jimfarley1025

I spent a great deal of this movie shouting, "What?" at the screen. Sometimes because the writing had the British Army doing things that made no sense, but more often because the screenplay had the actors doing things that made no apparent sense. A British Army column has marched for days overland toward a fortress and, upon appearing to be overwhelmed the senior officer sounds "Retreat!" as if it meant something in that context. "What?" There's a lot of that.

Some actually good acting occurs throughout the movie. The cast does well with what they're given, so I'm granting a lot of stars for that. The director seems to be of the Chinese Medicine mindset that, if a little of something is good, then too much of it must be great. Actually, no. The screenplay is about an hour's worth of story packed into over two hours of screen time. The void is filled by overlong, overdramatic scenes and a great deal of truly annoying background "music" in the form of a meaningless, Adhan-like moaning that prompts me to also scream, "Shut up!" at the screen. A terrible waste of a good story and a good cast.

Totally predictable. Totally cheesy. Totally Stallone. Totally well done. You really have to be a nincompoop to not like this movie. If you come into this kind of premise expecting Shakespeare, you really are beyond worth explaining to. It really is well written for the genre and target audience. The movie hinges on the child actor who could easily have ruined it all, but instead did a fine, workmanlike job. Stallone is and is not what you expect as well. The. Pilou Asbæk does a very good job as the villain supported by Sophia Tatum, also doing a very good job. Good cinematography, not overly-CGI'd, and well directed. Worth the popcorn and root beer for sure.

Imagine you were someone who knew nothing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and you thought that this movie might shed a little light on the life of a man who is renowned in Christian intellectual circles. You would be sorely disappointed by this offering. The movie gives no account of Boenhoeffer's early life, he springs fully adult like Adam in the Garden. The movie also gives no real account of later life. It portrays a series of vignettes in which he is peripherally involved in events in Germany, a passive observer of tumultuous occurrences that might seem to be of importance if only we had some explanation of what they were, who was involved, and how they came to be. None of that. Bonhoeffer drifts along in the stream of occurrences until he is swept away to a Gestapo prison where he makes a poor attempt at fooling the bad guys and is eventually killed. Apparently, Bonhoeffer was an admirer of Gandhi. Well, there you go.

I gave it three stars because Robert Joy does a good job of portraying the Gestapo menace. His is the only character that has an obvious motive which is carried out as one would expect. Everyone else is a two-dimensional NPC, reacting as programmed for reasons that are not given and not apparent.

I suppose the title should have been warning enough, but I had hope that a documentary about sending robots to Mars would have a great deal of information about sending robots to Mars. I began to lose hope at the outset with the unnecessary CGI dramascape, but excused it as just a hopeful device to draw in more viewers. As the documentary began, I thought I detected the introduction to a story about the twin rovers and how their developments aligned and differed and how that led to increased usefulness and the eventual longevity of Opportunity. It did not take all too long though before I realized that this was just going to carry on as some sort of sappy Disney puppy story, completely bereft of any detail as to the design and engineering of the principal subject nor any of the peripheral, but vital challenges that were overcome to make the mission a success. Prime Video continues to disappoint with offerings of what could be fantastic entertainment ruined by absolutely terrible execution. Good Night Oppy follows in the tradition.

I made it halfway through episode three before finally calling it quits. I am a huge Stanley Tucci fan, so I hung on the hopes that the writing would somewhere improve to a point worthy of his talent. Unfortunately, there are several other really good actors in this as well and they are all delivering as well as can be expected, which is something to say when what they are asked to deliver is completely unbelievable nonsense. I am obviously not using unbelievable in the colloquial sense of wonderful, but in the literal sense of incomprehensible. The storyline seems to have been written by someone who knows nothing of either human nature or how the modern world works. Starting off with the scene of the thin-thing young tough on the train who is trying to intimidate a young woman who looks quite capable of giving him a good bounce, followed quickly by the nonsense of same skinny boy somehow intimidating yet another girl into handing him her phone, followed by the tough old broad pretending to video him on "facebook live" being some sort of threat, as if the whole world is tuned in to her facebook timeline. All of which might have been forgiven in service of setting up a story line, except that the endless parade of people acting unnaturally and doing things that make no physical as well as emotional sense just keeps piling up; non-sequitur upon that's-not-how-that-works, upon non-sequitur upon that's-not-how-that-works until one cannot hope to suspend disbelief with even a Herculean effort to do so.

