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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Subspace Rhapsody (2023)
Little Ship of Horrors
I love musicals. And I love Star Trek. So I was really excited about the prospect of a Star Trek musical. Yes, yes, it's weird. But if the writers know what they're doing, weird can be wonderful.
IF the writers know what they're doing.
Where "Subspace Rhapsody" is concerned, they obviously, painfully, hadn't the slightest clue.
Somehow, much like being an actor or opening a restaurant, everyone and his brother-in-law thinks they can do a musical. They are mistaken. Note for showrunners of the future: Musicals. Are. HARD. And one should think twice before committing to making a musical if one does not have even a passing understanding of what makes a musical a musical, nor possess even the vaguest talent for writing music.
There were many things wrong with this episode: The meandering, threadbare excuse for a plot, the absence of a real villain to play off of, the disinterest in doing anything visually creative with the musical theme. The biggest problem, however, was the complete failure of imagination. Musicals require a heightened reality; loads of energy, bright colors, synchronized movement and yes, actual dancing.
Instead, what we got was relentlessly drab, dull, and lazy. The music was terrible and the lyrics were worse. All the songs sounded the same (half were just reprises, anyway), were completely forgettable, and none of them advanced the story or even revealed anything new about any of the characters.
It's my understanding that the songs were written by some alt rock band, and it shows. They have that 3rd rate garage band lack of rhythm, and lyrics that are just a mess of vague, generic sentiments, sloppy rhymes and stanzas that end nowhere.
The actors can be forgiven for not being professional level singers; they weren't cast in the show for that talent. But a decent composer would have written to their skill sets instead of making their vocal shortcomings obvious.
Even the actor who plays Uhura, who, I understand, sang on Broadway in Jagged Little Pill, and probably has the best voice in the cast, was forced to sing a song out of her range and use her head voice for the top notes. That's not how a decent composer treats their singers.
And don't even get me started on the choreography (or lack of same). How much dead-eyed, aimless schlepping around can one stand to watch in an hour? The only number that got the cast up and moving at all was Chapel's ode to her career/boyfriend dump. Mind you, it was what an old friend of mine referred to as the "Jump and Bounce School of Choreography", but at least it was something.
The only bright spot were the Klingons, who had all the energy, humor, and just plain gonzo fun that was totally MIA in the rest of the episode. Their bit was fantastic. It was also only about ten seconds long. Ten seconds of joy in an hour of drear. If this really had been a Broadway show, it would have been the one Bialystock & Bloom dreamed of; guaranteed to open and close on opening night.
All that said, I do give the show points for trying something totally out of the box. Major kudos for that. I love that they're willing to experiment with new ideas and genres (it worked beautifully with the Lower Decks crossover), and I hope they continue doing so. A for effort.
Unfortunately, C- for execution.
Great Expectations (2023)
Utterly Grating Expectations
Somewhere along the line Steven Knight forgot he was writing an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and instead gave us Taboo, season 2.
Genuinely dreadful, borderline embarrassing, visually ugly, stuporously paced and indifferently acted. Only Olivia Colman manages to get out of this with any dignity intact, and even then, just barely.
It would be one thing to create an adaptation updated to modern times. Then the writer could do whatever he wanted with the characters and dialogue. But, as it is, this bloated, hulking hybrid of Victoriana and "edgy", modern slang-infested grit just plays as a six-hour platform for Knight's personal fetishes and obsessions. He and the audience would have been better served had he simply worked it out in therapy, rather than committing it to a screenplay and dragging poor Charlie D. Into it.
This is probably the shortest review I've ever written here, but even doing this much on this series' behalf is an arguable waste of time and effort. Actually watching it, however, is so much worse.
Avoid it, if you can.
Up Here (2023)
Up Here Is Down There
For a musical to work you need to have at least two main ingredients: Characters you can care about and really good (hopefully great) music.
Up Here fails on both accounts.
It's a real pity, because musicals are so seldom attempted for television and this one has a solid cast led by two talented performers. Unfortunately, they're let down by spectacularly bad writing, a dreary, repetitive plot, and characters who run the gamut from selfish and self-absorbed, to boorish, to cartoonish, to just plain dull.
