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stormharbour
Reviews
The Blackwell Ghost 6 (2022)
Says he's not going to share a woman's name
I Says he's not going to share a woman's name. Immediately shares woman's name.
I love the videos. They're a clear example of what you can do with neither budget nor talent.
The Reckoning (2020)
Anachronistic
Lots of anachronisms and just plain historical inaccuracies, like most historical movies, but still engaging and entertaining.
The Poison Rose (2019)
So bad my wife had a stroke
OK, for real. Yes, we were watching this movie when my wife had a mild stroke (she's fine now), but I don't think the movie had anything to do with that.
That being said, this is a seriously bad movie.
Let's start with the title, Poison Rose. Typically, when you title a work, that title has something to do with, you know, the story. In this movie, there are two roses - Rose, Doc's daughter, played by the criminally underused Kat Graham, and Rose the nightclub where we meet Doc and the sheriff and the hippie guy and Rose and Happy and such. Yet, neither of these roses have much of anything to do with the story.
The director clearly doesn't have a good idea of what he's doing. Neither does the editor. I mean, there's a bit early in the movie when pretty much everything stops for the better part of minute while the camera concentrates on Travolta lighting a cigarette. Just basic, obvious stuff any decent editor would know to have cut around.
I could go on and on. It's really, really bad.
The Magicians: All That Hard, Glossy Armor (2019)
Pretty good
A pretty good episode. Margo has been developing nicely as a character.
The one thing, though. Love Jade Tailor as I do, she's really not as good of a singer as she seems to think. The other actors all seem to know their musical limitations, but she jumps in with both feet and... is not good.
2036 Origin Unknown (2018)
Incomprehensible nonsense
I'm glad Katee Sackoff is getting work, at least. Otherwise, a complete waste of time.
Demon House (2019)
Not even a good fake
The thing that stands out the most to me is that the police captain, who is supposed to have known the priest, kept pronoucing the priest's name "MAG-uh-not," when the priest's name was "Mazsh-ih-no." That tells me the actor had never met the priest, but was only reading from a script.
The Perfect Host (2010)
Great ideas marred by unfinished script (spoilers)
The Perfect Host, on first glance, appears to be one of the sort of movies I enjoy -- a psychological thriller matching two dangerous characters who are well matched antagonists engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse. Unfortunately, the movie falls apart in part because the screenwriter needed to go through a few rounds of revisions in order to sift out the extraneous ideas and fine tune the story.
*** Beyond this point there be spoilers. Arrr!!! *** The setup was pretty good. It established pretty quickly that John is on the run from a crime gone bad and is desperate to find a place to hideout. That's all well and good.
Then, there's the scene in the market, where John is attempting to to get some supplied to deal with his wounded foot. Suddenly, a robber comes in and tries to rob the place. John disarms the robber and she runs off, and then the store owner chases John off with the robber's gun.
There's nothing wrong with this scene, in and of itself. It's just that there's no reason for it to be there. It doesn't add anything to the movie.
So, ultimately, John manages to con his way into Warwick's house. Now, we get to the central conflict of the movie, where the tables are turned and John, who starts off as being this bad ass career criminal, becomes the victim of Warwick, who initially comes across as a nice but fairly inconsequential sort of fellow but who proves to be even more dangerous than John. As the story progresses, we get a view deeper and deeper into Warwick's psychosis. He's not just a bit off, he is literally delusional, and extremely dangerous.
I can let some degree of coincidence go in a movie. Willing suspension of disbelief requires that to a degree. So, I'm willing to overlook the coincidence of a criminal looking for a place to hide just happening to run into a delusional serial killer.
Weirdness continues. And I really enjoyed this. David Hyde Pierce was great as Warwick. Clayne Crawford did as good of a job with John as one can expect considering what he had to work with. Then, things just sort of dribble into incoherence.
Take, for example, the chess scene. John challenges Warwick to a game of chess. If John wins, Warwick agrees to let him go. If Warwick wins -- I'm still a bit fuzzy about what Warwick would get if he won. Suddenly, though flashbacks to John with his girlfriend, Simone, we learn that John not only knows how to play chess, he seems to be something of a chess master, and manages -- much to Warwick's surprise -- beat him handily. Being a lunatic of his word, Warwick lets John go.
Now, does John take the opportunity to go? No. No, he does not. He grabs a knife from a display on Warwick's wall and stabs the man. Only, he doesn't really stab him -- because the knife is a movie prop with a retractable blade. The house is full of knives -- we see any number of actual knives from when Warwick was preparing dinner earlier -- and John just happens to assault his opponent with a knife that just happens to be a movie prop? Surprised by this turn of events, John is overpowered by Warwick and tied up again. So the chess scene MEANT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You could cut it out of the movie completely and no one would ever know it was supposed to be there. It changed nothing in the story and, except for one brief mention, is never referred to again in the movie.
So, skipping ahead, we see what appears to be John's body out in the trash, with what appears to be a gash across his throat. Only, no, it's not -- John isn't dead. It's all movie makeup, implying that Warwick hadn't killed anyone.
Now, think about this for a moment. You have just held captive and tortured a man who has already demonstrated that he is willing to kill you. And you let him go. You let him go right outside of your own house. Please. Take a moment to consider whether you think Warwick was that delusional.
