tom-456 Reviews

The Bridge (I) (2013–2014)

The story and plot are poorly structured.

[3/10 · 7 April 2023]

There are some aspects of this series that I liked, but I have to slam it because of some fundamental problems that simply can't be overlooked. I was particularly bothered by something that happened in the 3rd episode.

It is revealed to the audience early on that the villain is the Steven Linder character played by Thomas Wright. I don't have any problem with that, but I still want to be able to put myself in the shoes of the detectives, paying attention to how they go about identifying the villain. This is obviously an important element of any good crime drama.

Early in episode 3, we find detectives Sonya Cross and Marco Ruiz knocking on the door of a ratty trailer out in the middle of the desert. This is the trailer where the villain, Steven Linder, resides. I was bothered by this because I could not recall how it was that the detectives came to be aware of this trailer and/or the person living in it. So I backed up and watched the first part of the episode again, starting with the opening credits.

The scene I was looking for is shown during the opening credits. In this scene, the two detectives along with a bunch of other law enforcement personnel are examining a grisly site where a half dozen or so illegal migrants died due to drinking poisoned water they found in the desert. In this scene, Detective Cross asks Detective Ruiz if he has any binoculars, which she knows he doesn't have. Then she said something else, which I did not understand. I recalled that when I had watched this scene the first time I had backed it up because I hadn't been able to understand what she had said. I still couldn't understand it, but I thought she may have said, "Who is there?" It turns out that she said, "Who lives there?" But because of Diane Kruger's thick accent, it sounded more like, "Who is there?"

Coincident with this line, the camera cuts for about one second, two seconds maybe but no more than that, to a distant high ridge, where perched on the steep slope just below the edge of the ridge, there is something that vaguely resembles a trailer, except that it doesn't have any windows or a door, and looks more like something else, perhaps a tank of LP gas. This is when she kind of, sort of says, "Who lives there?". Part of the reason that you don't understand exactly what she said is that you don't recognize this as a house trailer or a place where someone might dwell, because this thing, whatever it is, doesn't have windows or a door. Did I mention that this scene takes place during the opening credits?

No half-competent director would have allowed this. Instead of a quick 1-second flash of something that with the aid of a vivid imagination might be thought a house trailer, the camera should have lingered on a real trailer for an extended period to draw attention to it. The director should have made certain that the line spoken by Diane Kruger was spoken in a manner whereby people could understand what she said. The director should even have had the two of them engage in a brief conversation about the trailer, e.g., what a strange place to find a trailer, in the middle of the desert and perched up on the steep slope of a high ridge.

The scene where the two detectives knock on the door to the trailer should have come quickly on the heels of the scene where they showed a 1-second glimpse of what was ostensibly a house trailer, off in the distance and perched precariously on a steep slope off the edge of a high ridge. A short interruption is needed to suggest the time gap, but a mistake is made by making this interruption too long. We have to tread water during a lengthy scene at the funeral of the husband of one of the subplot characters. After this lengthy interruption, we arrive at the scene where the two detectives knock on the door of the ratty trailer where the villain resides. Except now it really is a trailer, and instead of being enveloped in sage brush and perched on the steep edge of a high ridge, it is situated in the middle of an extremely flat barren area bigger than a basketball court.

This show is comically bad. It does not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone. It is disposable garbage. The story line is bad. The directing is insufferable. Diane Kruger, in spite of being easy on the eyes, is insufferable. What is it that motivates so many people to give strongly positive reviews to this kind of unmitigated garbage? Are people really this gullible and stupid, or are the positive reviews of this show written by people who were paid to do this?

The Accountant (2016)

A lousy piece of garbage

[4/10 · 6 March 2023]

I sat through this movie as it was streamed by A&E. I hated it almost from the start, because it was really pretty obvious from the start that it was not going to be a good movie, but I sat through it anyway.

The main problem is that it just isn't a well-written story. Possibly, the directing and the editing may have exacerbated the bad writing, but it is difficult to say. The story itself was so poorly written that not even the very best directing and the very best editing could have salvaged it.

From the start, the sense the movie watcher gets is that the plot will reach some sort of climax when the FBI guy (or Treasury guy .. it wasn't that clear which he worked for) finally catches up to the man he desperately wants to find, i.e., the accountant. This never happens. The story thread that involves this man and the woman that he forces to figure out the identity of the accountant never really connects with the action side of the story. There is eventually some history that the FBI guy reveals, but this doesn't merge with the action side of the story in any meaningful way. This left me wondering why the FBI characters played by J. K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson were even included in the movie. If the writer had simply left that side of the story out, and had focused on a better job of telling the main story that involves the accountant and what happens as a result of his discovering financial wrong-doings at a company he is hired to audit, it would likely have been a much, much better story.

And there are a host of things that simply don't make sense. Given that the executive heads of the robotics company were involved in financial wrong-doing, what was there reason for a hiring an accountant with a reputation for uncovering financial malfeasance? This is a glaring question, which was never answered. As some point in the movie the girl (Anna Kendrick) asked this, but it was never answered. The accountant replied that it was a good question and he said that he intended to get the answer from the female boss of the robotics company. When he found her she was shot through the head (evidently by the accountant's long-estranged brother), so she obviously wasn't able to give the answer. The writer (Bill DuBuque) evidently thought that this sufficed as an explanation for this glaring question, i.e., since the person who would have the answer was killed, this glaring question didn't need to be answered! What kind of writer thinks this way? A terrible one, that's what kind.

