Category: movie

What I'm Watching: The Endless

The premise for this does not prepare you at all for what is to come, but perhaps the initial quote by H.P.Lovecraft will. On the surface, it's two escaped survivors of a Heaven's Gate-like cult, getting a videotape message and going back to the commune and finding old friends.

Then they see things in the sky and the water, and beyond the totem poles. Then they receive more messages. Then the truth of everything is revealed.

This is maybe the best strange tale I've ever seen as a movie.

The older brother's acting is wooden and fixed in a permanent blank stare and smirk, the younger one's a little better, the other characters are either stoic or insane, or underacting or overacting, but it's the story that drives this.

I don't like the final scene, there's too much closure and that's not what this story's about.

But you must absolutely watch this.

★★★★★

What I'm Watching: BoJack Horseman

If you think "a dumb cartoon about a horse?", no. This is maybe the best dramedy about depression, success, and failure ever made, live-action or animated (the other contender is Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is about the crushing weight of parental expectations told with giant mecha and alien angels at the end of the world).

Finally finished S4 and now all of S5.

S1 was a funny show about depression. Not all that coherent, still wandering between Simpsons gag format and long series drama.

S2 tries to cover up depression with work and success, and has an epic meltdown. The most coherent season so far, but the least fun. The one that hits closest to me.

S3 is the hangover after success, and then gets real fucking dark. But E4, "Fish Out of Water", is something everyone should see; you don't need a lot of context for it.

S4 spends a lot of time in flashbacks, especially to BoJack's mother who is awful. E7 "Underground", E8 "The Judge", and E12 "What Time Is It Right Now" are fantastic, though.

S5 has been more like S1, dramedy with no real point, Princess Carolyn's flashback and the eulogy both dragged on forever, but E8 "Mr Peanutbutter's Boos" 25 years of Halloween parties was perfect. The meta-show Philbert is a dead ringer for many of the crime dramas I watch.

There's long stretches of BoJack that I find almost intolerably dull, and start zipping ahead 30s at a time to see if the plot advances. I have my own family hangups, I can't be expected to care about BoJack's shitty family.

There's other times when it's the only show that's ever talked honestly about this stuff.

★☆☆☆☆ to ★★★★★ but averaging around ★★★★☆

What I'm Watching: Unforgiven

Up on Netflix, my 2nd favorite modern (well, you know, post-Spaghetti) western; Tombstone is 1st, obvs, guess Lonesome Dove is 3rd largely for the late, greatly missed Bob Urich.

So. This is more a character/actor study than a film with a plot as such.

Clint as Bill Munny does not really pass as the broke-down tired old farmer he's supposed to be at start. Looks like a guy you'd shoot first in self-defense. And he only gets meaner as it goes on. He does pass for desperate, though.

Morgan Freeman as Ned Logan doesn't want to be here. He's joining the party but there's no sense of desperation. He's got a happy life with his Indian wife, and Morgan was probably a billionaire already, fat and lazy.

The kid, Jaimz Woolvett, is more pathetic than anything. I see the appeal of being a gunslinger, but this fake it till you make it act is lame. And the actor's never made it big again since then.

The "cut up" whore, Anna Thompson, is mostly silent, and the cuts are almost invisible. In a time when half the population had smallpox scars, nobody'd think twice. Writing, makeup, and directing falls down spectacularly about her, and the rest of the whores are a Greek chorus to the madam who's driving this mess.

Gene Hackman as Little Bill, now, plays a spectacularly nasty son of a bitch. Doesn't seem corrupt, just got no sense of consequences to his inept actions. He likes power over people, imitates the kind of policing Wild Bill Hickok or Wyatt Earp did without understanding it.

The English Bob and Beauchamp episode's useful for setting Little Bill's character, and I like seeing Richard Harris take a beating for spouting off on monarchy as much as the next regicide-minded American, but it's kinda slow, tell-not-show, and at least one of the stories he tells is stolen directly from Wild Bill Hickok.

A while back I read Richard Matheson's Journal of the Gun Years, another fictional parallel to Wild Bill Hickok's life (Unforgiven's script is unrelated, dates back to the '70s & '80s, but Matheson published first). Like any Matheson book, it's more full of despair, horror, and sympathy and motivation for evil than any film can ever match. Unforgiven's portrait of Little Bill is no Clay Hauser, but it's not bad for a mere film where he's not even the protagonist.

