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A Ghost Story (2017)
Being a Bitter Ghost is Sad and Boring
This movie had so much potential in exploring a topic I have pondered over countless times: what would it be like if all you could do was observe one limited place in the world, without being able to affect anything that's happening. I have been wondering if it was possible to find meaning in living through other people's experiences, in forgetting yourself and becoming one with the inhabitants of a house/room. Could that be a means of not going insane or becoming utterly miserable? And if it could, what would happen when the inhabitants change, or the place is destroyed and replaced? How would that affect you if you had completely immersed yourself in the previous people's lives. Would you be able to recover and adjust becoming one with the new inhabitants or would that be the end and you would break, turning miserable forever or going crazy?
Well, as I've learned from this movie – if you are a boring bitter ghost who does nothing but get uncontrollably angry at everything that is natural and unavoidable (e.g. somebody with kids moving into the house, your wife kissing a man and instantly regretting it), then your life will be a big mess of heart-wrenching mundanity. To be honest, I figured as much, but it's nice to see someone shares my opinion. And I understand that seeing your wife kiss a man and not being able to do anything is horrible, that he probably wanted kids and seeing them in his house was very hard, so he snapped. However, there is not even a slight hint at ambiguity, at the ghost feeling any empathy for anyone, at the ghost attempting or at least wanting to help a single person (e.g. the other ghost that is in his exact same). The ghost is just a miserable dude who's entirely fixated on his past. If he feels nothing for any of the inhabitants, for the ghost that's suffering exactly like him, for the people being murdered – should we really feel sorry for him? As funny as it sounds, we see him doing nothing but bad things after his death
what an unpleasant ghost!
All in all, the movie felt like a meditation on generic behavior: you had a ghost doing ghost things (hiding in the wardrobe and throwing plates), a bereaved wife doing bereaved wife things (kissing the man who consoles her, then instantly regretting it), hipsters delivering hipster speeches, and, finally, the ending was as obvious as it could be. Maybe it was all intentional, but I felt like halfway through every scene you could just write "Simply imagine the most obvious ending to this scene and fast-forward 5 minutes or go grab a snack and leave the movie running".
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (2016)
Elijah Wood in Wonderland
I'm not going to discuss how the show is very different from the books, this annoyed me at first, but then I decided it didn't really matter. Douglas Adams's prose is all about hilarious descriptions and explanations so it is not very well suited for film. Once I got over the fact the series is nothing like the books, I found the show to be watchable and, at times, intriguing.
The acting, however, in my opinion, was nauseating. Everyone's acting apart from Elijah Wood (who just acts like he does in all his roles) can be described as silly. All the actors were asked to do strange voices and constantly make very silly faces. Dirk Gently (played by Samuel Barnett) seems to be an attractive and likable man in the split seconds when his face doesn't have a childish expression that made him seem terribly irritating. Other actors all act like they are 4-year-olds trapped in adults' bodies. I found this grotesque and almost impossible to watch; the characters seemed like they were all straight out of Alice in Wonderland, but without any of the witty lines.
The plot of the series was rather imaginative, although the first few episodes were just a sequence of seemingly random deaths that I found a little tiring to watch, everything began to come together and make some sense in the later parts of the show. I can't say I was gripped and couldn't wait to find out what everything was about, but it was fun to figure out who all the characters were and how they were connected. I thought there was a little too much death, and characters dying quickly became repetitive rather than shocking. The series ends on one of the least original or gripping cliffhangers I've seen − at the end everyone simply gets attacked, and we are expected to be worried what will come out of this. Apart from Todd (Elijah Wood) we don't really get much information about any of the characters. Everything we do find out is a little overly-sentimental: every character is terribly lonely, feels left out, thinks he is a useless disappointment, and has no friends. I guess this is fine, it's just that with all the unceasing kookiness of everything, it would be nice to have a something a little more cynical or down-to-earth, but maybe that's just my own silly preferences.
Overall, the series constantly and frenetically jumps from being quite dark to being sentimental and childish, there is really no in- between. None of the characters ever really stop to think about anything: half of them simply possess some kind of 'sense' that tells them where they need to be and what they need to do, the other half just keeps saying that nothing makes any sense. The comedy is based on craziness rather than smart lines, which would probably have saddened Douglas Adams. I'm sure that many will find the show more enjoyable than I did, perhaps I have become a bit too snobbish for this kind of thing.
