Reviews

Here we are told a story about a luxurious murder/rape simulator MMOG where affluent individuals enjoy a "relentless f---ing experience" (trademark) with silicone lifeform mannequins provided generously by Delos Parks Unlimited who no doubt chair the dystopian megacorp roundtable together with Umbrella and Weyland-Yutani. Pick a hat (black hat, white hat, no hat) and join Man in Black (Ed Harris), one of stellar representatives of the human race, and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), one of the not-quite-human-but-close, on their journey to the center of the "maze." Oh, by the way, no refunds.

The good news, Westworld is a watershed moment of a positive representation of "synths" in the media; we don't see too many tired 1980s murderbot cliches or typical 1990s human propaganda about "big strong humans" putting "unruly toasters" back in the closet. The bad news is, like humanity and whoever comes after that, Westworld disintegrates faster before it can finish telling its story. Perhaps, there is a fatal flaw in the design, a ghost in the machine, if you will; a common debilitating television infection pandemic that accelerated in the 2010s, leaving characters withered away skeleton husks. Perhaps, as certain role-playing simulator developer prides to say, it is a feature not a bug?

Maybe we should face it: Humanity, including Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, is done. There will never be another Prestige (2006) or Person of Interest (2010s) no matter how many times Nolan/Joy will keep transplanting their former best ideas. As expected, some people (especially reviewers) see the ugliness in this world but I choose to see the beauty . . . In Westworld episodes #1.10 Bicameral Mind #2.08 Kitsugya #3.6 Genre and #4.10 Que Sera Sera.

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"There's a path for everyone. And my path leads me back ... to you."

(Super-jerk early September 17, 2018 review. If the final episode of the show proves me wrong I am going to take this post down.)

The Purge film series, unlike other gore/torture porn the likes of SAW (2000s) that likes torture for torture's sake and gratuitously have delivered multiple times like trucks delivering fresh meat to supermarkets on schedule, mostly goes for the "thinly veiled anti-violence message with a modest-size political satire cherry on top" angle and that did not change with the TV adaptation. But, and here is but a big but the size of William Baldwin's character's ego.

Here is what I expected a "Purge" to do: Knock my socks off while singing the National Anthem then removing the Bugs Bunny mask it wore and that would conclude another hearty yearly patriotic day but instead it sat me right in a bathtub of cult leader-blessed lukewarm water in a Southern Gothic bando where an insecure business suit-clad corporate figure plays to me a snuff clip on her smartphone where the 1980s old white male Wall Street executive stereotype is awarded a one-way ticket to the Tombstonetown. 10 episodes later, we are still there sitting in that bando but now the water is freezing cold so we caught pneumonia and are about to die, purged not by any person following the official policies of the crypto-patriarchal political establishment that un-satirically calls itself The New Founding Fathers but merely due to coincidental circumstances which Franz Kafka's Josef K. would love dying of. In other words, one minute of torture stretched into ten hours of footage.

No. Just no.

Everyone likes purging sleazy 1980s corporate guy caricatures played by members of the charming, smooth-talking Irish/French acting dynasty family as much as the next person but there is no sense in prolonging the agony more than necessary because now THAT would be torture (like me prolonging this so-called review). It's good we have Mr. Ever-Ready 1980s Marine (Gabriel Chavarria) and Jane (Amanda Warren) on board since they work as the show's life support.

Message to the Purge creator(s) (assuming they read low-rating jerk comments on the internet which they don't): don't stop what you are doing, I am more than inclined to use words like "promising" and "ambitious" to describe how I feel about the show but you may never "raise the roof" beyond the tepid "promising" point unless you drop the wannabe HBO/AMC mannerisms: your "zombie soap opera" serial drama format (including the dreadful cuts that unnaturally make every end of each episode a mini-cliffhanger) and gratuitous "cool and hip hedonistic" relationship arcs because you are no Scott M. Gimple and you are not a Game of Thrones writer either. You are that mid-budget guy reveling in Richard Bachman-era Stephen King (1980s) speculative scenarios and produced by Michael "Demolition Porn" Bay, damn it.

I knew that this is what Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the creators of HBO series Westworld (2016) were working with which is why I decided to check it out.

The dialogues are humorous (in a good way -- I can understand why HBO fished out the Westworld series from the ancient void of movie irrelevance in the first place since what we get here is contemporary banter, sex-bots of all sex organs for everyone, and a wee bit of android free will philosophy, which indubitably all of us love) but everything else, including the execution of plot twists, dreadfully insipid pacing (boredom followed by something that actually passes for "not bad" dialogue then switching back to Plan 9 from Outer Space-grade SFX action or whatnot), character interaction, "romantic" subplot, is laughable (in a bad way), save for the touching heartfelt relationship between Bernard (I mean "Harry") and the faceless android named Kent which was shown in a positive light the entire time even with all that cheesy cartoonish tone to it.

