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julianj-1
Reviews
Game of Thrones: No One (2016)
Without GRRM D & D Roar but they are no Lions
I am only going to mention the Arya plot line, as I agree with the posters on the first page of this reviews section - Karl, Nathan, Delta, etc, that it was very poor.
I have only seen the TV series, not read the books but I loved it. The grimness, unpredictability, characters dying, bad guys winning etc, made it hugely different to most other things on TV. I was begging the Red Viper not to do something flashy but kill the Mountain "Pleeeasee, shut up, stab him some more" We know how that ended up.
Apart from the magic, the world is grimly realistic. Did you note how in this episode, as Varys and Tyrion were saying touching goodbyes, there were several beggars around, and Varys wafted past them as though they didn't exist...and he's one of the most sensitive and concerned people in the series. That's GoT world folks.
On to the Arya stuff. We've all be led to believe that she is going to become some sort of pint-size super soldier - with the twin-track sword-training of Silvio Forel and her later assassin Masters in the House of B/W.
So once the Waif (plus possibly others) is on her trail she's got to have a super-cunning plan.
We've all seen a lot of films where the hero beats enemies by sheer wit and cunning. That's what we wanted.
Like many of you, when she was arrogantly strutting around, flashing cash (and not wearing Needle - eh?) it seemed like a big setup. Or as some theories said Jaquen impersonating Arya.
So walking into an ambush where a crone turns into the Waifinator and getting gut-stabbed...is that a plan?
No,in Medieval times its death. Pre-antibiotics peritonitis is fatal. I read somewhere that 25% of medieval warfare casualties died of this agonisingly after the battle and there was no cure. A Viking re- enactor friend of mine said "Onion Soup" when I asked him about this. "Eh?" I said. He explained that if someone had a gut wound, he would be given onion soup and then they would smell his wound - if it smelled of onions, he would be given a priest, if it did not they would sew him up and hope he would survive.
It's totally unbelievable that Arya could survive multiple stabbings and falling into disease-ridden water, then do a full Braavos Parkour.
Let's look at that E7 sequence again:
Arya goes around approaching the Westeros sailors. She has needle. When the crone approaches, Arya isn't fooled and draws her sword and there is a fight and both the waif and Arya are cut but not seriously, then she dives off the bridge and escapes. That's more believable and sets up that A is not the Waif's victim any more.
I can think of various other ways of Arya beating the waif, for example if she was injured when the Waif kills Lady Crane, but had Needle, then pretends to be in a drugged sleep and just stabs her though the heart then that would reveal that she has become a deadly assassin.
Or we see the mammoth fight which we were cheated out of. While they wasted time with an irrelevant jokes scene. Quite frankly someone with a small dagger v basket hilted rapier is probably not ever going to win.....
That's why I found it all so stupid, and insulting to my intelligence.
The plotting of this was basically pants. The two Ds really need GRRM imo.
Prometheus (2012)
Bring back Jar Jar Binks to the Prometheus
I agree with all the other brickbats launched by cineasts with IQs at room temperature (the film's natural audience) or above.
I never thought that I would see a mega budget SF film worse than The Phantom Menace. I was wrong: Prometheus is worse. Jar Jar Binks would not have been out of place on the crew - he's a dysfunctional, incompetent imbecile - perhaps there's scope for an AVP type crossover, weird engineers v Darth Maul?
I did notice one other stupid thing that I don't think has been mentioned, if Weyland was about 100-120, given future anti-ageing technology, then he would have fathered Charlize Theron when he was 80 or 90. Hmmm, another anomaly not explained.
SPOILER: PROMETHEUS 2
I can now reveal exclusively that 5 hour epic Prometheus 2 will consist soley of Damon Lindelof explaining everything from Prometheus to camera, with the aid of a box of crayons, an out of date science textbook, and some tatty 1970s copies of the Daily Mail about Chariots of the Gods, given to him by Von Daniken's mum.