The first two killings are miserable and hard. Most of the real gunslingers weren't assassins for this reason; they killed in self-defense, or drunk, or over cards or women, or hunting a legal bounty. This half-assed bounty from whores is some cold blooded shit, and they hurt for it as they should. "We all have it comin', kid."

The capture, crucifixion, & torture of Ned Logan would be a lot less racially charged if anyone else in this film was black. There were a lot of black cowboys and whores; even in Wyoming, it'd make a cattle town more plausible and this scene less… what it is.

And then the fucking apocalypse comes. It's fantastic; both in the sense of a great gunfight, and the kind of thing that never happened in the old days, but stories say did.

HD is not this film's friend. Shots are just blood squibs, no latex special effects let alone CGI (barely possible at the time). Rain machine rain is really terrible looking. One-armed deputy isn't as one-armed as he seems to be. Sigh.

I know there's a recent Japanese adaptation, which maybe I should see.

★★★★☆

"A known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."

What I'm Watching: Game Night

I was hoping for another The Game (not Fincher's best, but a good tricky movie). Instead we get the insecure lead couple, saccharine black couple, idiot & random date, and annoying brother, in a painfully obvious scenario. Occasionally funny, but so dumb. I am sad I paid a couple bucks to Redbox to watch this.
★★☆☆☆

What I'm Watching: Bosch

I watched S1 when it came out in 2014, was somewhat annoyed by the Hieronymus Bosch name gag (but the actor is named Titus Welliver, so… ludicrous historical names all around), all the jazz (not even music), and some of the inappropriate workplace relationship bothered me, but it was a competent murder show. Little scattered in plot, personal drama, and side-plots that go nowhere.

Picked back up S2 and now working thru S3, and I'm more interested. The jazz is sometimes overbearing, especially when smug asshole Bosch preaches about how great vinyl is, or how every restaurant he goes to is "best X in L.A.", he's a super punchable prick. He's like House or Sherlock Holmes without the genius or charm. As a villain, he'd be fantastic. As a protagonist, he's much less charming than Dexter Morgan or Walter White.

But J. Edgar the partner (Jamie Hector, aka Marlo Stanfield on The Wire) and other competently-acted characters (several also Wire alumni), and better plots and writing, make up for a lot.

S1's a cold case murder. S2 is more of an LA Confidential thing with a murdered porno producer and hot blonde wife named Veronica (not Lake) as a film noir femme fatale. S3 has a couple parallel veteran murder stories going on; I assume in the books these are Vietnam, there's something about how they're written that doesn't fit the desert war that never ends.

★★★½☆ solid but rarely amazing.

What I'm Watching: Ultraviolet (2017)

No, not the vampire movie, nor the shitty DRM video system. The Polish crime drama. It is all but impossible to search for a title like this.

A Buffy-like chick: blonde, vapid, argumentative, shitty family life, etc., except she's supposedly 30 instead of 16, is working as an Uber driver in Lódz, Poland, sees a girl thrown off a bridge. The cops call it a suicide, she disagrees, and starts investigating. Finds a quasi-secret society of "Ultra-Violets" (the explanation of the name is so ludicrous you have to watch to hear it) who hang out in a Slack with a purple backslash icon and solve murders while supposedly doing their real jobs.

Social media-solves-crime is not a bad premise for a show, even if mostly social media-causes-crime in reality, and the chat and screens are usually captioned well enough to make sense despite being in Polish.

Lódz really isn't grim enough for my "Grim Scandinavian Drama" taste, just a little run-down, not cheerful enough for it to be ironic like Death in Paradise. It's like setting a crime drama in Boise or Salt Lake City; death's a bit of a relief, but not an omnipresent gloom.

The acting's a problem. Buffy, er, Ola wavers from nonentity to annoying. The useful cop is barely present. There is less chemistry between them than between noble gasses in sealed glass jars. Mom's a crying stereotype. Older dude Henryk is not bad, he might be an actual actor. The dirty cop is either stoic or stoned. The "Ultra-Violets" (snicker) are only on-screen for a line or two at a time, mostly from behind.

If they got some acting lessons, this could be watchable; as it is, it's on the "occasional watch if I'm bored" list.
★★★☆☆

What I'm Watching: Jack Ryan

Back in the Good Old Days of the Cold War, I read the hell out of the original 3 Jack Ryan books, and I love the Harrison Ford movies, considerably less the Baffleck "Sum of All Fears". The spinoff pulp books and shitty videogames, far less so. Amazon's now got "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" on Prime, let's see.