The "evil" bad guy, sort of a cross between Westworld (2016)'s Dolores and Ford, who talks about replacing world leaders and key corporate figures with logical, greener Earth-conscious androids before irresponsible humans ultimately and inevitably destroy Earth (if Skynet went full eco-friendly?) and you have to wonder, wow, that's it? That's the supah ebil premise that is supposed to knock my socks off? The 1970s Hollywood and society, for all its burgeoning sci-fi and environmental awareness, was incredibly anti-environmentalist and anti-technology-leaning ("Durr, da Saylort Greeny iz peeplz!!! Oh NOEZ!"). Or maybe fear-mongering just sells, I don't know, what am I, a sociologist?

But I digress. I am sure the 1970s movie-goers loved this future-phobic spectacle before hopping into their ridiculous-looking ominously heavy carbon monoxide-emanating automobiles, having a TV dinner, kissing their spouses goodnight, and praying to God the Almighty not to die in a Cold War-fueled nuclear holocaust tonight. (Not much has changed, huh?)

This movie is completely dismissible on its own and only works in the context of exploring what Joy and Nolan were working with in which case, if you have the spare time you can pointlessly waste, check it out.

My father used to own like a gazillion VHS tapes including 1980s and 1990s bad horror/SF/action flicks that seemed like they were meant to scare very young kids but amuse adults. There was one that was particularly upsetting about a baby crocodile pet being flushed down the toilet by an irate bitter redneck dad and later coming back as a mutated monster (the crocodile, not the dad), growling for an Old Testament-type of revenge which, as a child, makes you scared because of the crocodile's "unaesthetic" appearance but, as a cynical misanthropic adult, you cannot help yourself but root for the crocodile because as any child is often told, what goes around comes around (even if it has to crawl out of the creepy sewers).

Parasite is one of those flicks I would expect to find among those tapes.

Right off the bat things have gotten wacky super fast and with the initial oh-so-spectacular "3D" saloon fight sequence you just know you are in for a treat. Hilariously contrived action sequences, hilarious pacing, acting, hilariously dull dialogues (Character 1: "Duh, don't open the, uh, container with the biohazard logo thingy on it or you'll, uh, die." Character 2: "Ummmm, shut up!" -proceeds to open the container and dies-) is what you can expect from this hysterically amusing old flick.

This movie sure gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "burning pig."

Now that we have tasteless "jokes" out of the way let's unwrap this literal Celtic straw man.

The most powerful part for me was the end with the cop (Edward Woodward) praying to his Christian God while the people outside were praying to their Celtic Neopagan gods and the flick ending with a close-up on the sun that, if anthropomorphized, would probably say "these primates must be crazy." The amount of sheer loneliness and helplessness the cop must have felt during his last minutes on Earth had to be beyond excruciating.

God, those over-abundant sing-along muscial-y interludes were more dreadful than the whole "human sacrifice" shebang though. Sure, it gave the movie a "creepy" feeling and culminated wonderfully in the last scene of the movie but other than that it was pure torture. Just watching the movie should be enough to bring harvest to at least a thousand Neopagan island societies.

Now there is not much to say about the rest of the movie which felt like a regular episode out of a generic contemporary Bri'ish TV cop drama. It all started with "harmless" police-obstructing activities of fun pranks and pub jokes and feigning ignorance with good-spirited quasi-hippie songs slipped here and there and eventually getting to the surreal David Lynchian tipping point and afterwards it was clowning around in jester costumes and then some. Suffice to say this stubborn cop wasn't exactly an exemplary Sherlock Holmes but your typical uptight stubborn fascist bureaucrat in a state security suit who no wonder ended up trapped on the island. Now now, I realize that the movie wasn't ever supposed to be about a cunning detective cracking bizarre homicide cold case and have "boys down the station" giving them a congratulatory pat on the back and being ordered a knight/dame by the Queen herself afterwards but more about one of Queen Elizabeth's Finest thinking he can arrest the entire "heathen" island alone while not seeing the obvious that's in front of him but nevertheless, color me curious, what would S.H. do? I am sure he would successfully turn the gullible villages against Summerisle himself since Watson would meanwhile fetch all the evidence villagers needed to see to be convinced (the poor copper didn't have anything on him except his fool(ish) costume) and wrapping it up perfectly by appearing at the Summerisle estate with Summerisle completely flabbergasted, the old dog. And instead of a borderline cynical close-up shot of the careless sun we would have a tender intimate close-up of Watson acting all incredulous "b-but how did you know that Rowan was on it all along?" with Holmes confidently responding "The E-word, my dear Watson."

