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Reviews
Last Seen Alive (2022)
A TV movie in Film Form
This is so naggingly reminiscent of one of the old 'TV Movie of the Week' shows that went out in the 1970s. When I say 'reminiscent' I mean 'heavily derivative'. Check out 'Dying Room Only' (1973) with Cloris Leachman - a rather better movie all round - or 'You'll Never See Me Again' (1973 again) - whose plot this one pretty much replicates. It's been done much better for the cinema - such as by Kurt Russell and Co in Breakdown (1997) - and with a bit more wit and style. This movie is quite a lazy and unimaginative 'homage' to the others, very much reliant on people not having seen the ones that inspired it, but if you're looking for an undemanding but reasonably engaging thriller, this will probably do.
Unplugging (2022)
Horrible. Just horrible
We watched this with fairly low expectations - we just wanted an amusing movie for a Friday night, and, after sifting through the various super hero franchise offerings, the teenage-oriented shack in the country horror movies, the elderly person's last hurrah movies and the range of action movies which still have Bruce Willis 'starring' even though he's barely in them, this was left.
It's unoriginal - several movies have already 'done' the digital detox theme. It's unlikeable - the set-up, focusing on someone who cannot stop texting and scrolling, just irritates: it goes on so long you just depise the character and want her off the screen.
Then the basic story begins and it's not really a story. It's forever trying, not very hard, to find a story.
A bit of a road movie, a bit of fish out of water movie, a bit of a small town eccentrics movie, but still no actual narrative. You keep expecting something to happen in a joined-up way, and it doesn't.
Worst of all, it's so desperately unfunny. It really is mind-bogglingly devoid of real humour. The chicken 'thing' epitomises how badly-written the whole thing is. They don't know what to do with the thing. The chicken symbolises the script. People just carry it for no reason.
What on earth did they think when they sat through this is the screening room? Shame, I hope. It's a depressing waste of time.
Resident Alien (2021)
Losing its way
This used to be quite a promising show, with a decent story and some nice comic characterisations.
This time around, however, it seems more like a soap, with a bit of Mork and Mindy's 'what I learned about humans this week...' tagged on at the end.
Did people really tune in to see how all the love lives turned out? Do we need yet another show where the kids are supposedly the smartest people around?
The problem seems to be that the writers wanted to bring the show back but didn't have a second storyline in them, and so they're digressing more often even than The Walking Dead and The Blacklist. The sad thing is it's getting less and less amusing and more and more irritaing.
Lost in Space (2018)
Written by robots
What a tiresomely 'correct' show, so slavishly eager to ingratiate itself with its key demographics that it makes little sense. The kids are super-smart, the woman (whose solitary expression suggests severe constipation) is super-super smart and the man is barely bright enough to ride a tricycle let alone serve any practical purpose in deepest space (if you want the show to seem realistic, then BE realistic!). As for the 'action,' it's just another soap posing as sci-fi, like much TV sci-fi is these days. The writers clearly have no idea what to do with an old campy show except make it un-campy. So everyone just gets on with things, hugs and supports each other a lot and endure the useless bloke. Even Ms Smith, now that she isn't he, can't be allowed to be so selfish and devious, because being selfish and devious isn't nice, children, so she's an aimless character who doesn't have much to do. What on earth, or off it, is the point? Even the trumpet-heavy music is formulaic. Utterly lazy, patronising and pointless.
The Blacklist: The Skinner (No. 45) (2021)
An Awkward Reboot
Hearing the surviving characters practically sob at the memory of Keen ('Let's hold hands and remember her' 'I couldn't have put it better myself' - yuk!) was quite surreal. The writers still don't get it - they seem to think they wrote a saintly, inspirational, character in Keen, whom the world now mourns, rather than a stunning idiot who betrayed all the other characters multiple times). Move on, for goodness sake, MOVE ON!
The 'let's get the old gang back together' routine was all a bit 1970s, but much more clumsily done - Dembe as an FBI agent (but of course!), Ressler doing a Fonz impression as a reluctant car mechanic (the obvious career move!), the one that didn't do much now training agents (whatever), and Cooper, er, nope, I can't even remember and it's only been a day since I saw it. Oh yes, and Reddington has had a lockdown headshave and Spader is having a Brando moment. It's all a bit halfhearted.
If they can quickly move on to some decent stand-alone episodes, maybe the bad memories of Keen and her crazy family/fake family/real family of shape-shifting Russian/American/spies/counter-spies/nice/nasty nonsense will begin to fade, and the show can actually find a focus again. But not a great start.
Old (2021)
Promising idea, badly executed
M. Night Shyamalan. What a strange character. Intriguing but often exasperating. If his ability to develop ideas into a coherent story was better, he'd have a far more impressive track record.
I notice some reviews sneering that the 'masses' might not get his genius. How amazingly patronising. It suggests there's something 'deep' here that only the really sophisticated can appreciate. The opposite is nearer the truth.