The music is a miasma of bouncy, pop drivel and witless lyrics that are about as memorable as a seventy character password. I defy anyone to hum any of them from memory (the finale excluded, simply because it's repeated over the opening credits of Every. Single. Episode.).
There's only one really good number in the whole show; a Christmas ballad that marvelously lampoons Holiday love songs with poison pen accuracy. Unfortunately, the viewer would have to suffer through nearly the entire series to get to it and I can't say the effort would be worth the prize.
In all, Up Here is a disappointment. When it comes to getting my TV musical fix, I'm still waiting for season 2 of Schmigadoon.
Tár (2022)
Two Hours and Thirty-Eight Minutes Just To Watch A Narcissist Implode
I'll start with the good: Cate Blanchett is brilliant, as always. The rest of the cast does what they can with their tissue paper-thin characters. Also, the scenes are shot and composed very well. It was a handsome production.
Aside from that, the film is a meandering mess. A self-consciously pretentious, over-long, and tediously obvious study of an artistic sociopath with a fan following who deserves every bad thing she ultimately brings on herself.
Overflowing with scenes and themes that spring up only to go nowhere and numbing lectures about art and music and music history and music theory and the meaning of music, Tar plays less as intellectual cinema than as an ignorant person's idea of what an intellectual film is supposed to be.
With five minutes of end credits inexplicably front-loaded into the beginning of the movie, backed by nothing but the whining drone of a capella folk music, Tar almost seems to be daring the audience to tune out and play with their phones right from the get-go. And, honestly, in retrospect, that might well have been a better use of my time.
The most egregious fault of the film, however, is the fact that, with all the talk, talk, talk about music and Tar's supposed musical brilliance, we never get to see her or her orchestra perform for more that ten seconds at a time without being interrupted. There's no revelling in the beauty of music, no joy, no rapture. Instead, we get endless repititions of the cardinal sin of telling instead of showing.
As a result, there's no sense of loss when Tar's many abused chickens come home to roost. On the contrary, her comeupance ends up feeling long overdue.
In sum, the film would have benefitted from actually giving the audience some example of what Tar was supposedly worshipped and admired for. It also could have done all that in 2/3rds the running time.
Our Flag Means Death (2022)
Dodgy Start, But Be Patient
I wish I could give this a perfect 10, but it gets off to a bit of a rocky start. If you can get over the hump of the first three episodes, however, your patience will be rewarded.
The humor seems a bit low and forced at the beginning, reminding me a great deal of Mel Brooks's disasterous Robin Hood series from the '70's, When Things Were Rotten, that traded on a lot of obvious caricature, deliberate anachronism, and Borscht Belt humor.
Things pick up considerably by episode 4, when Taika Waititi's Blackbeard gets fuly integrated into the cast. The real heart of the show are the characters and their relationships and interactions, especially between Blackbeard and Rhys Darby's absurdly genteel Stede Bonnet.
The show continues to get better with each episode, finally ending on a very high note and a cliffhanger that demands to be resolved in a (as yet to be announced) second season.
The cast is wonderful, including some celeb cameos (special shoutout to Rory Kinnear for doing hilarious double duty), and the production values are impressive. In all, a great, fun and surprisingly touching series.
The Mysterious Benedict Society (2021)
Probably Fun For Kids; Slow, Agonizing Torture For Adults
Visually, it's beautiful. Clearly, the director and cinematographer O. D.'d on Wes Anderson films and tried to copy his use of color and scenic design in every frame. The result is gorgeous, deep pastely color saturation and artful environs designed to look dollhouse perfect.
And there the good stuff ends. The rest of this series (at least up to episode 3, the last to air as I write this, and almost certainly the last I'll bother to watch) is just your standard boilerplate YA nonsense about weirdo outsider kids who turn out to be uniquely gifted and team up to save the world from an evil that all the grownups are too inept to fight themselves, yadda-yadda-yadda, blah-blah-blah...
As warmed-over as this trope is, it could still be amusing with a great cast and a witty script. Sadly, The Mysterious Benedict Society is bereft of both. The writing is achingly pedestrian and, while some of the adult actors are game and fun to watch (Tony Hale and Kristen Schaal, in particular), the main focus is on the children and they are not ...well, ...uniquely gifted.