Fish Tank (2009)
Another film demonising poor people
I have to review this title because it is another caricature of poor people. Some have claimed that the director is comparable to Loach or Leigh, but they have more awareness than this and create more complex characters.
Everyone in the film is a two dimensional cardboard caricature of an unlikeable poor working class (or Andrea might say underclass) person, by someone who I strongly suspect is from a middle or upper class privileged film school background.
I live in a similar, very deprived area of SE London, so I can say that I believe this is a false depiction of the reality.
Firstly, where are the black people? I can think of only one, who appears for a few seconds and commits a crime (buying cider for an underage girl). If Mia is so into black music, one would expect her to have black friends whom she could empathise with.
SPOILERS COMING UP Caricatures: 1. Alcoholic promiscuous single parent mum, who seems to have no feelings for her elder daughter, even saying she almost got her aborted 2. 2 delinquent,violent,alcohol abusing kids, Mia and her younger sister.
3. A pit bull type dog called Tennants (FYI a brand of strong lager) 4. A philandering Irishman with a wicked way with the ladies who takes the virginity of a girl he knows to be 15 in a place where he could easily be discovered by her mum. Being drunk isn't an excuse.
5. A gypsy/traveller lad who makes a living by stealing car parts from a breakers yard and fixing cars.
Total plot predictability/not credible I knew Connor was married from early on. When mia abducts the little girl, nobody has called the police. I imagine Connor's virtually-unseen wife would go berserk, and then would twig that Connor knows who it is when the girl returns to describe her assailant - note that we never see that scene because the director probably couldn't handle it correctly.
The dance audition which shatters her dreams is for some sort of sex work/lap-dancing. I sighed beforehand hoping this wasn't going to be the case. I think that people who recruit girls for this are very careful to check ID to make sure they are 18, so they don't get busted.
All in all, I thought this was a very patronising film, which does not represent the complex and difficult life of poor people in the UK today, it's a sort of 21st Century equivalent of Bedlam, where privileged people would pay to laugh at mad people.
Hell Boats (1970)
Creaky war drama
I've become fascinated by the small-scale war of coastal craft in WW2 - the nightly battles between allied and axis fast light craft, the buccaneering nature of some of the commanders and the stoicism and bravery of the crews on both sides fighting with grim and unrecognised heroism.
When I realised Hell Boats was showing on C5 I turned it on, missing the first 20 minutes or so. Unfortunately this is a horribly creaky drama, and doesn't do any favours to realism. It's basically ridiculous, even allowing for the terrible model work, with German "E Boats" (actually called S-Boats) that don't look remotely like the real thing. The hero and his mate plus comedy partisans and eye-candy sneak into a German port and shoot their way out....
{SPOILER} At the low point of three men with pistols capturing an "E Boat" I gave up.
A disappointment. I'm sure there is a great film to be made about the coastal war, but this isn't it.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Waste of time
I just want to add my two pennyworth.
It is perfectly OK to create a fantasy world in film, but it has to be self-coherent and logical in its own way (for example The Last Battle,post-apocalypse fantasy where it rains fish and characters armour themselves in pots and pans..the villain keeps a girl in the boot of his car for sex; so when the hero wins, he takes the villain's sharp suit and does the same - it's bizarre but it has its own logic) IG has none of this logic. it's completely incoherent and moronic and apart from about 3 of the Nazis we don't care about anyone - yes this is a film so bad that the bad guys are the only one I was almost rooting for; There's lots of torture, with the "good guys" doing the torturing. It did turn my stomach a bit.
I'll just highlight one particular bit of uber-stupidity. Four anti-Nazis, including a Brit spy and a glamorous German film-star meet in a bar which turns out to be full of off-duty soldiers playing a parlour game; professional spies would abort the meeting, but lets leave that aside.
Then a Gestopo officer appears and makes them play the parlour game: He's super perceptive enough to unmask the Brit spy because of his accent and a gesture He's so super unperceptive that he doesn't recognise German army enemy No 1 Hugo Stiglitz ("everyone knows Hugo Stiglitz" earlier in film)at the table.