So the director seems to have just discovered mortality, and, like so many other filmmakers who've belatedly stumbled on to this theme, he appears to think he must teach the rest of us what it means. That's bad enough, but the way that he does so suggests a precocious 14 year old trying to explain 'carpe diem' to his intelligent parents.
The idea draws you in - a strange secluded beach where time seems to accelerate. Fine. And he knows where he wants to go - he knows the start and the finish. It's the between bit, alas, that he fails at.
There's barely any character development, so we don't really care about anyone. The dialogue is almost laughably bad at times, so we're not even nudged into trying to believe in any of them.
As usual, the director has to rely heavily on actors just staring slightly to one side of the camera, looking beyond at something or nothing, like a revival of the Kulshov Effect, to intimate whatever you want it to intimate. At least that's preferable to the terrible dialogue, but it isn't great storytelling.
And there's not really anything happening in the middle except one after another of them dying. Yes, there are a few tacked-on muttered 'if onlys' and 'what ifs' to encourage the idea this is some kind of profound meditation on time, meaning and mortality, but, as we don't know anywhere near enough about any of these people, who cares?
So you get a few characters, a clumsy attempt to list their conditions (they may as well have had them all sing that old 'Float On' song to get the job done: 'Hi, I'm Larry, and I'm a paranoid schizophrenic...Float, Float On...'), a tiny bit of excruciating dialogue, and then we're straight into an hour of 'I'm not feeling very well'/'I have a knife, and I'm very angry!'
Insulting tosh, I'm sorry to say. Really irritating nonsense.
As an episode in The Twilight Zone, it would have made for a distracting enough little fable (although they would have told it far better). As a full-length movie, however, it's a couple of nice pieces of rustic bread with a heck of a lot of processed ham stuffed inside.
If M. Night Shyamalan just had ideas and passed them on to filmmakers with greater intelligence, maturity and discipline, I suspect we'd end up with several excellent movies. As it is, he just goes on disappointing as the conception gives way to execution.
Only Murders in the Building (2021)
The charm covers over the cracks
This is a show I was eager to see. There are aspects that, personally, disappoint - the pacing (Woody Allen used to do these things so much better, with an under-appreciated energy and precision), the peculiar interactions between the 'odd trio' (yes, I know Gomez's character is supposed to be somewhat disconnected from the older pair, but her behaviour in the early episodes is just a bit too odd and illogical to work for me), the already-cliched 'talking to a dead guy' conceit (after The Flight Attendant, and others, this needs a long, long, rest) and (I know, I know, these things are subjective, but...) Gomez's weird, ultra-constipated, nasal mumble - but the charm of Martin and Short makes up for any misgivings and keeps one watching. Like so many shows these days, this feels like a 90 minute movie stretched out to fill up a non-negotiable run of episodes, but it's entertaining even during its detours and digressions. Not a great series by any means, but a welcome one.
The Tomorrow War (2021)
Okay for Friday Night Escapism
Watchable movies that don't involve terminal illness or dementia, or endless variations on horror movies from the 90s, seem pretty thin on the ground at present when you just want something to give you a brief but blessed release from all the depressing reality, so this movie was welcome. It was pretty silly and superficial, but had some humour, a decent pace and some likeable characters. But the laziness did irk at times.
For example: everyone shoots bullets at the creatures, over and over and over again, very, very noisily, and nothing seems to happen. Okay, it's an action/scifi movie, I can tolerate that. But once you've established that shooting lots and lots of bullets at those things doesn't appear to stop them, do we really need more scenes in which it happens over and over again?? It was just noise. At least Kirk hobbled off and tried to think of another strategy when the zipped-up Gorn wasn't too fussed by being smacked!
Good writers would have used this as a means of moving things on, but these writers just kept rinsing and repeating. Because they already had their third act, so all of this action was taking us nowhere. It was as if the over-long length of the movie had been pre-ordained and they just had to keep pausing to fill up some time.
So it was okay-ish as escapism, but my goodness there were times when it was irritating.
The Blacklist: Nachalo (2021)
The consequence of hubris
The arrogance of the writers is to assume that most of the audience has remained obsessed with the storyline for years and years, rather than been worn down and bored by it, so they expect that everyone will recognise all the characters (even though some are played by different actors), remember all the key events and require zero assistance in trying to remember what on earth they're talking about. A lot of the time I was left thinking 'Who??? What???' The writers need to wake up and appreciate that they've lost plenty of viewers, and are on the verge of losing a whole lot more, and they need to re-engage them rather than just think they're all obsessive fans.
The Misfits (2021)
A horrible mess of a heist movie
It starts okay-ish: a very familiar, formulaic scenario, but tolerable for a Friday night sort of undemanding movie, with a decent cast and a good pace. Then, about twenty minutes in, it's as if they handed over the writing to some teenager. It gets progressively lazier, more incoherent and just plain dumb. Most of the characters aren't really developed at all, several of them do things that make no sense whatsoever, and as for the 'climax' - ye gods. A quite dreadful effort by all involved.