Is there any writer, director, or creative person in the business today who has the professionalism and maturity to have their work edited by anyone with some knowledge of the things used in their work? How can anyone today be so unfamiliar with the internet, computers, and social networking even though they wish to use it as a main point in their tale? Steven Moffat might as well write about deep-sea lithium mining. He may have more knowledge of how that actually works.

Four stars for actors who deliver lines well, no matter how idiotic they really are.

A classic example of people needing to write about what they know and refrain from writing about what they know nothing about. I thought at first this was going to be animated because of the weird opening scene, but then it morphed into real acting. Real poor acting. Real poor acting by people with no feel for the characters they are trying to portray, reading words written by people with no feel for the era which they are trying to convey. Other than the uniforms, which are too clean and intact for a unit on Okinawa in the aftermath of the bloodiest battle in WWII, the actors do not look like Marines and they do not speak like Marines, and they do not act like Marines. I didn't last ten minutes in before I had to turn it off.

Like all of the modern retellings of WWII, the film makers fixate on the details at the expense of the reality. The costumes and makeup for this film are extraordinarily well done. The details of uniform and equipment would be remarkable if they were used to enhance a story that was equally concerned with the truth of human courage and suffering in war. The characters in the story are too shallow to support the incessant fear and shock they are displaying in the moments of crisis. We don't understand why they act as they do because we have no idea who they are. Especially egregious is the portrayal of the British Glider soldiers who completely fall apart when they are force down in the wrong place. I suppose one could make a believable story of such an instance, but it would require meticulous explanation because it goes completely against every true example of those men that we have from history. Such a group, in such an instance, as was demonstrated more than once, would have been much more likely to become even more tightly bound and fiercely heroic. Similarly the portrayal of the young Dutch Resistance man as a careless, foolish boy is practically a slander on the reality, which was a great many very young people who acted with old heads on their shoulders with gallantry and stoicism. All in all, a terrible waste of talent.

The opening scene of the questioning is nicely done and humorous. It's all downhill from there. Some very good acting from a great ensemble delivering some poorly written, tedious, overlong, drawn out, excessive, laborious, seemingly endless dialogue that ceases to further a coherent plot right after the first scene. It goes on and on, which wouldn't be so bad except that, of course it goes nowhere.

Ana de Armas is quite beautiful. It's almost worth the tedium to continue watching her do almost anything.

I lasted about thirteen minutes into this when they start playing some saccharine nonsense song that is supposed to evoke feelings of some sort that might be useful in a story that had focus and purpose, but instead is just another annoying intrusion that makes you wonder what is supposed to be going on in this film. The film cannot seem to decide if it is about Iris Chang, or her book. It would even have been good if it were about Iris Chang writing her book, but it's not that either. The confusion created by having footage of Iris speaking interspersed with footage of an actress doing things that are not clearly explained as supposing to be Iris doing those things really destroys the viewer's ability to follow along sensibly.

This is a terrible shame. A great disservice to Iris and her important work.

I agree with this being the slow season. Was there a writer's strike or something? Speed it up, will ya?

I really wanted to like this series. I love the premise. I was prepared for it to be historically off a bit, it's drama after all, a little license is allowed for some entertainment. What put me off the most was the characterization. The poor attempt at having people in the show speak like people of the period actually would was allowable; it's difficult to speak a foreign language, which the past really is. What's not allowable is to have the people acting in ways that would truly have been anathema to the period. The lack of honor in any of the characters except the caricature American General is completely off-putting. The character of Simcoe is a defamation. More than there historical inaccuracy though, is their completely unrealistic motivations and actions. No man or woman of the age would have thought to act as the characters in this show do. Even for modern sensibilities though, the characters act stupidly and do senseless things. It couldn't be more obvious that the writers have no conception of the people in their characters; they are all just stupid Punch and Judy puppets whacking each other over the head all the time.

Finally, but not least is the constant dark screen. Yes, we understand that some of the action is happening at night, in the dark, in secret. We don't need you to actually black out the screen most of the time to get the point across. It's a visual medium - show us what's happening. Otherwise, do a radio show.

