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Reviews
Dave Chappelle: Sticks & Stones (2019)
How does he do it over and over?
Absolutely incredible. Thank God Dave Chapelle is back. We're witnessing one of the greatest if not the greatest stand ups of all time. The hour is original, thought provoking, incredibly executed, and bold. This may be his best special yet. The writing flawless. The depth and range that it demonstrates is nothing short of genius.
Standup and Away! with Brian Regan (2018)
Decent Material with Unbearable Production
Brian Regan has been a great comic for decade, so I was happy to see him get a new opportunity, but almost everything about this show is terrible. The production is so bad that you actually think the choices made are intended to add to the comedy. Unfortunately, it's not. It's 100% serious.
The stand-up by Regan in between sketches is just regurgitated material that he did in a half hour special on Comedy Central in the late 90s. He has so much more material than that. Why is he only doing the same 20 year old jokes?
The laughter from the crowd is probably genuine, especially when Regan is doing stand-up, but they don't mute the crowd noise after cutting to sketches so it ends up sounding like a laugh track. Cringe.
The transitions into the sketches involve a "producer" who feigns stupid and interrupts with uncomfortably forced questions or comments related to the topics of the bits. It's so terrible and unnecessary.
The camera work in the sketches is super shaky and they make 15 cuts in a 6 second period. The stand-up segments do this as well. It's almost as if they were trying to impress you with how many cameras they have recording the show.
Even the intro to the show has ridiculously corny narration, music, and visuals. It feels like a horrible 80s tv stand-up production.
So many comics have done this formula well (stand-up to sketches) and it is not a difficult one to follow. It's almost impressive to screw it up so much.
Stop over-producing and over-editing the show. Stop using the same tired, old material. I feel bad for Brian Regan because there's no way in hell this gets another season. If you are a fan of him, do not watch this.
The Fall (2013)
Please God. Don't Watch. Save yourself.
The old adage is that time is your most valuable resource and this show robbed me of a ton of it. I've never written a review before, but I felt obligated to do so for this piece of trash. The series was so unnecessarily slow it almost painful to watch. I heavily rely on the IMDb community when it comes to chosing what to watch, and it completely failed me this time. The entire thing could have been rapped up in 5 or so episodes. There are so many unnecessary shots and sequences that one cannot help but believe that either the series was edited/directed by an 8 year old in that it just rambles through so many useless details of a story OR the network was just milking this thing for all its worth knowing people may continue to tune in because of the solid leads and provocative subject matter.
The acting by Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson is very strong and the only redeeming quality that makes it any bit tolerable. This is the only reason that I didn't give it a 1 and also didn't punch a hole in my wall when it ended.
The writing of the series is so horrible in so manys that it doesn't even warrant my time to list them all. The most significant two are as follows. 1) There are so many errors, inaccuracies, and mistakes in the due process/police work demonstrated that one must figure the writers take the audience to be complete morons who won't even notice.
2) Once you painstakingly arrive at the last episodes of the series, you think that they may have something and finally pull this thing together. NOPE! It just ends in an incredibly lazy way. Lots of solo shots of characters not saying anything. This is merely an attempt to make you think that maybe you didn't get the deeper message. The messages are clear and obvious early on so like I said, it's just Lazy.
How anyone could rate this garbage anything higher than a 3 is beyond me. Either you have all the time in the world on your hands or you've never really watched decent film/tv. Rarely am I physically angry when something ends, but this did it.