Granted, it is rare to find child actors who can rise above child acting. But when your story devotes 90% of its running time to watching them, more effort should have been put in finding kids who had the talent to warrant that attention. None of the four leads do. Watching them is like having to sit through your neighbor kid's grade school holiday pageant. It's teeth-grating terrible.
Fortunately, unlike said pageant, there's no need to sit frozen in your seat with a fake smile pasted on your face all the way to the end. So, here I bow out. This may be amusing for little kids, who are sure to be more keen on seeing people their age look heroic than they'd be descerning of bad acting and weak scripts. But for older viewers, I'd suggest finding something else to while away your time.
The Midnight Sky (2020)
Long Spaced Journey Into Midnight
This movie wants to be taken seriously so very badly. Emphasis on the "very badly" part. It wants to be deep and profound and important, and instead just lumbers along tediously, Frankenstein-patching two different movies together into one and clunkily tripping over every possible cliche in the process.
It's a generic post-apocalpse story, slow and portentious, where the world meets its end via some pointlessly vague and undefined human-caused fashion, leaving alive no one but George Clooney and some weird, silent waif in a station in the Arctic tundra.
But wait! It's also a space saga, featuring a super cool, designer space ship containing five generic astronaut types winging their way back to Earth from a summer vacay on an entirely mythical Utopian moon of Jupiter, bravely fighting through barrages of meteors that seem to be deliberately stalking them through the solar system!
For a film that wants to be taken seriously, the science is laughable. Mortally injured people can languish in downed aircraft for days in the Arctic without freezing to death. Clooney can go swimming in frigid waters and not turn into an instant popsicle. A moon can exist so close to Jupiter that the gas planet takes up 2/3rds of the sky and yet not have its magnetosphere fry everything off the surface. In fact, said moon keeps being referred to as an "exo-planet" because, apparently, the screenwriter doesn't even know how to use Google.
Flashbacks dragging the audience through the old trope of how geniuses - especially of the science variety - can't ever have normal lives or families. On the nose moments, like one of the astronauts actually watching a copy of On The Beach. The sacrificial space walk. The wild coincidence that's supposed to tug at the heart strings, but instead makes you roll your eyes. And then there's the "twist", which makes no sense given how the film is shot.
The Midnight Sky has it all!
On the bright side, George Clooney gives a solid performance. As does his wraithy waif. Everyone else, though, looks like they're just there to collect a check. And to top it all off, it ends with what, I guess, is meant as a ray of hope, but is actually pure nihilistic doom for anyone with an I.Q. higher than room temperature.
In sum, if you're looking for a sci-fi film with depth, look elsewhere. In fact, that '60's version of On The Beach they showed a clip of would be a far better place to start.
Star Trek: Discovery (2017)
Full Of Sound And Fury, Signifying Nothing
I'm not going to drone on about how this series isn't Star Trek. That's not entirely accurate and anyway, it isn't really the point. The point is simply that it ISN'T GOOD.
Oh, it certainly looks amazing; the special effects are gorgeous, the sets and costumes all beautiful, the cinematography up to major movie standards. The problem is that that is where the excellence ends. Everything else, from the storylines to the acting to the dialogue run the gamut from merely adequate to utterly painful.
Aside from the series having a disgraced officer, rather than a heroic captain/commander in the lead role (plus a less uptight view of sexual preference and a cable-ready willingness to let the f-bombs fly), the series has nothing new to offer. In fact, every episode seems devoted to mining a specific worn out, hand-me-down sci-fi trope: Space monster who turns out to be a gentle, sentient being? Check. Kidnap and torture by aliens? Check. Character saved by mystical psychic connection and the power of love? Check. Crew caught in an endlessly repeating time loop that only one person notices? Check. Infiltration by an alien spy who's the last person you'd expect (but not really if you were paying any attention)? Check. Suicide mission to an enemy ship to accomplish something that could have been done in perfect safety via techno-wizardry? Double-check! Mirror universe shenanigans? Checkity-check, check, check!
And then there are the deliberate recyclings of characters, situations and even famous Trek quotes that the show insists on dredging up like sodden remains from an old shipwreck.
Do we really need to see Harry Mudd again? Do we really need to see him reimagined from a light, doofy baddie to a murderous psychopath? Do we need to see Sarek and wonder why Spock never, ever bothered to mention this older, adopted sister his dad seemed so obsessed with?
