often independents who collect signed leases and then bundle them and sell them to the highest bidder for a percentage profit.
Second, the idea promoted by PL that the community "votes" on whether to "allow" the mining in their area is completely false -- we ALL know that state commerce rules largely supercede any local regulations, even if the court's stay of the worst features of Act 13 stands.
Third, the portrayal of rural small town life as an idyllic environment inhabited by idealistic traditionalists is largely false. The reason that there has been such a boom in drilling is that a large percentage of individual land owners are enthusiastic, sometimes blindly so, about signing up to get the money from the drillers. And most, even if they have not leased, have friends or family who work either for the drilling industries or for businesses that profit from their presence, like industrial suppliers, truck drivers, laborers and owners and employees of motels, restaurants and service stations. Even if it is a Devil's Bargain, the fracking industry has brought at least a temporary level of prosperity to many struggling small towns. Much of the population of these regions tend to have a suspicion of environmentalism (which they associate with "big city liberals") and of academics and science, so educating them about the real threat to their lifestyles and health by shale gas drilling is a tough row to hoe. The notion that locals would challenge and beat up a gas leasing agent in a bar is beyond dumb.
Fourth, there was virtually NO real depiction or explanation of the process of fracking in the film. The schoolroom "demonstration" scene and the "dead cows in Louisiana" trope were ludicrous. There are REAL environmental issues with frack drilling and REAL accidents affecting human and animal health that could have been worked into the script. There was NO mention of air pollution, the effects of heavy traffic on rural roads, the noise and emissions of compressor stations, the land destruction of pipelines, the massive draw-offs of water and the disposal problems of "produced" waste water. Anyone not already familiar with the frack process and the issues involved would learn nothing from this film. The subplot about the doofus living in the trailer who enthusiastically signs a lease is beyond dumb. For one thing, a fracking well pad takes a MINIMUM of 4 acres and most are closer to 10. No leasing agent would solicit a contract for the guy's 1.3 acre plot. And people who are leasing their property tend to be pretty well informed about the going rates and royalties. Pretty typical Hollywood condescension towards rural folk as dim yokels.
Fifth, though I am no big fan of the oil and gas industry, I do know that they are more greedy than sneaky and the plot device of the "secret agent" is silly and distorts the real issues. Yes, the industry does sponsor duplicitous phony "environmental" propaganda, but the standard two-dimensional Hollywood portrayal of the "evil corporation" and the "ethical insider with a heart who has an epiphany" are cheap shots and juvenile scripting. I could have drafted a more effective script than this one in about 15 minutes.
Honestly, the fracking industry has little to fear from this dopey film (we got to the 7:15 screening early enough to be subjected to the entire 45 minutes of ads and "coming attractions" and didn't see any of the "industry information" we were told to expect). And I see little in this piece of Hollywood run-of-the-mill cheese that would inform or energize anyone about the genuine issues involved in the fracking dilemma. If anything, the falseness of the premises and the portrayals could be a setback for the movement. There are such major gaffes and gaps in this film that I feel strongly that it would be a mistake for the anti- fracking movement to pin any publicity or hopes on it in strengthening the cause.
The movie is a complete disappointment and a failure, both as a dramatic production and as a potentially influential public wake-up call. Hollywood crap. Matt Damon should be ashamed of this pablum.