Reviews

Don't Look Up is a social satire that makes fun of the current state of western civilization in a round about fashion. The absurd comedy coupled with scientific accuracy is alternatively realistic and then over the top, building up and breaking down authenticity, making it an experience that alternates between escalating terror and total ridicule. The many unexpected turns, throw away comments and running gags all hit the mark. The emotional responses of the characters are very funny and memorable. The movie has a runtime of 2:18, but I felt it was much shorter, because it's constantly entertaining. Quick cuts and shock cuts are utilized fully to put interesting things in the frame and refine the product. If I have any critique of the movie, it is that the refinement was almost too much. In a twisted turn of fate, it feeds into the very lack of attention that it critiques.

I understand some people feel hurt about their demographic being made fun of in a movie that makes fun of everybody... you don't need to listen to them. This is a very funny movie that has heart and balls, and I personally didn't find it the least bit patronizing or pretentious.

First of all, I only saw one episode, and only because this series is now all the rage, apparantly. I don't see the appeal.

Right off the bat, I felt the protagonist was very tropy and annoying. Why was it necessary to depict him as a pathological gambler? Not a lot of people can relate to that, but almost everyone knows what it's like to be broke (which is what drove him to enter the game, so he wouldn't lose his daughter). Why doesn't the show have the courage to write typical people? I'll tell you why: It's just not smart enough to do it.

Twenty years ago, this show might have had something interesting to say. Today, it's just par for the course. We live in the Squid Games. There are poor people right now somewhere who are in the actual Squid Games. If you don't have a gun to your face, you are somewhere else on the Squid Games spectrum, which goes all the way to the other extreme, where losing means hearing the words: "you're fired".

If you want to say something about the reality of poor people, it better be important. This series is clearly just gory entertainment. In Hollywood, there is greater awareness today that white authors can inadvertently create black stereotypes that don't age well. The same awareness doesn't exist when rich people fictionalize poor people for the exploitation of poor people. It's actually quite gross.

Have dignity, don't watch this junk.

The White Savior trope was discussed as a trope where a white person acts as a savior to black people. This is simply shameless and offensive appropriation, as that trope is strongly associated with native americans and other real or fictional cultures in movies such as Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai, Dune, Pocahontas and Avatar.

They ignore all the premiere examples to focus on a movie like The Green Book, where the trope is so weak that it might not even be worth discussing, but they just had to make it all about black people, of course. Cringe and tone deaf.

Bland and uninspired show, that doesn't even discuss the BWAAARP sound Nolan uses in every trailer.

First of all, like all things, it was stolen from black people by white people. Latinos do not exist.

Secondly, some individuals did it first, and then some other people copied them, and that's bad.

Finally, people dance because it makes them feel in sync with eachother or something.. Was that important to establish? I dunno. We covered our racial/social justice bases, so I think we're good.

And that's how you get the worst rated episode of an otherwise OK series.

UUURRRGHHH SIIIGGGGHHHH I CAN'T.

Netflix is a metaphorically anemic streaming service with osteoporosis in their allegorical vertebrae. Their cognitive abilities resemble that of a cognitively impaired troglodyte. The body odor they emenate draws vivid comparrisons to a container full of decomposing marine life. Truly, those who are unfortunate enough to make their acquaintance can sense nothing but foulness and misery in this severely deformed creature that is Netflix.

Naming your show "Mare of Easttown" and starring Kate Winslet is essentially a promise that there will be a strong female protagonist who is for once not a shallow Mary Sue. I'm happy to report that this promise is delivered on, and the show raises the bar for female protagonists. The only things I don't know what to think about is the amount of conspiracy and crime commited by 9 out of 10 people in this little town. Everybody deals with their issues in the worst possible way. I got the feeling that this town was basically 99% of the way to going supercritical and exploding in an orgy of violence. I guess it makes for good drama.

The first couple of episodes were... strange. But we like strange. Anything that ends up being a memorable experience starts out as something we don't understand. However, as the episodes goes by, it becomes apparent that this magic trick, with its elaborate setup, is just the usual sleight of hands that have been done to death already. It plays right into the superhero tropes that we were hoping it would subvert. And in the last 2 episodes, I think it really falls apart, and fails to even be that, by introducing villains and new powers that seem to distract the plot pointlessly from the central theme. It's a patched up random mess, that tries to be too much and ends up being nothing.