Skipping ahead again, we soon learn that Warwick is, in fact, a police detective -- and is in fact the detective in charge of the investigation into the crime John committed the day before.
I don't know about you, but I'm far beyond my ability to suspend disbelief at this point. This is simply too much of a coincidence to be acceptable.
Next, we learn that John was committing the crime because he thought his girlfriend was sick, when in fact she was just playing him to get him to rob the bank and she could screw him over.
What? Then, there is the interminable scene at the end where a detective working for Warwick receives a Polaroid in the mail showing Warwick and John together, something Warwick took at his house. I'm sure this scene is supposed to be trying to set up some sort of suspense about the detective discovering Warwick's secret, or maybe Warwick doing the same thing with his detective he did with John. I'll just say that it doesn't work. Not a bit.
Even with all of these criticisms, there were a lot of things to like about this movie. Unfortunately, there appear to be ideas for about three or four different movies in this one screenplay, and none of them really work well together.
Writer-director Nick Tomnay was in desperate need of rewriting this script and determining which story he wanted to tell. As it is, The Perfect Host is simply a perfect mess.
L.
Daredevil (2003)
Quit Yer Whinin' (Spoilers)
What's all the whinebitchmoaning about? Daredevil wasn't any worse than Spider-Man last year.
True, it was more an outline of a potentially good movie, but that's true of 90+ percent of the consumable product Hollywood craps out every year. To quote an entirely different movie, "It ain't meant to be liked; it's meant to be bought!"
True, the characters weren't fleshed out very much. And the main character is rather thin. But these are flaws in the comics, too; Daredevil is one of the dullest characters in comics, made interesting only when the characters around him are interesting (i.e., Elektra, Kingpin, etc., in the comics, at least).
In many ways, the movie developed the character in a lot of interesting ways that I never saw in the comics (admittedly, haven't read the book in 20 years). The fact that Daredevil is willing to commit murder (make no mistake -- Quesada's death is clearly murder) and is conflicted about whether he is the good guy or not was quite interesting. Unfortunately, especially considering how relevant it is to the climax of the movie, this theme isn't well developed. Of course, nothing in the movie is.
Liked the sensory deprevation tank. Pretty cool, that.
Of course, there's a lot to dislike about this movie.
The trial scene near the beginning of the film makes me feel embarrassed for the writers. Either they didn't know -- or simply didn't care -- what the differences between a criminal trial and a civil case are. More annoying, apparently the people watching the film either don't know or care, because I haven't seen anyone else mention it.
The extended voiceover/flashback of Daredevil's origin story was poorly done. What's that line from Adaptation? "God help you -- God help you! -- if you use voiceover!" Sloppy storytelling, indeed. Batman had a similar childhood story to tell, and did it much better.
Don't they have laws against murder in England? After killing a man with paperclips in a pub, don't you think the bobbies would sort of notice, and put out a "be on the lookout for a freak with a bullseye carved in his forehead."
It's a pretty chintzy crime lord who makes his top assassin fly coach, I just must say. And killing the old lady just for laughs? That was just wrong on so many levels. Daredevil is not a movie that needs comic relief, especially snuff comedy.
Matt's attraction to Elektra is peculiar. Did she have a particularlly attractive scent or something? And why is he hitting on her in the first place? The movie pretty much already established that his vigilante lifestyle precluded him having anything resembling a normal social life. There was simply no reason for him to be either attracted to Elektra or to follow her out of the coffee shop.
The Kingpin isn't established as the crime lord of the city well enough. Having a few low-rent thugs beating up on other low-renters and saying something about the Kingpin does not establish a character as the bad guy.
And so on and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad naseum.
Overall? Not really that bad, but not really that good, either. Had lots of potential that the film's makers simply didn't have the interest or talent to develop.
L.
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Not a complete story
I'm a big-time David Lynch fan -- I even like his original cut of "Dune." And, without question, "Twin Peaks" is my favorite TV series ever, even the second season (well, most of it, anyway).
All that being said, I was looking forward to Lynch's new TV series "Mulholland Dr." and was quite disappointed when I heard it wasn't going to be picked up. When I heard he was releasing the pilot as a feature film, the only thing I could think was, "Twin Peaks pilot, European release."
"Mulholland Dr." does exactly what the European release of the "Twin Peaks" pilot did -- set up lots of interesting story lines, and then have to rush to a conclusion that made little sense and didn't tie up anything. The only difference is that we had the rest of series to make some sense of "Twin Peaks."
"Mulholland Dr." simply isn't a complete story. At a certain point, roughly about the time Betty and Rita start getting naked, the story became incomprehensible.
Sure, I can piece together a story from the mess that Lynch threw together here, but why should I have to? It's one thing for a story to be ambiguous, another thing entirely for it to be so obscure as to be little more than random scenes tossed in a bowl and flung across the screen. And, honestly, the story that I piece together is so trivial and banal that it really isn't worth the effort.
Of course, the same could be said of all of Lynch's work -- much weirdness to disguise the complete lack of anything to say, all form and no substance.
Even so, I sure did like it, more or less.