Utopia (2013)
Utopia shows the value of good screen writing.
First, I want to start with the positives of this show: I think it's great that it tackles the problem of overpopulation - something that is talked about way too little nowadays. The show has some very impressive visuals (the colours and the scenery) and a good general outline of story (the virus, the comic book). I am a sucker for originality and I have to admit there was a lot of that.
However, this is where it ended to me, the show has A LOT of weak points. The biggest one to me were the characters, 3 of the 4 main characters (Becky, Ian and Grant) are almost in no way interesting, charismatic or likable. I understand that they were supposed to be the "normal" characters in the show, but the fact that they don't have a crazy past doesn't mean they should be almost entirely devoid of any complexity. This is a huge problem, because a lot of the dramatic scenes would have only worked if I cared for the characters, but with so much death and murder in basically every episode (often of other important characters), I couldn't care in the least if one of the main ones was murdered too.
The character development was also suspect. Many characters changed way too drastically in way too short of a span: Wilson Wilson turning into an absolutely brutal psychopath during the last 5 minutes of the last episode; Arby turning into a peace loving family man; Jessica Hyde at some point suddenly turning into a self-obsessed nymphomaniac that wants children? I understand they wanted to make Jessica Hyde more human, but wasn't she all about "individual people don't matter and this is bigger than all of us" in the beginning? There was almost no transition between these states, we see characters going from one extreme state to a completely different one in one single episode.
A bit too much of the show depended on the "shock" and "taboo" factors, from the very first scene the show seems extremely full of itself, along the lines of "look, we can kill a kid in the very first scene, we're so controversial and cool". I am okay with violence in movies and series, but a large part of it seemed like violence for the sake of keeping up with the amount they had in previous episodes.
The comedy attempts in the show were okay, but nothing noteworthy.
Overall, the show had everything except for a good writer. Perfectly, I think, this could be solved if they hired a great comic book writer to write the story for them (as the whole thing does have an intentional comic book feel) and then have a high-class screenwriter adapt it for TV. I'd give it a 6.5/10 if I could.
I am excited for the American remake that could solve all of the series' problems, With David Fincher and Gillian Flynn making the remake, they probably will not go in the "comic book" direction, but it should be much better than the original.
Horns (2013)
Quite a good movie, really.
I don't see why everyone is so disappointed and angered by this movie. I must admit that I haven't read the book, perhaps the movie really is a let down for a fan of the book. However, as a person who watched the movie not knowing what to expect - I don't see why everyone is so upset. To me, the bottom line is this:
1) I was genuinely interested who the killer was; 2) I thought the love story was rather touching; 3) The acting was good; 4) A lot of the movie was quite entertaining and some parts of it pretty funny.
Certainly, you can easily find flaws in this movie: the ending is a little underwhelming, the character development is a bit sketchy and etc. However, none of that spoiled the viewing experience for me. Overall, it was a movie I enjoyed and I am in no way sorry that I watched it.
There are so many absolutely identical movies coming out all the time, so much unoriginal boring stuff, it's nice to see something different and actually interesting.
The Grey (2011)
Hated it
I went to watch this movie having absolutely no idea what it was about, me and my friends were simply bored. I must say that watching this movie was a painful experience. Now the film has multiple impossibly stupid flaws: wolves that go over huge cliffs, rivers and into the middle of nowhere to attack a bunch of people who survived a plane crash; a guy that swims around in freezing water and comes out of it like it was nothing; loads of people getting out of a plane crash completely unharmed and so on. But honestly I could live with all of that if the movie made up for it with at least anything. I found all of the characters either dull or totally hateable (the funny overly-talkative guy was kinda likable, but he died at the very start). The character Liam Neeson was disgusting, with his no emotions, depressive comments, super-high morality that didn't seem relatively real. No worthwhile dialogues, pretty much no plot, even the poem his dad wrote sucked! And anyway, what a prick do you have to be to write a poem and put it into a frame and on your wall?