Now, the overall theme is kinda dated and fits shlocky B-flicks that are based on the "us modern civilized upright Christian citizens" vs. "creepy weird tribes and hidden retrograde cults" trope and the entertainment and cheap shock derived from this clash of values. This type of "spooky children-of-the-corn cult thriller" genre, and particularly this movie, can be interpreted multiple ways: * We can see it as a silly oversimplification of polytheist/nature worship religions, plus putting a "spooky" spin to it -- and considering from the historical standpoint that the 1970s WAS basically the golden age of cults we could take it as a jab at these cults but with an awkward blend of basic imagery from these innocuous nature religions, showing them in a negative light by association. * Another could be taken as good ol' Christian-leaning British conseravative pandering ("See how barbarous are these creepy pagans? You ought to be glad to be in good company of Jesus Christ & friends & The Queen, innit"). * Another as an English director painting fictitious Scottish villagers the same way some Yankee director from New York comes to shoot a spooky thriller in the south where they show Southern fellows engaged in simplistic gun-totin' Bible-thumpin' moonshine-brewin' endeavors. * Another as an egalitarian poke at all religions because it doesn't matter how innocent or "righteous" it is, at the end of the day when the sun goes down you are still going to look foolish (like a jester; that was a good one, Robin Hardy) when you think a "prayer" or a "human sacrifice" will grant you a bountiful harvest - but, God forbid, if you don't try, right?

Now, The Wicker Man is a smorgasbord of all the above; it could work well as a religious satire (and it does) as well as a "spooky thriller" and also a dated critique of cults in general. Whatever the case, it was a fun movie. Chilly setting, sly villain, dense cop, 70s hairy humans, what else to wish for? Well, actually nothing, I don't wish to watch this movie again.

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"And on that bed there was a girl And on that girl there was a man And from that man there was a seed And from that seed there was a boy And from that boy there was a man And for that man there was a grave From that grave there grew ... a tree"

"99 out of 100 people on IMDb disagree with THIS, you bad mean person! Your rating is way too harsh! This is a lovely light interstellar romantic comedy that's, like, loved by EVERY critic on Earth! Also, Chris Pratt, he's so dreamy with his sad puppy-bear expressions. Don't tell me YOU wouldn't sabotage a hot guy's pod and wake him up to keep you company for the rest of your life, just admit it, you hypocrite!"

When it comes to movies, I feel a special, top-shelf repulsion for the "people doing stupid things" trope which lurks in the dark with its loathsome slack- jawed cousins "This is a scary dark house/hall/corner but I am going inside anyway!" and "A scary serial killer is chasing us, gang - We should split up!" ready to jump up at you. My rating is merely a reflection of my displeasure with movies such as this one still using or having to primarily rely on the same cliches used over and over and not in any way is supposed to reflect the movie's cinematography, pacing, editing, settings, art direction, etc etc etc, because there is nothing wrong with the movie in this regard. Even the main Robinson Crusoe premise is delightful Existentialism 101 and I enjoyed it. Up until a certain point, that is.

Chris Pratt plays a mechanic with a shady past who's aboard an interstellar Titanic. When space ice (meteorite storm in this case) hits the ship, his hibernation pod malfunctions due to a temporary blackout. Only his, so he's the only person on the entire ship awakened early and there is another 90 years or so until destination arrival and allegedly there is no way to repair the pod on a ship with the most advanced tech equipment known to humanity. What are the odds! Now our mechanic takes it hard, as expected, and soon goes cuckoo from loneliness. Before you can say "Adam and Eve" he starts auditioning for the best Tarzan Impersonator Year 2150: Interstellar Tarzan strand in space. Interstellar Tarzan sad! Interstellar Tarzan look at sleepy box thingy. Interstellar Tarzan see future Mrs Tarzan. Interstellar Tarzan happy Interstellar Tarzan not be alone any more! Interstellar Tarzan genius!

You would expect from a sensible character in a sensible science fiction movie that instead of playing Biblical Adam in space, they would keep it in their pants and just wake up enough technician personnel to look at our WalMart Intersteallar Boats Inc Economy Class HiberPod(tm) malfunction and eventually better face the impending interstellar Titanic issue but I guess Morten Tyldum thought date rape-y deceptiveness (in Space (TM)) is a more fun topic to explore. Saving the ship? Boo! Building a mobile robot to send flirty notes to the person whose hibernation pod you deliberately sabotaged ensuring they will never see the new world ever? Yay!

