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Snowy River: The McGregor Saga (1994)
as As a series this program has far too many loose ends and inconsistencies.
Half the rated reviews are 10 stars and half are 8.
I must be missing something.
The show certainly had potential (did it inspire "Yellowstone"?), but the writing is awful.
Almost every episode is inconsistent with what had happened previously, and the individual characters change their personality to suit the current episode's plot.
It's like there was no "show bible" for the series, and each episode's scriptwriter (and there were many) based their writing on the initial description of the series.
In one episode Danni sees the race as scary and dangerous, and warns people not to enter the annual race. She seems to have forgotten that in an earlier episode, she had disguised herself as a man and entered the race (and won!).
Some characters are bad guys in one episode and good guys in another, with the other characters completely oblivious to their past behaviour.
One female character doesn't even own a dress, but in later episodes she almost always wears one.
The dog "Patch" gets replaced by a completely different colour dog, as if the director (and there were many) had never seen any previous episodes.
Bringing rail service to town is a major part of the plot in one season, yet in a later episode the plot involves a rotting abandoned rail bridge.
People start new jobs without the loss of their previous job affecting anything. Both the publisher and the editor of the local newspaper (which has no other staff) leave, but somehow the town still has a paper.
All of the McGregors continually find new major activities and commitments (taking over the newspaper, buying a livery stable, becoming a teacher), but whatever it was they used to spend their time doing no longer matters.
New characters appear then disappear without any reason (other than to meet the requirements of one or two episodes).
A family of Ukrainian refugees buys the local general store and after some initial difficulties they are eventually welcomed by the whole community. But having served their purpose for that one episode, they are never seen again, and a different person is running the store.
Old characters disappear and may or may not return dozens of episodes later. Other characters are left in limbo.
One main character takes a vacation to Ireland, her husband occasionally mentions her, but it's mostly like she had never existed.
Another main character gets lost in the desert, and remains prominently in the opening credits for the entire next season, but nothing.
Individual episodes might be worth watching, but as a series this program has far too many loose ends and inconsistencies.
The Bannocking (2023)
If you don't like the beginning, give up, it only gets worse.
There are some shows that leave you unsure about whether they are good or bad, right up until the last few minutes, and it's the ending that determines whether they are great or awful.
This was not one of them; its first few minutes were more than enough to know it was going to be awful.
The characters are irresponsible, unreliable, and never follow through with anything they start.
There was no one I could identify with, understand, or even care about.
They continually start to do things, with no apparent motivation, and don't seem to be bothered by each other's senseless behaviour.
The plot seems to consist of building on this situation, getting more and more pointless as the show progresses.
The ending is a welcome relief, not because it explains what has happened, or because it makes any kind of sense, but simply because it means it's over.
Sea Patrol: Red Sky Morning (2009)
A non-canonical Halloween Special, but in December?
Some TV programs (especially "The Simpsons") sometimes present non-canonical Halloween specials.
This episode was just like a standard teen splatter movie, where instead of everyone staying together, the next victim would wonder off on their own, and surprise!
And as usual, people with guns use them, except when there is actually someone to shoot at.
And of course you can guess what happens after the evil monster is finally killed.
This episode certainly felt like one of them, but I see that it was released in December, not October.
I can't imagine what they were thinking when they wrote this.
Wielka woda (2022)
Good, except for a couple of annoying things.
Typical Hollywood movies tie everything up nicely at the end.
But some movies leave one guessing about a few things, and being left wondering about what happens next often makes a great movie.
Days after seeing the last episode, the main thing in my memory about the series is the unanswered question of "what happened to the ...?".
Unfortunately that is for a totally irrelevant detail, not for something intellectually or emotionally interesting.
The writers of this series obviously never heard of Tolstoy's gun, and the series needlessly suffers for the resulting frustration.