And as bad and cliche-ridden as the scripts are, with dialogue that is almost impossible for actors to say with a straight face, do they have to be made even worse by the shoehorning of random Trek catchphrases, like, "To boldly go where no one has gone before" or "the undiscovered country" into Every. Single. Episode?
I pity the actors having to deliver these strings of dross. Mind you, the talent on hand is uneven, and of the cast, only Jason Isaacs manages to rise above the material consistently. Still, Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Michelle Yeoh and Shazad Latif do what they can to acquit themselves and deserve better. The rest of the cast, unfortunately, might as well all be red shirts, as none of them have been given much of anything interesting to do, nor have managed a characterization that is memorable without being irritating.
Of course, they are not helped any by scripts that allow no time for either the plot or the characters to breathe. Instead, the writers all seem to suffer from a form of ADD, where, instead of letting the story unfold and progress organically, they're jolted from bullet point moment to bullet point moment, hitting their highlight reel points with little or nothing to build on in between.
All of this is aside from the annoyance of mowing over Trek canon about every ten minutes, radically redesigning a beloved Trek species for no discernible reason and giving us a show utterly shorn of any of that dumb, old fashioned hope and aspiration that the franchise once hinged on.
Star Trek: Discovery could have been a terrific show. They certainly spent enough money producing and promoting it. Too bad they didn't bother to devote more than $1.49 and a pack of minty Lifesavers on the scripts. Having started with quality on the page could have made all the difference.
Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)
Bargain Basement Bond For The Brain Dead
I remember seeing a clip from Kingsman a year before the film came out. It was that great fight scene in the pub and it generated loads of excitement and anticipation in the crowd that viewed it at Wondercon. Who knew that scene was the highlight of the whole movie and it all went down the drain from there like a sludgy turd?
It's simply amazing to me that a film that should have been such can't miss material managed to do almost everything wrong. Dumb, predictable, crude, sexist, unfunny to anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature and violent to the point of grotesque, Kingsman just devolves from scene to scene into a miasma of stupid.
I generally have no problem with movie violence, but Kingsman simply disgusted me. When a film tries to sell itself as a quirky Bond send-up, suddenly dumping a metric ton of Evil Dead-esque hack and slashing (most of which is being committed by the film's ostensible hero) pretty much destroys the tone and makes clear that the filmmakers haven't a clue what they're doing. The pathetic stabs at unPC satire are, likewise, amateurish and eyeroll-inducing.
Probably the single biggest dim-bulb move, however, is systematically killing off anyone in the cast remotely interesting, including the nominal star, Colin Firth, who is denied the dignity of even making it as far as the final half hour (though it's entirely possible he insisted on it after reading through the whole script).
Since everything these days, no matter how vile and utterly devoid of merit it may be, is granted a sequel, we will apparently be getting a Kingsman 2. And how thrilling to know it will star the bland, charisma-free twenty-something leftovers from K1, whose names and faces I'm struggling to recall even though I watched the film less than an hour ago. Yes, nothing says a good time at the cinema like watching the human equivalent of vanilla pudding.
In sum, if you really want to see a Bond-like film, go see a Bond film! Or watch the British Avengers series, or The Incredibles, or track down a copy of In Like Flint. Anything up to and including watching test patterns and infomercials for incontinence care would be time better spent than watching this thing.
The Man in the High Castle (2015)
Imperfect, But Interesting
An ambitious series that starts out exceedingly promising, then wanders in slow circles for ages before waking up and remembering it had a plot to deliver.
Mind you, there's a lot of good about Amazon's Man In The High Castle; it's alternate world is wonderfully intricate and imaginatively detailed, filmed beautifully, directed, cast and acted well, and it addresses compelling questions about freedom, oppression and humans' ability to normalize and adapt to even the most appalling conditions.
Unfortunately, most of it is paced with all the kinetic urgency of melting tar and frequently tries the audience's patience with dull love triangle nonsense and occasional, halfhearted and barely coherent nods to the book's mysticism. The latter is especially vexing as it's presented as something vague and tangential for most of the series, yet suddenly plays a huge, plot twisting and thoroughly confusing role in the finale.
