asherstuhlman Reviews

Cade: The Tortured Crossing (2023)

Breen has hit his stride, but takes on too much for one filmmaker

[6/10 · 4 September 2023]

In short: A wealthy benefactor funds a hospital to study genome editing that is plagued by black-market medicine theft and poor maintenance.

Neil Breen makes many decisions in this film that, if they were part of a more complete and coherent vision, would be bold and truly represent ambitious B-movie filmmaking.

Aesthetically: The entire movie is shot in green screen, over stock photos. Establishing shots are also stock footage. This is really exciting to me; it represents a really interesting way to do a film on a budget and nobody else would dare to do a film that way.

Narratively: The first 20 minutes of this movie has a lot going on, and it honestly made me wonder if Breen had learned from his previous films. He's certainly learned a few editing tricks. But as the film continues, it's clear that Breen still hasn't figured out how to write a plot with a beginning, middle, and end; scenes happen in seemingly random order and repeat information.

And as usual for Breen, characters speak vaguely without specific details or characterization. This is especially frustrating because it feels like this film, of all his post-Fateful Findings films, really has a clear and interesting premise.

Ultimately I came out of this film really wanting to see Breen direct another writer's work, or another writer direct a Breen screenplay. Both the central narrative idea and the directorial style have interesting things to say, but they both need some external contribution to really make them click.

Sqrambled Scuares (1999– )

I'm glad this exists, but it's not good

[3/10 · 6 July 2022]

Well, there's a lot of episodes on Youtube and I love weird local TV so I figured I'd have a watch.

I suppose I shouldn't criticize a local show for a small market too much, and of course I have to give major credit to the show for enduring as long as it did. But the game show aficionado will notice a wide gap in production values between this show and shows made for much larger markets - the sound mixing is lackluster, and the software running the game is clearly undercooked (you can see the mouse moving on the game's screen, manually dragging and dropping letters!)

The game format is actually quite good, though. I would have loved to see more time spent on gameplay and less time spent on reading sponsors, as much as I understand their importance to a show like this one.

eXistenZ (1999)

Cronenberg doesn't understand what a video game is.

[6/10 · 11 October 2021]

To the best of my recollection, there isn't a single computer, screen, or electronic device depicted in this entire film. The plot doesn't depict anything gamelike either - no goal-directed play, no clearly-defined toolsets or limitations.

For a film that says it's about video games to not use any of the visual or conceptual vocabulary of games has to be either deliberate obfuscation or someone trying to write about a topic they don't know anything about. Either way, you get this film out of it, a film that uses the phrase "game" a lot but doesn't engage with the the idea at all.

The visual concepts, the overall tone, all work for me. Some other reviews call it cheap and that's true, but it's cheap in a cohesive way. The nested realities don't feel particularly novel right now but it's in service of a story as opposed to a stunt in itself, and the nesting is pretty easy to follow. The gross out stuff is fine, I guess. It doesn't seem to really be in the film for any particular reason but it mostly doesn't outstay its welcome.

I was frustrated that there's no clear motivation for the central plot element. The protagonist is being hunted for making "video games", and then later, other people hunt other people for making "video games". Why do these people hate games so much? What is a game to these people? I don't expect a film to explain everything or spell it out, of course, but we're left with a film that:

• Doesn't depict a video game at any level, visual or conceptual
• Appears to depict a concern about video games and technology, but doesn't articulate that concern other than "some people think it's bad."

And between those, I think the film gets a bit lost in figuring out what it's trying to be and ends up kind of trying to pull its plot up by its own bootstraps. The stakes start clear, but by the end as the movie moves through "layers" and characters switch roles relative to each other the stakes lose all meaning, and I just ended up wondering what the point was at all.

Family Game Fight (2021–2022)

A game show that doesn't know why people watch game shows

[2/10 · 12 August 2021]

This show is a loose spinoff of Ellen's talk show and Ellen's Game of Games, and it takes some inspiration from them - games involve putting the contestants into painful/annoying/humiliating situations (one game has contestants pelted by lots of snow if they guess a wrong answer; another game has contestants pied in the face if the opposing team scores a point.)

