Reviews

This is such a low blow of a movie. The woman in the story is so insanely naive and she is being so abused, it blows my mind. Never mind the fact she's trying to do something she loves. That's not the point. The point is, her money and her stupidity are making her the target of EVERYONE from her vile husband to the garbage sell-out human being that's supposed to be her instructor. Even the opera director just goes for the dollar bills, knowing he will cause her to be a laughing stock. They all revel in it. It literally kills her, when she finds out how she is being laughed at. For people to shame someone for doing something they are passionate about - WHILE robbing her, that's just ... I can't get over that. The whole movie is just about shaming a dumb old rich lady. It feels like shaming a special needs kid during a dance recital.

It makes almost no sense, but it's not a bad watch for the season, and really well-filmed. The cinematography and acting are lovely. Even some of the twists, however predictable.

The parts that made no sense and put me out of the narrative - boys talking about it like it's a myth and yet every year it's publically killed and ripped to pieces in front of everybody ... The boys are given no real weapons and prepare zero strategy (ambush, maybe, anyone?) ... The body count during the hunt is insane, it's a total Purge evening. And the one girl who insists on secretly joining against the rules (I imagine it's to prevent girls getting r*ped and killed), actually wears a skirt during... And that's just the movie. The book never explains how this all started either, how the guild figured out the rules of the sacrifice, or how one cop prevented traumatized teenagers/parents from fleeing, what makes it even worthwhile, since the town isn't even all that well off... The list of weird inconsistencies goes on. But overall, I enjoyed it. Will watch Pumpkinhead next.

How did a short girl with curly hair at the university grow up a very tall woman with very straight hair is not as interesting as how the police failed to follow a social security number of a woman who got a marriage licence in the UK and probably the bar and certainly her own solicitor's office. You can easily change your name, but that hardly makes you invisible from the police and tax auditors, no matter what you mum tells them.

I was hoping this would be an good show, which it wasn't, it was badly acted and badly written and the plot is nonexistant, with a single twist that doesn't really go anywhere.

However I wasn't expecting that among all the mighty women in the story, I'd like the performances of Sienna Miller the best. She does a lot with what she's given!

I don't know for certain what type of paint Eugenia Bouc was using - it's suggested oil in the close-ups of her canvas work, but it could have been acrylic - but dude. Dude. You cannot use oil paint to fake blood. First, it's basically like margerine, it doesn't 'bleed' and second, if you get that on your hands and clothes, the mess it makes, you're not washing it off without a LOT of turpentine. The smell of either would have been so pronouced, the whole room would notice it, yet alone a doctor. Nail polish is similar - just because it's red, it doesn't mean that a doctor examining the wound wouldn't notice the smell and stickiness and unusual brightness all over the clothes and hands. Ink, okay, dilluted acrylic, sure. It's possible. But still. That bit is just stupid.

... Why hadn't it occured to anybody to save the sex slaves? Did they just leave them there to die, I dunno, because they were natives?

Adorably grotesque movie, a surprise among the cowboy genre indeed, but stuff like that bothers me. They were natives, so F them?

Impossibly bad screenplay, performed by actors who are asleep, and some mesmerizingly beautiful shots of Montana. The lead is supposed to be a veteran firefighter, the kind who easily wears makeup during a firefighting drop, yet she acts like losing a civilian and a colleague in a wildfire is the most unlikely-to-ever-occur, blame-myself-forever event. The watchtower she inhabits gets struck by lightning the first day, destroying everything inside - you would think, what with it being an iron tower, that would happen before and someone would invent a lightning rod by then? Her only means of getting out is wildly unsafe and even though she falls two stories, on her back, and communications are off, nobody thinks to check up on her. But don't worry, she gets struck by lightning later again, and she doesn't even get fuzzy hair. Like that time she gets beaten to a pulp, only to appear a little bit panda eyes smudged a few hours later. The lady who uses a spray can to pull the fire out of the fireplace and towards an assassin (who instantly knows she used a safe word when asking if the kid is hungry, somehow), doesn't get her hair singed even a little either. It is so, so dumb. Really, it's worth seeing just for the beautiful landscape, but as for the plot and the performances, holy cow, it's really bad.

