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Reviews
Sneaky Pete (2015)
Boring
Boring characters, who are impossible to care about.
Boring plot, unimaginative, predictable.
Boring pacing.
What more could you ask for, as a viewer ... and then not get?
I tuned in because I've greatly enjoyed several other Amazon series in the last year, because of characterization (Goliath) or plot (The Man in the High Castle) ... and because several of the actors in this show were so enjoyable in other TV series. Particularly Bryan Cranston and Margot Martindale. I was expecting characterizations interesting like Walter White and Mags Bennett, but their characters in this show are very flat and, well, boring. The bad guys are not fun to hate, nor inventive, nor shocking, nor plausible, nor ... well, they don't give you any good reason to tune in. There are no good guys, no characters to root for as protagonists, or even to feel bad for their misfortunes, or even pity.
The Man in the High Castle (2015)
Terrifically thought provoking, well delivered, but not character driven
Spoiler alert.
I just finished watching season 2 of The Man in the High Castle, and I must say that my rating of it increased quite a bit from my opinion of season 1 and the first few episodes of season 2, when I would have given it only a 6. The plot seemed nearly indeterminate through most of season 1, but began to come into view late in that season. Then the plot direction seemed to stall again early on in season 2 before I was able to make sense of what had gone on before as well as where it could (possibly) be headed.
The production values are excellent, with great atmospherics, especially the scenes in the massive Nazi rally that took place in episode 10. The contrasts between the dirty seediness of Japanese controlled San Francisco and the neatness and cleanliness of Nazi New York is striking (though not reflective of any contrast today between the streets of Tokyo and Berlin).
The biggest disappointment with this series in my view is that the characters for the most part simply aren't very compelling or entertaining, indeed, they seem almost annoying except for John Smith, Inspector Kido, and Mr. Tagomi, who are the only three with real depth to their characters.
The big concept, of course, in this series is the contrast between our world today and what the world could have been had the Germans and Japanese won the second world war - an allied victory being an outcome that most people growing up in the post-war era tend to take for granted. It is fascinating to see how so many "Americans" adapted to the Nazi and Japanese dominance and control of the people and our cultural institutions. Particularly with respect to the Nazis. There is less acceptance by the American characters of their Japanese victors, seemingly mainly for racial reasons - not just racial bias by Americans of all races against the Japanese, but also blatant racial and cultural bias practiced by the Japanese against the Americans.
It's really quite chilling to look at "fellow Americans" adopting Nazi ideology, from their notions of Aryan superiority, to their nonchalance in removal of "defectives", and their willingness to accept and engage in mass murder, all for their utopian "betterment of the planet".
If viewers take any one thing away from this series - utopians are the world's worst persons, for such can justify any evil in the name of their version of utopia.
The other thing that is striking is that there really are no "good guys" in this series except for Mr. Tagomi. All of the other characters range from crazy psychopaths (Reichsminister Heusmann and Heydrich) to bloodless opportunists (Inspector Kido, General Onada, and "Bob" Childan) to glaring ideological hypocrites (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) to clueless pawns (Joe Blake) to seemingly loving innocents quite capable of bloodlessly killing those who temporarily stand in their way (Juliana Crain and Frank Frink).
Curiously, Adolf Hitler seems almost non-threatening.
There's much that still needs to be explained, presumably in season 3 to come, such as why some of the "world shifters" can be in only one world at a time while being aware of both worlds, while Juliana Crain can seemingly exist in both worlds simultaneously while being totally unconscious of her dual existence.
I think I'm going to have to binge-watch both seasons back to back to see what I may have missed as clues in the early going.
Tyrant (2014)
Started out interesting in Season 1, Season 2 less believable, Season 3 Tyrant Jumped the Shark
Can't discuss this series without discussing "spoilers", so hang on, here goes.
Interesting concept in Season 1 - can an Americanized expatriate son of a bloody Middle Eastern dictator manage to bring some western- values based humanity to a forlorn country long used to abuse by its autocratic rulers - first his father, and now his own brother?
In Season 1 the answer was "maybe?".
In Season 2, all of a sudden this Americanized son and brother of a brute was leading a "revolution" and a hero to his downtrodden countrymen and women? Uhhh, no, that's simply not very plausible.
And by Season 3 the series arc suddenly became the Americanized protagonist now fully Tyrant-ized, brutalizing his own people and fanatically pursuing tribal vengeance at the shrewish urging of his own Tyrant-ized wife, now focused solely on killing the killer of their daughter, no matter the cost to any other person on earth.
