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Reviews
All the Old Knives (2022)
Complete waste of 10 minutes or so..
This movie brought back the horrors of Messiah and Fifty shades of Gray. The cast of this movie could easily get a part time job at Mother Teresa's charity looking at the performances in the first 10 minutes of the movie.
The stereotyping is ever present, characters are forced to emote as the director thrusts the air of gloom and nostalgia down the throat of the movie.
The director appears to be more than convinced with "show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy".
The end result is a movie that is a complete waste of everyone's time.
As far as I am concerned, I could not believe that this is an amazon original.
10 minutes was all I could endure.
Messiah (2020)
Messiah of Stereotyping
Not sure where to start from, let's see.
If there is a war, it has to be middle east. If it is middle east, it has to be turban clad muslims. If there are muslims, there has to be an imam (to brainwash the kids). And if these guys reach isreal's borders, they have to blood thirsty.
So far so good.
Now, if there is a spy agency, it has to have a great spy. If there is a great spy, he or she has to have a presonal tragedy. Besides, he or she has to be misunderstood (lest I forget that). If there are 2 great spies, they have to be at odds INITIALLY.
This is where I turned off the TV.
The series reminds me of horoscope. Jumbled pieces of jigsaw that has something for everyone.
No wonder the audience rating is high.
The 24th (2020)
Test of endurance
If I remember correctly, amazon charged me 3.99 for the hd version. Thank God, I did not opt for the uhd version.
Calling it an old wine in a new bottle is an insult to every new bottle. Every inch, or rather 1/8th was apparent within 3 minutes of starting.
First black person to arrest a white person for murder of a black person could be made into a good enough movie.
The way they made this one though, smacks of a C grade movie that very trying so hard to manufacture anything authentic. But deep down, it knows futility of the exercise.
My heart goes out to those who HAVE to write good things about this movie. I don't understand how they managed to endure this 2 hours or so of complete torture.
Hostiles (2017)
Sheer waste of talent and time
The moment the movie started, I could vividly predict every minute of it with 88% accuracy. With the number of movies that I have watched in the last 5 years, I suppose an average movie-goer should predict every minute of this movie to 98% accuracy. And mind you, all this within the first 1 minute !!!!!
Just whatever happened to Christain bale? Not that he is bad at acting but no person who is not about to foreclose his house in a weeks' time, should accept a movie that plans to go down such a down-right beaten path.
Even in my country, India, they have stopped making such predictable movies.
They focus on political movies now. Ok, those are more predictable that Hostiles, but the economics are different at least. The producer does not have to worry about box office collections. The political parties pay them on cost plus basis before the movie is released.
The Accountant (2016)
What a waste of time
What a waste of time. Young kid, extremely brilliant, the world does not understand, grows up to do the most spectacular wrong deeds but very good at heart, extremely honest, blah, blah..blahhh... and to top it all, falls for a very simple girl. Sheer nonsense. Just what went into Ben Affleck's mind that he agreed to this role. Maybe he is not in demand these days. This movie is a million miles below Argo. Every second of the movie is predictable with clock work precision. I waited for sometime to watch this one but had to leave it half way through. Anyways, the entire 2 hours or so could have been predicted after watching the first 10 minutes. Let me waste my time on a dozen or so Robin Hood movies instead.
Hell or High Water (2016)
Not quite there
I waited a long time to watch this movie. It seems that the Indian Govt. is following the US govt footsteps to prevent piracy.. Ha. ha.. Nonetheless, if you asked me if it was good movie? Definitely YES. If you asked if it was a great movie? Perhaps not. One reason could be that the trailer appeared to have raised the expectations very high. The actors do a good job but the story appears a bit run down. However, the real let down for me was that the movie appeared to lack the connection between events. It somehow did not appear to be a very well connected sequence of events. I wouldn't write any more on this since I am not writing a spoiler. But do watch the movie. It is still quite good, especially the characters but somehow, its just not quite there.