Now, I don't like Ellen's Game of Games, but it's hard to deny that that show has a clear voice and thing it's trying to do. I only watched one episode of Family Game Fight, but it's really hard for me to puzzle out what this show is trying to be about. In Ellen's Game of Games, the contestants screaming at the host is the point; here it seems like the hosts are more concerned with each other than anything else going on. They banter (terribly), they make jokes about each other that barely rise above "Take my wife... please!" In a good game show, the banter is about the contestants and the game's content. Family Feud hosts will react to contestant's ridiculous answers emotionally and get to know a bit about the families for instance.

None of that happens here. There are elaborate sets brought out to play 3 minutes of actual game; the sets are aggressively themed and no two themes interact or intersect. The games played are tired word games, which don't have anything to do with the sets. They're not bad games but they contribute to the feeling that this show doesn't really have anything to say, and there's this overall feeling of ludonarrative dissonance where the show doesn't really establish its "world" and internal logic. There's a weird sports aesthetic on the scoreboard that never comes up in the games.

The most confusing thing to me is that sometimes the contestants aren't even involved. The episode I watched opened with the hosts playing a game with each other, with essentially no contestant involvement: the contestants had to guess how well the hosts would do, and that's it. What's the fun of a game show where the contestants aren't the ones playing the game?

Worst of all, I don't even get the feeling that the hosts are having fun. They do not interact like normal people interact, which is ridiculous because the closest thing this show has to a conceit is that they're a married couple. It feels like they know they're on the job and have to act in a heightened way. Even though I'm familiar with both their acting work, I don't know why I should care about them in the context of this show.

If I were director of this show, my notes page would be looooong. I think the biggest change I would make is, focus on the game first. You can keep references to the hosts being a couple but the core fantasy of a game show is the contestants winning money through skill at games, and this show obfuscates that fantasy and distracts from it at every turn.

Billy Topit (2015)

Not Burton's finest moment

[2/10 · 14 April 2021]

Considering the quality other material Lance Burton has been involved with (his stage show and TV specials), it's astonishing that something like this could come from him. Mr. Burton clearly has connections - several other magicians appear in this film, and Louie Anderson too. It's shot in casinos and rich peoples' houses. One would expect Burton has "his people", who he collaborates with and help him refine his ideas. And yet, something has gone terribly wrong, because it's written badly, it's filmed badly, and it's edited badly. Nobody intervened at any point along the way, or if they did, Burton didn't listen.

The biggest issue is the overarching plot. Topit and his friends get a cheating syndicate kicked out of a casino, the syndicate kidnaps Topit's girlfriend, and Topit and his variety-arts friends stage a rescue, after which Topit gets to perform on a Vegas stage. Burton probably meant for this to be a hero's journey, but something like that requires the hero to be challenged by something, and the title character never is. He accomplishes everything he wants with ease.

The writing and editing is terrible on the scene level, too. Scenes are so bloated that you could cut an hour from this film and have it still be the same overall thing. There are moments of brilliance, including one very clever bit of payoff in the last third of the film, which is why I'm giving this a 2. But most of the jokes and bits don't land, and even that one clever payoff is set up far too aggressively.

Finally, the way the movie is filmed (cheap digital cameras, it looks like) isn't a dealbreaker for an independent film, but someone like Burton should have known enough to hire someone who knew what they were doing.

Unfortunately, this is a bad-bad film, not a good-bad. I really wanted to like it, because there are some people I deeply respect in it, but it just doesn't do enough right.

The Osbournes Want to Believe (2020– )

Nothing going on here

[2/10 · 20 October 2020]

There's just not much to this show. The three Osbournes sit in armchairs next to each other and the son shows his parents videos of supposed supernatural phenomena. It's not particularly ambitious. I would love to see this family sit together and talk, but the subject of choice doesn't work for me.

And the overall production feels amateurish. It's got stock visual effects, sound effects, and music, all used in the tackiest ways (someone will bring up Mexico and suddenly mariachi music is playing!)

Not the best in genre for The Osbournes content or for paranormal investigation content, to put it mildly.