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Reviews
You People (2023)
Just awful
Just awful. Cringy jokes, awkward situations without a comical exit. Larry David does awkward right, he leaves a comical exit. This movie's awkward moments are smothering and completely not funny. Who thought this was funny material? It gets really preachy in the middle and just unbearable. Eddie Murphy isn't funny, he's uncomfortable to watch.
The best I can say is that it sure looks a lot like Kenya's other TV work, down to the edits and the animated cut scenes that don't say "movie" they say "weekend project". It fits well into the Netflix ecosystem as a corss between a movie and a TV show -- so cudos to NF for landing this.
So promising. So not good.
The Black Phone (2021)
The Message is Awful
Besides being a very dark movie about a man that beats and kills boys for pleasure (why is this entertaining to anyone?), there is a message to the plot which is also awful. The message is boys/men are violent and solve problems with threats, beatings, and killings, and are unable to regulate their behavior and are encouraged by other boys/men to do the same. Meanwhile, girls/women are unpredictable and emotional creatures full of "dreams" and "hunches" that can't be understood or explained by men and require violence to keep these girls/women under control.
Awful.
Ethan Hawke is sad in this movie. It seems his agent gave him the few available scripts in play and he picked the least awful one to do. He's not good, he's not effective as the character -- there's very little to work with here in this script, and he comes off as silly, a more "masculine" version of the gay serial killer in Silence of the Lambs.
Let's take a moment to appreciate one of the multiple inane plot-point scenes where two adult police sit in a school principal's office, with the principal present, while a student tween girl tells the poilce her dreams so they can use it solve a crime. It gets worse from there as the "emotional" girl gets dreams from God (source implied by the story) that are sought out by the police who act on them and solve the big crime using her dreams.
Awful.
The Humans (2021)
I Want My Life Time Back
Ugh. You'll find yourself waiting for the story to get started, but it won't, and then it ends and you think, what the hell did I just watch and give me back my time in life for sitting through this thing. The moody nature, the dialog, the whole set, it's a very "this is a play that we filmed" feeling.
There's nothing creepy about this film because the implied creepy stuff is never shown or resolved. I'd like to think this was a psychological thriller and then spend time correlating all the VERY FEW things happen in this play to what the individual characters are going through -- but I would never spend my time to do that because these characters are shallow, vapid and need therapy -- you don't care about them, you have no empathy for them, they're just there.
It's like going to a convention and there's this play going on that keeps looping, and the actors think it's a cool idea, ...we'll put on this 'deep' production and draw people over to the stage during the massive convention. The truth is though that no one cares, no one stops to watch -- because the author gives you no reason to care or like or listen to these characters. Any maybe in a way that's the author's point -- no one cares about these people but because they're HUMAN you should? No. I don't.
The actors are all extremely good in this, with Amy Schumer being the biggest surprise -- she's a damn good actor. But that's all.
Move along. Spend your time elsewhere.
No Sudden Move (2021)
Stupid Camera Work Ruins The Movie
This poorly filmed movie is standard Soderbergh stuff where the women are dumb objects who shriek and the men are cool, edgy and turn out to be "smarter than they look" -- just like in all his movies. The #1 most annoying thing about this movie is that it's unwatchable. It looks like it was shot with a $200 phone camera. The wide-angle is awful, no depth, distortion everywhere, the color correction was bad, there were scene changes from light to dark and back again, I could imagine the color correction team doing their best with this budget camera Soderbergh decided to use. I thought it was another shot on iPhone movie, but it doesn't appear to be that. You can't imagine the annoyance until you see it. As people and cars pan by in moving shots the cars get smaller, distorted, shorter-longer, just odd. In one scene Del Toro is off to the left and the lens is so distorted that he's flattened and shortened in the scene. This was by choice? Why? The rest of the movie is the standard twists, turns, and resolution at the end. At least Don Cheadle wasn't asked to do an awful British accent like he did in the Ocean's movies. That was god-awful, but still not as bad as this camera work.