I've lasted not-quite forty minutes into the first episode, but mostly because I'm doing laundry, so I'm too busy to turn it off and look for something else. The over-extended, boring Gabriel Byrne intro-narration was my first indication that this show was going nowhere, slowly. Then, the when-is-something-going-to-happen-to-engage-my-interest Caibresi segment confirmed that there was just going to continue to be a lot of mood music while people about whom I know nothing do things that aren't interesting to me. Follow that up with the Mexicans running around randomly with occasional gunfire and I understand that this is definitely going nowhere slowly - very slowly.

Somebody needs to wake up modern film makers. Story. Story. You need to have a story. Oh, and stories are about people. We need to meet the people and we need to find a reason to be interested in their - wait for it - story.

A more apt warning has never been given. What sort of moronic hubris must you have to think that you are going to adapt Dickens? I didn't watch more than half an hour of this nonsense before turning it off. What is it about modern "education" that makes so many people suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect?

This is a quirky series, I get that. Some of the episodes are better than others. So far, all of the episodes are better than this one. Probably because it focuses so heavily on a guy who just cannot act. Every line is delivered as if he's reading it off a teleprompter for the first time ever, which may be true. He's not good in Spanish, but he's much more wooden in English. His lack of acting just drags the episode down. Might it have been good with an actual actor? It's difficult to know.

I'm giving this one-star in part to counter-balance the unrealistic 10/10 reviews that are padding this show upward. If it weren't for all of those, I would have given a another star each for the set designer and for Alex Borstein, who appeared to be the only actor on screen. My wife and I watched maybe-twenty minutes of this. We weren't sure if it was supposed to be drama or comedy and am still not quite sure which way it was going. At any rate, people who do period pieces should really have to know something about the period. As L.P. Hartley wrote, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." The writers of this show need to commit that line to heart. Incidentally, she's a pretty girl, but obviously not Jewish (nor a New Yorker) in so many ways. It wouldn't be so much of a distraction if she weren't the main character.

I feel compelled to write a review to help counter all of the foolish reviews of this series. I began episode one by agreeing with all of the people upset with the a-historicity of the show. Fortunately, they put it right up front so that you don't waste too much time worrying that they're historically illiterate and, unless you are the title of a Jethro Tull song, you soon realize that they are just using setting and character types to shorthand a fantasy story with some familiarity so that the writers don't have to waste a lot of time building up their fantasy world.

The key to this series, as it is for all entertainment are the characters and the human interaction. The characters, once you take time to notice them are excellent and the acting is wonderful overall. It is a rollicking good story and I hope there will be a season two and more because I'm eagerly awaiting it. Refer to "basilisksamuk" for anything else I might want to say about this except that the interactions between Nikolaj Lie Kass and Eleanor Worthington-Cox make it all worthwhile. Just good fun.

I should have looked to see who the writer and director of this was before watching. Had I known that "In Bruges" wrote and directed this as well, I might have avoided it, or at least gone in with no expectations. Perhaps then I would also have been less surpristed by the weird feel of the characters which is explained by the writer's ignorance of the sort of people he is trying to portray. The overall concept of the film is good, but almost every element of it is poorly executed. I'm somewhat puzzled that none of the actors, especially Frances McDormand did not review their dialogue and protest that their characters were stilted and not quite right, kind of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers imitations of real people. Overall, it was a waste of an extraordinary ensemble cast, especially the principals, McDormand and Rockwell who each do a very good job with the material they were given, but also a waste of Peter Dinklage who seemed to be there just to be the midget, and Clarke Peters who had basically nothing to do. I'm not a prude for language, but the use of it in this movie reminded me of the anecdote about Mark Twain responding to his wife's attempt to shame him with a stream of vulgarity, saying, "You have the notes, but you just ain't got the music." The violence was completely out of kilter also because the director never adequately set a tone to the movie. Was the violence supposed to be comic, and that is why nobody gets arrested, or was it supposed to be realistic and the characters in the show are really that stupid? It's impossible to understand during the course of the film. One starts out very much wanting to be sympathetic with McDormand's character and then, in desperation with any character in the movie, but to no avail. Each of the main characters turn out to be execrable, unsympathetic people with no consistent human pathos. The final "villain" character is nothing more than a tremendous plot hole so deep and dense that he is a veritable black hole that sucks all suspension of disbelief down into an alternate universe, leaving one wishing that another choice of movie had been made.