The Whistleblower (2010)
Worth watching
This is one of the reviews where the movie making takes a backseat. The review basically is about the issue that the movie covers. To be honest, that is what I am going to do as well. While I watched this movie, I was extremely engrossed. The acting and direction did not really matter much, though I would say they were quite good. It was a perfectly woven story which start at a relatively gentle pace, then picks up in speed and continues with the tempo till the end. It conveys the idea that normal looking people can indulge in horrible acts when there is lack of accountability or fear of the law catching up. And after they have started, they get so sucked into the system, that they can easily act as professional criminals. The movie talks about a US police women who goes to US as a peace- keeping monitor. She finds herself in the middle of gross corruption, prejudice, plight of women and outright criminality. She gets sucked into the gender affairs office after she manages to get justice for a woman who had been badly abused by her husband. At the gender affairs office she comes across cases of trafficking of numerous east European women and later discovers that UN personnel and her colleagues are themselves involved. They are involved not just in exploitation but actual trafficking itself. The story moves around how she is threatened to shut up and how she fights back and the fate of some of the trafficked girls. It is a moving performance. But as I mentioned earlier, the review is more about the issues that the movie raises and not necessarily about the acting and direction. And the worst part is that the movie is based on a true story.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
A very difficult review
I just watched the movie and read a couple of reviews as well. Almost all the reviews are poor. However, I must say that I liked the movie, a lot actually. It tries to look at the world from the eyes of a "once famous" actor. There have been numerous such attempts before, including that of hallucination and all but I think birdman stands apart. There is no or very little story-line but that's OK. The point of the story is to convey an idea. If you can convey the idea is a few words or a single image, it does the job. You do not need 1.5 hours all the time. Birdman is about a once famous person trying to make a come back. The couple of days he spends during the previews, all that happens around there. The birdman's perspective of the world around him is so different from the perspective of other people. That I think is the story-line. There is nothing great about the story. It has been told numerous times. But the way it is shown here makes it worth a watch. Its not really an art movie but does manage to convey the "idea of ignorance".
Oblawa (2012)
What was the director thinking
I admired Marcin's performance in Rosa. Because of that I somehow managed to get this movie as well. It is a complete anti-climax. The director (incidentally another Marcin) is under the impression that to win an award, the movie has to be extremely real life. For the movie to be real life, it has to be gruesome.. I don't know where he got this idea from??????????
You have a good set of actors, who try their best, at least it seems, to put up a good performance. The script also seems decent. But the way the movie has been made: it spoils a lot of things. If you look at the trailer: it would seem to be an excellent movie. If only these guys had made the movie in a simple linear fashion, I feel, it would have been terrific. What they ended up making was a complex and somewhat erratic set of flash-backs and at one place, childishly grotesque. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to tell a good story.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012)
Missed opportunity ??
This is one of those movies where one should read the reviews as much as watch the movie. As far as the movie goes, it is a waste of opportunity. Actually, had the story not been as good as it was, I would have been much more critical of the people who executed such a poor piece of work. They actually took a very good story, very good actors and simply made a below average TV series kind of stuff. I also fail to understand how they made the movie so predictable, especially what happened at Turkey or the whole affair of Riz Khan with the woman. It was a bad piece of move making..... Besides the story, what is interesting is the reviews (remember what i mentioned earlier). The number of people who manage to connect with the story is amazing. It is probably why they gave a higher rating also. This further shows the opportunity that was missed....
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Disappointing
This is my first review but I had to write something about this movie. It was a very disappointing one. I left the movie half way through. Christian seemed pretending to be someone he clearly wasn't. Anna was better in her performance but soon joined Christian's league. In the beginning of the movie, I got a feeling that Anna was trying to be intimated by Christian more than Christian doing something to intimidate her at the interview. He almost seemed boyish. When Anna trips at the door to Christian's cabin, it was one of the most predictable scenes that one could see. Their discussions over the clauses in the agreement for whatever he wanted to do, was a joke. It was a very wooden performance. This subject did not seem to be a new one but even with that, they could have made a much better movie had they not tried to force a wolf's skin over a lamb.