Someone else said it best when they said "the guy is a moron". Danish viewers will no doubt hear and see the resemblance of the main character to Frank Wham in Clown, a sitcom in the vein of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Emotional and dramatic music is played throughout the film, but all I could hear was the Clown theme. The main character simply doesn't evoke a lot of sympathy. He behaves like a child, and I'm not feeling his passion for his work nor his love of the women he meets. He lies and steals to acchieve his goals, but totally stubborn and can't take any hits to his pride. A very annoying protagonist, that you can't root for. The side characters get a more satisfying ending. It's also bad timing on the directors half that causes the ending to fizzle out. It seems rushed. There are many sudden jumps in time where a lot of important things happen off screen. The whole thing would have worked better as a 10 episodes series... The acting is OK, I guess, if you don't have a problem with the constant gravity of every situation, dramatic pauses and lack of social realism. Overall, it's an OK movie with high production value that I suspect non-danish speakers may enjoy more than natives.

Injustice is like a sclerodic disease, and riots are the attacks. In this documentary, we see each stage of the attack as it happens. There's people in it too, but they don't matter. They're used like puppets by the disease, and all have a part in every stage. According to the color of their skin, they must perform. The disease is the writer, director, producer and star.

In the beginning, you may feel like the violence can accomplish something. You may feel sympathy for one of the sides. That infantile hope will be beaten out of you soon. The disease is toying with you. The only power you have is the power to make it worse. Surely guns will save us!? Cut to store owners shooting randomly in all directions with cold, lifeless eyes... A random truck driver is pulled out of his vehicle and protestors smash his skull. What used to be a person who probably has a family that loves him is now just a lifeless bloody pulp in the middle of the street. That's where your sympathy dies, and you feel your humanity slip, and you see how the darkness is spreading and eating the world up like a cancer. Innocence of millions destroyed with one brutal act.

In the end, the citizens are begging for peace, and so will you. Peace will be the only desire left when all the violent impulses have had their way with you. The blood is hosed off the pavements, the rubble is carried away. No lesson is learned though. The stage is set for another attack, another scar to the soul of a country. One little act of hatred at a time, and decades later, you have a strong and sturdy foundation for the terminal fase... And now you understand just a little better where all these hateful people came from.

When the story gets dark, you will notice a smirking, evilly grinning face staring back at you. That's you, sitting there in your chair, rubbing your hands together, reveling in the slowly unfolding misfortune of the royal family.

At the core of the Watchmen comic and movie was a moral conundrum: whether the secret use of great power by individuals is ever good or justified. I would argue that you can't justify making a series about Watchmen without this conundrum at its center. It's not worthy of being called "Watchmen" if there are clear good guys and bad guys, and Watchmen (2019) fails in that aspect.

The racism theme that the creators injected into the series feels like an uninteresting distraction with one dimensional characters attached. The original characters are neglected and watered down sociopathic versions of themselves, as are many of the new ones. Also, leaving little hints of what's to come in future episodes is not necessarily good storytelling. Massive props for finishing the joke, though.

All this wokeness BS aside, it's still a pretty good seres, I guess. Just not what I was looking for, and I know many others are also disappointed.

When Brad Pitt enters the hippie farm, I was on the edge of my seat, trying to figure out what was going to happen. With Quentin Tarantino, you never know! If there is an opportunity for some epic acting and scenes, Tarantino will not abstain, continuity be damned!

In this movie, Tarantino manages to seemingly effortlessly bring back the 70's in all it's neon glory. How does he do it? I think it's something with little quirks from that time that no one remembers and something with the physics of the cars. Either way, my jaw dropped several times in amazement of this universe that he is able to create with just a few shots.

I don't think any other director would dare use a voice over to fast forward in the story and set the scenes. There are plenty of signature techniques here by Tarantino that are at odds with what you learn in cinematic classes. But he just does it anyway for the greater good, I guess.

Overall the story is kind of a mess if you think about it. Still, it's the most memorable movie I've watched in 2019, and the only one I'd like to watch again. Look, I'm gonna be honest here. I'm just here to praise Tarantino, OK? I'm giving this a 10 although it's actually an 8 or 9 in my book. But I wish other AAA movie directors would learn from this man and his brazen ways. Tarantino takes huge artistic risks over and over, and to this day, he still hasn't made a forgettable movie.

The final episode of this series was a hard-to-watch heart-wrenching experience, but the hardship Korey experienced is the same for thousands of inmates, and I don't think it makes much difference whether they are innocent or not... However well it played as a psychological drama, in a series about the case of the Central Park Five, I expect a thorough examination of the societal structures that causes the criminal justice system to fail. If the series is meant to be informative and facilitate discussion and change, one-dimensional antagonists won't do. Prison guards that seem to do evil for evils sake is one cinematic sin, but the real shame is that the power dynamics between the prosecutor, the police, businesses and politicians is not explored. We understand that they are caught in a web of lies at the end, but we don't get the bigger picture, which is necessary if we're to understand what motivated them and got them to this point. In real life, there is a hierarchy, and everyone would have someone cracking a whip over them, forcing them to go forward aggressively with their part in the case. Professionals usually don't make bad decisions because they're "evil", but because they are under pressure - from their leaders, from colleges or other circumstances. A few bad apples is not what causes justice to fail so spectacularly over and over. It's the system itself that is rotten to the core. However, instead of taking a hard look at society and classicism, the series settles for racism and outrage. Thus, it fails to become more than peculiar entertainment, which I don't think was the intent!

