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Reviews
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
Beyond bad and full of goofs
This movie is beyond bad and is full of goods...
It alternates wish-to-be-dramatic (but just pathetic) scenes, wish-to-be-comic scenes, and absolutely incoherent action parts. The plot has been written by copying and pasting the previous plots without even checking whether a scene made sense with the rest.
My kids know the 6 movies by heart and started listing the goofs.
I just report some egregious ones.
*spoiler* So the hero is a clone and escapes conditioning, fair enough, but half way through he says he was been taken away from his family. Oh man, he was a clone...
*spoiler*Throughout the movie the bad guy use the force to push people around and block them (heroine included). At some point he smashed the heroine for several meters against the tree and lo and behold she resume and defeat the bad guy on a light saber duel.
Oh man and the power of the force? Forgot it?
In the past Star Wars you get hit by a light saber and the best that can happen is that you lose your arm but here... *spoiler* here you get hit and nothing happens at most get a scar in the face.
As my kid said: forgot to charge the battery anyone?
I could continue for hours.
Harrison Ford and Daisy Ridley try to do a bit of acting but the other characters have the same famous number of expressions of Clint Eastwood (with the cigar and without it, except here they have no cigar).
What else should I say? It reminded me of the Sleeper by Woody Allen.
If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor, and see something else.
OdysSea (2013)
Awful documentary about the photographer's midlife crisis
I know, that's not what the title and the plot summary says, but (unfortunately) that's what the documentary is all about...
If you read the synopsis what do you expect? A documentary about the problems in coastal areas due to rising sea levels (Michael Moore's style)? or, being a by a Magnum photographer, at least some beautiful scenes about European coastlines doomed to disappear?
Nothing of the above.
The bulk of the movie is sequences and sequences of a close ups of the photographer badly shaved face and his ramblings on his broken families, how he bought a hi-fi mixer, his kids suffering because he like photography so much (oh my...), and so on and so forth. It ends with him waiting and meeting his new fiancé at the airport with a close up of they opening the car (pathetic)...
Occasionally, they shot him nearby some interesting coastal sites and you are not told where they are, what they are but you only have his ramblings that these areas are not interesting,he is looking for something special and then a photographic shot of the area.
The title and the synopsis are truly a bait for innocent viewers. They should be ashamed of that.
Bananas!* (2009)
A good courtroom "docu-fiction" on workers'exploitation in banana plantations
I saw the documentary at a docu-fiction festival that is screened every year in my city and I also watched it with my kids (10+).
The documentary is very good in terms of actions, suspense and overall story. It is very enjoyable to watch.
It describes the bad practice of banana production in the 70s and possibly later in the great plantations of Dole and the like. Airplanes sprayed chemicals on plantations on plants, fruits, and ... workers. Those are basically drenched by the chemicals. Unsurprisingly they developed all sorts of illnesses.
The documentary produced some good evidence (such as letters) that pesticides were actually sprayed on people. Possibly also that this massive use of pesticides continued even after those chemicals were banned in the U.S. and the interviews with the Dole people and the farmers are very good (no matter on whose side you are standing one).
The factual accuracy may be a bit shaky and sometimes the romancing of the story gets in the way. For example there is not a recap of the facts by the lawyer, who is the main character of the movies. It is a "to say and not say", "we will discover in the court", etc. Albeit they might have wanted to avoid legal challenges by Dole, they could have been more precise. This is OK for legal thriller, a bit less for the documentary.
At the end of the day, the kids liked it, they found it an interesting story and the main message went through.