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chrisshawbang
Reviews
The Road Dog (2023)
This film is terrible. Really totally aweful.
Well, Doug Stanhope is without doubt a stand up comic of absolutely unparalleled ... what?..... well he's the best stand up comedian bar none of the last 2 or 3 decades. Hes mostly terrible in this though. Occasionally, against all the odds, he's really good . It's not his fault, because the direction is appalling as is absolutely everything else. Stanhope is very very good in that episode of Louis C K's 'Louis' for example but The Road Dog is a disaster. I hope they paid him well and I love the irony in which he must surely have swam before taking on this gig - supremely cynical as always - he deserves good pay. But whatever you do don't watch this film. It wallows about in lazy American therapyland cliche and sentimentality and most of the acting is dire. Unless, of course you already know, like me that Stanhope is a true great and will just buy the film anyway. But for feks sake don't watch it.
Horace and Pete (2016)
Nearly Great
Lots of seriously good parts to this TV theatre as you'd expect from a creative talent with Louis CK's incredible body of work. Buscemi is brilliant and most of the regular characters sat at the bar are more or less terrific. Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) Horace's ex wife's soliloquy is riveting and there are other good set pieces. But the series as a whole feels unfinished and in need of a lot of pruning, especially Louis CK, Eddie Falco and Alan Alda's contributions. There are a couple of 'issue' based passages of writing too, that feel very under researched and unecessarily politically correct, like Horace's inability to decide if he has just slept with a biological woman or a trans woman suggesting, for the sake of gender identity virtue signalling, that perfect surgical transition is a given which it ain't unless you happen to be on board with gender identity ideology. There's a lot of blank slate, therapyland parent blame underpinning the script writing in general which becomes almost as annoying as the lack of Louis CK's more recognised area of genius, ie comedy.