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DrNick1
Reviews
Babylon 5: Confessions and Lamentations (1995)
The HIV allegory episode
A serious infectious disease rips through the station. In this day and age especially I ding this episode for the totally unrealistic management attempt in an enclosed station. It gets kudos from me for the excellent and unexpected end of the episode.
Babylon 5: In the Shadow of Z'ha'dum (1995)
Story episode
Exposition heavy but lots of explanation of plots that have been percolating for seasons. Nice to see Sheridan going by any means necessary in this episode.
Babylon 5: Knives (1995)
Had some good ideas
The plot with Sheridan is pretty silly, but the Mollari plot had a lot of potential - a little on the nose, but not bad. The Sheridan stuff messes up the episode.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016)
Pull the Other Leg
Documentary that doubles as a hagiography of a family of directors of a small Chinatown bank chain as they are brought up on mortgage fraud charges for wholesale fabrication of mortgage banking records sold on to Fannie Mae. They are proposed to be the victims of awful low level employee loan officers who fabricated and extorted the clients whose records they helped fabricate. What it actually shows is a family of shady bank directors who successfully firewalled themselves (take a page from Stevie Cohen!) from criminal guilt. Congratulations. A systemic problem that large wasn't found because they didn't want it found.
There's a few words about tax fraud in this film but the subject passes by quickly. Make no mistake though, that is the scam going on here. The default rates on these loans was so low because the applicants actually made much more money and/or had assets that they never paid taxes on. Possibly kept in the Abacus Bank security deposit vaults shown early in the film. The gift note is mentioned prominently in the film, a note where a relative or person connected to the borrower promises a money transfer and this promissory note is then added to the mortgage file. If the makers of this film were really interested in what actually was happening at Abacus, a fascinating thing to do would have been to try and find the authors of these notes. I suspect they wouldn't find many, and that most of these promissory notes were to cover for mortgage applicants pulling their own unreported money out of whatever bolthole they had it shoved into.
Was the prosecution and dog and pony show of dragging people in chains worth it? In hindsight, probably not, but that doesn't change the amount of shade going on at Abacus.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Fine movie, just a little rushed
With all the hype that Lord of the Rings has been getting, my hopes were way up before seeing this movie. As an old Fantasy/ Middle Earth fangeek, I figured if the other fans are loving it, they can't all be wrong.
Well, I did like the movie, but it wasn't the epiphany I was expecting. It's an entertaining take on Middle Earth, and what is in the movie is done well. It's what's missing that I was dissatisfied with. The movie feels rushed. It's a huge book to adapt, but I feel that the story told in the movie doesn't really hang together and isn't plausible without understanding the book. It's a good try, but I would say that movies like Star Wars or the Matrix, which create their own mythology, or movies like Blade Runner which doscards much from the text it's derived from, have the advantadge over movies like The Fellowship. The sheer amount of detail and plotting that went into the book are difficult to convey onscreen. Not having that detail and plotting detracts from the movie, even without comparing it to the book.
Wo hu cang long (2000)
I don't get it?
I like action movies, I like foreign films. I've watched trashy Hong Kong action movies for a long time now. And I guess the thing that's bothering me. This movie reminds me a lot of those movies that I have already seen. Oh sure production values are better, but the same hackneyed plot, dialogue, stories, structure (loved that flashback to the desert, didn't break the film up at all!). Come on people, get off the bandwagon. It's not special.
Kundun (1997)
Commendable effort, muddled results
This effort is unfortunately is betrayed by its execution. It is a very pretty movie, beautifully shot, but with no real point outside of its most obvious one (that the Chinese coming was a disaster for Tibet and the Dalai Lama (kundun), and that that Dalai Lama guy, hey, he's pretty cool). It fails to engage the viewer, making do with empty symbolism, and some wooden acting from what I assume are probably real Tibetans. This movie has an important story to tell, but fails in the telling.