Reviews

Although this series takes its name from a famous Edgar Allan Poe short story, the only link to the great horror writer is the use of names from various Poe stories, all attached to insufferable, inhumanly unlikable characters. I came into the series expecting a contemporized version of a Poe tale, but this is a poorly drawn business soap opera. It doesn't help its case that every character has been named after, but not in the remotest way linked to or modeled after, yet another Poe character from a story or poem. It wouldn't be such an egregious pilfering of classic literature references if it was anything more than slicked up, 21st Century American Capitalism pornography.

I watched this years ago because it was one of those cult classics I'd heard so much about. I don't remember enjoying it back then, and I can't say I enjoyed it on a second watch. The film has two glaring problems. First of all, the pacing, despite a rather exciting story, is excruciatingly slow. It's a bit of an accomplishment for Weir that he was able to turn a story with so much tension into such an uninteresting film. The other problem is the absurd level of racism at the heart of the plot. I would guess that in the 70s when the film came out, it was considered (by white people) to be forward thinking because it "celebrated" indigenous cultures. But time hasn't been kind to it, and in 2023, it comes across as a white person's attempt to use people of color to add flare. The old white writer's fantasy of being a central figure in some indigenous prophecy is not only a dated cliche, it's just plain racist.

I haven't seen the other Matt Helm movies, but I doubt I'll try after suffering through about 30 minutes of this trash. Dean Martin can hardly complete a sentence, and the script and cast are as sleazy as can be. I can forgive a little bit of old-fashioned objectification, but this film is just too much. I was ashamed for the writers, the cast, and myself for the portion I sat through.

I love a good parody, and I get that this wasn't supposed to be serious like the James Bond movies, and I suppose I could forgive it some of the sexism because, and I'm reaching here, it was making fun of the Bond films, but the plot is ridiculous, the repeated premise that gaggles of beautiful, young women just can't wait to be ogled by a drunk, aging lecher is too obviously an adolescent fantasy for Martin, and the jokes are just embarrassing.

It almost succeeds on purely prurient grounds, but too often, Dean Martin, or other apparently drunk male, middle aged actors stumble onto set and make creepy leering sexual comments about the women on scene and remind me of how much this movie is simply trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator and buy Dean Martin another several cases of gin.

I can see this doing well as a play, but on film it shows up too obviously the unrealistic nature of stage drama. The characters speak in far too well edited soliloquies, chock full of deep insight and philosophical prose. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel real, despite the incredible acting. Denzel Washington and Viola Davis perform their roles masterfully as usual, but they're too obviously written, too poetically smooth to be believable.

The other problem I had was that I felt the writer wanted me to love this man, to respect his goodness and forgive the bad, when his good side was a thin veil, too thin to cover up the bitter, hateful person he really was. He ruined the lives of people around him. By the end of the story, any sympathy I'd felt for him was gone.

I enjoyed this movies in my early twenties, when it first came out. I found it stylistic and edgy. Now that I've grown up, or in other words, that I'm not a pretentious 20 something, I found it empty and lacking in substance.

Watching it again, hoping to relive that experience of enjoying a great film from the past, I realized this one doesn't travel well. The story is silly, the dialog is, often gratingly, cliche, and though the production is decent, the style of the film feels like a rip off of several other movies.

Both Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette offer some of their most derivative and unimpressive acting in this film. The rest of the all-star cast doesn't help either, as the script doesn't give any of them good material to work with. In fact, every character feels like a 12-year-old's fantasy of an action/crime movie character.

In 1993, True Romance was an interesting film, with an edgy flare, but it needs to go back to 1993 because in 2023, it just doesn't hold up.

I recently re-watched the three Sinbad the Sailor movies, and this was my least favorite of the three, but it only barely falls behind The Seventh Voyage.

There are a lot of things I love about this last installment in the series, and quite a few that had me rolling my eyes.

The plot took a lot of interesting turns that were quite different from the previous two. Some of these were great, but some were not so great.

Jane Seymour wasn't even close to as annoying as Kathryn Grant playing Parisa, but her acting wasn't very good, and she was absurdly overplayed as eye-candy. She's great to look at, but they put very little effort into disguising the fact that she served virtually no other purpose in the film.

Some of the creatures were good, but none were as memorable as the creatures in the first two (the second had the best). The titular "tiger" was the best visually, but it felt very tacked on, as if they'd created the title for the film and then figured out a way to cram a tiger into the plot.

I did enjoy Margaret Whiting as Zenobia, adding a bit of nuance with a female antagonist, but there was virtually no logic to her "magic," a problem the other two films had as well, but this one took it to a new extreme.

All in all, it's a fun film to watch, if you can get past the cheesiness of it. Having enjoyed it as a kid might go a long way toward solving that problem, but if you've never seen it before, it may be far too dated for you.

This is one of my favorites from my childhood. I've recently rewatched the three in the series, and I recognized the story, the actors, and the monsters from this one significantly more vividly than those of the other two.

The acting, not stellar by any means, was better in this one than the other two. Law is my favorite Sinbad, and though Munro wasn't great, she did a better job than the other two "princess" actors, and her character was so much more memorable. The eye on the hand, as badly painted in grease make up as it was, always seemed so haunting to me.

There are certainly some problems with the film. A few scenes drag a bit, and the plot is flimsy. Just like the other two, there's a bit of racial stereotyping, and the princess character is certainly objectified. Those elements might ruin it for a lot of people, but as a lover of old movies, and someone who grew up enjoying this one, I can forgive its flaws.

Of the three Sinbad the Sailor movies, this one is my favorite.

I loved the Sinbad movies as a kid. Every summer, these and a couple other so-called sword and sandal flicks would show on the three o'clock movie on channel 8, and I loved them. Watching them again as a grown (middle aged) man, they don't hold up quite as well. They're a bit racist, certainly sexist, and the special effects look really bad.

But the racism and sexism aren't hateful, just grounded in stereotypes and outdated social perceptions, and I'd take Harryhausen's stop motion effects any day over most cgi effects. There's something about those computer generated details that almost always annoy me. I guess the memories of watching these as a little boy add some magic to the experience that can't be recreated, no matter how much more realistic the more recent, digital efforts come across.

To be honest, I don't get why this one is called the best of the three. I didn't remember most of the monsters, and Kathryn Grant as the princess--dear god was she annoying. Her acting was like a radio toothpaste commercial from the 30s. Yikes.

But I definitely enjoyed re-watching it. I'll certainly revisit it again when I'm feeling like something childish and nostalgic.

House of the Dragon disappointed me. It reminded me very much of The Witcher, in that I kept waiting for something exciting to happen, but the majority of the story consisted of conversations about politics. When a few action scenes came up, I got excited and thought maybe it was finally going to pick up, but even these were uninteresting. I think the biggest problem is that the characters, or maybe it was the actors playing them, are all so smiley about everything. There appears to be some real intrigue and back-stabbing brewing, but the characters all respond to everything, even serious matters, with a smarmy grin and a gentle chuckle, as if they were talk show hosts responding to a low billed guest. It made everything seem so phony and unimportant. Game of Thrones was definitely soap-opera-ish on many levels, but the actors showed range, and the story had layers. These actors seem to be in the same emotional state almost indefinitely, and the story consists of one very thin layer.

I love it when people who love a movie are convinced that those who didn't like it "just didn't get it." This is one of those.

The fact is there's nothing much to get in this film: it's just badly written.

It's also unoriginal, and though I'm not always a fan of the haunted/remote boarding house/orphanage genre, I've greatly enjoyed several of them over the years. This one adds nothing meaningful (although it does an almost decent job of repeating what's already been said), and maybe since I've watched quite a few, I didn't give it as fair a chance as some of the previous ones.

