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Reviews
Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (2012)
A few issues, but the regulars all make it good enough to watch again
I heard this touted as a great show with a great heroine, and ... well, I sort of agree. It's "all right" as far as having a strong heroine goes, but I admit to being disappointed when they went the romance route with Phryne and Jack instead of a solid friendship. It's such an overdone route, and undermines everything that delighted me about Phryne to begin with - her frank enjoyment of sex, singlehood, and being an independent woman in a time when women were still expected to give up working when they got married. I much preferred having a 20s female James Bond type of character, who bedded men involved with the case, and solved the cases stylishly and coolly. It would have been a much fresher and more unique take on a "lady detective" than what actually happens. Also, now they have to find ways to drag it out, which just means continual irritating side stories taking time away from the main story of each episode - Jack's jealousy, Jack's ex-wife, etc., etc.
I also didn't really enjoy the ongoing background stories much. Being filmed as short individual stories, I think they should have been kept as short individual stories. The longer ones just cut in and out too sloppily. Jane, for instance, is adopted, and then only ever seen again when she's useful to the story. This makes Phryne come off as selfish in the worst way, taking in a kid that she then ships off to school and never has anything to do with except when she's needed for a case. The child killer story and Phryne's father's story, like Jane, dropped in and out of each episode if and when necessary, but dropped out again a moment later. And frequently this was combined with cutting straight from solving a brutal, vicious murder to Phryne throwing yet another party. Again, makes Phryne (and co) come off as heartless.
AND YET despite this, I loved it, believe it or not. Every regular character is a delight, and for each instance of the issues above, there were plenty of instances of fantastically enjoyable story, dialogue, action, etc. I love that Phryne frequently saves herself during a situation of her vs. villain, with Jack bursting in only in time to see her dusting herself off and waiting for him to make the 'official' arrest. I love their friendship. I LOVE the evolution of the relationship between Dot and Hugh, which is a much more satisfactory relationship than Jack and Phryne's. I love Bert and Cec, Mr. Butler, Mac, and good god, I adore Aunt Prudence, who is one of the delightful frequent recurrences in the series, and who dances on the line between "likeable" and "unlikeable" with style and grace, never falling definitely on either side.
I also really enjoy the modern issues that show up - including but absolutely not limited to transgenderism, gay and lesbian relationships, various disabilities, and Phryne's attitude toward them all goes a long way to highlighting how despicable attitudes toward them were then, and how despicable they still are now. It's never awkward or forced, it just is a part of the people's lives and they are parts that Phryne accepts them as who they are. I'm not describing it well, but I feel it needs to be acknowledged as a very good thing.
Il racconto dei racconti - Tale of Tales (2015)
Ultimately, a waste of two hours
The best that can be said of this movie is that it is beautiful. Unfortunately, that's all it brings to the table. While I appreciate the attempt to produce a lavish set of fairy tales based in the violence and cruelty of the old tales, I don't think it was, in this case, successful. I think part of the problem was trying to shoehorn three stories into one movie. This left no time for character development for anyone, at all. And while character development is not necessarily crucial in fairy tales themselves, quick 2 minute reads that end in a lesson for everyone, a two hour movie where one is watching these people move through the world really does require *something* to latch onto. Unfortunately the movie keeps switching between stories without having provided anything to latch onto in the characters. Mother wants child, daughter wants freedom, woman wants man - and they proceed to do anything and everything to get it, and the end lose everything without ever having gotten what they wanted. The problem is even the ending is unsatisfactory. Because just as each story reaches a moment where it might get interesting - the prince's reuniting with his friend and the death of his mother leaves their story open for development, the princess finds a family to help her escape from the ogre, and the old woman secures a future - the movie ends. The prince walks away from his friend - nobody actually mentions why, after he's spent a lifetime fighting to be with him. Or who the tall creepy man was or the how or why behind his advising the king and queen and how the queen turns into a bat creature. The princess escapes, and for some reason *doesn't* murder the ogre until he's brutally murdered the entire family (is the moral of this story 'heck with helping a stranger in need, I wanna live!'?), then she returns to her dad and they both cry and then she's crowned but still there and ... uh? And the old lady's sister is flayed and wanders into town where the townsfolk avoid her, and then the scene cuts, and we never see her again. Did she meet her sister? What happened when she realized it hadn't worked? Etc etc. And why did the old woman's skin start to change back? What happened to her?
In short, the movie takes a long time to get interesting, and then just as it does, it ends, with no resolution for any character, and no lessons, from what I saw, being learned by anybody. They're all either dead or in the same spot they began in. Which is weird, because fairy tales do tend to have moral lessons at the heart of them, and even in the middle of blood and death and gore, the characters usually end up altered or having learned something in the long run.
