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Reviews
Inside Man (2022)
Weak moffat first draft
Normally you can count on steven moffat for avoiding tight scripts and avoiding the cliches. I was hoping the same was true here. Unfortunately it was not the case, the mistaken assumption happened in the first episode and the whole series stalled out. Tennant plays a stupid man who is going to get catch. Tuci plays hannibal lector who is going to catch him. The kidnapped woman only offer one choice of mutual destruction. At the end she knows she was wrong and doesnt care. It should have lasted about twenty minutes. Where is the twist? The victim is no unpleasant about having to be right, there is no sympathy Where is the weight of the in any circumstance, any one could be a murder?
Theodora Goes Wild (1936)
Rewatch The Awful Truth Instead
The Awful Truth is one of my favorite screwball comedies. Irene Dunne held her own against Cary Grant. This movie follow the same structure. The male character interferes in the female characters life then the roles are reversed. Then they get together in the end.
Unfortunately, This movie is a shadow of that one. The major issue is the Melvyn Douglas character is way too creepy. He stalks the Dunne character back to her home and then hangs around bothering her and blackmailing her until she admits she loves him. It is hard to believe this ever played as innocent. The second half of the movie, the Dunne character gives back what the Douglas character deserved. The movie ends with the Dunne character showing up wih a baby for some reason that is never explained. Not sure why any of the town thought it was hers since she was only gone a few days. Other than thomas mitchel, Overall disappointing.
A Year from Now (2021)
Like the movie "click" with a really slow main character
The movie is very unclear on its rules of how the time skipping works. As far i i could figure out, it is similar to the "click" movie without the main character trying to figure out what is happening. She just wonders around aimlessly enough though she is losing all this time. There is a hint that the journal given to her at the beginning has some sort of power but she never really uses it during the movie. It seems to be just a normal journal that she writes in during the year. I would think that after the second or time, she would consult the journal rather than walk into awkward situations.
There is a theme that she is not treating time seriously so she does not deserve the extra time however after she changes, it does not stop or chage the process. In the end, the time jumping just stop for no reason.
Definitely a unthought out idea. Should have worked longer on rhe script.
Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938)
missing clarity for a success
I agree with the other reviewers that say that gary cooper didnt fit the role. It seemed too naive like henrty fonda in The Lady Eve. It is hard to believe it was with seven woman before and he left them because of some hot passion for the next.
That aside,it is perplexing that Claudette Colbert's intentions where hidden to the end of the movie. This stopped the audience from being on her side. With the information we had, she turned into a monster during the honeymoon title credit so no reason.
And finally when they came together, it was no compelling.
I would imagine Wilder would have done a better directing job.
Night Moves (1975)
Only for big fans of hackman or arthur penn
One would think that "night moves" is a hidden gem with all of perfect score it has received on imdb. I For me, it is a weak script masquerading as a new wave film. I will assume the plot is know since many reviewers explain the whole plot as their review. One of the first scenes, harry said he saw a rohmer film and it was boring. I wonder if this was a joke by the film makers since most of the movie is a tepid melodrama about sexual politics with Melanie Griffith playing the Rohmer under aged ingenue. The detective story is incidental to all of this. There is no explanation of why the group is taking a night boat ride or why they stopped at this place or than to find the crashed plane and advance the story.
Much is made by other reviewers about harry's unique form of detective work where at one point a character challenges "take a swing at me harry the way same spade would" and harry just walks away. This may have been valid if the movie ended like with inaction like "the conversation" or the parallax view. The movie ends in a fist fight where harry gets to show his macho. He survives a bullet wound. And there is a big explosion which the general audience always like a movie conclusion.
OtherLife (2017)
Could have been interesting but Bad script direction lead to weak cliche story
Otherlife had potential but decided to play it safe with cliche narrative. The story involves a technology that can plant new memories. The main and only character is ren, the chief technologist whose brother went into a coma from a surfing accident. Way way too screen time is spent ren mourning her brother. The audience got it the first time the brother was mentioned. We didn't need countless scenes with him at the hospital and flashbacks.
Next, the technology is never fully explained so the viewer does not know the limits. It is programmed with code somehow. It is supposed to give the user a self contained story. Ren is working on the technology where a user can choose their path but that has not been finalized. The first time we see the technology glitching, ren is caught in a repeating loop. The technician watching her seems strangely unconcerned. This is never explained. She needed the technician to get her out.
Ren's business partner makes a deal with the department of corrections to create a prison in the mind. Ren is volunteered to test it because there is a question of glitching and repeating. The first test is for a full year. Granted no developer would first test a full year, i will allow some artist license. Of course at the end of the year, it glitches and the prison sentence restarts. Again, the technicians on the outside do nothing. She escapes the prison. How? That is not part of the program. Ren was working on a technology where you could choose but that was not the current program. If she did the switch, why didnt she escape in day one? In this other life, she encounters the same people as real life but many of them are evil.