Busanhaeng 2: Bando (2020)
Awful, embarrassed for the film makers {because they don't appear to be!}
What junk. Awful. Bad script. Bad and completely implausible and illogical plot. Bad CGI. Some truly awful acting. Saccharine sweet and way, way, way over the top "acting" with scenes designed to illicit emotion that are laugh inducing. I used my face mask during the last ten minutes to cover my eyes most of the time in horror of what I had to witness in the name of a film making money grab. If you love over the top Asian love story soap opera drama you'll love this movie. I've seen better CGI on a Playstation. In fact much of this movie looks like a Playstation game being played while you are forced to endure it.
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
AWFUL
This movie looks like a bad Steven Seagal movie of 15 years past -- from the set designs, the terrible acting, the stereotypes of Asian and Black men and women. It just SCREAMS out that this is poorly written, poorly directed, from an average script. What a terrible movie. I know MOST of the areas in Asia where the film was shot, been there, seen them, even live near a few of them, but the way its shot is just awful. The real locations without Spike Lee filming them are far more beautiful, -- Lee either doesn't have the talent to know how to shoot the scene, or he made these areas look awful by choice. I'm surprised the locals on this movie allowed themselves to be used -- but it was extremely likely that they had NO idea who this man is and didn't care -- it was a "Netflix" movie so they jumped on it. Some of these scenes look like bad sets populated with bad actors, yet I know these areas where he shot and somehow he made a the real places look like Steven Seagal ran out of money during filming of "Untitled Movie #129". I kept expecting Seagal, Lundgren or Stallone to be in the back of the shot, unaware they'd been accidentally included in a Spike Lee movie. One last thing. The LIGHTING on this movie looks like it was done by a teenager.
It Chapter Two (2019)
Boring Fun House Scares and a Stupid Story
This movie is not good. The acting is poor, the direction is spotty, and the whole thing feels like a money-grab. It's best described as a nearly three-hour walk through a haunted house where nothing is scary, everything tries to jump out and surprise you and everything fails.
The story makes no sense. The ties to the original movie are overly detailed. The film is an hour too long (at least an hour too long), talented actors come off as sleep walking through a Netflix special movie production.
The ending is so stupid, so dumbfounding that my favorite part was when it ended and the credits rolled.
Stephen King I hope you took home a 100 million because there no other reason for this and your extended "cameo" is an embarrassment to your artistry.
Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
Sorry, Nope
Sorry, but as a young man I watched friends and strangers live this scenario. The two male leads are fictionalized fantasies of the personalities of people that would have lived through this. Losing a bunch of weight to play a role does not make the performance real, or "lived in", or stellar.
Don't believe the hype of this film, it is only a film, a vehicle for people to further their careers.
The lead characters don't seem to live in, or inhabit the true nature of people facing their demise, instead it seems to be a vanity play for accolades and publicity. Sorry, nope, this film's reflection of this time never happened. This is not how real people were conducting themselves, this isn't how they acted, this film did not portray their human motivations and emotions accurately. This was a film that tells a dramatic story about a time when people died from a disease, and prejudice and incorrect information was everywhere, not a proper reflection of the reality.
Lest you think I am cynical, think again. The reality I witnessed in the eyes of people who were dying, who scrambled for anything to save their lives, was not portrayed in this movie. This film is nothing more than a dramatic story, about a real time in human history.
Let's not hype these performances by the leads as exemplary acting, because no person I met in those days ever acted like these two leads. But if you are a director, and never met real people who lived this reality, and then sought to make an "actor's vehicle" drama, -- you would create characters like these, characters that are neither accurate in their human condition, psychological motivation, or reality.
And if, as I suspect, there are some folks involved in this production who did live this reality, I would bet that when asked if this movie reflected the reality of the time they would answer likely answer, no, not at all.
Huhwihaji anha (2006)
Stunning
I just finished watching this movie and I don't have words to summarize the emotion it places on you, the roller coaster ride of ups and downs and twists. I have never seen anything like this movie. The last 30 minutes of this film is unlike anything I have ever seen or experienced in a movie in my entire life. The visuals of the last 30 minutes -- I've never seen anything like that -- I've never had that kind of emotional experience from a film. There are so many scenes in this movie that stay with you, that pull at you, that are universal. You don't need to be gay, or Korean, or anything like the characters in this film because the emotions and experiences are universal, shared by everyone.
It is a must see. Do not doubt for a moment the payback you will receive from locating, buying and spending two hours with this movie.
If anyone connected to this movie's distribution or production is reading this -- please put out a high definition version of the DVD. Please!