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The Endgame (2022)
This is a nothing burger
I watched the pilot the other night out of curiosity. Did not see any trailers of it before hand, but the word of mouth was that this is a The Blacklist rip-off. So I was expecting a mediocre procedural with some outstanding characthers that would make the show stick. Well, it does not. Morena Baccarin look awesome and she really tries to deliver the goods, but there just are none. Ryan Michelle Bathe tries hard as well, and this female criminal mastermind vs. Female supercop stick is interesting in concept, but her character is written without any originality. And this is the main issue with the show. The writing sucks. Seems like they had a one page concept for a show, spiced it up with some cool setpieces, action and editing, but did not bother to develop the story and characthers. You have the attorney general, the FBI director and the Homeland Security advisor in one room calling shots, and they talk and think like beat cops? Everybody is dressed up fancy, but they do not show an.ounce of.sophistication that their job titles would require, everything is just posturing without any substance to back it up. At least in The Blacklist you had a handfull of characthers that were enjoyable and the mastermind was oozing.of charisma. And he still does even after 9 seasons of storytelling that run out of steam about 5 seasons ago. This show is trying to sell us a beautifull packaging that is empty on the inside.
The Young Pope (2016)
waste of potential
The trailer was more than promising. The premise of the Vatican to elect a new, young pope that they think they can control and use to rejuvenate the masses only to find out that the would be puppet has a mind and an agenda of its own sounded more than interesting. And Jude Laws performance has sold this series to me as the new must watch on TV. But, as often is, just because the trailer is great, it does not means that the end product will be too.
The main problem with this series is the story. This is a 10 episode long mini series, so it should not had have any problems in presenting one, coherent and gut punching story. Instead, we get fragments from 4-5 story arcs that are never fully explored or resolved. The only thing that is made crystal clear is that the pope is conflicted. Yes, the power struggle elements are there, but they are brief, lackluster in effort and basically forgettable. Temptations and crisis of faiths are also there and they are just as powerless. There are these beautiful ideas and motives planted in this series that are cut down even before they can blossom. And the ending... its just insipid.
If you are a fan of Jude Law then you might enjoy this series, as he does get to shine in a number of scene. He was the perfect casting choice for the role. It is a pity that the script is sub par.
Warcraft (2016)
I just might buy this one
I knew of this movie, that it is coming out but it did not interested me that much. I never played the game and the trailers didn't do a thing for me. Than the movie opened in the states and critics wrote it off right away as a failure.
Today I wanted to see a movie, and this was the only one on play that I have not seen yet but was willing to pay for. Given that my only expectation was to be entertained, I must say that this movie was a very pleasant surprise. It is not a great movie, not by a long shot, but it does the job it was set out to do rather well. And that job was: set up a franchise.
The good: The basic plot of the movie is quite good and there were some twists and turns that really payed off. The ending especially was very satisfying to me. The orcs look freakin great and basically all the scenery look beautiful. The genre of the movie is fantasy and it shows. another thing that I really liked is that the wast majority of the actors who were not doing motion capture are best know for their TV work, so this movie could be a career launching pad for many talented people.
The not so good: The movie is based on a computer game and has to set up the franchise, meaning that it has to show locations and factions and stuff that are not relevant to this movie. Now, this movie already has a build in audience of millions of gamers to whom all this exposition is useless because they already know the mythology of the world our story is set, but as for the casual movie goer, that only knows that warcraft is a popular game, at best. So half of the first act is basically a huge information dump that is incomplete, unnecessary (for the current story) and overall unusable. But it will make sense 2 years from now in the sequel. My second problem with the movie is that its too short. There must be a good 20-30 minutes of story that were cut out because of length. Because of this some things are not set up as well as they should be. Like, the motivation of the main villain is not explained. There is a hint towards the "why" but thats about it. Also, some lines of dialog were rather flat, like if they were taken right out of the game, so yeah, some better dialog is badly needed. And as a personal taste, some of the costume design of the humans were rather tacky. It just goes to show that some elements needs to be adapted for the big screen as they do not work as well as they did in the game.