Sorry, I didn't much believe the noble American revolutionary leader and I sure don't buy the full circle transformation into bloody Middle Eastern tyrant - either of Barry or his seriously demented American born wife
Through the second half of Season 3 I found myself wishing someone would just take out Barry's evil you-know-what wife ... to save Barry, his son, and his entire nation the bloody outcome sure to result from the path of never-ending vengeance.
And I also found myself wishing that the producers and writers could have come up with a more nuanced Barry character and not the complete submissive idiot that he turned out to be, fully whipsawed by a combination of his wife, his terrorist nemesis Ihab, and, well, his entire situation. Not that I wished instead that Barry would somehow become a Middle Eastern Super Hero and teach all those Middle Easterners how to live like a good American ... but rather, I wanted Barry to have some sense of humility, to recognize his own limits, and to understand that absolute power corrupts absolutely (after all he had his family history to prove that), and to realize when he was in far over his head.
I sympathize with the desire to exact revenge after a senseless bloody killing of a dear family member, but stupid is as stupid does. Pretty much every single decision that Barry made in Season 3 was worthy only of someone dumber'n a box of rocks.
After Season 2's semi-ridiculous story line, in Season 3 I was hanging on in hopes of a turnaround that would get it all back to something resembling a thoughtful treatment of Middle Eastern culture clashing with western values ... instead, I'm done.
Emperor (2012)
A movie with great pretensions that fell far short in execution
As a military history buff, particularly of World War Two, and being familiar with excellent non-fiction and fiction works in print from great authors such as John Toland, Richard Franks, and William Manchester dealing with the end of the Pacific war, MacArthur, and the occupation, I really wanted to like this movie, just for its subject matter alone. But I was significantly disappointed with this film in several key respects.
Warning - several of the following points will involve spoilers: 1) The fictional love interest involving General Fellers significantly detracted from the plot, the flow of action (with its constant flashbacks,) and the seriousness of the film. It added nothing but unnecessary and confusing drama, including the silly "Japanese lover" appellation given to Bonner by a competing staff MacArthur toady.
2) I am sorry, but I was not impressed at all with Tommy Lee Jones's portrayal of MacArthur, which was actually just yet another portrayal of Tommy Lee Jones by Tommy Lee Jones ... as he does in nearly all of his film roles. The actual "American Caesar" MacArthur was nothing at all like TLJ's southern drawling cartoonish portrayal of the man, which transformed MacArthur into a two-dimensional caricature of the patrician American general. No American actor in a film yet, including the late Gregory Peck, has ever accurately captured the persona of one of the most accomplished, egotistical, intellectual, visionary, infuriating, devoted, yet enigmatic military leaders in our national history.
3) Collapsing the entire investigation of Hirohito's role in starting the Pacific war into 10 days only served to add fake urgent drama to the setup ... it was both untrue (the actual timeline was about 5 months) and reflected a purely political viewpoint that was not matched by the facts or motivations of key players at the time.
4) It was all well and good for General Fellers to conclude that nobody could determine with certainty after the fact what Emperor Hirohito's complicity was in the start of the Pacific war. That could have been a compelling finding ... but exploring that issue in at least some reasonable detail, instead of the airy dismissal given at the end of the film, as applied by the Fellers character (no doubt to make up for lost time from wasting most of the film's screen time on those silly flashbacks to the fake love affair with the Japanese teacher) completely detracted from the serious issues that the film was supposed to address. This matter deserved an in-depth investigation in late 1945, and an in-depth treatment in this film as well.
5) The acting by the Japanese characters seemed fairly well done (in contrast to TLJ, and Matthew Fox's wooden portrayal of Fellers), but the Japanese characters themselves were far more deserving of exploration than this film provided. Particularly, the most telling insight was offered by the Lord Privy Seal Kido character ... i.e., his statement that the Emperor was really just a ceremonial religious figurehead before, and during the war, who only rose to the occasion in August 1945 to exert the Imperial Will. That is, his demand that his war cabinet agree with him to accept the Allied surrender terms. The drama with which this scenario was infused was almost completely ignored in the film. The film did in fact depict the attempted military coup just before the surrender, but it did not bother to describe who was actually conducting the coup and what they intended to accomplish, and exactly whom the plotters intended to assassinate.
That the Emperor was not really in charge of Japanese imperial policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s was, of course, completely counter to the Western notion of an Emperor's role and authority. Yet that concept and fact, along with the fact that the Emperor finally forced his will upon the militarists in charge of the regime, was the lynch-pin of the film's reason for being, and for MacArthur's decision regarding the prosecution of Hirohito.
All in all, this film disappoints almost entirely, including dramatically, factually, and thematically. Realistically, a proper treatment of what was involved even just in MacArthur's decision whether or not to prosecute Hirohito deserves at least a mini-series level of treatment, not a less-than-two-hour film.