The acting is mostly good, and the production is atmospheric (albeit not even close to innovative).

My biggest problem is with the meandering, sometimes self-contradicting plot. Too many details just weren't realistic or believable, and often the story seems to move in directions that cancel out what previous plot points had established as fact. I'm fine with what Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief," but when a film tries too hard to take the "gritty realism" route, I can't forgive glaringly unbelievable details, especially when they occur frequently.

Paranormal investigators seem to have quit trying to act as if they're not just performative con-artists. I can't decide whether the public has stopped asking for something more than blatant hokum or if the genre has just played itself out and the producers of this show are trying to get a last cash grab from a dwindling credulous audience. The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch is a brainless and shamelessly phony atrocity of pseudo-investigative entertainment. The actors (or, maybe they'd rather I call them participants) are buffoons, some of them pretending to be scientists, but miles from understanding basic scientific principles. The "investigations" are a laughable dance from one meatheaded fool's errand to the next, and the results are obviously fake. I found myself rolling at the frequent instances of the actors saying one thing and showing footage, or photos of something completely different, or the equipment always conveniently failing when it might have measured something (probably not, as they're measuring the most meaningless things). I watched the series not because I found it informative or even close to realistic, but because I was fascinated by how far they were willing to go in pretending that they were producing something real. It's mind-boggling that they managed to carry it through as far as they did.

I love Bergman. In fact, I hate relationship dramas usually, but still I enjoy a lot of Bergman's films in that genre.

I've been trying to see as much of his work over the years as possible, and I recently bought the Criterion box set.

This series has been praised to the heavens since its release, and you can see by all the reviews here that it is greatly loved.

However, despite all the love others have given it, and despite my being a huge fan of Ingmar Bergman, I struggled to get through this. I really only sat through its entirety to say to myself I've experienced the director's (mostly) complete oeuvre.

The production was flat. I know it was a TV show, but I expect from Bergman at least a little bit of cinematography. This series consisted of mostly long, unmoving, direct conversation shots.

The acting was decent but not good.

The story was tired and uninteresting. Despite a few interesting and insightful moments, it was a run of the mill, uninspired, and downright boring failed marriage tale, presented in the form of long, generally vapid conversations in which the cold husband tries to justify himself with junior high level philosophical commentary and the spineless wife placates him with coddling smiles in between badly played crying fits (the most entertainment I found in the series was laughing at Liv Ullman's weird moaning).

I'd looked forward to this after all of the great films by Bergman and all the accolades this series has received, but what a let down.

This film is quite a ride. If you like nonstop action, you might like it. If you like stories about desperate people stuck in desperate situations and struggling to get out of them, you might like it.

Unfortunately, you have to be willing to suspend quite a bit of disbelief to keep watching it, as each five minutes takes the main character further into unbelievable territory. By the end of the film, he's outsmarted several police organizations and several crime organizations, all of which have been chasing him through most of the movie, and it tells in several scenes where, rather than showing how he got out of an impossible situation, the film simply cuts to him driving or running away with nobody in close pursuit, suggesting he did it . . . Um, somehow?

Other reviewers talk about gritty realism, and while it is gritty, it isn't within miles of realistic. In the real world, the main character of this film would have been either killed or put in prison within thirty minutes of this 2.5 hour story.

I loved quite a lot of this film. The performances impressed me, the "story" inspired me, the production, though low budget, was well done, and the performance of "Song of Myself" at the end, though ridiculous (it was supposed to be from a play?) was very touching. Unfortunately, it was all a big nothing because the premise was so far removed from reality that it was ultimately meaningless to real life. It also ran a bit too long for what it delivered. I found myself checking the progress bar far too often and thinking, "haven't I watched a lot more than that?"

This film plays like an early 60s B movie, with poorly executed cinematography, inconsistent pacing, and mediocre acting. The reviews I've read mostly rave about how great the acting is and how beautiful the production, so maybe I expected too much, but even if I'd expected a bad movie, I would have been disappointed. This is not a good film.