Overall, this is a decent movie, and if they will nail the sequel, which will come, we will have the first good fantasy franchise since the lord of the rings.
The Revenant (2015)
Beauty is only skin deep
Everybody loves this picture. They praise the looks of it. And indeed, it looks beyond awesome. From a technical point of view, it is nothing short of flawless. But unfortunately, beauty is only skin deep, and if one manages to look past the the cinematography, he/she will find that the story is nothing special, in fact, compared to the praise this movie is receiving, it feels like it is a fraud. Basically it is the journey of DiCaprios character from near death to a moment of revenge, but if you take into account what his character goes trough, he should be dead already from exposure or pneumonia half way trough, instead, amongst other things, he rides a horse off a cliff and falls hundreds of feet without getting a new scratch next to the scars made by a bear. Also, the plenitude of nature shots which are there to pound in the viewers the severity of the heroes situation, despite being beautiful, are so excessive that a good one hour of the 156 minutes runtime of this movie could have been cut out without any actual loss to the story. The director is also pushing the boundaries with the flashbacks and hallucination scenes just for the sake of back story and motivational exposition. Given the depth (or lack there of) of the story, the movie should have been around 90 minutes flat instead of an almost 3 hour long epic. Honestly, when I was not bored by the national geography shots, I was hating this movie with a passion. I found it to be pretentious, hollow, with badly written characters and way too long for its own good. Also, in about 2-3 years of time, nobody is going to talk about this movie unless the topic is not the fact that DiCaprio still did not received an Oscar yet. Quite frankly, I cannot imagine anybody to want to re-watch this movie again given its length unless he/she is glutton for punishment. I could go on and on about why I find this movie to be soo bad, but it would become a mindless rant and I do not like that. It is basically the posh version of Avatar. I am just wondering when will people see this?
Mondovino (2004)
Maybe my expectations were to high....
I watched this documentary because it said that it is about the globalization of wine and how this is impacting different wine regions of the world. My interest in wine is rather new and I am still in the initial research phase, so I thought that this would be something educational for me. Instead, it brought me mostly frustration.
Basically the movie is about this: in Nappa valley there is this guy named Bob Mondavi, a real power player in the wine world. He tried to buy in his way into a french wine producing village to extend his "domain". He failed. He goes to Italy instead where he has more success. Oh, and he has set up shop in other parts of the world as well, mainly south America.
In detail, 3/4 of the documentary is about the french affair, where the locals are presented, the small players, the big players, Mondavi is being presented, some fancy wine consultant is presented and a guy named Parker who is a wine critic that can make or brake wine companies worldwide. The french bicker amongst themselves and lament about how Mondavi, Parker and the consultant has changed the way of doing business and these 3 in return say that there is nothing wrong with their way. In the last quarter of the documentary, the focus is shifted towards Italy, how they came in contact with Mondavi and have found that everything is OK. At the very end there is about 10 minutes of shots from south America, not that it matters anyway.
This documentary bothers me. First, it doesn't knows what it wants to be. It is not about globalization, because it covers only one business deal and its consequences (barely). Its scope is not global, it doesn't even mentions the emerging Asian markets, hell, it doesn't even covers Europe, just some parts of France and Italy... Also, it tries to give an insight into the way of life of the wine makers, on a personal level, but does so in a manner that is totally distracts the focus about the main theme of the documentary.