I give it three stars because the actors all acted and the images made it to film okay. Other than that, I sincerely wish the movie had never been made.

Reviewing this series really should mean reviewing each season distinctly, but I'm too lazy for that and my overall for each would be equivalent anyway. Each Fargo season is an original story, well written and superbly acted. I found myself intrigued at each beginning and sad that it was over at each conclusion. Each story is nicely eccentric in the mold of the namesake, yet not at all derivative. All of the protagonists and antagonists are engaging, fascinating, and fun to watch. Extraordinary work. Just excellent. I can't wait for them to make another season.

I really wanted to like this because I really like Helen McRory's work in everything I've seen her in to date. Her acting is excellent in this as well, but that can't save a facile story line people with shallow characters and littered with plot holes. It's the sort of story line where you quickly find yourself rooting against the protagonists and laughing at what are supposed to be the moments of intrigue. It's very sad for everyone involved.

This is too sad. I tried this out with high expectations because I like Tim Roth. The opening scene was the big clue though; the annoying little "I have to wee wee" boy as Tim pumps gas in rural Alberta when, out of nowhere the assassin appears at a random, apparently deserted but still functioning gas station that nobody had any reason to expect that Tim's character would have stopped at. The scene, repeated as the ultimate portion of episode one makes even less sense in context than it did out of context. The whole base story line is a continuing series of nonsensical plot points that all beg unanswerable questions. By the end of episode one, it is obvious that this is going nowhere fast. Too sad.

This movie is long and tedious, unnecessarily dark (as in unlit, not as in foreboding), and nearly completely devoid of compelling motive. As you watch it, you get the sense that the writers have decided to dramatize much of the actual story and that there are really, really important things missing. I read the Wikipedia entry for Percy Fawcett and, it turns out that they've taken what should have been an exceedingly interesting story and ruined it because they didn't understand what they were working with. What was Fawcett's underlying drive in life? How is it that a man can be motivated to attempt such an arduous and probably fatal task not once, but four times? There's an answer and it is given in one three-second throw away portion early in the film, then ultimately ignored. The real Percy Fawcett was a much more interesting and involved story than what is portrayed in this film. What a sad waste.

I think we lasted through about fifteen minutes of the first episode. The writing is so poor that it doesn't rise to the level of laughable. The characters' speech is literally unbelievable for the time period as are their actions. Perhaps I would have lasted longer if I knew absolutely nothing of history, but I doubt it. Even without the jarring anti-historicity of the characters and their actions, if I imagined the show to be something like a fantasy story based in another universe that resembled Britain and Canada of the Napoleonic era, the story beginning was trite and boring, the characters unengaging, most of the acting ham-handed and silly. So, all in all it was a wasted fifteen minutes.

I started to watch this for something to have on while waiting for football to start. I stayed to finish it because I was fascinated at just how awful the story was and wondered if, at any point there was going to be an attempt at elevation of the story, but no, nothing, never. It's been quite some time since I felt compelled to write a review on IMDb, but when I saw the overwhelmingly positive reviews of this film, I felt duty bound to add balance. Apparently, the director/writer of this film is of the opinion that complete ignorance of a topic shouldn't stand in the way of you making a story about it; not ignorance of the history of WWII or feudal Japan, ignorance of Catholic catechism, or even ignorance of human nature and cognition. None of these things stood in the way of the creation of this truly unbelievable story; and by unbelievable, I mean literally not-believable. Had I desired to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story, which should be the desire of the film maker, this movie continually destroys that suspense through one glaring display of ignorance after another.

In addition to the flaming historical ignorance that composes the plot elements of this movie, there is a complete lack of character development and a story line so facile I must believe that it was conceived by an eight-grader. The most amazing element of this film is that so many high-quality actors devoted the minutes it took them to phone in a basic performance. The child actors were actually better than one often gets, but with such facile material to work with, it's difficult to credit their performances with any redeeming value.

We watched this on the recommendation of a friend's teenage daughter who, fortunately loaned us the DVD so that we have no financial investment in this at all. I've loved many a Ridley Scott movie and was prepared to forgive him the descent into "3D" because I assumed that there would be some fine scenery and an entertaining story.