Forget about story arc. Mad Max: Fury Road is an unpredictable thrill ride that keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout. The protagonist Max stays in the background so that the secondary characters (who are not critical to a sequel) have screen time to be humanized before some of them are killed in an orgy of clever and inventive brutality. The refreshing lack of humor is made up for by a handful of personalities whose agendas are evident and therefore interesting. Although it is violent, the passion put into every scene shines through the bleakness. It feels authentic as dystopian fiction. The themes of despair and hopelessness are presented convincingly with the help of amazing settings, props and cinematography. I don't have any real complaints apart from Max being perhaps a bit too hard to relate to. Overall, here is a movie that has realized its potential. Watch in 3D.

There is about one movie per year that has me gripping my seat out of concern that I will fall into the cinema screen like it was a black hole. For 2014, it's Interstellar.

Interstellar left me wanting more after 3 hours. It overwhelmed my emotions and perception from beginning to end. It is a jaw-dropping (literally) visual and dramatic masterpiece. The sound side is also great, and goes from silent like the void to violent like the surface of the sun. EXPERIENCE it in a good cinema!

When I award a movie a perfect score, it's because the script and acting and visuals flow together to create a higher unity that outshines the distractions. Distractions from a sci-fi drama like this are inaccurate or cliché physics, illogical character actions and dialogue. By those criteria, I judge the movie.

The movie expertly conveys the range of feelings associated with being separated from your loved ones by vast amounts of time and space. As with most sci-fi drama though, you'll have to be ignorant or willfully ignorant of science and logic to enjoy it. Drama 1st, physics 2nd.

There are some hitches in the script. When the spaceship approaches the wormhole, a crew member informs the pilot that the wormhole is spherical. I don't know if wormholes are hypothesized to be spherical, but the right time for sharing such information with the pilot is not just before entering the wormhole, right? It's the right time for informing the audience, but do we appreciate being reminded like this that we are watching a movie? I certainly do not. However, the characters and the acting are so strong that I could easily look past the few idiotic remarks. I cared for all the characters. I cared for the robots too. I even cared for the "bad" guys.

If you liked Sunshine (2007), you will love this.

I'm going with my guts on this one since they were turning the entire time when I watched the movie. The universe and the action unfolding within didn't feel right. Great actors like Matt Damon and particularly Jodie Foster did nothing to improve it, but the fault does not lie with them. The problem is the demand for realism in "fantastic" movies. I just didn't buy the vision of the future that the movie presented. The movie's vision of society and technology was clumsily stitched together with a shallow story, and the seems are so visible that it hurts. Let's go over a few examples.

Since the movie clearly wants to be "science faction", I expect consistency. Max is doing manual labor, and it is seen how he is treated with no regards to his humanity. However, if there are robot policemen in the universe who can have conversations with humans, there should be VERY few jobs left for humans to do, because a policeman's job is one of the most complex things imaginable to make a robot do. So unless the government is OK with an inefficient and expensive police force, we must assume that robots in this universe are as good as or better than humans at doing this job. It is blatantly obvious that the robots are only there to convey a message to the audience. The message is again that the government is treating Max like an object because they deal with him through robots. The moderately informed viewer will not buy this inconsistent vision. IT MAKES NO SENSE. Max should be a policeman, and robots should be pushing stuff around. Later, Max is being hunted by humans. The reason for this is that it must be personal. We cannot hate a robot in the same way that we hate humans, and the movie does an excellent job at setting Kruger up as a villain! It ruins the movie when I am painfully aware of these things. The monochrome screens and the stupid messages displayed on them was also a huge annoyance. They should drop those and just have the actor tell us what happened instead of insulting our intelligence.

There should be fixed levels of automation and technology in the universe, and the story must play out according to the rules with such consistency that most people will accept the vision and forget that the universe and the story are not really one. Otherwise it must stop trying to be realistic.

Overall, I cannot recommend this movie to anyone who has a moderate interest in science fiction and has something to compare it to. I don't usually write anything, but I make an exception on this one because I want others to know that this movie is seriously flawed.

Oh yeah, one last thing: The shuttle and the velvet rope... come on.