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The Good Karma Hospital: Episode #1.6 (2017)
Most powerfully moving episode so far
Good Karma Hospital is easily one of the most uplifting, intriguing, thought-provoking yet fun series, a treasure in the sea of material on streamers. This episode takes things to a deep and wonderful level of joy, reflection, love and loss. Superb!
Rain is the underlying metaphor in this episode, for its delight and often its unexpectedness. A crisis reveals much about the work of the hospital. In the process, we learn more about Ruby and her personal history and her career, about Fonseca and Greg, about Dr. Varma, the relationship of Dr. Nair and his son, and the deep love of Paul and Maggie. Must must see!
Magic in the Moonlight (2014)
MitM production meeting
Producer: Tell me about your latest project!
Woody: It's about the banality and pointlessness of life.
Producer: Wow, that again? But I'm sure it'll be great. How is it going so far?
Woody: Well, it's only one page so far.
Producer: No problem, we can just have the characters repeat the premise in different ways for about 40 pages. But how might you move the plot after that?
Woody: Simple: See, there's this supposedly psychic girl, and in a couple of throwaway lines she'll cause the lead character to completely throw away his lifelong beliefs. It'll work fine as New York art house play.
Producer: Stage? No, this should be a movie. We can throw in some gratuitous beauty shots of an old car on a dirt road on a mountainside to tell moviegoers it's Europe. And maybe some interior shots at that restaurant Gavin Newsom likes.
World on Fire (2019)
A decent yarn, but, oh, so drippingly PC
WoF is entertaining, a decent yarn I suppose. That is, as long as you don't take it too seriously. As another reviewer said, it's World War II in some kind of alternate universe. It's not so much about World War II as it's about 21st century Hollywood obsession with the Holy Trinity of the left-wing: race, class and gender, with a weepy forlorn pacifism thrown in for good measure. Oh, goodness, could they have packed in any more of the shibboleths of the university grievance studies departments? To the extent that WWII intrudes on the story, we see the British being weak, Dunkirk looking like a under-attended rainy day at the beach, the Germans universally diabolically evil (except for the one that helps the gay soldiers), the Russians are absent, and various soldiers from elsewhere are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The only saving grace is the degree to which the suffering of Poland is emphasized.
Special note must be made of Helen Hunt's odd role. She clearly is here only to add some A-list name power to the show. But her casting is weird as a sort of commentator on radio from Berlin, with all the verve, depth and wit of a high school sophomore reading a book report. Her role seems to be to provide some vague half-hearted context, and that's all. Sad to say, her appearance is a little jarring as well. This is not the best performance by this accomplished actress.
A group of regular people and soldiers thrown into the start of WWII? A *MUCH MUCH* BETTER series with that same theme is "Generation War" from 2013. Wow, it's involving, informative and passionate! As of this writing, it's available on Amazon Prime.
Freud (2020)
Are you Serious?
Remember Yahoo Serious' "Young Einstein"? The one about Albert Einstein growing up on his family's farm in Tasmania before working at the patent office in Sydney when he meets Marie Curie and discovers how to split the beer atom? This movie has the same kind of fidelity to the life of Sigmund Freud. But "Young Einstein" is a lot more fun.
Turn Up Charlie (2019)
Started kind of cute, ended miserable
We watched the first episode on a lark, and both my wife and I enjoyed it. Yeah, the little girl is bratty and obnoxious in the first episode but she softens up a bit and turns out OK by the second episode. The characters are interesting and had interesting issues.
But that was the beginning. By the middle of the series, we were seeing a lot more drug use, indiscriminate sex partners, excessive use of alcohol and continuous nonstop horrible language.
By the end of the first series all of the characters were in miserable states, having dissipated themselves with alcohol, drugs and sex. Even the 11-year-old girl had found a new friend ... a much older boy who is selling drugs and scheming one juvenile delinquency act after another. There were supposedly laugh points about one character fishing a used condom out of an excrement filled toilet, and the 11-year-old girl having her first period. This was supposed to be funny?
No one in the show, and I mean no one, seemed to be living a life that was productive to society. The characters focused on some kind of electronic night club music that could be summarized as thumpety-thumpety-beep-bump. I mean, every single "song" these supposedly talented DJs turn out is a variation of that. A breakthrough point is when the lead character hears a reworking of his song that made him famous years ago. We listen to it and it sounds like instead of thumpety-thumpety-beep-bump it sounds like beep-thumpety-thumpety-bump. The contrivance of these characters being supposedly famous DJs does have an advantage: nobody is ever shown actually having to do much work on anything. People stand behind consoles and do something or another and make more of that same thumpety sound. It's not like they actually had to play an instrument or sing or do something that would highlight a talent. It made me think of that Gwyneth Paltrow movie, Country Strong - she was supposed to be a top country singer, which is a challenge given the casting. But they got her to do her big title song, which was a pretty good song but only involved her having to hold a single note. But in Turn Up Charlie no one actually had to evoke ANY resemblance of having to do anything that required any talent.
The last couple of episodes were mostly filled with breathtakingly crude language of people screaming at each other. By the end we just wanted all of these characters to evaporate or go away. What a lost opportunity for an interesting premise!
Who Do You Think You Are?: Zooey Deschanel (2013)
A break in format
This is an educational and inspiring episode, but it's very different from other episodes. Unlike the usual pattern of searching back through generations to find stories, Zooey is handed a complete genealogy going back some six generations right in the first minutes! The rest of the program covers events involving pre-Civil War relatives in opposing slavery.
Touch: Safety in Numbers (2012)
Flight attendant subplot far more interesting than rest of show
What is the story about the flight attendant? She was easily the liveliest, most appealing and most interesting character in the show, not to mention that she's a girl-next-door stunner. Who was that actress? None of the cast photos on IMDb look like her, and the Fox website's sampling of photos and clips from the show ignore her and that whole subplot. My theory: the producers saw the final cut and realized they had a big problem: a minor character was far more compelling than their stars, so they had to bury information about her!
The story itself was interesting, but only in a this-is-so-dumb-that-I'm-wasting-my-time- on-this sort of way. The boy, though cute, was as intriguing as drying paint. The supposed pattern of numbers made no sense whatsoever. (Does it even matter to today's crop of writers, who graduated from an American K-16 education devoid of serious content?) The stereotypes were galling: the awkward Foreign Man, the Russian Mafioso, the social worker with boundless empathy, and -- worst of all -- the "magic Negro", a painful trope as marinated in racism as the Noble Savage of years ago.
BUT -- just who was that flight attendant!
St. Elmo's Fire (1985)
Dreary
I saw this in the theater when it came out, and just yesterday I saw it again on cable. This I was able to reacquainted myself with the feeling of just how revolting this film is. The whole bunch of characters are self-absorbed narcisstic preeners. Worst of all, it reinforces every negative stereotype about 20-something dating, even as it purports to celebrate people "finding themselves". The nice guys finish last, the jerky guys make out great, the jerkiest guys do best. The girls are all boy toy pushovers. Only one character ("Wendy") is seen doing anything remotely useful to society, and she dispenses with her long-saved virginity in a throwaway one-night stand with a scumbag, in a lushly filmed scene that we're supposed to think is romantic. What this really is is Hollywood's concept of young America: permissive, detached, promiscuous, conceited.