It's also shot through with weird anachronisms that tend to pull one out of the story. I suspect the series will play better for people with little knowledge of WWII and/or Nazi ideology. For others, like myself, however, it's impossible to even listen to the opening theme without bristling and wondering how, in a world where the Nazis won WWII, a song from The Sound Of Music could exist.
The constant use of jazz, swing and blues music, which the Nazis reviled as "deviant" and banned wherever possible is also, shall I say, tone deaf. And suggesting they'd ban the Bible while embracing Huckleberry Finn is just sloppy, stupid and not a little suspect.
I understand there's talk of a season 2 for this series. I'm sure it'll get it. I just hope they use the extended time to fix the problems of season 1. As is, MITHC has the potential to be a great series. Here's hoping it finally realizes it.
Salem (2014)
A dim-witted series aimed at idiots
The Salem witch trials were an infamous chapter in American history in which innocent people were targeted as witches by their malicious neighbors. Greed (for the land they owned) was the reason behind the accusations, but religious hysteria was the weapon. A series exploring the actual events and the psychology of the people involved, their personal motivations and culture, might have been fascinating. Instead, we get cheap supernatural pap geared toward the lowest common denominator that insults the memory of those who died.
From a ridiculously macho, tough-talking hero to catty, sexpot witches to hilarious woodland orgies to a Mustang Ranch-like brothel smack in the middle of ol' Salem towne, the show is riddled with anachronisms and absurdities. Top it off with daytime soap acting, laughable dialog and low-rent SFX, and you've got a festival of dreadful that could only be enjoyed with a group of witty friends and a lot of alcohol. And I don't think that much alcohol would be advisable for anyone. Miss it if you can.
Pitch Perfect (2012)
Aca-bysmal
The single best thing I came away with after watching this movie was the wild relief I felt knowing that at least I didn't pay to subject myself to it. Some positive word-of-mouth made me curious enough to DVR it. An 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes got me to sit through the whole thing (albeit with a fair amount of time spent pressing fast-forward), just to see if there was something - ANYTHING - that could justify such an absurdly high score.
Short answer: There wasn't.
I'm given to assume it got its high rating only because the studio wouldn't allow any critics to screen it without first producing proof that they possessed an IQ of 70 or under.
If you read the IMDb synopsis, you know the whole movie. Actually, if you've ever seen any film starring characters under 25, you know the whole movie. There is not a single unique idea to be found within a light year of its sorry script. Comparisons to Glee are inevitable, but the truth is, PP is so utterly dull and witless, so aggressively devoid of joy or humor or anything akin to real human feelings, it makes the worst episode of Glee look like Singin' In The Rain by comparison.
Ostensibly a comedy, the film is mercilessly unfunny. Their idea of hilarity seems to run the gamut from projectile vomiting to juvenile puns like a singing group called "The Minstral Cycles" to inserting "aca" into every exclamatory phrase, like, "Aca-scuse me?!" and "Aca-believe it!". Isn't that funny?! Aren't you just gasping for breath from the amusement of it all? ...Yeah, me neither.
The characters, who are either grotesque, shopworn stereotypes or dull, cardboard cutout caricatures, flap about from scene to scene without ever even accidentally bumping into a real human attribute or emotion. They're also supposed to be in college, but the movie is so bent on regurgitating teen film tropes that nothing they say or do is indicative of a person over 15.
You know your film is bad when you feel compelled to reference other better films to move the story along or motivate your characters. For Pitch Perfect, that other better film is The Breakfast Club, which the 2D heroine's would-be 2D boyfriend regards as the most meaningful thing ever. There's a scene where said heroine (she had a name, but really, who cares?) is sitting on her bed watching the flick on her laptop, tears welling up in her eyes to indicate some grand epiphany ...which, under the circumstances, must be her devastated realization of what a GOOD teen movie looks like.
In sum, this is a film I'd recommend only for use as a torture device on terrorists. Badly written, directed and acted with characters as irritating as a rash and music numbers so awful, even the editor's attempt to slice them into bite-sized bits couldn't make them any more palatable. Funny only for people whose sense of humor atrophied at age five and entertaining only for people who've never seen a movie before. I give this a "1" only because IMDb does not allow me to score in negative numbers.