This movie's premise is the type that would work well for about twenty seconds in a conversation: "Hey, I have a movie idea." "Really, what is it?" "People go to a place where they all age super fast." "Hmm. Interesting." And that's pretty much it. Exactly what you would imagine happening in that scenario is exactly what happened, and then the movie kept going for ever and ever and ever and ever. I wouldn't have minded this on the Twilight Zone back in the day because after about twenty minutes, when the trite, predictable premise had started to get on my nerves, I would only have a few minutes left to see what kind of vapid TZ ending would wrap it up. Unfortunately, this film, though more up to date and higher budget, didn't do as well as the Twilight Zone did with these kind of silly, predictable, other-worldly, fantasy-sci-fi stories.

From the first moments of this film, it's clear that it's nothing more than another chunk on the trash pile of pop horror. The formula is trite, the story is ridiculous, and the characters are intolerably unlikable. The budget made for a slick looking production, but ten minutes of the annoying dialogue, written by pretentious writers and acted by performers who--well, they were good looking--was all I could take. No way I could suffer through an hour and a half of these people's empty personalities. The only one who has a hint of substance as a human being threw that away when she shrugged off the fact that her narcissistic friend canceled some charity work she had scheduled so that she'd take a trip with her. Is our culture really so shallow that people appreciate this kind of trash?

Having watched and greatly enjoyed the first three seasons of AOT, I came to this season expecting more of the same. Unfortunately, this season is a convoluted, completely new story that only marginally connects to the previous ones. The first episode begins in the middle of a war between, well who knows? The rapid fire dialog tries to cram pages worth of explanation of previously untouched backstory, so it's near impossible to follow. Maybe if I had patience I would watch several episodes I didn't understand to finally put it all together, but this is just lazy writing. I'm not obsessed with AOT enough to slog through the confusing middle of a story I haven't been told yet/

There is much about this film to like. The production and location feel like a stage production, but it doesn't come across as a cheap, filmed community theater performance. The hyperbolic sets, the black and white cinematography, and the fantastic and symbolic imagery throughout are all beautifully atmospheric.

As a Shakespeare production, the film does a good job of telling the story without being too confusing, but be prepared, this film uses the original script, so if you don't like 17 Century dialogue, you won't likely enjoy this film.

The performances are a mixed bag. Sometimes the actors do a beautiful job, and other times not so much. Most of the cast have at least a few brilliant moments, but with the inconsistency, the wires become too visible quite often. But on the whole, I enjoyed the acting. I didn't know what to expect from Denzel Washington in Shakespeare, but I mostly liked what he did.

Two specific elements annoyed me, not enough to make me stop watching, but enough to make me think about it from time to time. As is common among Shakespeare adaptations (I can't blame Cohen for following the tradition, I guess), the script was cut down, and the story gets a bit rearranged. I've come to expect this over the years of watching these films, but for this one the changes were often strangely significant even if small in scope. Characters that belonged in completely different parts of the story got combined together, scenes or parts of scenes were removed in such a way as to change the meaning of certain lines. This won't matter to anyone unfamiliar with play, but some of these changes didn't seem reasonable to me, and in fact in some places made the story unnecessarily confusing (and that's coming from somebody who could almost recite the play from memory).

The second annoying element, and the one that really prevents this film from being more than almost good, was the absurd pace of the film. Maybe somebody in power put a time limit on the production, but the delivery of the lines and the move from scene to scene went at a break-neck pace. I felt like I was watching it in fast-forward. The actors seemed to be in an extreme hurry to rattle off their lines, making it seem like a high school drama class performance consisting of all nervous cast member who wanted to hurry up and get their grade. The editing followed a similar trend, sprinting from scene to scene with very little time spent on transition or mood setting with in between material. Strangely, the very few such moments felt like they drug on forever, but in reality they were very short, and the fast cuts in the rest of the film just made them feel out of place. I really wish the production would have taken its time. I wouldn't have minded cutting some more of the less important scenes to make room for a bit of quiet, mood setting location shots and for the actors to act as if they were pausing to think once in a while or to speak their lines without squashing several sentences together at once.