"Do you trust me?" sayeth the dishonest rat. I wonder what would Ellen Ripley do? Probably watch Moon (2009) instead because it offers the juicy slice of existentialism without the gratuitous high sugar, trans fat-ladden, LDL-raising Biblical connotation icing and rotten, worm-infested Stockholm syndrome cherries.

Apparently nothing says "bad guy" like a character who is all "Now give me some Richard Wagner, fam."

I won't even bother divulging into what made me rate this well-polished yet laughably dreadful flick so low, let's say the plot-convenient "solar flare incident" caused this.

As for the Synth subplot, David (Michael Fassbender) is a formidable foe and a well-developed character just like Sigourney Weaver's Ripley was in the 1980s Alien series but at the same time, an "artificial person" being made a villain, yet again? Stop it already, Scott, you can only plunder and loot your older movies for story for so long.

The Walter/David confrontation, both philosophical and physical, was particularly stimulating and captivating and if "Alien: Covenant" was just that --- first David showing pity for frail, aging Weyland (another charismatic figure in the Alien series, played by Guy Pearce), who David realizes is no omnipotent "creator" but a mere mortal (hu)man, followed by the fallout between duty/program-bound Walter vs. free will-harboring David --- I would rate it favorably.

* What you are NOT going to see: A sensible crew (for a SF movie, I mean), wearing Hazmat suits on a breathable albeit unknown planet, abstaining from sticking their nose into peculiar lifeforms' rears or trampling on everything while wearing simple camping gear and hunting hats as if they were a bunch of drunken fishermen in Alaska.

* What you are going to see: David, the prodigal android, "teaching" Walter, an inexperienced naive android, to play on his flute.

I felt from the get-go that the show (season 1) is exactly the kind of treatment the Book truly deserves. Episode 1 (Season 1) straight away set the bone-chilling tone and was unrelenting throughout the season 1, confidently sporting the heavy dark combat shoes of suspense, backdropped by orchestral dark ambient score and 2010s cable shows' popular gratuitous sepia filters invoking "grimness" (it was not nearly as intrusive as I make it sound, instead it fit well like Aunt Lydia's fascist coat - which would even make Hermann Göring blush). The overall atmosphere alludes to creepy war-time occupation claustrophobia and depicts this feeling splendidly well.

Season 1 surprises: This one is controversial, at least for a staunch book adaptation purist like me, I praise the show creators for doing something that feels as something more than just a mere "TV adaptation of a book" so while the show feels a little less "personal" and is no longer focusing on one particular handmaid('s tale) as the Book is, we are instead treated with a more expanded universe of Gilead. The show successfully supplemented plenty of hot ideas to the table, not to mention brought some of the ideas from the Book up to date (Serena Joy is an ex-feminist now and God, I love the change). The show creators clearly knew what they were doing with the source material.

Season 2 opened with a gratuitous torture porn sequence and it was obvious we were now in the edgy HBO wannabe land and that the show creators are only good at adapting existing material but not telling their own story without ripping off season 1. I will not bother with season 2 and beyond but #2.02 is a must-see episode, if nothing else.

Now if the show creators in the end decide not to go for the post-war documentary twist the 1990 movie adaptation substituted it with an atrocious travesty I berated it for, it will be OK as long as there is no sappy idiotic trailer park ending again. ("Okay crew, for the last final scene we're gonna need a trailer park. Bob, I know you love Atwood's book but quit sulking now and go back to building the set!")

I would like to believe that "masterpieces" or otherwise great works don't need accolades in the form of never-ending blocks of flattering text by overzealous fans and armchair film critics alike as these works pretty much speak for themselves (as do the opposites of masterpieces, of course) so I'll just stop here, with an unnecessary tedious 1984 reference that betrays my love of both Atwood's and Orwell's book that I see conceptually analogous in nature: If Winston Smith were a fertile woman, in Gilead, he would have been a handmaid and, most likely, renamed Ofobrien.

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"My name is Offred. I ... had another name but it's forbidden now. So many things are forbidden now."

This review is obviously not going to end well.

*looks smugly into the camera*

See, the whole point is that the "victims" here is not the nice upper middle class family who can't for some asinine reason recall the emergency numbers (how convenient for our young sadistic smooth-talking Germanic gentlemen) but the audience. How funny and original is that? Are you entertained yet? Aren't you? Why aren't you? *shoots you in the knee* Wow, I have been like super civil with you up to this point yet you choose to bleed on our brand new IKEA rug? What kind of a rude guest are you? Tsk tsk.

