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Reviews
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure (2022)
Wish I'd been there
So, fair warning: this movie is not exactly a "coming of age" story as advertised. Actually, it's barely a story at all. Some will find that disappointing, but if you're a Linklater fan ("Dazed & Confused" might be my all-time favorite movie) this won't be a problem.
What this is, like most of his movies, is a narrow but deep snapshot of a moment in time. It is concentrated nostalgia done right. It is a time I wasn't alive for, but have always wished I could have been...and this might be as close as I can get.
I love the subtle bit at the end where even the cynical counterculture older sister can't help but smile when Armstrong steps out onto the moon. I think some skeptical viewers may have the same reaction to this movie.
Invasion (2021)
Earn the drama
Okay, yeah, it is slow. Slow is fine. Slow I can handle. But my main issue is that despite this pace, it still tries to shortcut into drama that isn't earned (at least not at first).
You can't introduce a character and cheat me into caring about them by playing super dramatic music while telling me nothing. You can't expect me to care about the woman finding out her husband is cheating when I don't know any of these characters yet. Having her cry a lot doesn't really change that. And you definitely can't make me care about a subplot when you drop it after one episode never to return.
I did finish this series, and I will say I think it got better...I don't regret sticking it out. I just wish some of that slow slow buildup had been used to develop these characters organically rather than just saying "here's some sad people, please feel bad for them immediately".
Also, many of these reviewers are wrong. There IS an actual alien invasion in this series...just not until 3/4 of the way through the season.
Death to 2021 (2021)
Morbid curiosity
So bad. Not because of anything political. Just...The jokes are painfully lame. I can't believe these actors read that script and somehow convinced themselves to recite these lines on camera. Not a single laugh.
Virgin River (2019)
"I think something's burning"
This show is cheesy as hell. It's like a series-length Ford F-150 commercial come to life...It's like 94% Hallmark with the remaining 6% being some "edge" in the form of hugely manufactured dramas, cartoonish "bad guys" and each character being assigned a trauma. Seriously...It's one trauma per character, no more no less. It makes no sense and I don't even know why I'm still watching it but somehow it just hits me in my cheese bone and it's a weakness of mine.
Seriously, do yourself a favor and live in this childishly perfect world for a minute, it's worth it.
Edit: okay after finishing season 3 I had to come back and add a star to my rating. Why? Well, one scene in particular. Jack & Mel are in the bathtub having a romantic little bath together. After a while Mel says she thinks she smells something burning. Jack's like yeah, I think I smell that too. They go to investigate and open the bathroom door and...take a wild guess as to what's burning.
EVERYTHING. The entire freaking house is on fire (except the bathroom). Like blazing inferno, backdraft on fire. The ceilings are already starting to cave in. This all happened while they were in the quiet bathroom with no clue anything was happening. Now THAT is the kind of ludicrous hilarity that's kept me coming back to this show.
Or like when Bree is checking out Brady's motorcycle and he asks if she wants to ride with him, and--what's this?--he just magically has a second helmet in his hand. The single guy who had no idea she was going to be coming to ride with him. I know their helmets are magic anyway because they don't even need to fasten the straps on them when they put them on.
Season 3 really did up the ante on traumas--all major characters have now been allotted two traumas apiece (minor characters still limited to one) and man those traumas come fast & furious this season. Don't ever expect to feel good for more than a couple minutes at a time, because you better believe if things have seemed happy for that long, it's time to pull another trauma out of the hat and slap it on a character pulled out of another hat.
Finally if you like apologies, this is your show. The run time is about 47% traumas, 45% people apologizing, and the rest filled with people being nice to each other.
I look forward to more of this off-the-wall and yet astoundingly predictable craziness--sign me up for season 4.
The Green Knight (2021)
Didn't walk out...but should have
That's it. There are some pretentious blowhards on here trying to convince you that the negative reviews are just coming from people who can only appreciate superhero movies. Well...I have zero interest in superhero movies and I still hated this.
I added a couple stars because apparently if I had been sufficiently scholarly in Arthurian legend going in, I would have had some minuscule shred of context to help make sense of the utterly disjointed jumble of images I just watched, but even then I would still feel like the filmmakers were trolling me. Not since "The Lobster" have I hated myself so much for allowing nothing more than the Sunken Cost Fallacy to keep me watching till the end when in retrospect my life would be categorically better if I had just walked out right when I started to realize I was not going to enjoy this movie...which was about 10 minutes in. Honestly, I'm not some stupid MCU-obsessed strawman...I can and have enjoyed all kinds of slow, cerebral, artistic, even openly pretentious cinema. The Green Knight on the other hand is just so boring it felt like a hate crime committed against me personally by the filmmakers.
Brand New Cherry Flavor (2021)
Gross fun
Yep, it's gross. This is a show where a 10-foot worm slowly being pulled out of a character's eye is only the SECOND hardest scene to watch involving an eyeball. That right there should be enough to decide if this is for you or not. However, the series retains just enough of a darkly humorous tone to take the edge off of what could otherwise veer into torture porn.
Speaking of porn, I am of the camp that feels this show actually got a lot better in the second half, particularly jumping off from a graphic sex scene which I guess avoided being straight-up porn by virtue of the fact that the sex organs involved were...how should I put this...not factory-original. That was the scene where I realized this show was going much wilder places than I originally expected. And I was on board for it.
Was a bit turned off early on by what seemed like some ridiculous decision making that was making it hard to invest in the main character--she is quickly betrayed and exploited by the first stranger she meets in LA who promises to help her with her goals...then immediately responds by blindly putting her trust in the SECOND stranger she meets in LA who promises to help her with her goals. But, once the curse plot got going I was willing to forget and get on her side.
That's a lot of words to ultimately say: it was great and I enjoyed it. You need a strong stomach in places but it is really more gross than sadistic.
Death to 2020 (2020)
No
Feels like a lot of first-draft jokes aimed at children. This movie peaked in the first few minutes with the Greta Thunberg/Billie Eilish joke (the only time I laughed) but otherwise felt painfully on the nose
Sweetheart (2019)
I'd love to see the first act
Have you ever been flipping through channels and caught a movie part-way through that got your attention, and ended up watching the rest of it despite having missed the first 30 minutes or so? And you end up enjoying it but not everything makes total sense, but that's okay because you figure you probably just missed some important stuff in the beginning?
Yeah, this is just like that. Except you didn't miss anything-the beginning of the movie really was just left out. It starts with basically no exposition-which is fine and good--until later on when they end up back-loading a bunch of exposition after it's too late for it to mean much to the viewer and instead only confuses things, suggesting character development and motivations that don't really connect to anything. And it doesn't come off as an intriguing puzzle to piece together-it just literally feels like the film is referencing a first act that was written but left out. A first act that sounds genuinely interesting and complementary to the film we do get.
The sudden use of the voice-over towards the end felt a little jarring and tacked on from a different movie-again, maybe the version of this movie with a beginning?
Other than that though-I enjoyed it. It is a remarkably literal and straightforward woman vs. monster story with good performances and an honestly decent reptile-shark-man.
Singularity (2017)
"You're the most dangerous thing that's ever existed. ...I'm leaving."
I don't understand all the negative reviews on here...I'm going to be a lot more charitable. Because it's obvious that the kids from the high school film class that somehow scored a hundred thousand dollar budget (and spent 98,000 of that on John Cusack) to do this class project have got enormous potential.