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Maniac (2018)
Really good movie with a quite crappy script
Sadly, that's another time that I recently see a production that's technically really well made, the cast is perfect, the acting is top notch, the story is intriguing and shows a lot of promise, plus it is original and quirky... It seems to check all the boxes. And yet when you finish it, it becomes obvious that the script was still at one of the draft iterations, at best, and they just decided to roll with it and make into a movie. A deadline probably? Leaves you with a "whaaaat?" face, and not in the good sense. It's not really open ended, there's no real twist, there's maybe a really simplistic, overall message which is not clear nor clever. It's a movie embodiment of form over substance. Well executed hollow performance.
Apart from that it is frustrating that Netflix feels this huge urge to make everything into a series. This is a mini series stretched into 10 episodes, which varied between 25 and 50 minutes each because of course they didn't even have enough material for 10 episodes of one hour each. This could easily been a 120 mins movie.
I really wanted to give this less than 6/10 but can't, since as stated before, it is really well made, and in my book, that alone deserves something, yet overall I am just disappointed.
Unfrosted (2024)
Criminally underrated!
It is one of the better comedies I've seen in a while, its script is original, it has a stellar cast, beautiful aesthetic and scenography, brilliant, funny dialogues and references of the bygone era to the current day. It is well aware of what it is and what it isn't. I really enjoyed it, but it is rather on the more intelligent side of the entertainment spectrum. Nevertheless I am stunned to see how low rated it got here, maybe there is no more place for movies for which you need to know a bit before watching to completely understand and enjoy. It's just not for everyone, which by no means makes it a bad movie.
Night Sky (2022)
Another installment of...
..."I bet I can take this one pager script and stretch it to a tv series!". I just watched the first season and the first thing that comes to mind is "SLOOOW". A similar situation as with the "outer range". Amazon pays top dollar for talent and cinematography and then takes a 90-120 minutes script and stretches it into a 8 to 10 one hour episodes. Puts it on Prime Video and sells it through IMDb which they also own.
So is Night Sky good? Well, it isn't bad, but it definitely is not more than 6/10. The acting and cinematography are top notch, the story has potential but you get about as much of actual plot as you could fit into a three to four minutes of trailer. I kid you not. It is deliberately slow and this just shows in many many many scenes that feel redundant or way too long. The ending is not satisfying, underwhelming rather, explains next to nothing and the characters seem to constantly act irrationally. Overall it is definitely different and bit unusual, but at the same time struggles greatly to be engaging in any way.
Outer Range (2022)
Very well made piece of cr*p!
I started this without much in terms of expectations apart from the really intriguing premise and a good teaser. After seeing the whole first season, I've got to say just a few things here:
1) beautiful cinematography,
2) good acting & casting,
3) this absolutely could be fit in a 90 minutes movie,
4) script deserves a Golden Raspberry - it is a mess of symbolism, with overintellectualised tropes of family dramas and god-knows-what else and just a sprinkle of time travel on top.
To sum things up - you'll be disappointed by the story, disconnected from the characters and generally confused about what all that was even about. Easily the most anticlimactic ending I've seen this year.
PS: Sorry, Mr Brolin, I love you as an actor!
Nobody (2021)
Well made, yet unoriginal
Law abiding citizen meets the Equalizer meets John Wick. There's russian mob, traps, gold, get out of jail free card, sketchy hero's backstory and, of course, the retired one-guy army. It is made well-enough and entertaining, the cast is good, and there is occasional, if dry, humor. Overall it's just unoriginal script and what feels like another movie made mainly so the aging actor can boost his ego.
The Expanse: Babylon's Ashes (2022)
Please, don't cancel it!
This is *almost* perfect show, but the minor flaws are really far and between.
This episode, on the other hand is NOT a finale, it is an intermediate, at best. There is tons of material left to adapt and the strong seeds have been sown here. I know it must be really expensive to make, but, COME ON, I'm pretty sure Game of Thrones or Westworld were even worse. It is a matter of better selling it! And it's not that Amazon can't really afford it anyway.
If it is a good-bye though, then this was one of the best space operas to date, if not the best. Maybe it is not the most original show, but what is today? The acting is solid, the characters have depth, production value is really high, especially for a tv series, and while it might never be a legendary thing, like all the Star Treks or Star Wars, I do absolutely adore it for how realistic it feels, how gritty and claustrophobic, which is exactly what the space is - an oxymoron, a claustrophobic vastness.
Dexter: New Blood (2021)
A satisfying epilogue to a bad original finale
It was good, not briliant, but still I believe, the best we could hope for, without some non-sensical changes to the story of the original plot.
There were parts that showed this was all rushed and cramped into a ten hour confinement, and not very thorough-written, as there are a few important plot holes and far stretches, but, let's not forget - many actual, real-world cases, do end on accidental finds and chance encounters. Some plot-devices were, unfortunately, less than believable, for they operated on my most disliked parameter - characters' incompetence.