I watched this several years ago, and I enjoyed it mostly. I recently tried to rewatch it, and I didn't make it. It's fun for what it is: a bloody, shallow, fight and kill movie. All the talk of deep philosophical themes is just talk. The film offers nothing in the way of depth. It doesn't help that the production is cheap. The casting is off (twenty somethings as 7th graders) the acting is consistently bad (one actor seems to be laughing as if she's embarrassed by the cameras every time she's on, even when something very serious is happening), and the plot is absurdly predictable (surprise, some more violence). It's a low budget production in which a bunch of teenagers kill each other for a couple of hours. That's it. Having watched it before, when I tried to watch it again, I realized there was nothing more to be had from seeing it a second time.

This film tells a good story. Unfortunately, visually it was annoying. If I could listen to the audio with footage that wasn't repetitive, overly kooky, and often disconnected from the subject, I would have enjoyed it. Todd Haynes seems to be oblivious to the reasons why so much of that era hasn't lasted because he seems to be trying to rehash things like the worst stylistic elements of the hippy era films, Andy Warhol's studio funded films, and other over-the-top artistic experimentation that was popular for several years in the late 60s and early 70s but quickly fell out of favor when the world came down from the acid trip that had them thinking that stuff was good. It wasn't good, and it hasn't lasted because, as art, it was intolerable. A close up of Lou Reed's face fills half the screen for several minutes, for example. It serves no purpose except to beat the viewer over the head with itself, and this is the overall style of the visual editing in this film.

This series offers expected, cliche, formulaic thrills in the shape of constant and often absurd plot twists. The acting is good, the production is standard but good, and the plot is good enough to keep you watching, as long as you don't mind silly, unexplainable, and often just plain illogical twists and turns. Watch it for what it is (a cheesy, low brow mystery thriller) and you'll have fun with it. If you have standards requiring believability, consistency, and thorough story-telling, don't bother.

My wife and I gave it about 40 minutes, and when there still was no discernible plot, we gave up. What are we supposed to care about in all the mundane emptiness that dominates the film? She's annoyed by the loud family? She's trying to deal with tough memories? She's lonely and wants companionship but can't find it? I'm grasping at straws because the film, to that point, has not real conflict. You watch a middle aged woman going through uninteresting days in a resort hotel setting. She eats alone. She watches a family having a very raucous vacation near her on the beach. She fails to flirt with a man. Throughout, it's hard to tell what the characters are thinking, as their facial expressions, though well acted, are almost never appropriate to what's happening to them at the moment. Maybe Gyllenhaal was trying to create mystery. Unfortunately, it added no interest to the absolute nothing that was going on in the film.

The film itself is well made, aside from too many extreme close ups, and the acting is consistently very good. Put those elements together with a story, and this could have been a wonderful movie.

Clint Eastwood's movies tend to be ridiculous but entertaining, and this one is his most ridiculous yet. Often, it felt like a studio had given him a courtesy budget because they felt sorry for him. A scene about halfway through in which a drug kingpin has a couple of prostitutes entertain him feels like an especially cringy attempt at pretending Eastwood isn't a decrepit old man. Spoiler Alert: he is. The story is rambling and aimless--it makes sense, but it never goes anywhere surprising or meaningful. The plot is exactly what you'd expect from the premise: an old man low on funds takes a job as a drug mule, and things go downhill from there. From all the rave reviews I read and heard from friends, maybe I expected too much, but The Mule barely had enough to keep me watching. Don't expect anything from this one, and you might be surprised when it gives you a little bit of entertainment.