Change Your Image
gaabib
Reviews
The Rook (2019)
I wanted to like this...
I wanted to like this show based on the premise but it just fell flat for me. Characters weren't interesting, there was too much exposition and not enough building the progress of the story - characters did things that made no sense with no explanation. I was also thrown off and out of the story at the beginning by the completely unnecessary and unexplained bit about mispronouncing the main character's name, Myfanwy, as "Miffany." In reponse to some other comments, I live in the USA, I know people named Myfanwy, I've always loved that name and I have *never* heard anyone say it "Miffany," it's mu-VAN-wee. "Miffany" added nothing to the story, just sounded stupid and if you know the actual pronunicaition, is just a pointless waste of a good name. I have not read the book series, by Australian author Daniel O'Malley, so I can't comment on how it compares to that.
Captain Marvel (2019)
I really like Captain Marvel
I've been a Marvel comics reader and fan for 45 years and this is up there as one of my favorite Marvel movies, with the first three Spiderman and Guardians of the Galaxy. Brie Larson was good as the main character, I saw a couple reviews unfavorably comparing her performance to Gail Gadot as Wonder Woman but I think Larson was fine and her character was definitely better. The female characters and their interrelationships were well presented, substantial and believable. It suffered from the shallow, implausible dialog that is fine in comics but I think has always cursed almost every Marvel movie, and ruined the Avengers for me. These characters were not as shallow as the Avengers. It was fun, it rolls along and there wasn't much that knocked my attention out of the enjoyment of the film. Younger Nick Fury was great and of course, who wouldn't love that cat?
Hitler's Circle of Evil (2018)
Excellent, enjoyable presentation based on primary sources
I have to disagree respectfully with the other two reviews on this documentary series, I found it very good and enjoyed it.
This series presents the Nazi high command as people in a way that I had never seen in any previous documentary or book. The writers made good and frequent use of many primary source documents - diaries, letters, court transcripts, memos and other materials - so I would in no way class this as "propaganda." I think this series is an admirable work that probably represents many hours of research and puts together information I had never seen presented like this.
Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goering, Speer and others were not inhuman monsters who just sprang up out of nothing, they were people who behaved monstrously, and neither were they supermen nor military geniuses. This documentary gives a detailed picture of who they were as individuals through how they interacted with each other, and how these monstrous, flawed humans destroyed themselves and their own country.
The Hitman's Bodyguard (2017)
Insultingly Bad
I gave this one star for Samuel Jackson, Gary Oldman and Salma Hayek - who was sadly hardly on screen. Ryan Reynolds was ok, he's not bad and I think he and Samuel Jackson have chemistry and could be good together in a movie with a script, but he didn't have much to do in this. It's just really awful and it has nothing to spoil. There's one character-building scene at the beginning and then it's just one long, super violent chase scene with tons of bullets and bodies and something I can't even call a subplot that I think was intended by someone, once, to build a relationship between the two stars but falls absolutely flat. Really, I don't know why they bothered with even the light dusting of explanation for who those people were and why they were there; just open with bullets flying and go to the end. One hilarious, good touch was Ryan Reynolds' climactic battle with the bad guy's chief muscle, which starts in a restaurant kitchen full of sharp things and hot things, moves out the window and into a hardware store full of all kinds of things. Apparently, the police in Amsterdam have two used Hondas or something and maybe four officers. Otherwise, you can drive around Amsterdam at 60+ and spray the city with bullets to your heart's content. It really feels as though whoever made it just did not give a rat's poop about it.
Cave (2016)
Ugh
Completely ruined for me by the bad, banal and meaningless English dubbing. Looks nice, acting seemed OK, camera work good and locations nice and I wanted to watch it but just couldn't. Maybe this would be better in Norwegian with subtitles but that dialogue was so bad, so not thought out at all that I couldn't finish watching it.
High School Musical (2006)
Polished but "written" by a machine
It's slick and polished but I refuse to believe that a human wrote this. The plot and characters were pulled out of the stock plot and character drawers, no effort was made to do anything with it at all. Every second of this movie is expected, no surprises at all. The characters are just horrible - flat, hardly even 2-dimensional stereotypes: the evil popular girl who's jealous of the saintly new girl, the jock whose father (gasp! he's the coach!) pushes him to relive his own success/dreams, jocks/drama club/scholars who don't like each other and are separated into completely segregated herds and a HORRIBLE, sexist caricature of a drama teacher. It was so formulaic that I thought Disney must have software that craps these turds out of the printer. Just absolutely awful.
Just because it's a kid's movie is NO excuse to shovel out hack schlock and call it a movie. Millions of dollars flushed down the toilet to make this piece of garbage which didn't fool my children one bit. They were completely perplexed that it was so bad and pointed out what was wrong with it all the through the movie. 90 minutes or whatever of our lives that are gone now.
I gave it two stars for at least camera work, sound, lighting, sets and editing as it's not their fault. Sorry to be so mean in this review but Disney has the money and the experience to do a better job than this and they make so many movies this bad. I don't know if the problem is failure to hire real directors and writers or committees making artistic decisions instead of artists. Whatever it is, STOP ALREADY!
Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929)
A Beautiful, Stunning Masterpiece of film
Shot in 1929, the camera travels around a Russian city, showing us all of life in it. A homeless child in rags sleeping on a bench, workers pouring out of a train station, a young woman getting dressed, a bicycle delivery man pounding through the streets, a mother giving birth, horse-drawn wagons sharing the streets with electric streetcars, ambulance workers, a steelworks, a family on holiday, people working, people getting their hair washed, people using old fashioned telephone equipment, people mining coal, people making things, on and on and on and on and the cameraman himself on occasion. The pace and the editing are excellent and I was completely fascinated and entranced, getting to see another world that's gone now.