He's so stupid that he then pulls a gun (outnumbered 3-1) and the scene turns into a pointless bloodbath. He doesn't make and excuse and leave to find backup, or quietly get the other Germans to arrest the potential spies, which any even remotely normal person would have done.
The film is like that the whole way through. Nothing makes sense. the only fascinating character is SS Colonel Landa; and he inexplicably changes sides at the end.
Some of the other commentators have said what an insult this is to anyone who resisted in WW2. That I agree with but this film seems to be aimed at sub-morons. Question - why did QT put in all the film buff references, which are surely aimed at a completely different and much more discerning audience? Any third-rate afternoon telly WW2 movie sparkles in comparison to this.
Mammoth (2009)
Tedious pretentiousness
As an avid cinephile I am reluctant to submit a rollickingly bad review, but I find it necessary to counterbalance the favourable ones.
This is a tedious, almost plot less, farrago of rich Westerners patronising impoverished third-worlders. I was waiting in excruciating boredom for something to happen. It doesn't.
The cinematography is nothing to write home about, score is poor and the acting OK. The script is dire - mixed metaphors about a Mammoth (v expensive) pen and also astronomy. Probably the idea for the film comes from the pen, and it's too thin a peg to hang an entire movie on. I would say this was, for me, one of the top five most boring films I have seen in my life.
The Road (2009)
A ridiculous film
I read the book. I didn't find it particularly good, and I've read a lot of post apocalypse SF. These fall into two categories: "realistic" attempts to examine behaviour in the aftermath of some catastrophe. The most recent one I would recommend is Octavia S Butler's Parable of the Sower.
The second category is nihilistic despairing romance. Anna Kavan's Ice - where the world is smothered in ice - and some early Ballard are in this category. So is The Road (book and film.
The Road is basically ridiculous. Neutron Bombing? Nuclear Winter? Giant Asteroid hit? Plague? Humanity eaten by Giant Mutant Pink Ants? The author doesn't tell us because he simply hasn't thought it through. Unlike most regular hard sf apocalypse writers who usually work our their premises carefully You can pick out the sheer silliness of it all yourself but I just put out a few pointers: 99%+ of the population has died in 10 years but they don't have clothes to wear or a decent tent.
Only two rounds of ammo? Just so the author can set up a fake dilemma.
Farming Humans for Cannibalism? If you have food to feed humans, you would eat it yourself, rather than loose calories.
Leaving the bunker - the height of stupidity. Wait out and try to rebuild. And one presumes that the people who set it up would have a) stocked it with weapons and ammo b) medical supplies. So when the Dolt (we can't really call him a Man) gets shot with an arrow he should have had antibiotics etc so he wouldn't die.
Medical supplies: ditto the Ship. Question - why does he swim back - are there no life rafts or lifeboats left on the Ship? You could carry a lot more supplies safely.
Maddened brigands and bandits: this comes to the heart of the matter, even bandits are likely to negotiate first. They can't afford wounds, loss of members, and may even want to recruit more people into their gang. Safety in numbers.
It's just ridiculous that there is no government at all surviving, or people banding together for skill sharing and mutual defence.
Why would the nuclear family with the dog accept a lone boy into their group? Unless he had skills that were useful he's just a worthless mouth to feed? If you have read anything about people surviving in adversity, without having a rose-tinted view of humanity, The Road is hokum.
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
Essential viewing -especially for the deniers
I see that there are a few climate change (better to call it climate crisis) deniers posting.
They seem to have seen a different film to me.
A. It is not sensible to play Russian Roulette with the only planet you have to live on.
B. The film answers this with the parallels to the tobacco industry - I'll bet there are a few "scientific studies" wheeled out even today claiming the link between tobacco and lung cancer is "not proved" but no serious person believes this.
C. Obviously you don't want to believe your lying eyes as the 10,000 year old Larsen B ice shelf slides into the sea.
In conclusion, to modify the Upton Sinclair quote in the film: "You can't make a man understand something when his lifestyle depends on him not understanding it".
For the rest of us, this film is essential viewing.