Heidi (1993)
Terrible
Disney is known for some pretty cheesy rock-to-the-head morals but usually the high budget production at least makes it tolerable. This, on the other hand, is low budget Disney cheese - the stuff you find at the back of your fridge and shove way back in, in the hopes that maybe if you ignore it long enough it'll go away. It begins by shoehorning in an overdramatic scene with Heidi's parents. They are on screen for a handful of minutes so who even cares about them? Nobody, at the point where they stand frozen in stupidity watching a tree really really really slowly topple over after being struck by lightening. Seriously. I was glad they were dead. They deserved it. And it all went downhill from there. Whoever cast the Heidi kid... I'm not sure what they were going for. It was like they said "we're looking for another Annie, only with no personality." Honestly, I don't even particularly like Shirley Temple, and the Shirley Temple version was a thousand times beyond this one in terms of quality. Shirley brought personality and precociousness to the role that this kid entirely lacks. As the movie rests on this kid's shoulders, it fails dismally, especially as the rest of the cast perform equally poorly, making the whole movie an exercise in wondering "good god, how much of this can possibly be left to watch?"
Another Earth (2011)
Yikes, boring.
I gave up on this film about halfway through and read the synopsis - glad I did because from my POV it didn't get any more interesting and just ended in a really weird manner. So John goes to E2 and finds... what? His family alive? That would presumably include him, so he's still screwed. Or maybe only he died instead. That means that he lost his wife and child, and his wife and child lost him. That's... I mean call me crazy but I can't see how you could go through that loss and then just take the 'replacements' as a 'fix' for what happened. I suspect that would alter you in ways that aren't possible to fix by pretending it never happened.
It didn't help that I quite honestly could not feel the slightest interest in Rhoda's plight. Poor little pretty rich white girl was too goddamn stupid to stop her car before looking at the stars? For a kid on her way to MIT that is a stunningly large deficit in the area of common sense. After that, I kind of hated her and had no interest in watching her passively grasp her way back to 'a normal life'. And let's be honest, no matter whether John found his replacement family or not, she still killed two people with her really, really, really, really, really stupid actions.
The Quiet Earth (1985)
First half good, last half bad
Honestly the beginning of this movie is great. I really liked Bruno Lawrence, and his travel through dubious sanity was hysterical and yet relatable. I know I'd wander around on a deserted earth finding better houses to live in and deciding how to live off the land and, yes, probably going slightly mad in the process. He did that very well. His balcony speech is delicious. But the instant other people begin to show up the whole movie stalls and never starts again. There are only two other people. They are uninteresting. The love triangle is uninteresting. The finale is ... sudden, and quiet honestly I haven't got the slightest freaking clue what that final scene is about. I read the summary of the book and I feel like it did a much better job of an ending. For the movie, it felt like they started with a great script about one man waking up alone in an empty world, then ran out of creative juices as soon as they had to focus on more than one character and just kept writing anything, *anything at all* for the remainder of the film. Then they hit the hour and thirty minute mark and went "thank god, I can end this!" and just slapped an ending on to what had been happening for the last 90 minutes. A highly disappointing end to a promising beginning.
The Prisoner (2009)
A waste of talent
I have no complaints with the acting in this movie - in fact the acting was the only part that I really enjoyed. The story itself was awful. It's a great example of why I hate Lost and how heavily it has continued to influence serial television - Lost was popular, let's do the Lost thing of never telling our audience anything. Well, I despised Lost and I stopped watching it in the second season, and I despise Lost for making it so that every television show I watch feels the need to continue drawing things out for ever and ever and ever and ever. I thought that perhaps 6 episodes would be tolerable but no, even six feels like forever. At 40 minutes an episode it works out to 4 hours, and as someone who felt BBC's Pride & Prejudice was the perfect length, let me tell you - The Prisoner *felt* like about a hundred. I kept thinking "I get the feeling this would have worked excellently as a movie" but actually I was wrong, because, whether you've just sat through 2 hours or 4 hours or 2 seasons, the ending is *bad*. And I do not refer to being unsatisfied that it wasn't a happier ending, I refer to being unsatisfied with it *as* an ending. I am irritated that I kept going in the hopes that eventually something would happen but no, all that happens is that eventually we get a wishy-washy half-assed "science!" explanation for everything that has been going on and ... that's it. I went and read the synopsis of the original show - which I kind of wish I'd done beforehand, might have saved me some time - and it appears that viewers then had as frustrating and rage-inducing a finish as viewers of the remake have. All I can say is that as much as I like Ian McKellan, I'd like my 4 hours back, please.