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ethanw-hecht
Reviews
Gotti (2018)
A profoundly misguided failure
The movie doesn't hide that it's been partially funded by the Gotti family and probably former associates. It presents a literal murderer as a hero despite also including frequent scenes of him being a controlling absent father.
The structure and pacing are extremely non-linear and there're multiple moments where you're left wondering what point in the chronology the scene is set to. I know the characters were historical, but for you to keep showing me highlights of characters names as they enter scenes for the first time it's obvious you know there's not enough exposition for that character for me to truly remember who they are in the context of the movie.
There are multiple moments where we see newscasts glamorizing the events and reminding us it's real (as the directors are obviously scrambling to avoid more of Travolta's over-acting). There are multiple points where the same shot of characters watching is repeated, as though we're supposed to be watching from the police's perspective and we're just seeing the outside.
Lastly there's the Son's plotline...
At no point are we told Jon Gotti Jr's son's names, wife's name, or anything about him as a person other than he was a good dude who also simultaneously was not involved yet became a made-man? Ok bub, please tell me why the movie NEEDED an inclusion of a wedding recreation? How was that essential to our understanding of the character of Jon Gotti?
I don't get why the Gotti family was so invested in getting this made, it's obvious Travolta and others thought it was the last ditch to enter some cinematic hall of mafia-movie greats, but it's just so dull. We're just shoved a bunch of out-of-sequence events of violent idiots who people love for reasons we're not shown why, we're just told to like them and then the movie ends with Gotti's death and a placard reminding us John Gotti JR was such a nice boy.
Denial (2016)
Mick Jackson's TV experience truly shows...
For Denial, the most shocking thing about this film was that it was made in 2016. Everything about the camera work is so bland and uninspired at introducing Professor Deborah Lipstadt that if enough context was removed this film could literally be about any female professor that's liked by her students.
The initial barrage of Professor Lipstadt's routine is a series of extremely bland cuts from organically lit shot to organically lit shot, and in that barrage the blandness emerges. The trope of the beloved professor is so shoehorned in to create a character for Prof. Lipstadt that I feel completely alienated from the character at large. Denial's pacing alone is so bizarre at jumping to the lawsuit that I'm wondering why I should care about a story fighting Nazism. Jackson feels as though he's done enough to make me empathize with Prof. Lipstadt by showing me at the 14 minute mark how she'll be fighting an uphill legal battle. Around the 19 minute mark, Jackson choses to actively waste our time with an extremely unoriginal rainy London sequence to establish that she has arrived, and even though it's a minute long it's failure of purpose makes it stand out so belligerently. Rachel Weiss' acting as Lipstad feels so inorganic that I am completely skeptical and extremely bored by lines meant to be inspirational as "my mother always said there was gonna be an event. That I was picked out, I was chosen
well here it is." (16:01) That alone is one of many lines that seems to have been taken verbatim from a book. Denial at large is a very aggressively okay film, and at large it seems as though the only thing it's missing is commercial breaks. A quick look through Denial's director's past works shows that the vast majority of his experience prior to his 2016 film is in television. Denial's entire goal of presenting an uphill battle for truth against hate, with it's recurring shots of stairs among other grandiose imagery of rising above, fails so spectacularly entirely because of it's pacing and strange dipping in and out of Documentarian nature.
If a film tells me that it's "based on true events" then why on earth is it showing me meaningless dates and times? Saying your movie is "based on true events" is the most blatantly lazy form of opening a film beyond subtitles showing location and narration, which this film also does. Denial if anything seems in denial of the fact that it's not an HBO series, but a film.
Dredd (2012)
I could literally write for days about everything I like about this movie
Imagine this, a superhero movie that actually has you on the edge of your seat wondering if everything works out okay. Amazing cinematography paired with some really interesting soundtracks and a compelling story! The movie like almost all modern superhero movies always feels the need to cram exposition to shove their comic worlds onto the screen.
The cruel world of Dredd is gradually built, with rooms for the audience to interpret, it doesn't feel confined to awkwardly tie in side characters. There are some moments that have gore in them, but it really helps establish our anti-hero. I honestly wouldn't recommend this to everyone as it can get really violent, but for fans of movies like Die Hard or Watchmen this movie is just about perfect.
True Detective (2014)
Great show! Shame it was only one season!
I really enjoyed the first season. The story was unique (a bit dull here and there, but it was acceptable), and was acted out very well. In certain moments I was looking for subtitles, but it was easy to ignore the occasional "what did McConaughey just say moments" when there was amazing shot after shot with a near perfect soundtrack.
Then comes season two...
The first episode was bordering on Michael Bay levels of over-sexualized violence and a complete lack of the procedural tone from the first. The director chose to repeat the same shot of Los Angeles freeways that I was honestly groaning with boredom towards the end when they kept cutting back to those shots. The director didn't seem to even slightly want the audience to interpret the characters, he just wanted to cram as much awkward exposition in as possible. The soundtrack sounded almost entirely like a ripoff of Lost, and I felt so painfully compelled to finish the first episode because of the first season. Words cannot describe how much this show turned into a amateur nihilist exposition festival. I couldn't bring myself to watch 5 minutes of the second episode and I'm having trouble distinguishing the two as I write this.
TLDR/In short: I wouldn't put Season 2 of True Detective on my TV even if it was to deter burglars from my house when I was away. I'll probably give it another chance soon.