However, the main problem with this documentary is the low technical quality, that make its weak substance even worse. Whoever shot the movie had no idea what it is doing. The camera shakes, the angles are all wrong and the focus is all over the place. Some wine maker is being interviewed and the camera just zooms in on hie eye, or his mouth so I can see how bad his teeth are. Or it zooms in on the fat old guy in the background that is going down a latter. The dialog still goes on but all I can see is Santa coming down from the roof. The editing is also abysmal. Every dog that the crew encountered during the making of the documentary gets a good 5 seconds of close ups in the movie. I know now that the worlds most influential wine critics french bulldog farts... Why is this important? Why was this not cut out? I know that the wine consultant sends out his driver to buy him newspapers and cigars. The maid comes in, sees the camera, gets shy but eventually asks if anybody wants to have a drink or something. Some guy passes trough the room where a woman is being interviewed, than passes back a moment later, both times they have a brief chat that has no value to the documentary whatsoever, yet everything makes it into the documentary. Some kid is being washed in a sink, on a porch in south America, I can see clearly that its a boy. An ugly/old piano player woman puts up makeup at a dinner event.There are countless such distracting elements that have no relevance, no added value, no contribution for the subject whatsoever. They should have been cut out. High-school kids could achieve better production value with their cell phones. And even if this movie is from 2004, I expect better quality from somebody that has the budget to travel around and the access to talk to VIPs.
Over all, this is a mediocre at best, shoddy, narrow view documentary that does not worth your time and effort.
CSI: Cyber (2015)
To be canceled
I actually looked forward to this series, despite the fact that Arquette is its spearhead. I have never been a fan of hers, but it still could have worked.
It does not. The problem is that this show relays too much on the formula. Widely recognized TV series spin-off? Check! Even more niche specific than the original (see law&order SVU)? Check! Is half the cast made out of already established and recognizable actors? Check! This is the formula, this is not the first show that uses it, and to some degree it works decent enough. So why is it failing here? Because the script is non existent. They did not even try to make it somewhat lifelike. It is 1 degrees of separation from a script used in porn. The show starts early on with an "argument" over jurisdiction of a kidnapping case. The argument is that since electronics were used during the kidnapping it would be a cyber crime and it should be reassigned to the cyber unit from the detectives already assigned to the case. This argument is accepted without 2 second of protest. First things first. Kidnapping in the US is a federal crime and it is handled by the FBI by default, not by some detectives. Even I know that and I am from Europe. Never lived in the states, by the way. Number two, considering the extensive level of use of electronics in the day to day life, at least 80% of crime would fall under the provided cyber crime definition. Now a lot of you will come back at me that it was meant to be malicious use of electronics, but that was not proved until way after the argument over jurisdiction was made. And number 3, that argument went way to easy, as it was there just because it had to be there.
Look, I am not even going to bother with all the other sink holes with this show. The writing is lazy, the dialog is terrible, it is a waste of time all around. It should be canceled based on the pilot alone. Unfortunately, I think it will even see a second season.
Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
I have seen porno movies with better scripts...
Lets face it. This is a cash cow franchise. And it will be milked again. I can only imagine what this movie would have looked like in an IMAX theater. I bet, it was a visual orgasm. It should have been, since it was shot beautifully and like 60% of this entire movie is nothing but explosions, gunfire and building sized robots wrestle mania. And this being an almost 3 hours long flick, it means that the action alone lasted more than feature films now days. I give this to Michael Bay, he is the best director when it comes to epic scale, extinction level magnitutde action sequences. There is no contest. None. If only his involvement would have been restricted to just that, the action sequences. But no. Besides the hour and a half of mayhem, you also get about an hour worth of bad dialog, cheesy one-liners, dumb decisions made by people who supposed to be smart. Basically, you take a low quality Saturday morning cartoon that normally last only about 20 minutes max, stretch it out to last for 3 hours by adding in a bunch of subplots and characters that are more than unnecessary, and you got a movie. Ah, yeah, you also have about 20 minutes worth of story exposition, which is totally useless. The story is not in sync with the other 3 earlier installments, but honestly, who cares about that anyways? Stanley Tucci is enjoyable in this film. And the action looks spectacular. But next to this, a Sasha Grey movie is front runner for the Oscars for best original script.