It's been so long since I (tried to) watched a genuinely bad film. Not bad like 'Army of the dead' is bad, where camerawork, acting, budget, CGI, villains and costumes seem award-worthy by comparison, but like, seriously bad. I watched about 20 minutes or some such, up until when he tries to have a sermon and people stand up, when they should be sitting down. Yes, that was written in the script under 'that'll be funny, right?'. I have no idea who the writers or director for this movie were, because ... I mean, were they awake? Are they small children? Did someone pitch: Let's find a guy who looks like Mal Reynolds, we'll dress him as mal Reynolds but call him Will Reynolds, so it's not too obvious, and he'll take on EITC, which everyone knows is evil from Pirates of the Carribean. He'll be like a murderer, but a good guy. Let's just not make him speak too much, because cringe. The main female is cookie-cutter cute in a costume nobody could ever place in any human period and there's John Rhys Davies, but other than that, from the cartoonish set-up (and not even all the way, like some steampunk extravaganza you might expect from S. Holmes movies), to the cloned coloured sidekick, it's bad. Boring bad. I tried, I really tried. It was on netflix, we all love netflix, right? Sigh. Yikes.

I cannot get over how dumb these shows are. Like they're made for eleven-year-olds with a learning disability. (Despite overwhelming evidence against it, there ARE good YA books out there ...) The characters are sooooo cliché it's painful to watch. The arch of the underwear-models-early-twenties super-capable multiracial extra-woke villains who aren't really (I know! I was so shocked! It's like I'm watching Firefly for children!) is so predictable, it can be skipped entirely and you'll still know exactly what happened. (They're not really greedy villains?! Friendship is better than money?!?) There's a grown woman obsessed with waffles. No, I didn't write that wrong. Not opals. Or sables. Or Russo-Baltique. Waffles. Grown woman, not a small boy. Which, by the way, are shown Belgian in the show, zero to do with fake tsar Russia, a land where neither uniforms nor weapons involve in hundreds of years and they need a whole wagon of child cartographers to chart a fully populated, fully known region, for some reason. There's a woman with no issue spying on her son's sex life and, yes, you might have guessed it, the protagonists are orphans. Who manage to find their inner power due to goodness of their hearts and dire straits. It is sooooo... freaking boring. I just cannot get over how ret*rded the Fold is. Like ... three hundred years later? They haven't built a mountain pass or negotiated a route with the northern-convenient-plot-barrier folk? They HAVE to try and SAIL through the WIDEST part on OPEN sailboats, with zero bars or cages or armor, standing, looking around stupid, shocked, with NO weaponry, ballistic countermeasure (a little net? No? Not even a small with two stones on it?) or even slightly bigger crossbows? Seriously? They're just ... sliding buffets in winter costume, screaming in the fog for 300 years? I'll give points for Ben Barnes's effort, but the rest ... Come ON show. You're forcing me to read a YA book to see whose fault this is and I have so many more important things to do ...

*Spoilers* The ending made no sense. Either this is because it was done poorly by the director or the book isn't very good either. I'll get my hands on it and read it. How did it make more sense for the woman to invite a murderer in her home where her children slept to kill her as opposed to selling the farm and moving to her (inviting) sister until she gets a job that isn't a total loss. Because she liked the farm so much? How are her four per-pubescent kids with a creep father supposed to benefit from that?

The directing was actually really bad. Charlize Theron was oddly cast and nobody else seemed to make any sense either - a lot of really good actors just showed up to do some weird scenes and the were gone. Theron wonders from one scene to the next like she is hoping this will be over soon and she gets paid. The kids had most of the story and the boy who plays the brother is the only one that stands out. For some reason i really don't like Chloe G. Moretz, she always plays such unpleasant people. Great actress, just ... Creepy. Of course they chose her adult version well - all the women in this movie stand by their 'white trash once, white trash for ever', and it's even worse if they had rich mommy and daddy.

The one thing I liked somewhat were the costumes. (Not so much the make-up, because in one scene Theron's 'trailer trash tanned' face totally mismatches her chalk white hands, and the MUA seemed to only know how to apply eyeliner and not much else to make women seem trashy.) Although it feels like this takes course over three weeks and not one day and the lead COULD change her styling at least once, she is wonderfully locked in her own mental prison, as her brother points out - she cannot think outside herself at all. Her family is said to be incredibly poor, but I always imagined poor people to be, dunno, less neat and not quite so perfect. The hair of several actors has more character and message than their faces and clothes.

What went wrong?