The other annoying thing is the way Netflix has been labelling languages in the subtitles lately. When people switch to speaking French or English or German, the subtitle begins with "{French}" etc., but when they revert to the prevalent language of the rest of the production, the subtitle says "{English}", not "{Polish}". This is very confusing and annoying.
But if you can handle such things better than I can, it's worth watching.
Résistance (2014)
Great production, awful script.
Given the excellent reviews this series has received, I must be missing something.
Yes, the production values were good, but the script was terrible.
For the first few episodes I kept wondering whether the writers were deliberately making the resistance workers seem incompetent, but eventually I realized that it was the writers themselves that must have lost contact with reality.
Some of the ignorance was simply a lack of research (e.g. even a casual look on Wikipedia would show that rather than exploding, Molotov cocktails work by spreading burning gasoline when the glass container shatters, but the characters simply rolled the bottle under a truck without even attempting to break it.
Similarly, hand grenades have a lever that, when released, automatically opens and starts a timed fuse, but the characters were told to count to three *before* releasing the lever).
By far though, the worst writing was the way the characters would continually tell each other what they and others had done and were going to be doing.
It seemed like they were trying really hard to ensure that no matter which one of them got caught, that person would know all the secrets of the whole organization.
Can you imagine in real life someone telling you something like "Joe Smith is going to meet Herman Perkins, the secret head of the resistance, tomorrow at noon at Granny's Café so they can discuss the border tunnel they're digging in Smallville"? That conversation wouldn't have been out of place in this program.
No underground organization could work like that, at least not for long.
If someone doesn't need to know something, they shouldn't.
Gyeongseonghakgyo: Sarajin sonyeodeul (2015)
Can be confusing to viewers, especially those that haven't watched a lot of Korean films.
It was perhaps a good film, but its style was a bit confusing. Individual scenes were suddenly cut off for no apparent reason, with the missing part shown much later in flash-back.
And unless you have a lot of friends or acquaintances that are oriental you might have trouble keeping track of the characters. (The old "they all look alike" cliché.)
For an OWM (old white male) like me, it especially didn't help that not only did most of the characters look very similar, they all wore identical clothing. The scenes that were fast paced didn't give me enough time to figure out who is who.
Just to make it worse, each character had two different names (their real name and their school name), and to top it off, one of the names was used for two different characters.
Being able to recognize the difference between Korean and Japanese might help too.
I suspect I'd like it better if I watched it a second time.
Beyond Valkyrie: Dawn of the 4th Reich (2016)
Movie might be far-fetched, but the premise isn't.
Some people have commented that the Roman Church helping the Nazis is unbelievable
It isn't. Here are a couple of excerpts from https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II_aftermath)
-- Spain, not Rome, was the "first center of ratline activity that facilitated the escape of Nazi fascists," although the exodus itself was planned within the Vatican.
-- By 1946, there were hundreds of war criminals in Spain, and thousands of former Nazis and fascists. According to then-United States Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Vatican cooperation in turning over these "asylum-seekers" was "negligible". According to Phayer, Pius XII "preferred to see fascist war criminals on board ships sailing to the New World rather than seeing them rotting in POW camps in zonal Germany
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)
The ending is a surprise, but not in a good way.
The only spoiler here is with respect to this film's genre.
The first 95% of the film is a good psychological thriller, but without warning it suddenly becomes supernatural horror at the end.
That makes a really bad ending for a psychological thriller, and a not so great everything else for a supernatural horror film.
Rise of the Zombies (2012)
The second part of a trilogy, but there are no first and third parts.
When this film first started, I thought that it must be a sequel to some other film that had ended with a group of hopeful people escaping in a car. When it ended, I was left feeling that it needed a further sequel.
I.e. it's the usual standard semi-boring second part of a trilogy, the one that continues the story from the first part and sets things up for the third part. Unfortunately (or perhaps not), the first and third parts don't exist.
As others have said, and will say: a few good actors, a lot of bad script. There's no real MacGuffin, and even when something looks like one, it changes to something else.