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Babylon (2022)
Why bother?
Stopped watching this film at about the 50 minute mark and I think that was pretty generous considering there wasn't much going on. The plot and much of the acting is rather flat and boring. Yes, boring.
The film opens with a party sequence that is intended to titillate the audience but it's literally just an attempt to titillate. It doesn't actually work. The camera does not get placed within the party but is pedestrian; a camera that is just taken around to look at people and stuff rather than actually being engaged/invested in the scenes. So boring, so ordinary when the sequence is supposed to present a set of scenes out of the ordinary. Weird.
I guess the writer/director has mistakenly assumed that his audience has never seen an out of the ordinary film before?
Even Margot Robbie doesn't find the correct tone for her character even though she's taken on a role that affords her, literally, plenty of freedom. Did Robbie actually consider her character is supposed to exist in the 1920's? I think not. She plays the party scenes as if her character lived just last week.
Witness Number 3 (2022)
Blimey mate!
This could have been good but the flight choreographer took the night off. We were heading for something special in episode three, something faintly reminiscent of the kitchen scene from 'A Perfect Murder'. The build up was good, but then the script writer decided to payout his own story, presenting a deep and meaningful conversation rather than ferocious realism as a fitting confrontational climax to a crafted suspense. Apparently deadly street hardened lost souls have second thoughts when their dear old mum gets a mention. Gosh, such easily conveyed sympathy saves the evening and what could have been the best scene.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
Social realism rather than cinema
This film has difficulties and not just because of its subject matter. It's level of social realism borders on documentary rather than being an exercise in dramatic cinema. For the most part the film is also devoid of soundtrack which renders it flat and rather banal. It created a sense of being not worthy of viewer attention and relies entirely on its stark subject matter. This is simply not a film in the cinematic sense and doesn't deserve to be judged ad such. The Sundance award suggests that the Sundance judges need to give it a day, move over and let some new fresh blood come into the organisation.
On the Basis of Sex (2018)
Misleading cinematic trailer
I remember seeing the cinematic trailer for this film on the big screen and actually really wanting to see this movie, even telling people I work with how much I was looking forward to seeing it. As it turned out I didn't manage to see it in a picture theatre when first released and now that I have seen it years later on DVD I'm glad I didn't. The trailer is completely misleading. You simply don't get the story the trailer pretends to offer.
The emancipation of women is not here, that's relegated off screen somewhere else and in its place is a fill in caretaker story based on gender definition; a story about a middle aged man who cares for his elderly mother. That's definitely not what the trailer put out there.
In addition I noticed within the first 30 minutes the film lacked any reasonable connection to it's audience. The story simply moves along in it's own little world, either oblivious to its audience or straight out uncaring to even make a connection with it's audience.
Context is lost, mostly because the story takes too long to get to where it should be and when it gets there it's knee deep in entirely the wrong story.
I know this production was based on real events and the professional lives of real people, it's just a pity the production studio edited a trailer about a completely different set of events involving the same people.
This is the story of the other 'days of their lives', the altogether boring bits.
How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town (2015)
Quite simply not funny
This film just doesn't make it. It doesn't even come close. If this is Canadian humour then, wow, I'll never enter such a boring small minded country. Keep your crap Canada, you boring dolts.
To deliver humour something needs to resonate. This flat, pale and completely not funny. It simply makes one feel quite empty and rather sad.
When the write and director are one and the same it quite often doesn't come off, lack of collaboration and creative interpretation. In this case the writer/director is just giving the audience a glimpse at his own small mindedness after he's watched 'There's Something About Mary', got excited, but doesn't actually understand how comedy should be developed and delivered on the page. Thus the actors in this little crap piece have very little to use. Which begs the question: why would any actor having read the script accept a role in this misfortune?
The Kill Team (2019)
Good, but completely spoilt with the mis-casting of Nat Wolff
Good, but completely spoilt with the mis-casting of Nat Wolff.
Well, it could have been good, very good, if it hadn't been for the awful mis-casting of Nat Wolff. A lot of the production is excellent, but it is as if Nat Wolff never understood his character. He is shown early on as a dumb Forest Gump like nerd who doesn't know his way in the world let alone within the military.
A persona of excessive naivety represents no one.
Tenet (2020)
Psst. Dr Who never had this trouble.
Running around backwards is just a cheap way for the Director to visualise and screen those characters in inverse time.
Dr Who never did this when coming from the future and walking around the English countryside. I guess Dr Who managed to walk around forwards in inverse time because he rather cleverly wore his Gallifrey manufactured underpants on backwards.
Ah ha! There you are, I bet you didn't think of that little wrinkle of time travel trickery. And K-9 does without any underpants at all. Pretty clever stuff huh?
Mother! (2017)
Left-wing subhuman garbage
Yes, it is that bad. It is literally an example of the left-wing mindset laid bare and displayed clearly to be subhuman. I am not generalising, I am not exaggerating.
This is the work of an egotistical enfant terrible who has reached such a level of pretension his work falls dramatically, disgustingly and even boringly upon itself. This work is boring. Literally. The director pretends to follow in the footsteps of David Lynch and Roman Polanski, but this offering to his audience is nothing more than rancid vomit masquerading as perception.