radivel Reviews

The Wheel of Time (2021– )

If you complaini it's not exactly like the books - be realistic. It's great.

[9/10 · 31 October 2023]

Precursor: I've read the books.

Readers, take note: Let's be real here.

You're not getting a 14 book exact replica of the series that you and I all love. It's just not possible. Rosamund Pike and.friends aren't going to hang out in the Slovenian countryside filming for 8 straight years or however long it'd take. It's just not going to happen.

So, what can you do? You need to retell the story in the best way you can, in a way that can satisfy all the non-readers and make a valid attempt at satisfying all the readers too... eventually. Fanbases are notoriously prickly and WoT's are, as we see on these reviews, no different.

You just need to get over that it cannot be the same as in the books, so take it upon yourself to enjoy what it can do - take you into the WoT world and experience the moments you can with what you're given. If you let go of the need for perfection, you'll probably love this show too. Make it another turning of the Wheel in your head if you want, whatever, just recognize: you don;t need book perfection to achieve success.

So, what DO you get? What's great about this show?

For Readers: Well, not really Season 1, for starters, although it warmed up a bit with time and offered promise by the end.

Season 2, however, has an absolute ton of WoT goodness. You just need to watch for it. Remember how all the characters have their own personal secret agendas? That's here. You can feel it. Embrace the series' faithful dedication to small details like the subtle way the Aes Sedai.pull the old truth-but-lies dialogue tricks. Love that you've read the books so you know some of the subtle clues that a non-reader won't get. Love the visual representation of the source in all it's glory. Love Egwene. You know you do. You've read the books, so it's in you. Love that now that most of the blatant exposition is done with, you're going to get more of that WoT feel as time goes by, and you know this.

For Non-Readers: After being somewhat bored and confused by Season 1, Season 2 will open you up to the introduction of what's going to be a pretty good series.

The acting mostly improves as the actors and writers learn their characters better (sans Perrin, but whatever, you get one lame one for now, there's still hope). The environment and digital work feels like it all got a massive budgetary upgrade. That White Tower sure looks sweet now. The costumes are all spectacular, diverse and appropriate. The world, goals, motives and story become both more clear and more enticing for the wild ride to come.

Basically, blood and bloody ashes people, just stop complaining it's not exactly like the book. Accept your Wheel of Time as it is and don't demand blood from a stone. After all, if you want an exact version of the books... go read them again!

Conclusion 9/10 and extremely hopeful that we get to play this thing through. Light, am I ever excited.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Dear Hollywood, do you just find it impossible to make a good monster movie?

[5/10 · 2 April 2021]

You trip over your own feet every time!

This movie gets five stars because quite frankly, the monsters themselves were very well done and fun to watch. The fighting was well choreographed and exciting. That's best part about the show.

The other good part is the overall fantasy-level story, which was quirky and would have been a lot of fun in other circumstances.

Everything else, like when humans show up on screen, is downright brainless. Hollywood, I can help you. I'll work cheap. Send me your movies, particularly your monster movies, and I'll point out the stupid parts for you so you can make millions more dollars and have satisfied movie-goers instead of people griping about dumb crap that goes on.

For instance, I'd be able to tell you that of the 11 human characters who play roles in the progression of the movie, only three of them actually matter. The rest, the movie would be almost the same if you replaced them with "guy off screen".

I would also tell you that about half of the entire runtime of the movie is completely pointless and leads to practically nothing. It's like you put an entire story arc in just for exposition purposes.

Anyway, Hollywood. I await your call. I'll de-stupidifiy your movies for you. This one is a sort of fun but extremely brainless romp. Congrats on better monster special effects, though! Good work, chief!

Cosmic Sin (2021)

Makes you wonder what could have been

[5/10 · 2 March 2021]

A strong opening act shows cracks that eventually become chasms of mediocrity. The concept is quite good and really feels like the sort of thing you dreamed up in your nerd-driven fantasy of what could happen in a cool sci-fi storyline, but when the budget gets you Bruce "Anything for a Buck" Willis and a bunch of special effects worthy of mid-90s SyFy TV shows, you end up feeling like you've just been lied to. Frank Grillo gets top billing but is on screen for about 5 minutes. Mid to late movie direction is particularly poor, as you sometimes enter the zone of "spooky ghostly characters in the dark" and dudes in plastic outfits that bear no resemblance or relation to the interesting type of antagonist encountered in the first act.

