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opheliabrock
Reviews
A December Bride (2016)
Hilariously terrible
You only need to watch the first ten minutes to get the major problems. This thing has all the technical competence of a homemade sextape.
The cinematography is bizarre, the camera is constantly zooming way too close and cutting to different shots that look like they took place in a completely different movie. It looks like they recast a ton of people and butchered it in editing for a completely different storyline, everything is so randomly placed and directed.
Scenes last two minutes max with no cohesive structure so if you're not focusing you'll have a hard time even figuring out the when where and who of any moment.
The storyline itself is equally weird. The family aspect is absolutely horrible. There's this bizarre relationship between the lead and her ex boss that feels straight out of a bad comedy.
The whole movie takes place in about three sets that somehow get uglier and uglier as time goes on.
I'd honestly recommend the watch. If you can get past how spineless the lead is, how manipulative and cruel her family is, and how pathetic and desperate the love interest is, this is a really fun hate watch.
The Umbrella Academy (2019)
Ultimately a disappointment
Quirky writing and a dash of interesting execution really made this show stand out. The flawed characters had promise for compelling dynamics and the show went on promising it up until the last episode.
Hardly anything was even remotely resolved by the season finale, major characters experienced no growth, and anything upping the stakes felt forcefully injected at all times. There was no natural progression, no constant tone. It felt like two authors had a beginning and an ending between them and never reached an agreement on how to fill the middle.
It was an entertaining ride right up until it decided it didn't want to be entertaining anymore. Any quirky humor flew right out the window, leaving you with jarringly stilted writing and character interactions that felt like smashing your head repeatedly against a brick wall at best or utterly meaningless at worst. You might like it, there were exceptions and shining moments. But be prepared to slog through the rest to get to those exceptions.
Maximum Ride (2016)
Bad book makes a worse movie
The Maximum Ride series is terrible, take the word of an old fan. It's corny, aimless, lazy, and just reeks of 0% effort. I still loved it enough to buy the graphic novels once upon a time but my expectations were LOW going in to see a direct to video adaptation of a series with very little substantial material to begin with.
Somehow, the movie was WORSE. I'm not even disappointed, I'm just amazed real people created this and deemed it worthy of viewing.
Well, less amazed considering writing hack James Patterson was directly involved with its creation, but still. This got approved by actual, paid adults.
You might be able to get some cringe enjoyment out of this, but for me, the dialogue alone was too painful to sit through. Which is frankly astounding considering the dialogue in the actual books fit well in a middle schooler's Danny Phantom fanfic.
Balto (1995)
Disappointing on so many levels...
I used to adore this movie as a kid, and had some huge nostalgic goggles on the thing for years. But after recently watching it again, it's lost most of it's charm.
First off, the animation has a non-Disney style, which means it can be interesting. However the animators don't try to play with this advantage in the least and leave the audience with plain, lazy, and boring sequences. The only times I remember even bothering to watch closely were scenes with Balto's mother, which were nice if not completely unrealistic.
Which leads me to my biggest gripe, the many multitude of insults against the viewers' intelligence. Definitely a movie for kids 8 and younger.
First off, Balto was not a wolfdog, he was a purebred husky and a trained sled dog. I'm not sure why he needed the underdog edge, considering he was already an outcast for his poor sledding capabilities. And the studio didn't bother incorporating ANY common sense into the move. Like how wolves are smaller than huskies, dogs howl, and bears are not bigger than houses.
And thirdly, if you know ANYTHING about what really happened during and after that relay, this movie kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
Steele, the antagonist actually represents the only other existing character, which is Togo. The sled dog that was a natural born leader, extremely successful and beloved, and quite worthy of his own movie.
He carried the medicine over the largest and most dangerous stretch before being switched out with Balto, to give him a break at the very end. Togo would receive all other awards and medals, but Balto and his statue were publicity darlings. This all ends after Balto's owner finally finishes milking his fame for all its worth on tours and drops them off at a circus, where they were discovered years later covered in their own filth and starving. Balto and his team were later rescued and lived their lives out at a zoo, while Togo would remain with his owner before finally retiring.
Beside the historic flops, the characters are uninteresting, clichéd, and unsympathetic. The action is fair if ridiculous, the music is forgettable, and the acting and animation is lazy.
The reason I'm so harsh on this movie is because I really did love it as a kid, and find myself completely frustrated over its failures. It could have been so much more, and animated retelling of the relay was not unwelcome. But the delivery was stale, clichéd, and completely uninterested in actually telling the story itself.