When the FBI woman had a breakthrough in discovering the identity of the accountant, some fellow who was evidently a computer hacker (modern suspense stories require a computer hacker) already knew the accountant's last name (Wolff) and it was then merely a question of him and the FBI woman deciding which of the four candidates that shared that last name was the target of her investigation. How did the computer hacker come up with the name? This is another pivotal question, and if there was a scene where this was explained, it was evidently deleted by A&E. This was very annoying, and to make it worse, the way they decided which one of the four men was the right one was by noting that in the run-down strip mall where Wolff (two f's) had his phony/front accounting office (ZZZ accounting), there were several other businesses in the same run-down strip mall that were likewise registered by the same accountant, with the same name (Wolff).

Seriously? This accountant is supposed to be this very worldly ghost-like accountant, whose 2nd residence is a small trailer he keeps in a storage locker, who is an expert on financial malfeasance and a gun expert and expert fighter and a savant-genius, but he uses several small businesses to wash the money that he gives away (his real compensation is in fine art and gold bricks that he keeps in the trailer locked in the storage locker), and these small businesses are all in the same run-down strip mall and are all registered under his real name (Wolff)? Huh? For the accounting work he does, he uses fake names, but they are all the names of famous dead mathematicians. If he is smart enough to use fake names in his accounting jobs, why is he so dumb that he registers those several businesses all under his real name, that anyone can use to look up his other, "official" address (a modest house that does not draw attention).

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT THIS STORY THAT MAKES ONE WHIT OF SENSE!!!!!

When I say "nothing", I really do mean "nothing". There is nothing whatsoever about it that makes a sliver of sense. The authorities-in-search angle never amounts to anything, even though they figured out his identity, and the way the figured out his identity doesn't make sense, and in the writing of this side-story the writers have him doing something that a character of this type wouldn't ever do, i.e., set up several small businesses for the purpose of washing money but have them all in the same run-down strip mall and all registered in his own (real) name!!!

Who wrote this piece of garbage? Bill DuBuque? How could someone with any intelligence write this kind of garbage? What he should have done is to have left out the whole side story with the FBI people. He should have made the story mostly about Wolff being chased by the leader of the military-like bunch of men who had been hired by the head of the robotics company to eliminate the accountant (and the girl who also knew about the financial malfeasance). The leader of that bunch of thugs turned out to be Wolff's long-estranged brother. Surely more could have come of that other than the two of them being happy to meet again, at the end of an extended and brutal gunfight, and agreeing to meet for dinner in another week. That's it? They decide not to try to kill each other and to instead meet up for dinner one day next week?

DuBuque, I hope that you give up your aspirations of being a writer. It is clearly not your forte. Hopefully, you have that producer thing that you can fall back on. You are NOT a writer.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Too long, but otherwise enjoyable

[8/10 · 15 September 2022]

I grew tired of this movie franchise before I had even sat through the first one, however long ago that has been. The first one was definitely the worst of the lot. The "Jurassic World" reboot stepped up the game considerably. And there can be no sincere doubt that this movie is a better movie than any of the others, and an enormously better movie than the original, in every respect. But let's admit that they are all hokey, and that there isn't any way that any of these movies wouldn't be hokey. The story in this movie is head and shoulders better than the story in any of the others. Instead of just a bunch of dinosaurs running around eating people without any story to speak of, this time we have a presentable story revolving around a well-intended attempt to improve on Mother Nature, that went sideways. In order to do that, they had to let the dinosaurs do their own thing, and introduce a new villainous monster in the form of flying swarms of huge locusts that eat literally everything. Yes, it is a bit hokey, but at least its something and it is something more than any of the other movies in the franchise had.

Not to suggest that the dinosaurs are part of thrill ride. I was very, very impressed with the quality of the computer-generated dinosaurs. Dinosaurs galore, and they all looked vastly more realistic than in any previous movies, especially compared to the first ones. It was spectacular. In fact, I'm probably going to watch this movie again.

Ambulance (2022)

Could not understand a word of dialog

[2/10 · 25 June 2022]

I could not understand a word of dialog because the foreground music and the sound effects completely drowned out the dialog. Even in the scenes where there weren't any sound effects, the music was recorded at a level so high that it drowned out the dialog. I have no tolerance for a movie done this way. I have no doubt that there have been some otherwise very good movies that were relegated to the trash heap because the audience couldn't understand the dialog. I do not recall a single movie of this type, where you can't understand the dialog, that won any awards. Not a single one.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

Awful movie propped up by a bunch of fake reviews

[3/10 · 29 May 2022]

If you read the titles of a bunch of reviews on IMDB, it is all too obvious that all of these so-called "user reviews" are bought and paid for. There is only one clever what-you-think-is-going-on-isn't-what's-going-on trick in this movie and it comes very close to the start of the movie. There are many plot twists but there isn't anything clever about any of them. About half way through this movie I had had all I could take. It seemed like I had been watching it for at least a couple hours, but then it went on for what seemed like another couple of hours after that. Eventually I stopped caring and was just wanting for it to end. This is at least the 5th time I've tried to watch this movie on cable. Each of the last four attempts I have started out determined to stay focused on it from start to finish. I always give up about half way through. They should have retired the stupid masks immediately after the first of the revived series, the one with Jon Voight. The masks had become much too tedious even in that movie, and yet the producers, most likely Cruise, kept bringing the back and using them again and again. I just saw that they are actually going to make another one, due out sometime next year, in 2023. If people keep returning to the theater and paying money to see them, they'll keep making them. I'd rather watch reruns of the old TV show. It was more clever by leaps and bounds than any of these movies have been.

R.I.P.D. (2013)

Not a bad movie, the negative reviews are silly

[7/10 · 10 March 2022]

I watched this movie on cable, 6 or 7 years after its theatrical release. Most of the reviews written shortly after the release were written by people who rush to the theater to see every new movie immediately upon release. These people are expecting a nirvana experience, and when a movie doesn't quite give them the experience they were hoping for, they trash it.

I enjoyed watching this movie, and the fact that I did tells me that it is better than a good majority of the movies out there. The fact of the matter is that the concept for this movie is very clever, and the way the story plays out is also very clever. Near the beginning of the movie, the Ryan Reynolds character gets shot and killed by his partner, played by Kevin Bacon. By the way, Kevin Bacon always plays a good bad guy. As the story unfolds, we learn the reason why the KB character killed his partner. The story is actually pretty clever.

So why isn't this movie well-liked? I think it is partly because of the casting, and because of the similarity to MIB. When people watch this movie, they see MIB. In place of TLJ, they see Jeff Bridges, and they see The Dude, mostly, with some Rooster Cogburn mixed in. They see The Dude and Rooster usurping the role of TLJ. And they see Reynolds usurping the role of Mr. Smith. They immediately lose sight of the fact that this movie is not another sequel to MIB. They think that that is what they are watching, and they are not happy that a sequel to MIB was made with with TLJ and Mr. Smith replaced by the Rooster Dude and Ryan Reynolds. On that basis alone, they resent the movie and fall to notice that it is pretty good script, that the CGI is second to none, that the acting and directly are perfectly good.

All in all, the unpopularity of this movie is due to it being perceived as a cheap ripoff of MIB. But this isn't what it is. The fact of the matter is that the MIB movies had very little in the way of story or plot, whereas this movie has a clever story and actually has a plot. Thinking about this, I would have to say that this movie is really a better movie than any of the MIB movies. Nevertheless, in the respects that matter for box office success, it does not compare well to the MIB movies. The single reason, I believe, is that the MIB movies were funnier. Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith are funny. And they have strong chemistry. Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds are kind of funny too, but not in the same way as TLJ and Mr. Smith. And whereas there was a certain chemistry between TLJ and Mr. Smith, there is practically no chemistry at all between Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds.

But now I've fallen into the same trap as everyone else, using MIB as a sort of yardstick for measuring R. I. P. D. There's no way for anyone not to do this, and not to think of Bridges as a stand-in for TLJ, and not to think of Ryan Reynolds as a stand-in for Mr. Smith.

If you can force yourself not to look at this movie as an attempt to cash in on the success of MIB (it is not that) it is a pretty good movie that relies on a lot of clever and well-done CGI, with a clever script and with good acting and directing. It gets poor reviews only because the MIB crowd wanted another MIB and were disappointed because it wasn't done quite the same and because in place of TLJ and Mr. Smith, it stars Rooster Dude and Ryan Reynolds.

Promised Land (2022)

Prime time broadcast TV just keeps getting worse

[2/10 · 1 March 2022]

This show stinks. The scripting is awful and the acting is nearly as bad. What more can I say? Every once in a while a watchable show comes to TV. Less often, ABC manages to come up with something watchable. This is not one of those times.

Hunting JonBenet's Killer: The Untold Story (2019 TV Movie)

Garbage

[1/10 · 5 January 2022]

What a piece of garbage this is. Elizabeth Vargas evidently has no shame, and neither does the network that represented this program as a legitimate piece of investigative journalism. Far from it. The first 3/4 of the program is entirely about allegations made by a woman (Bernice Johnson) incarcerated in Colorado. The man that she claims is the killer is the man that she attempted (or planned) to kill, this being the reason she is incarcerated. Her reasons for believing he is the killer are slim and none. In her theory, this man was hired by another man on the east coast, to kidnap JonBenet and the kidnapping went wrong. After Vargas stretched all this out for 90 minutes, in the end they finally stated in a plain way that there is no reason for anyone to think these two men had any contact or even were aware of each other's existence. And no real reason to think that the man on the east coast had any interest in JonBenet Ramsey. The reason why the authorities are not interested in the theories of that incarcerated woman become all too apparent. Why do Vargas and the A&E network producers believe that any of this is something that the public should be made aware of? Anything to make a quick buck.

What happened to the A&E is terribly sad. When it first began as a cable channel in the '80s, it focused on the arts. There was nothing else on cable like it. For anyone interested in the arts, it was the best thing that had ever happened to cable. I recall that they used to have a Sunday morning program that was truly outstanding. The downfall seems to have begun in 1994, when they first began airing reruns of "Law & Order". How does a TV channel dedicated to the fine arts switch to the worst sort of fiction that television has ever produced? In 2012, "Duck Dynasty" arrived, a program most notable for grown men with long scraggly beards who liked to use dynamite to blow up beaver dams and kill the beavers. To be fair, A&E has done a ton of really good stuff over the many years since it was created, but this kind of programming, the preposterously DISINGENUOUS search for JonBenet's killer, is just plain garbage.

Princess Kaiulani (2009)

Just a comment on casting ...

[5/10 · 17 December 2021]

This movie was off-putting for me for more than one reason. To be completely honest, I might actually have enjoyed it had it not been for the casting of the main character. I could not understand this casting, for more than one reason. I could possibly have dealt with the more obvious reason if the actor had been ethically true to the character. But this is not the case, and as such I really was not able to understand what the casting director was thinking. Evidently, the character (the princess) was of mixed race, partly European. As such, the actor chosen to play the role should have had similar ethnicity. The actor is evidently of mixed race, but this in and of itself does not make the actor ethnically correct for the role. Even if the actor, like the character, was 1/2 European. The other half of the actor's ethnicity is that of a particular group indigenous to Peru and some of the countries that neighbor Peru, mostly to the south. This ethnicity is a branch of the indigenous people of America, who entered America from Siberia a little more than 10,000 years ago. This ethnicity has very little in common with the Polynesian people who populated Hawaii, i.e., the indigenous people of the Hawaiian islands. As I tried to watch this movie, I couldn't get past the fact that the main character looked absolutely _nothing_ like what she should have looked like. This _ruined_ the movie, and would have no matter how good the movie might have been in most other respects. Why would the casting director have done this? All too often, movies that cost a lot to make are ruined by inexplicably bad choices made by casting directors.

The Hunt for Planet B (2021)

CNN produces a real stinker of a documentary

[1/10 · 21 November 2021]

Good Grief, let's hope that the James Webb Space Telescope is better at maintaining focus than this stinker of a documentary.

I saw this program listed in the on-line TV listing I use, and based on what I read, I thought it was going to be a documentary on the James Webb space telescope. Man, was I ever mislead.

A very, very tiny portion of it is in fact about the James Webb space telescope. But the even the portion that is actually about the James Webb gives you about three sentences worth of information about the James Webb. Less than they could have put into the promo for the program, if they had wanted to do that.

For the most part, this program is actually snippets of a whole slew of very, very uninteresting people discussing their thoughts about the origin of life and about the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life. This is what this stinker of a documentary is actually about, and it isn't even a half-decent documentary about the origin of earth life or the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life. It is a lousy, lousy documentary about the possible origins of life and the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life.

I find this terribly annoying. If CNN wants to produce documentaries, why don't they hire some people who have exhibited a smidgen of talent at producing documentaries? The people who made this piece of space junk didn't even have a clear sense of what sort of documentary they were trying to make. They ended up with something that is horrifically unfocused and horrifically bad, so bad that it should never have been broadcast. They tried to make it seem like something other than what it actually is, by drawing attention to the James Webb Space Telescope.

If you want to reduce the James Webb Space Telescope to a single idea, it would be the idea of seeing all the way to the edge of the known universe. It would not be about the search for exoplanets, and even if it were particularly about the search for exoplanets, it still would not be specifically about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I actually sat through this thing twice, and I do not recall even once hearing anyone talk about the capability to see to the edge of the known universe.

The people who produced and directed this piece of space junk should never again be allowed to produce another documentary, by anyone. And by the way, CNN, one way that you could make up for this wasted effort would be to make a broadcast-quality documentary on the James Webb Space Telescope. But I seriously doubt that CNN or anyone affiliated with CNN would have any idea how to go about doing that. Why is it that CNN consistently produces these really, really god-awful documentaries that are so outlandishly awful that hardly anyone can stand to sit through one of them?

Below Deck (2013– )

Unrealistic reality where too much drama is contrived for the show

[3/10 · 21 October 2021]

There's enough drama in one episode of this silly show to last the real thing for several years. Too much of the conflict among the yacht crew is created for the benefit of the camera, in order that people will watch the show. And Captain Lee, to say it plainly, behaves perpetually like a jerk. He is not a leader. I dislike the fact that his conduct is portrayed by the show as leadership, while the truth is that his conduct is perpetually a very good example of poor leadership. His favorite trick is to put direct subordinates between himself and the working crew, when he knows that the working crew are screwups and that his direct subordinates have little if any experience in managing people. Then when the screwups screw up, he gets to rake his subordinates over the coals. This is all a big setup for the benefit of the home viewer. It would be nice to see an above-board documentary of how the crew on a small chartered yacht operates when it isn't all put on for the home viewer.

Big Sky (2020–2023)

Just another mediocre television show

[4/10 · 15 October 2021]

When this show began in mid-November 2020, it was different and had some interesting elements. One of the most interesting elements was that one of the two key bad guys involved in human trafficking was a state trooper (Legarski) who was using his advantage as a law enforcement officer to do so some very bad stuff. His situation quickly changed, but the show remained interesting for a while longer, in part because of the uncertainty as to whether Legarski was faking memory loss while in the hospital bed. This also was resolved by the last episode before the first break, in mid-February 2021. With that resolved, the only thing that held any strong interest was the chase to catch Legarski's partner (Ronald Pergman). The series resumed in mid-April with seven new episodes. These new episodes dealt mainly with a couple of new storylines, which were nowhere near as interesting as the original storyline. The writers strung us along with brief, occasional updates of the goings-on with Ronald. As we got closer to the end of the first season, the saga of Ronald Pergman returned to the forefront, and the series was reinvigorated. In the final episode of the first season, the saga of Ronald Pergman seemed to be coming to closure, but then there was a plot twist complete with a cliffhanger. (Those writers know their job.) The 2nd season began in the early fall of 2021, and I've completely lost interest. Just like in the 2nd half of the first season, new storylines have been introduced and they are now the main storyline. As before, we are fed little snippets of the goings-on with Ronald. I understand that writers do this kind of thing strategically, to string the audience along, but I think they are making a big mistake. They cannot split the show time evenly between the new storylines and the Ronald Pergman saga. So they choose to give us the Ronald Pergman saga in slow drips. The drips are so slow in fact that big questions about how Ronald got to be in the situation where we now find him, are not answered. The frustration we have over this only makes us less inclined to pay any attention to the new storyline. So we sit there half interested through most of the show, no caring about who all these new characters are or how they tie in to the original characters, half paying attention to see what news there will be of Ronald. By the time they get around to that, I've stopped watching and have gotten interested in something else.

I'm pretty much done with it. I think the writers should have focused exclusively on the Ronald storyline until it came time to end it, however long that took. At that point, if they had managed to think up a new story good enough to hold the viewer's interest on its own, then the series would be able to continue. If not, the series would come to an end. The writers and producers of this show didn't look at it this way. They only had one really interesting storyline, and they stretched it out way, way too thin, expecting to keep the viewer's interest high enough with mostly new storylines that weren't that interesting, and snippets of the saga of Ronald. For me, this just doesn't work. I think that the writers and producers deserve for this ploy to backfire on them, if the majority of viewers simply get tired of being played this way and stop watching, with loss of viewership leading to cancellation. Who knows. Television is a strange thing. Prior to the past couple of decades, the networks would not waste time cancelling a program that people didn't watch. A couple of decades ago this changed. The reason it changed seems to be the potential for revenue for the series after the initial run, through sales of DVD box sets and of course streaming on the various internet streaming services. I can already visualize the Big Sky box sets on sale in the local book stores, and it is already streaming on one of the major streaming services.

Is it worth continuing to watch? I've decided not. I think I'll just wait until the series if finished, and then I'll binge watch to fast-forward through the filler storylines and watch the saga of Ronald.

Krakatoa: East of Java (1968)

Just a cheaply made, awful movie.

[2/10 · 12 September 2021]

I cannot think of a single good thing to say about this movie. I am a big fan of Diane Baker, but she shouldn't have accepted this part. If she had read the script before she agreed to do it, she ought to have known better. The script is awful, the dialog is awful, all of the acting is awful. And the special effects, the exploding volcano, are so bad that it makes you want to laugh, except that it is really funny, just hokey. If you can imagine a movie similar to The Poseidon Adventure but several times as bad in every way that The Poseidon Adventure was bad, then you get the picture. If you're thinking about watching, I suggest just sitting outside where you can watch the grass grow, because watching the grass grow will be more entertaining, I promise you.

Reign (2013–2017)

Basically a romance novel apparently written for a preteen girl audience

[4/10 · 22 August 2021]

I tried to watch this on Netflix, thinking it might help to justify a subscription to Netflix. I made it through seven episodes. All this really is, is a cheap romanced story of the type known to appeal to preteen girls. There is absolutely no question that the writing is done specifically to appeal to this "demographic". It does not remotely measure up to kind of story telling expected of a novel written for adults. The user rating on IMDB is completely meaningless if you do not know the makeup of the people who watched the show and bothered to give it a rating. It's a children's show. Not for very young children, but nevertheless a children's show.

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

Perfection

[10/10 · 15 August 2021]

I sometimes feel guilty about all the bad reviews I give to all the bad movies that are made, so it makes me happy to be able to give an unqualified recommendation for a change. The Queen's Gambit impressed me in every way. I had read the short novel by Walter Tevis. Three of his other novels had previously been adapted to the big screen: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. One thing that surprised and pleased me, with the movie adaptation of The Queen's Gambit, was with the faithfulness it was to the short novel. I don't think I've ever seen another movie that stuck as closely to the book as this one did. This also provided a sense of how long a movie generally needs to be, in order to be faithful to even a short novel, thus revealing the main reason that most movies omit so much from the book on which they are based.

I was also surprised at how well the movie managed to recreate the 1960s (also the latter half of the 1950s). This particularly surprising when you consider that most of the filming was done in various locations in Berlin, with the balance in Canada. When I read this I was very surprised, because I grew up very close to the central Kentucky setting for Beth's childhood, and the movie gave me the sense that I was back home.

It probably doesn't need to be said that Anya Taylor-Joy's acting was superb as always. But it does need to be said that Marielle Heller, who plays the woman who adopted Beth Harmon, did a superb job. In all other respects the movie was flawless, and for me a very welcome departure from the usual disposable stuff churned out by the Hollywood movie factory.

The people who made this movie, notably screenwriter/director Scott Frank, screenwriter Allan Scott, and produced William Horberg, knew what they were doing. I applaud them for making this excellent miniseries that I am certain will stand the test of time and will be enjoyed by movie-goers for many years into the future.

Erased (2012)

Badly written script that doesn't hold together

[3/10 · 15 August 2021]

The problem with this movie is that the script was thrown together by someone with no talent for writing an action movie. There is a pivotal scene that takes place when Olga Kurylenko enters the film, which is supposed to give us some understanding of what exactly is going on and why the Ben Logan character is caught up in it. Unfortunately this explanation of Logan's role wasn't helpful, and immediately after this, the plot just sort of dissipated into nothing. It very quickly became much too tedious for me to watch. A completely forgettable movie that I was not able to sit through. It doesn't deserve more than a 3/10 rating.

Human Capital (2019)

All in all a decent movie

[6/10 · 8 August 2021]

All in all Human Capital is a decent movie. I don't understand why there is so much strong dislike for it. The story unwinds kind of slowly, and the pivotal event isn't fully revealed until near the end. I think that lots of people just don't like the slow pace and downbeat mood. I think the story is told fairly well. Not to suggest that it is a great movie that people will remember ten years after it was made. Like the great majority of movies that are made, it will be mostly forgotten ten years down the road. But it is not a bad movie. Hollywood makes a lot of awful movies. This one isn't bad. The story is okay, the acting and directing are okay. There isn't any reason for anyone to hate it or give it a terrible review. It isn't an endless sequence of loud explosions, and lots of people will pan it for this reason. I'm just a little bothered by the fact that whereas lots of movies that genuinely stink (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) do not get a ton of bad reviews, whereas this movie, which isn't half bad, gets a bunch of bad reviews. "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" was an utterly tasteless piece of garbage, and it still has a 7.1 user review on IMDB, whereas this fairly decent movie has a 5.8 user rating. Don't trust the user ratings, and don't believe most of the reviews. There are plenty of stinkers out there. This isn't one of them.

Skyscraper (2018)

An unintelligible, incomprehensible mess

[2/10 · 1 August 2021]

I tried to watch this movie on cable, on FX. I was looking forward to it, thinking it would be fun to watch, but just a few minutes into the movie I found myself turning the volume down, then up again, then down again, then up again, and this didn't last more than about fifteen minutes before I gave up and switched the channel. The actors do not enunciate. This is a common flaw of many modern movies, but was a rare occurrence with older movies. You rarely find an older movie where there is any difficulty understanding the dialog, but with many modern movies, this is a common problem. The problem starts with the actors not making any effort to clearly enunciate their lines, then this problem is compounded by the sound engineers. The sound engineers apparently start by compressing the dialog track and eliminating the high and low frequencies in the dialog, then they mix this together with sound effects but they set the sound effects volume much, much too loud in relation to the dialog volume. The sound effects are so loud that it is downright unpleasant, while the dialog is so quiet as to be unintelligible, which compounds the problem with the actors not enunciating their lines to begin with. What you end up with is something that they ought to just throw straight in the trash, because the trash is where it belongs. The reason that FX chose the movie is probably the name appeal of the main star. But there is more that is wrong with this movie. The script is awful, the dialog is awful, the acting is awful, the directing is awful, the technical aspects are awful. This movie epitomizes a class of movie that is all too common nowadays, where nothing is assumed to matter other than the action and the box office appeal of the main star. So long as you have non-stop action, especially lots of explosions, and the main actor has strong box office appeal, it does not matter how bad the script is, how badly the acting is, how badly the actors mumble through through their lines just to get it done, how bad the directing is, and how bad the editing is, especially the sound editing so long as the explosions are a whole lot louder than the dialog. Skyscraper epitomizes the modern movie of this worthless genre. It is the worst of the worst. The worst I've watched, or rather tried to watch, in a long while. What the director apparently does not understand is that there are good action movies where the script is good to begin with, where the actors enunciate and are required by the director to do so, and where the sound editing is done so that the sound effects are only modestly louder than the dialog, so that you don't have to keep turning the volume up and down every few seconds so that the explosions are tolerable while you still have a chance of understanding the dialog. The director has made some good movies, but this is certainly not one of them.

Flight of the Phoenix (2004)

A cartoonish remake of what was originally a good movie

[6/10 · 8 January 2021]

I recently (2021) watched this movie for the 2nd time on cable, and my thoughts are not different from what they were when I first saw it. This movie has a lot going for it, but in the end it is let down by less-than-stellar casting, and by the decision, most likely on the part of the director, that the players should be rendered in a fairly cartoonish way. Dennis Quaid is a so-so actor, never bad but never great. He can't fill Jimmy Stewart's shoes. There are other actors today who could have, a fellow named Damon for example, not to mention that fellow named DiCaprio. And a few others, but Dennis Quaid just isn't that good of an actor. Most of the other actors are similar, not bad actors, but none to fill the shoes of Richard Attenborough, Ernest Borgnine and George Kennedy. If you want to remake a movie that had a bunch of exceptional talent, you have to start with talent that measures up to the original. This is one of several mistakes that are made in the great majority of remakes, along with inferior directing and inferior writing.

But with respect to casting, there was one casting choice that was brilliant, which was Giovanni Ribisi in the role of Elliott. The character Elliott is the second of the two major characters. This character is the same character as the Heinrich Dorfmann character in the original. Someone decided to take away the German identity of this character. In the original, there was a certain appropriateness to making the aerodynamic engineer a typical German engineer, someone who was borderline obsessive-compulsive by nature and needed for there to be rigid structure with respect to all things. Because this was the character, it was understandable that he would eventually insist on being in charge, and would utter the line, "Who is in charge, Mr.Towns?" (That might not be an exact quote but it is close and is what I remember.) The point is that it is perfectly reasonable to expect this from a German engineer. (No offense to German engineers, but anyone who has ever worked with many German engineers will know exactly what I mean.)

The Elliott character in the remake is not a German engineer, and is played instead as some sort of savant who has mathematical abilities but no clue how to get along with people. This of course is a familiar personality type, however it is taken to an unrealistic extreme when Elliot looks at Towns and in a demanding tone says, "Who is the boss of everyone?" This of course evokes a familiar phrase frequently spoken by three-year-old children. The effect is to portray Elliott as having the personality of a three-year-old child. Whoever decided to give Elliott this particular line did this movie no favor. More than anything else in the movie, it was this one line that gave the movie a sort of cartoonish character. It would have been vastly better to have had Elliott speak the very same line that Heinrich Dorfmann spoke in the original. It is unfortunate that this was done, because in spite of the loss of the German engineer aspect of the character's personality, Ribisi was well up to the task of pulling off the savant-with-no-social-skill character without being turned into a cartoon by saying something as ridiculous as "Who is the boss of everyone?" Whoever it was who made the decision that Elliott would utter these words deserves a large share of the blame for this movie not being more successful. That, and the decision to save money by not hiring any actors that you have to pay more than whatever the amount is that you have to pay Dennis Quaid, who isn't a bad actor, but who is best left to light comedy roles alongside comedic actors such as Martin Short and Meg Ryan. The role of Tuck Pendleton in "Innerspace" is the kind of role that Dennis Quaid was meant to play.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

So much is wrong with this movie

[2/10 · 11 August 2020]

So much is wrong with this movie that I don't know where to start. I'll start with Tom Cruise. It goes without saying that he was selected for the part of Ethan Hunt because of box office draw. Or maybe he had enough money to buy the role in effect, which is what happens when a leading actor is listed as a "producer". Cruise had been acting for fifteen years when this movie was made, and yet he was every bit the awful actor that he was when he started. No true acting ability whatsoever. Then the script, which is beyond awful. Then the director, Brian De Palma. Granted, this thing was doomed before he got involved in it, but whatever hope there may have been of salvaging this movie was lost once he was chosen as director. Okay, to be fair to Brian De Palma, he has actually made a few watchable movies, but the great majority of the movies he's directed are utterly unwatchable, and this is one of them. A good director would have identified the problems with the script and would have found ways to make up for the problems with the script. But not Brian De Palma. I've watched this movie several times and one of the scenes I find particularly annoying is the scene where Ethan Hunt meets Kittridge after the failed, phony mission in Prague. What's the deal with those crazy camera angles? And why is the actor playing Kittridge (Henry Czerny) behaving in such a bizarre, flippant manner, that isn't remotely like how a real person in this role and situation would behave? "Bizarre" isn't even a strong enough word. This is the scene where Hunt learns that the mission where most of his coworkers died was a phony mission and that he is now suspected of being a mole. Cruise's acting is particularly awful here. Both men are talking and behaving in a way that is not the least bit plausible or believable, and the camera keeps sinking lower and lower, looking up at Cruise, then Czerny, then Cruise, then Czerny, back and forth and it just keeps getting sillier and sillier and it seems like it isn't ever going to end. Seriously? What a joke. The old TV series was a MILLION times better than this silly joke of a movie. This movie was made the way it was made because moviegoers have decided they like Tom Cruise and they like movies directed by Brian De Palma. It is a bad, bad, bad movie.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

A wonderful, wonderful movie

[10/10 · 7 August 2020]

I happened across this wonderful movie on cable while channel surfing. I suppose the appropriate genre label would be "black comedy", but I've never seen another black comedy like this one. Laughing and shedding tears, not from one minute to the next, but both at the same time. I don't need to tell anyone what it is about. All I want to say is that if you haven't seen it, please do so at the next opportunity. I can't think of a better way to spend a couple of hours. As a side benefit to having watched this movie, I finally have an answer to give people who ask me to name one of my favorite movies.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Insufferable

[6/10 · 20 July 2020]

This movie is insufferable, and the fault is squarely with Branagh, both his acting and his directing. In any movie, TV show or theatre production, it is fundamentally essential that the audience be able to understand what the actors are saying. Incredibly, Branagh does not understand this. His phony French accent is utterly unintelligible. Far better to have a French actor trying to speak English in a way that allows people who speak English natively to understand him than to have an Irish actor trying to speak his native language with a foreign accent. And most of the other actors similarly speak unintelligibly, the fault for which is also Branagh's, because he is the director, and it is the director's job to make the actors speak intelligibly.