The redeeming quality is that it makes you think about what a cool story this could have been if it had a giant budget. It could have been longer, more fleshed out, and not look like half the movie takes place in a garage.

Robin Hood (2018)

We're looking at this all wrong

[2/10 · 5 February 2019]

This movie is secretly a parody of Robin Hood, only they didn't tell anyone, not even the actors.

I don't have a problem with movies being less than excellent, but this movie is just downright stupid. Dumb, illogical things happen, which makes it nearly unwatchable because it's also done poorly.

There is one positive, though - hopefully no one will make any more Robin Hood movies for a very long time.

Mr. Robot: eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko (2017) Season 3, Episode 8

This episode is everything that Mr Robot needed and more.

[10/10 · 29 November 2017]

I honestly never thought something like this would be possible out of Mr Robot, a show where you never really understood how people are feeling. It's not like any other Mr Robot episode because here, the viewers get to experience exactly that, and what an experience it is. Catharsis can be a wonderful thing.

Transcendence (I) (2014)

This movie was illogical garbage, so here's a summary (SPOILERS!)

[3/10 · 16 May 2014]

Alright, odds are you're going to hate this because I didn't really like this movie and I'm fairly blunt sometimes.

My extremely detailed summary:

This is what I get for finally going into a movie blind thinking it has Morgan Freeman and Depp and Paul Bettany in it so it has to be passable at least, right? Well, the director was very awful and the story was ridiculous. It's a movie about the singularity and dealing with it, and while there are some things in that I'd like to believe happen someday, it's not going to happen in this manner.

Here we go.

Basically, Depp is a brilliant weirdo and married to his soulmate wifeperson, they work in genetic computing. So Depp gets shot by a psycho and is going to die, so emotional wifeperson takes the next step and downloads Depps brain into the pc system he's been developing, AND IT WORKS. The psychos are attacking all over, it's calamity, Jim. What can we do?! We have to hide inside this totally undefended abandoned school from our childhood which happens to be housing this extra copy of the world's most advanced computer set up system we need, that anyone could have just walked up and used.

• Super Computer Depp needs to be connected to the internet, and does get connected for approximately 1 second and is now spreading himself over everything everywhere, but it took days to download his brain? - Super Computer Depp does shady stock works to make his wife rich, and so then he's going to work towards fixing humanity in some method that computers believe is best, so he needs a place to do this. He decides (and he's smarter than us so this has to be right) that this place should be underground under a desert in California right beside this piece of crap hopeless hick town. Wife will use newfound riches to build it. - This might be reasonable, except wife hires one redneck hick from the town to build it. - Redneck hick is successful in a few seconds, and *POOF* we have this insanely gigantic underground facility full of technical equipment never before seen to man. So it didn't actually take a few seconds, but in actual movie time it was more like a month. - Deppbot starts healing people with nanobots, and taking over their bodies making them super strong and super smart or restoring vision, this seems fine except they're now brainwashed into a nanozombie state - Deppbot decides this is better for everyone, starts recruiting more people for miracles - Bettany is aware things aren't good, and teams up with the original psychos (including a Daenerys clone) that shot Depp to try and bring him down, they hide under copper wire nets and eventually steal the original Redneck Hick, since nano-programmed into a superzombie. Deppbot can't see through copper wire, it blocks his wireless signal. - Bettany helped Live Depp program the original AI system, he's the only one that can stop this - In a few seconds, he comes up with a virus that can take down Deppbot, and injects it into the wife, she's going to die but it's going to be for the good of humanity - Attack Plan time! The psycho team mounts an assault on Depps field of solar energy panels to distract him while wifey goes and is like, "Oh save me lover Deppbot!" or something, and gets him all secretly. He'll never see it coming. - Using four guys, the fake Mother of Dragons, three guns, and a 1910 style mortar gun dragged around on by trailer hitch on an elderly Chevy van, they defeat the evil nanozombie townsfolk despite a large number of shading things happening. - Bettany's virus is uploaded to all the internets in the entire world, infecting everything and shutting the internet off and turning it back to a pre-stone age state, also known as 1986. After all, it's better than an army of Depp clones that use wireless internet to steal people. They're nanobots, you know. They're in EVERYTHING now. - Humanity is saved! YES!

***BIG REVEAL*** I won't reveal it, but what doesn't happen is Depp isn't like, "Screw your internet. I'm gonna make my own internet to run my life." He made his own new self out of synthetic flesh and whatnot, he reincarnated himself as a living breathing Deppbot, but he apparently can't defeat the lack of 801.11ac wireless. I can assure you that that did not happen, even though his nanobots are in EVERYTHING.

Moral of the story: This movie is impressive in it's illogical hilarity which is extremely difficult to describe or attempt to write down (I didn't include most of it), it might be worth it to watch and make fun of in a sort of "count the number of times the Wet Bandits die in Home Alone" sort of way, but otherwise don't. We got like, 5 minutes of Morgan Freeman in this one, apparently there's only so much Morgan Freeman to go around and some other movie needed an old black guy.

I hope you appreciated this summary, but odds are you're bugged now.

Cloud Atlas (2012)

Cloud Atlas is not a normal movie.

[9/10 · 4 November 2012]

Cloud Atlas is by no means a normal movie. IMDb has this blurb: "An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution." (Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/) which is vaguely accurate. The story itself is more both complex and less deep at first glance than this.

It's more like a collection of stories across history that feature strange interactions between them. Each story and time period has the same actors / actresses playing either complete different or characters that are somehow related to their other time period characters in some way. The decision as to which is which appears random, sometimes feeling unnecessary and not all appear in all eras / stories. The drastic changes of say, Hugo Weaving's appearance between two periods is amazing and nearly a reason to watch the movie on it's own.

So, having read this so far, you might be thinking, "But I've already seen The Fountain, why do I need to watch this?" Well, The Fountain is an amazing movie, but it's different than this. The themes explored in this movie are nowhere near present in The Fountain, because despite the "intertwined characters across time" aspect, it takes a different approach. The Fountain is much more evident in it's time-spanning interactions, but perhaps Cloud Atlas takes multiple viewings to achieve this?

But that doesn't mean that this isn't a great story. It very much is. There's adventure, love, humor, passion and some amazing writing, all set to spectacular scenery and a probable Academy Award for costume design. It explores multiple themes, has you caring on multiple levels, and encourages multiple viewings.

The Good This movie is: 4/10 The Fountain 2/10 The Hyperion Cantos (seriously!) 1/10 Blade Runner 1/10 Mad Max 1/10 British Comedy 1/10 A bunch of other things If this doesn't sound good, I have some Jason Statham movies to recommend to you.

The Bad It takes a long time to get going, you're very confused at the start. I mean a long time, more than half an hour. Some of the dialects used are difficult to understand.

Overall It's rare that someone can call a movie "beautiful", but this is indeed just that. I will watch this movie several times throughout my life, and I suspect that over time, it will gather appreciation it deserves. 9/10 stars here.

Zombieland (2009)

A new style of comedy!

[9/10 · 28 September 2009]

Zombieland is hardly a plot-heavy and dramatic masterpiece, but it IS very, very funny, and not funny in a way you're used to seeing in a comedy.

There are very few jokes made, the humor is more from people doing things that people might normally do, just filmed very well in a humorous fashion.

Oh, and the movie has lots of zombies and other awesome stuff that surround this entire idea of having every situation be the biggest "What the frack?!" you can possibly imagine.

The small cast was obviously having a great time when they made it, and all four characters did a very good job of fitting with the style of the movie.

Lastly, while the whole movie is hilarious, one scene in particular will have you in fits, one of the funniest single little scenes I've ever seen. But, no spoilers here!

The Lookout (2007)

The Lookout is a story, not a thriller

[5/10 · 7 December 2007]

This movie was advertised as some sort of action thriller, as though you were in for some exciting and face paced bank heist.

It isn't that, at all. The acting was fine but not exciting, the lines were appropriate but not exciting, everything about the movie was fine, but.. it was boring. It didn't really require any thought, you just sort of watched it, and when it was done, you realize that nothing changed from the start. If you watch it, think about that.

I got to see it at a prescreening, thankfully, because it wasn't worth the price of admission normally charged.

PROPS: Good job by the now-grownup kid from Third Rock from the Sun on acting a difficult part.

SLOPS: No advancement at the end of the movie. Overall dull.

Summer (2002)

one of the best movies you'll never see.

[9/10 · 11 July 2007]

The other description of this movie that is incredibly long pretty well describes it to a T. You should be able to find it since there are only about 8 other descriptions.

There is no reason not to watch this show if it comes on. The cast does an extremely good job, they don't overact, they don't underact, they basically seem real, like they're doing real things, unlike practically every other movie of this type. Obviously the low budget helps with this, even, someone with a huge budget might not make the movie feel like this.

Really, all it says is everything you could want about life, love and the choices one might make about them both. What more do you need?