Slow start, but obviously a War That Never Ends in Middle-East thing.

Blank-faced drone John Krasinski as Ryan is generically skilled, has war flashbacks while he stares emotionlessly at a ceiling, writes "SQL queries" that pop up graphical displays. He's like someone's shitty PC in Millennium's End RPG, and I don't believe from his walking meatstick "acting" that this Ryan has a PhD in Economics, or even a GED, or really more than a brainstem.

Wendell Pierce (the Bunk!) is promising, but he's playing a last-chance-don't-fuck-this-up bureaucrat section chief, nothing exciting yet.

After a bit, Ryan is Proved Right as in all Jack Ryan stories, and dragged into the field from a party for a rich asshole & his generically pretty but vapid blonde daughter.

Interrogation and the vaguely placed prison are, uh, unpleasant, but nobody's being tortured. Yet. Bombs and guns always get into these, and it's fine but very console-shooter: Indistinct action around a squad shooting aimlessly (because without mouse you can't aim).

It all seems competently produced, poorly acted, and written by very unimaginative frat boys who've played too much Tom Clancy's Rainbow Seven. Long-dead Tom Clancy is the only real writer on the show, and this is "ripped from the headlines" by some necrophiliacs last employed on garbage like Lost.

I'll probably do another couple eps to see if the Bunk does anything good, but I hold little hope unless they replace almost the entire cast and writing room.

★★☆☆☆

What I'm Watching: Star Wars the Last Jedi

In the "that took a long time" category, I finally hit play on SWTLJ in my Netflix queue. I've been disappointed in all the new ones, so I didn't expect to like this. I'm drinking cheap wine and not in a great mood, perfect.

SPOILING THE ENTIRE MOVIE STOP DO NOT CONTINUE UNLESS YOU DON'T CARE, WHICH IS TOTALLY REASONABLE. THIS SUCKS

Holy shit this starts dumb, with Poe crank-calling Hux. I thought that was a joke meme, but no, it's actually a scene with "Admiral Hugs" and "your mother" jokes. The single fighter vs giant starship point defenses thing is nonsense especially since they should have learned since the Death Star. The bombers have really shitty fire control systems, and then somehow are gravity-fed. In space. They're not missiles, they're "bombs" which drop "down". What is down? So stupid.

Old Man Luke is annoying, but he's doing the Yoda thing, so annoying is in character for once. That's the only plot- and character-consistent thing I see in this shitshow.

Drinking intensifies.

The long tail chase with the few Resistance and First Order ships, and the centralized command system they use where one shot can behead the fleet, is so stupid. Scatter the ships to the wind, with randomized meetup locations, and no amount of tracking will help. Everyone in here is an idiot; Finn's attempt to flee is the only sign of sanity.

Now let's zoom off to a sidequest at a casino, like I do in JRPGs; sure, sure, fate of the world, first I have to race and breed Chocobos. The casino should be fun, altho it looks too much like a modern Vegas casino. Instead it's preachy because Rose hates fun. Also there's no way these scruffy degenerates get into a classy casino with a dress code. Also nobody in this will be implanted with Ovion eggs, or have Cait Sith join their party, which is what they deserve.

The endless "psychic phone calls" between Rey and Kylo are like a teenage soap opera, and the low-tech camera cutting is awful. Can't be bothered to even project force ghosts in the scene? Actually, now that I think of it, there are very few scene wipes for transitions in this, which is why it feels so jarring. It's all hard cuts with no context. The director's incompetent.

Burning down the Jedi "library" is typically ham-fisted metaphor for Disney Star Wars burning all the Expanded Universe and classic Star Wars. They don't care, and the callow youts of today aren't capable of reading. Yoda drones on and on, which is not at all Yoda-like, but the writer's a moron and doesn't know or care.

The mutiny is terribly executed. Admiral Bligh, er, Holdo is incompetent, but Poe has no idea how to use handcuffs or a brig? Abandoning warships so you can hide, when the First Order fleet still has scanners, is moronic. Instead of all but 6 ships exploding, it really should be all.

Drinking intensifies.

Snoke's always been a bad ripoff of the Emperor, but at least the hologram in The Force Awakens left the possibility he'd be 1m like Yoda; nope, he's human-sized, and basically parrots the Emperor's lines from Return of the Jedi. The duel in the throne room isn't bad, not amazing but the only good, Star Wars-like content in this film so far.