Extant (2014)
do yourself a favor and skip it
This show had many things going for it. It had a a pretty good cast and lots of interesting ideas. I mean, you had a space entity invasion or something, you had the robot boy thing, you had the whole anti tech theme, a mysterious billionaire with a more than shady agenda,conspiracies, hell, you even a Cain vs Abel theme towards the end. I mean there is an immaculate conception from space Jesus with plague pitted against the baby Skynet. So much of story ingredients, and they even looked cool on the screen. But man.....The script was AWFUL!!!! It was dumb! At best! They introduce all these ideas and concepts and afterwards they do nothing with it. Not a damn thing. Instead they have all the people running around doing pointless things, everybody is an utter idiot, or incompetent at best... And Goran Visnjic is just a pain to watch. I don't know if the writers purposely wrote his character as a pretentious prick or it just naturally came of from him like this.
I watched the first season to the end because I don't like leaving shows hanging in the air if I invest some time in them, but please, PLEASE, whichever network produced this reject, cancel it now. Right now. It is the second sci-fi concept rich show that disappoints, disappoints bad. I'm looking at you Almoust human.
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
it kinda shows that J.J. has moved on
I almost haven't seen anything out of the original Star Trek series and feature films. I was aware of Kahn and his caliber as a villain, but that's it. So, the first Abrahms movie didn't bothered me as much as it did the hard core fans. Actually, I have found it enjoyable.
But then, I have watched this sequel. And, as usual, it is weaker than the "original". It still looks right. It is still flashy, modern but retro in the same time, the style is spot on. The actors all deliver, the story ain't bad, it ain't good either but it is OK. Basically you would expect the movie to work. It doesn't. My personal comment on this is that it is soulless.
Frankly, this entire ordeal of Kirks coming of age story kinda tires me. It is a centerpiece of this movie and it would have been better if it wasn't. Than, we were promised klingons...we get one scene with them, face to face I mean, and even then, most of them are wearing helmets... And you never know who the real villain is. You have got the klingons, Khan and that admiral fellow on villain rotation. I like twists in a story, but this is a roundabout...
2 good things did come out of this movie: 1) the performance made by Cumberbatch as a villain. It is superb and by my opinion, it should have landed him the role of Batman, not Affleck.... 2) that scene with the blonde in nothing but underwear. I know that the filmmakers took a lot of heat including that picture in the trailer, and it is considered sexist and all that stuff, but honestly, in a movie filled with all sorts of eye candy, that scene takes the prize.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)
Way better than I expected
This is one of those occasions when the sequel is better than the original. And given the fact that the lead role is still held by Johnny Cage, that's a big deal. Don't get me wrong, the guy has potential, but he kinda became a warning sign of bad movies. Now, first of all, the Ghost rider itself became much more realistic, as in it doesn't look like a cutout from a PC game put in an actual movie, as the first did. I mean in the first one it was obvious from the first second that the rider was CGI. Second, the settings. It is more gritty, more dark, more dark ages. That's mainly because the movie was shot in Romania. And those parts of Romania are exactly the same in the every day life as it was shown in the movie. I know this because I live in that country. And for a Ghost rider movie, it was a pretty inspired choice of settings. By the way, that huge castle at the beginning of the movie, that is real too. Now, the plot. It is shallow. But this is okay since it is a comic book movie. And is one that doesn't really takes itself seriously. So basically you can enjoy it. Idris Elba really steals the show with his character of Monroe. Another interesting thing, well for me at least, were the choices of transportation of the villains at the beginning of the movie. I mean, the devil arrives by train... CFR (Romanian railways) has the most foul and hellish trains ever, so I guess it was fitting in an ironical way. And those 4x4 cars in the first car chase? All made by Dacia, and they are like less than 10K $ right of the production line. So you can see that some serious dime was saved on this movie. All together this is a perfect movie for one of those afternoon or nights when you want to see a movie, but a brain free one. I would buy the DVD, if it were on sale...
AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem (2007)
low, low, oh so low.....
The first Alien vs Predator movie was fun. It was nicely put in context, whit the pyramid in Antarctica and the whole predator initiation ritual. It combined the survival struggle of a small group in a remote location from the ALien franchise whit the hunt and the last standing alpha human from the Predator franchise. And had left a pretty nice cliffhanger too, for an obvious sequel.