When she gets pulled out, she still thinks all the people are evil and the movie doesn't question it. This is a big opportunity missed. She then goes back to her brother yet again and has another emotional scene. She is approached by her "evil" business partner who gives her a rational comment. She then decides to shut the whole program down with no explanation. Finally we end on a brother flashback again. Very weak.
True Confession (1937)
Weak characters, weak writing, weak comedy
Unless you are a megafan of carole lombard and love anything she does, you can skip it. All characters are way to extreme to be funny. And the actors play it too far over the top. Lombard is too all over the place, macmurray is too much of a serious bore. Barrymore is too much of a ham. It feels like all the actors think they are real funny. You are waiting for them to break rhecfourth wall and tell you how funny they are.
, there is one scene that had potential. Lombard, who is a writer and pathetical liar, is being questioned by a policeman. He is trying to getting her to confess by telling her how it happened. She doesn't like is fake story so she suggests one of her own. Naturally the policeman thinks it a confession. Unfortunately the scene is done so poorly, it is not funny.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Pointless story within a story about cliché revenge movie
The initial premise was interesting enough. A woman gets a manuscript from her ex husband. The manuscript is going to reflect their failed relationship. The story is about a bunch of west Texas raving yahoos who terrorize a family. It is a very poor mans deliverance. The script is so lame, it is obviously the ex husband's anger against the wife and daughter that had rejected him. That was the forty five minute mark. The rest of script plays out like a really slow revenge movie. Then it is over. There is no interaction between the husband and the wife. That really makes the story within the story completely pointless. It really hard to imagine that if you were given the opportunity to make a major motion picture, anyone would choose this story to make.
I Love Dick (2016)
Dull romantic novel setup
Two New Yorkers move to Texas and deal with culture shock.I had hoped to see a story about multiple points view. Unfortunately, the only point of view is from the woman who is an uninteresting artist who almost titters when she has to say the word. dick. In fact she has a whole conversation about the name Dick. The dick character played by Kevin Bacon is a flat macho female fantasy. She first see him riding in to town on a horse. No I am not kidding! There are obsessive shot of dick and especially his belt buckle as she waxes that life is meaningless without him. The final "turnon" for her is at dinner when she lets him characterize her as a woman director thus a failure. That drives her into the restroom waiting for Dick to show up and take her. He doesn't and she has to be satisfied with her naval gazing husband. It is hard to see how these characters develop since Dick describes himself as post idea. I.e. Nobody else has anything worth saying. Don't waste your time.
Murder by Numbers (2002)
Thriller by Numbers
This is a typical "perfect crime" thriller. A perfect crime is executed and the investigating police officer, ignoring all the clues, immediately knows who guilty is. The audience has to wait around the whole movie for the guilty to be caught. The result is like every single episode of "Columbo" or "murder she wrote". The director himself refers to the hackney story by showing the police officer watching an episode of Matlock! This story barely fills up 90 minutes but the director insists on using all 120 minutes filling with every cliche in the book. Skip this one, you are not missing anything.
Nueve reinas (2000)
caveat emptor
I picked up this movie last week in the video store. I did not know anything about it except it was an non-hollywood film. I had no expectations. Unfortunately I found the movie to be uninvolving. I watched it with the same dispassion as I had when I watched Unbreakable, The Game, Jacob's Ladder, and The Spanish Prisoner. Nine Queens like all those other is about plot twists not about characters. These movies are about misleading the audience not about telling a story. It becomes a game of wits between the filmmaker and viewer. Can the filmmaker distract the viewer from considering every possible ending before the film finishes. I feel here the filmmaker does not succeed. Sure I thought of that possible ending but disregarded it as not believable. Learning for Jacob's Ladder, I pick one solution and stick with it. The plot will usually twist around again.
SPOILERS ON
I have seen "House of Games" and "Spanish Prisoner", I know how con-artist movies work. The basic premise that everyone you see is in on the con. Doesn't matter if there are 5 people or 50 everyone is in. That rule definitely worked in "Spanish Prisoner" and it works here. I was as suspicious as Juan claimed to be that everything was a con. I didn't take anyone for face value and was annoyed when one of the characters trusted another. No, it is not as bad as SP, campbell scott in that movie was so gullible, I wanted to scream. Still I was waiting for the point where, like in House of Games,characters had to sacrifice their own money. That took forever!
I would have prefer it if Juan told Marco's sister that he could get marco to tell the truth ala get the old woman's bag. That would have been a better payoff and given her a motive to be in on the scheme.
SPOILERS OFF
I fully admit that my prior viewing ruined nine queens for me but the film makers of Unbreakable, The Game, Jacob's Ladder, and The Spanish Prisoner ruined thrillers for everyone by such cold calculated filmmaking.