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Reviews
Otherworld (1985)
Fun to re-watch and realize how bad 80's special effects were
This show was one of my favorites in 1985, when I was eight years old. One mistake many reviewers make when looking at such sci-fi shows is to think they were intended for an adult audience. Otherworld was family TV, about a family getting sent to a parallel universe. Modern sci-fi is considerably more sophisticated in terms of plots and special effects, but shows like Otherworld and Voyagers were really interesting, whereas others like Battlestar Galactica 1980 were awful. It's great to see Johnathan Banks ('Mike' from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul) 30 years younger and playing a bad guy. Perhaps if this was filmed 15 years later, with a Malcolm-in-the-Middle-esque Bryan Cranston as the dad and Banks as the evil android Gestapo stalker, it would have done better.
The Iron Lady (2011)
Frame story falls flat
We've seen movies before where old people look back on the historically relevant events of their lives. It worked well in Amadeus, where demented old Antonio Salieri confesses his role in the death of Mozart. Here it doesn't. The most strong-willed figure in British political history since the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First is reduced to a frail old woman who wanders around her home listening to the bantering hallucinated figure of her ex-husband, suggesting that she's every bit as schizophrenic as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Meryl Streep succeeds in this dismal, gut- wrenching portrayal with as much success as F. Murray Abraham did in his portrayal of Salieri, and bravo. While they're at it, maybe the director and screenwriter can look at the life of Reagan while focusing on his final stages of senility. We're treated to a cursory overview of the events that defined Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister.