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Escher: Het oneindige zoeken (2018)
Narration misses the mark
Excellent documentary on the life of Escher, in great part based on his own memoirs, and commentary from two of his sons. Striking visuals (of course), enhanced by excellent CGI. This could have been a 5 star film, if not for the overly dramatized, over-embellished, pompous, pretentious and puffed up narration of Stephen Fry, which unrelentingly gnaws at the listener's ears and brain from beginning to end. A really poor choice by Robin Lutz, when he could have chosen a competent, less strident voice out of a universe of superior talents, like Peter Coyote or Martin Sheen.
Don't Look Now (1973)
Second-Sightseeing In Venice
Good cinematography and great editing try to sustain suspense, but ultimately fall short. Nicholas Roeg's inimitable style of editing disjointed flash forwards and flashbacks to tell a story are employed here to tell a tale of the effects of grief and the rebirth of hope on a couple after the tragic loss of a child. The viewer is not subtly bludgeoned with recurring motifs of water, the color red, falling, and claustrophobic scenes, many of which are overly stylized and pointless. The decay and rot of Venice are used to good effect. The plot revolves around psychic foreshadowing of events, until the "shocking" reveal at the end. The movie has been described variously as a thriller, a suspense, a psychological study, and a horror film, but doesn't really deliver any of this very well. I found it to be shallow and unconvincing. In one scene that involves a fall, and subsequently an object falling in slow motion towards Donald Sutherland's character, I kept hoping that he would end up like the unfortunate Father Brennan in the 1976 version of "The Omen" where the priest gets impaled by a lightning rod falling from the top of a church, but unfortunately he lives, and the film goes on. If you look up the etymology of the exclamation "meh", you'll likely find that it began as a description of this movie. And despite some clever uses of the color red as a repetitive motif, it has the absolute worse use of theatrical blood I've ever seen, kind of cotton candy pink. It's hilarious at a moment intended to be horrifying, and so bad, I have to believe it must have been intentional, but to what end I'm at a loss to explain.
Rogue One (2016)
The Farce Is With Me; I Am One With The Farce
I kept getting distracted by my toenails growing.
Question at end: Your Highness. The transmission we received. What is it they've sent us?
Answer: Hope.
It's a lie. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. What a steaming pile of dog crap. The only redeeming quality is that all of the story's "heroes" die at the end. It would have improved the movie a lot if they'd died at the beginning instead. This film is absolutely unsuitable for anyone claiming to be sentient.