Midway (2019)

The 1976 movie is better in most respects

[6/10 · 5 July 2020]

I will try to watch this movie again, and maybe I'll have a better experience the 2nd time, but there are obvious problems with this movie, including the casting. In the 1976 movie Admiral Nimitz was played by Henry Fonda. In this movie Admiral Nimitz is played by Woody. Since when has Woody ever been a serious actor, known for playing serious roles in serious movies? Why stop with Woody, why not cast Bill Murray to play Admiral Nimitz?

As with most great battles throughout history, a proper telling of the story needs to reveal the key decisions by the leaders, the turning points in the battle, the extent of good vs. bad outcome of the various decisions, and the extent to which dumb luck and mother nature had a hand in determining the outcome. We, the audience, want to be educated by a movie of this type, not entertained per se. This movie seems unable to make up its mind what it wants to accomplish. The extensive use of CGI does very little to enhance the telling of what happened in the battle of Midway. I'm not suggesting that this movie should have been a documentary of the kind you see on the history channel. Although many of the documentaries on the History channel are easier to sit through than this was. The IMDB viewer ratings are essentially the same for this movie vs. the 1976 movie, but this is a reflection of the fact that the modern audience was mostly born after 1990 and doesn't want to watch any movie that isn't filled with special effects. The producers of this movie could have made a better movie than the 1976 movie, through judicious use of more modern technology. This clearly is not what they set out to do, as evidenced for one example by the choice of Woody to play Admiral Nimitz. Some of the other actors in the 1976 movie: Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford, James Coburn, Hal Holbrook, Robert Mitchum, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner. Around half of the actors playing the major roles in this 2019 movie are pop music starts with no experience playing serious roles and not having the right stuff for the audience to take them seriously as military leaders. Another decade from now this movie will be largely forgotten, and the 1976 movie will continue to be televised on Memorial Day and on the Fourth of July. And don't get me wrong about Woody. I'm a fan of Woody. Just not when cast as Admiral Nimitz in a movie about the battle of Midway.

Hunter Killer (2018)

It might as well have been a silent movie.

[4/10 · 20 March 2020]

An interesting plot to be sure, and well done except for one thing. From start to finish the actors all whispered and mumbled. Continually. ALL of them. I kept having to turn it up so I could understand the dialog, then turn it back down again whenever gunfire or other effects entered the scene. I just don't like watching any movie when I have to hold the remote control in one end. The director is obviously oblivious to the need for the audience to understand the dialog. He isn't going to be winning any awards until he figures this out, because one thing that award-winning movies all have in common is that the dialog is easy to understand. Movies where this is not true never, ever win awards. This movie has similarities to "The Hunt to Red October", but if you think about that movie, and put yourself in the audience and watch it in your mind as you first watched it either at home or in a theater, you might notice that the the actors did not mumble or whisper. Every word spoken by Sean Connery was intelligible. The same goes for Scott Glenn, Alec Baldwin, and Jams Earl Jones. Every word that any of them spoke was easily understood, with no particular effort. And if you think it over, you will notice that with ever movie you ever saw that you really liked a lot, you did not have any problem understanding what the actors were saying. This falls squarely on the shoulders of the director. Even if it is the sound editors that screw it up, it is still the director's responsibility. It is sad, because were it not for this problem, this would probably have been a really, really good movie. Did Arnold mumble when he said, "I'll be back." I'm pretty sure he did not. Did Charlton Heston mumble when he said, "It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people!"? I think not. Even when Brando spoke in that thick accent with his cheeks stuffed with something in the Godfather, you could still understand what he said, because he still enunciated. Good actors enunciate. Bad actors do not. Good directors tell the actors to enunciate. Bad directors do not.

1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)

Rendered unwatchable by Gérard Depardieu

[4/10 · 14 October 2017]

This could have been a great movie, but it was rendered entirely unwatchable by Gérard Depardieu. Why did the people who made this movie cast him as Columbus? A French clown? Of course the French love him, because he's one of their own, and because they love clowns. They loved Jerry Lewis, after all. But why cast a French clown as Christopher Columbus? It is downright bizarre, and it completely ruined this movie, which otherwise could have been a great movie. Among the alternatives, there is one very well-known American actor, with southern European ethnic heritage, who would have been great in this role. Even Arnold S. would have been better than the French clown. The one thing that keeps this movie from being relegated to the trash pile is the musical score.