Overall, I do believe this concludes the original story well enough, at least way better than the original idea. There seems to be a lot of hate towards it, but that, I feel, is mainly due to the amount of potential the first seasons of the original show have had and how it gradually got squandered over time. So the bar was set pretty high and it is no wonder it was hard to reach it this time around.
A Primeira Tentação de Cristo (2019)
So that's what all the fuss was about?
Frankly, I expected more, I am into controversial and offensive humor and that was just mediocre. Also come on with chickenin' out with Allah - if you don't have the gut to piss off some muslims, then don't do offensive religion-parody content like that. I was meaning to write here a challenge for the creators, to next time make some fun of Mahomet if they really want to earn respect, but after seeing this to the end, I know they don't have the gut.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018)
Really well made, yet the story stays a yawnfest
It is to put it simply - a perfect opprotunity completely missed. The acting, cast, the camera work, the costumes, the landscapes - are just perfect. The source material is a really intriguing mystery story, although this adaptation is more about girls in a girls college who are really hot for each other, two boys who are hot for each other and a london crook who got away and started anew... oh, right, and somewhere in the background there is three people missing into thin air, around what is apparently some kind of a natural, magnetic anomaly, and it's like a tertiary plotline, at best. And also, there is the ambient music - it is not bad, it's just completely out of place with the visuals and the scene sets. Overall it is just a disappointing film.
Firebase (2017)
Evil dr Manhattan be like...
It is a quasi-horror telling of a dr Manhattan story, only here he fights on the other side and instead of a cool accident he's merely made by extreme grief. Just like that. Good production value, good CGI, OK acting and a draft of a story, at best. Short enough to watch, not good enough to make a serious impression.
Rakka (2017)
Just another blomkamp movie.
There is literal zero original ideas in this. And you could put those scenes in any blomkamp movie and most people wouldn't even notice. Also, what is with him and the metaphorical messages crammed in those as subtly as driving a tank through your living room? I mean, those are so on the nose I felt mine's gonna start to bleed. Same was with Elysium (powerful vs. Underdog) , District 9 (apartheid, racism), and so on. Here it's so obvious, it feels like an edu-film made for schools. Why people keep swallowing those movies if they are nearly identical? Also, the scene writing is usually at a teen-nerd level, I am not even exaggerating here. I gave it six out of ten, because the production value and the actors/acting were good, but overall if you saw any Blomkamp movie before, don't waste your time.
Spectral (2016)
Not a bad one, overall, but...
So, in really short, military words: not bad acting, considering almost no known faces, quite good dialogue, really good premise, surprisingly well made technically and with intriguing first act. Then the science behind the fiction starts being explained and it's a completely unbelievable pile of horse manure. The pacifist engineer egg-head turns into a MacGyver/Tony Stark wanna-be, constructing extremely complicated equipment with nothing but basic tools and some typical miliatry hardware in what is presented like an hour maybe two. (Keep an eye on the scene where they used an unplugged hot glue gun as a make-believe power drill, hilarious). The ending was OK at best. People behind it clearly struggled with how to end this and the result was unsatisfactionary.
La casa de papel (2017)
Could have been so much more
Just finished the second season, which marks the end of the main story. In short - I feel a bit exhausted. Why? Because of the script. Overall there is great production value, the dialogues are well written, the characters are believable. But the story itself is not THAT original (Inside Man, anybody?) and on top of that, the whole story suffers greatly from the main and constantly overused plot device, or rather, a plot-cheat. It is something that's also predominantly present in another known and praised TV show - The Walking Dead. Can you guess? Yes, it's the characters' incompetence, borderline idiotic decisions and also the unbelievable coincidences or plain nonsense that are commonly incorporated into the narrative. For a keen eyed, intelligent and inquisitive viewer this feels like material for a good story riddled with a barrage of frustrating twists and turns. It is what is best described as lazy writing. Let me give you an example "everything is going very well for our characters, then suddenly SOMETHING and one of them needs to go out of "the plan" to correct it. He has time and means to go prepared, he is a criminal mastermind and then we see him do some very incriminating activity without gloves. Aaaand this way we are soon in a whole lot bigger trouble. Which I accept, but we really could get there in some more sophisticated way. I really can't count the times I yelled at the screen wanting those supposedly hardened criminals to just grow a pair and get together. Not to mention the obvious nonsensical plot holes - like in one episode we learn that spanish policia has a protocol to close down the entire city in search of terrorists - which they enact to catch a single suspect, but when a group of criminals with a lot of money is getting away (just by a thread, of course) the police just stands there.
Just started the third season and I see that there is no change for the better. Magically the satellite phones can be traced geographically (they can't actually, all you can know from the other side is which satellite the called is connected to, which gives you pretty much a quarter of the globe area). But if that was the case in the story, then we would have to make up some actually intelligent way for authorities to find our fugutives.
All in all, there's plenty good here, but it's not like it's something that's never been done before. Except the language, it reeks of hollywood writing and directing style and not in a good way.
6/10.
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Totally don't get all the hype
Just watched it, and it was simply painful.