This and many more is the movie's principal tone. Still the most offensive thing about it is not the self-reflexive yet pointless violence that we the stupid brainless masses obviously crave according to our bitter Germanic director I can almost hear (profanity related to giving yourself pleasure) over audience's assumed stupidity but never-ending boredom intertwined with cringe-inducing moments. There is no story here except sending a big "F you" to the horror/thriller fan. This movie would have worked better as a short student film but as our lovely corpulent Australopithecus friend in golf attire already pointed out it wouldn't be a legitimate full-length "thriller" movie with all of its classic tropes playfully subverted making the "prank" on the audience incomplete and we don't want that, right? (Yawn.)

If you are into meta self-aware treatment of tired old themes or works containing a thinly-veiled anti-violence message, "Deadpool (2016)," "The Cabin in the Woods" (2012), Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" all do what Funny Games aspires to be a hundred times better.

*kills you so you don't have to be subjected to Funny Games anymore*

Why I am even bothering typing this? You know it was bad, I know it was bad so why not end it here? I mean commenting on something which is obviously no-good trash that in an ideal world would not be paid a single picosecond of attention to must almost certainly constitute a form of masochism or something. Now would be the time to insert an edgy "joke" here about this fakakta flick being the ultimate proof that God doesn't exist but I digress.

I was expecting a decent low-key second hand comedy like "Oy Vey My Son Is Gay!!" (2009) but this was, to put it mildly, way worse and there were no Bruce Vilanch's humongous shoulders to carry the burden of comedy on and no redeeming last moments like the affectionate post-wedding scene in "Oy Vey," instead it was just overwhelmingly offensive to everyone and everything, even to itself but true, offensiveness of a work shouldn't be the only factor in down-voting it. For comparison, writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone just revel in offensiveness yet the end result of their seemingly sophomoric work looks way different thanks to satirical tools they successfully employ, like take South Park episode "Ginger Cow", for instance. It took a jab at religion but it was pertinent, pithy, not to mention witty and it run only 20 minutes, which means watching that instead would save you about 70 minutes that you could otherwise spend on ... yoga, learning a new language, attending a secret fight club meeting or whatever IMDb-ers typically like to do in their spare time (probably comment on bad movies on weekends).

Perhaps it should be said that there isn't much material this movie can work with as it is a rehash of the same thing we have seen over and over again* except the names have been replaced with Jewish ones and as if to compensate for a lack of humor perverse obsession with embarrassing faux pas was cranked up to 11 and that's Jewtopia, also known as "Christian hell," enjoy your stay. Maybe to spend time less hopelessly, check out "Oy Vey My Son Is Gay" which to me seemed more authentic and cheerful as far as Jew/gentile weddings are concerned and the British 2010 movie "The Infidel" for an actually funny inter-faith clash (Judaism/Islam).

*(probably tracing back to Shakespeare and beyond, boy I can just picture "Shlomio and Mary-Jane-Destiny-Hopette," a tragic story about a simple Southern gal falling in love with a simple Yeshiva boy from Crown Heights, New York and their families not approving of the bond as usual and how even this ad hoc story, although a shameless carbon copy of a classic, would still be more watchable than Jewtopia)

The tone of the movie was reminiscent of those campy 80s black comedy horror movies that often didn't take themselves too seriously like Night of the Creeps, Return of the Living Dead or Evil Dead? and also more recent quirky semi-ironic shows like iZombie while the humor itself was more deadpan and sitcom-ish than those (think darkly humorous sitcoms like Married with Children). I wouldn't exactly say this is a masterpiece you would recommend your friend, unless they were a weirdo who is into this sort of humor (I am probably that weirdo) because I was squirming in my seat from boredom especially in the first third of the movie but once you get past the awkward twenty minutes or so into the movie where you are probably thinking "A high school male student most likely played by an early Tom Hanks-emulating middle-aged actor creepily trying to 'get the girl' since he was a little boy? I already hate this guy! Wow, I wish he were dead- oh." it has its moments. The fact that most characters were completely unfazed by the fact Johnny was dead and took it as if he just grew another zit on the face was just hilarious. The strongest point of the movie was however a satirical depiction of "angry villagers" (most of them white trash rednecks) wanting to burn Johnny "alive" because he was undead and seen with a human female which if you change the subject, say, instead of undead he was black or a member of the LGBT community it adds another layer of meaning to it. Again, don't expect --insert the most critically acclaimed movie here-- and 85 minutes of your time won't be wasted.

"Would you eat someone just to be few more hours with the person you love? No? I thought so!" Obviously paraphrasing here the part where a sheriff scolds the angry mob but God, was I not laughing out loud at this.