The only characters with any chemistry in the entire movie are Poe and BB-8. In The Force Awakens, it looked like Poe and Finn were gonna hump right on camera; they barely look at each other here. Rose tries to pull off a relationship with Finn, but it's not there.

I look back at Star Wars, and the love quadrangle between Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie was amazing. They were junkies hooked on each other. Leia and Luke only meet once in this movie and it's a quick, tired goodbye. Chewie has some cameos (and a bizarre infestation of CGI animals) but is never around Leia, and then vanishes. R2-D2 and C-3PO also get one line together.

The CGI animals and rocks in multiple scenes are so awful, they make Lucas' "special editions" look tasteful. This isn't quite Star Wars Rebels level of shitty cartoon CGI, but it's bad, very inappropriate.

Luke's death is pointless, repetitive of Kenobi's duel with Vader, because the moron writer can't write anything new, only recycle. The Just For Men beard before that is preposterous, though (worse than fake-young CLU in TRON: Legacy, which at least A) was set in a videogame, and B) is a vastly better film than this).

I knew going in that this would be bad, Extruded Star Wars-Like Product, but holy fuck. It's one of the worst-written, worst-acted things I've seen in forever.

In The Last Star Wars Movie, I suggested terminating the franchise, but still ranked TLJ above the Prequels-Which-Don't-Exist. I may have overestimated this trash.

★☆☆☆☆ and may the Force not ever be with you, Rian Johnson.

What I'm Watching: Deadwind

It's that season again: Grim Scandinavian crime dramas with troubled detectives!

Deadwind has it all: A widowed detective returning to work too soon, a rookie partner, a dead woman half-buried in a beach, a real-estate company with shady dealings and a Lex Luthor-looking playboy/fixer. Finland is shot in moody lighting, always night, morning, evening (I think they said it's October? So no sunlight anyway). I love the sets, too, sterile white/black perfect surfaces, inside scruffy weatherbeaten houses. Nobody could live that neat, but it's perfect for mood.

Plot seems to move fast but this is a 12-ep season, with another being written, so expecting a lot more complexity.

★★★★★ so far

What I'm Watching: Disenchantment

The new Matt Groening cartoon, at long last! Surely after 4000 years of the Simpsons, and a few seasons of Futurama over the 30-some years it was on and off and on and off, has taught him how to craft a tightly-wound, kickass cartoon!

Imagine the Dark Ages. Imagine plague, filth, terrible rulership by inbred aristocrats, superstition, religious lunatics praying to gods who aren't there, conquest by savage barbarians… Oh, what fun. Well, it could be. If anyone wrote "jokes" for this.

There's a princess Bean, who apparently you're supposed to sympathize with, but she's loathsome, the kind of shitty inbred mass-murdering spoiled aristocrat you'd hate in real life. An Elf named Elfo, because why even bother trying to make a joke (they did name an elf who left Elfland "Leavo", which was almost funny… Then beat it into the ground with "Returno"). And a shadow demon "Luci"… ugh… which everyone agrees is her cat. Nobody has a personality, just a one-beat repetitive routine. Bean wants to get drunk. Elfo is a goody-goody who wants to date the princess, but of course never will. Luci says "evil" things like "get drunk". It's like a world made of the NPCs from a CRPG. They walk in circles saying one of a few recorded lines.

The plots are tedious and unoriginal, even by the standards of extruded cartoon product like Simpsons. There's an occasional fight, which would at least change this from boring to some kind of adventure show? But they're short, slow-paced, lot of talking in between the occasional axe swing.

In comparison, watch an episode of Berserk, and you'll see great art, giant swords cleaving people apart, a fairy sidekick who's not awful, in a world far darker than this but far funnier, too. I'm fairly eager to see Castlevania S2 on Oct 26. I'm still watching thru the Godzilla anime, which is dumb as hell but amuses me at least half the time.

With anything Groening touches, of course, we need to talk about sexism and racism, see the Problem With Apu. In this case, the boring fantasy kingdom shows male honkies in charge, a few black (or blue & froglike) people off to the side. Women other than Bean are entirely subservient, medieval European gender roles followed 100% up through S1E5. The black vizier is of course evil and perverted; like, how could you expect otherwise from Matt?

I'm disenchanted with Disenchantment. It might be the dullest thing I have ever seen. I would ask Netflix for my money back, but, you know, watching other stuff.

★☆☆☆☆