I was really positive about this movie after the seemingly unending river of praise that flowed towards it. I mean even the people at Cracked liked it for crying out loud! But please don't be fooled. This movie is just boring, poorly acted and full of nonsense even for a comic book-based flick. Oh, and the writing, I guess too many cooks spoil the script (12 of them to be precise). And also even the visuals were not THAT good - it's 2017, darn it! Overall I think it's safe to say that this is not even YA movie, it's a preteen movie. Like if you are around the age of the protagonist (e.g. 15) you'll *probably* enjoy it. But even then, if you even remotely compare this to Iron Mans, or even the Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy it just falls painfully short.
Get Out (2017)
Poorly scripted joke of a horror. Don't give in to the hype.
Hey, this movie have actually done it! And I can't think of anything that did it before this one - it managed to be totally supportive on black/white racial equality by being equally insulting to both white and black people! Really, if someone told me the whole story of this before I watched it I would react exactly like the cops in this movie.
Seriously, this flick looks like it was filmed with just a draft of a script and I wouldn't even call it a horror. It is unoriginal and rather ridiculous than frightening. Don't waste your time - it's the most valuable resource you have!
PS: It honestly sickens me to even think that, but I have a slight notion it has such high ratings because of the racial angle of the production. Which is sad actually, because I don't believe people of minorities make worse anything as a rule, which means their works need not to be given any undeserved praise - that is not what equality means, people, that is actually a bad, harmful idea - if, say, a movie is praised as good - or even best like Moonlight - just because of some misguided parity sense - in other words, just because it was made mostly by minority members, and apart from that it is, like Moonlight or Ida,mediocre at best, then it harms the minority more than it helps it. It's simple - if you do anything and you are objectively not best in it, or you suck at it even, but everyone around you tells you, that what you do is awesome, then you don't have any incentive to try harder and be better.
It can even be a source of deep frustration as you can sometimes tell that you're getting undeserved praise, like from a overbearing parent, and deep down you know it is not sincere and something else entirely stands behind it. Like some politics that don't concern you personally as a creator.
If my work was praised no matter how bad it was just because of my color, beliefs or ethnicity, I know I would not be happy or satisfied with it. Also such practices make room for unethical creators who will see that picking up a specific set of topics for their works will automatically allow them to get ahead of any competition just because the topic is politically desired to be shown in certain context rather than the quality of the work itself. It's damaging and demoralizing.
Hitman: Agent 47 (2015)
High potential of the franchise utterly wasted
When I saw the first Hit-man movie, I thought it was quite a ridiculous attempt at transforming a high success video game to big screen. And then this came around. I mean, god damn, I gave it 4 out of 10 for Rupert Friend alone, because I absolutely loved the guy in Homeland. This movie is an insult to the source material. I mean I REALLY wouldn't force the director, writer and/or main character actor to go through even one of the games, but why, why on earth wouldn't they at least have read the script? I mean, movie people do realize, that games have scripts as well, don't they? In short words, instead of making kind of a suspense thriller (genre to which hit-man games could be compared) about a genetically modified assassin made in an insane attempt at cloning people in an insane *pun intended* asylum in Romania, they made a mediocre, at best, action flick with so bad writing that even decent actors can't help it.
Also, to the producers, next time you want a heavy cgi'd movie, make it's budget bigger OR try to minimize the CGI. Like, one of the two. Because this movie here is something that seems like it tried to rip off one of the newer James Bond flicks but it fell short like, well, a cheap rip-off.
It was quite unnerving, seeing Friend play in this, I hope he at least made a decent coin out of it, because it's not gonna be a bright point in his resume.
Riddick (2013)
Painfully disappointing
The first I watched was The Chronicles - thought of it as a quite good SF/Fantasy watch, even though there were some ridiculousness' here and there, and that the plot felt like it was a part of some bigger universe with wide lore and stuff, like it assumed that the viewer will just know some wider aspects of the story. Then I watched Pitch Black which was one of the best, non-expensive (because it wasn't just cheap) SF flicks I've seen. Then played the games, which were also quite good all things considered. I am a big fan a the genre - seen hundreds of such films.
And then 'Riddick' came by, loudly announcing it's arrival, having a trendy, seductive trailer and all. It's not gonna be long, folks, the movie is just really, really poor. The main problem is it's script - it's just like it was written by some fifteen year old, Luc Besson wannabe, who never wrote anything else. The other things are like: some bits of good acting, by Diesel mainly, the rest is quite dull, some less-than-decent CGI for such a budget, plot that's almost exactly copied off the first movie but not in the good way, and some of the cheesiest dialogues I've heard in a movie. Quite good pictures and editing though. Oh, and the soundtrack is almost non-existent, and the scenography seems like it was left for the end and the film's budget ran out while the decorations, costumes and props were still being developed.
On the last note, I am surprised the movie didn't catch any attention of LGBT, for depicting a lesbian in a tribute-to-the-'80s manner. Probably because it didn't catch that much of attention at all.
Seriously, for me it only lowered my overall feelings about this whole range of titles set in that universe.