The sequel is a poor excuse for the murder of an entire town. I mean it is the bloodiest movie ever. from the obvious chest bursting to slice and dicing and to be finished whit a thermo-nuclear bomb !!!!! And the human variety, not from the predator spring-summer bracelet collection. I just don't get it. Some ace Predator is called in for the hybrid, and all it does half the movie is to clean up the scene, in case of C.S.I. might show up. In the other half it is turned into a cowboy of sort, wen it shoots whit that cannon from the hands. And that hybrid...The scene whit it and the pregnant lady was just sick and cheap. I guess that the filmmakers had something whit kids, because they are killing them pretty nicely.The movie is sick and cheap from top to bottom, but that scene in particular. And finally, what is the deal whit the cliffhanger left whit this movie? Is there a secret group? Who/what are they serving. Why does it leave an after-taste of a B class television show? Tune in after 2-3 year and find out.
It shows that the directors have not done any movies yet as directors, they are visual experts, first of all. They know the stuff, but they have none.
just sucks.
Meet the Spartans (2008)
I guess Sorbo is broke
It is a slightly better than Epic movie. Thats because that Indian guy is no longer around. It is the only improvement.
The punchlines, or whatever they used in this movie as a substinance, are weak and cheap, on sale even. The "right in your face" approach does have a charm in general, but here is done distasteful. The Scary Movie series was good. It was fresh, it was funny. This movie is for hicks and hillbillies, that didn't made trough 6th grade. One Carmen Electra to drool upon and a bunch of stuff that they will find funny.
The major shock of this movie is Kevin Sorbo. I mean, what the heck is he doing in a slump like this? I mean, he ain't Pacino, but still, he is a decent TV star, with some good characters not like that white b**ch from Epic movie. Guess he really needs the rent money.
Transformers (2007)
not bad, but not good either
First things first, as even the title state, the movie is called Transformers, so by default the story is shallow. Now shallow is not that bad if its written good, but it is not the case. There are to many sidelines that are just thrown in the story and linked together without any apparent reason ( the blonde analyst chick with the Aussie accent and the black hacker would have been so much greater if they were just cut out of this movie, and there was just to much about parents - children relationship at the beginning, I mean masturbation a.k.a. happy hour? stepping on the grass, trash cans? come on......)
Now, when you see Michael Bay as director on a movie poster, you pretty much know what to expect, and that is action at its finest. Given the fact that we have 2 giant robot factions fighting each other kind of hand to hand, Bay doesn't disappoints, and delivers some fine shot action. Basically, the robots are great and they fight accordingly.
The actors are appropriate for this movie. Jon Voight brings some pedigree to the movie, but it shows that this role was accept to pay the rent rather than to claim critics. Shia LaBeouf ain't bad, but it could have been Justin Long in his place or any other young actor with a highscool kid face, it really doesn't matter. Megan Fox is a fox, plane and simple, she is hot. Besides the robots she is the only edge that this move has got. All the other actors are just annoying and mostly unnecessarily present, especially Anthony Anderson. No matter in what I see him, he is always an annoying loudmouth. Attitude and verbal diarrhea with a high volume. Fire him.
In a nutshell, good action, great robots, one FINE girl. Who needs story?
Ong-Bak (2003)
No SF fighting
Take one poor village, one good fighter, add a little disaster for the locals, spiced it up whit a quest for salvation. Now put it in the oven and cook it for about 2 hours. You got you're self a movie. The story line is predictable, I mean even if you see the movie whiteout the subtitles you won't miss a thing. Just like the fast and the furious. The only difference is that here everybody sounds like a screaming cat. However, the fighting is superb. It isn't science fiction like in the Jackie Chan, Vann Damme and company movies. Simple, real, stunning, painful. The other great thing about this movie are the chase scenes. Great thing to watch. All the character are one of the kind. To bad that almost no one is talking English. The language is gonna be tier-some.