First, let me say that the costume and set design are first rate. Absolutely what I expected and hoped for with Mr. Scott having a basically unlimited budget. Visually, a very entertaining movie with no overwrought "for 3D" effects, or at least none that were too glaring. Of course, after about half-way through the file I pretty much stopped paying attention, so there might have been something towards the end that wasn't good; I wouldn't know.

As to the acting of the movie; what a waste of some very talented people. The writing was so awful and the characters so shallow that it would have been difficult for even these talented people to shine. Most of the cast seemed to be at home in the shallow depth of the flat characters presented in the story. More's the pity for them. The promise of any excellence in acting is not possible given the poor dialog, vapid story-line and constant switching from one distraction to the next as the movie (I wouldn't say story) progresses.

The story line was non-existent. The outline of a possible idea for a story seemed to be about all there was. The outline was stuffed with one stupidity after another. When the characters pronounce otherwise earth-like atmosphere to be toxic because of 3% CO2, I had my first over-suspending of disbelief. Then followed one after another as the characters performed a never ending series of literally unbelievable actions, most of which in addition seemed rather random and disconnected from the main story outline.

What an awful disappointment. I really expected better of Ridley Scott. It seems a terrible shame that there is apparently an inverse ratio between the expanse of visual possibilities in film and the depth of the stories presented. Imagine how wonderful a good story might be if it were enhanced with some beautiful surroundings.

This film solidly portrays a very sad subject. The technical aspects are excellent. The camera work is great, the acting is professional, and the story is probably as tight and relevant as it can be. Ed Harris has done a first class job in capturing and expressing the essence of the thing. The problem is the thing itself, Jackson Pollock the man, his work, and life.

Jackson Pollock is presented as the quintessential artist debilitated by alcoholism and a burning talent. Perhaps his alcoholism is a damper to the intensity of his artistic vision which burns too brightly or, perhaps there is a hint of childhood difficulty, parental abuse or indifference which is never actually revealed in the movie. A cursory study of Pollock's real life shows the reason it is never revealed is because it doesn't exist. Pollock was, if anything, a well indulged child who perhaps resented his lack of struggle. The film incidentally displays that Pollock was an alcoholic for the simple reason that he lacked self-control and had no desire and no incentive to mature. We see his alcoholic rants initiated by something that discomfits his comfortable life in some small way. Some act of people in his life expressing or acting an independent will triggers an infantile cry from the drunkard, a whining insistence that everyone must his will, not their own. In one scene a drunken Pollock is riding his bicycle to his house, balancing a case of beer bottles between the handlebars while simultaneously attempting to drink one. He is distracted by a passing vehicle, loses his precarious balance and falls to the destruction of the entire case. I suppose that Mr. Harris was trying to create a metaphor of Pollock's life in this scene and, as with the film in total, he accidentally succeeded. He meant us to see a tragic figure losing control of a precariously balanced life, but instead we see a stupid man come to the logical conclusion of a juvenile misadventure.

Along with the man is his art. Many people observe the Pollock's work and don't like it. They keep their negative opinion to themselves while assured by others that his works are significant and deep and therefore difficult to fathom except by highly educated initiates with keener insight and greater knowledge. This movie does a masterful job of revealing how pointless and stupid Pollock's work actually is. We are treated to representations of his manner and method of creation. At first he squiggles brush strokes onto canvas without pattern or purpose until he creates a confused tangle of squiggles and stripes of discordant colors. Then, one day, in a flash of accidental inspiration he discovers that brushing the paint on is a waste of time – he can dribble and splash a confused tangle of splashes and splotches much more efficiently than with a brush. Voila! Genius – or perhaps the opposite, depending upon your viewpoint.

Pollock is supported by his long-suffering wife, portrayed convincingly by Marcia Gay Harden and his sponsor, Peggy Guggenheim, portrayed equally well by Amy Madigan along with a host of other characters including his mother, brothers, sycophantic art critics and colleagues. One wonders all the more at his own supposed "suffering" as he lives the free ride, consistently supported monetarily and nurtured emotionally by a host of women and effeminate males who ooh and ahh at his every incontinence and endure his childish abuse slavishly. This story goes on for two long hours until we finally get to the end where the drunken narcissist drives himself and an innocent victim to their senseless, violent deaths, along with his mistress, who survived by sheer chance.

Before I saw this film I knew that I didn't like Pollock's work. Having seen this film I know that I don't like Pollock himself either. How sad for us all.