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Reviews
A Man in Full (2024)
Bad story, terrible acting, billionaire with zero smarts
Where to start with this terrible show? My immediate reaction to Jeff Daniel's, who has always been terrific, was what happened! He's awful. Then I kept waiting for signs of a billionaire who was savvy, calculating, manipulative....what a billionaire has to have to be a billionaire. All I got was stupidity, dullness, and a very boring script. Add in "black man good, white man bad" and you've got a cookie cutter formula for a series. I also kept wondering what was the motivation for the banker seething toward Daniel's character? Did I miss it? Fall asleep? It was central to the story.
Admission: I stopped watching before the last two episodes. Just couldn't take it anymore. I simply did not care what happened to the people. Sadly, when I asked my wife what happened, she could hardly remember. That says it all.
Oppenheimer (2023)
Tedious on several levels
What has been negatively written before is mostly accurate, so I will concentrate on my greatest annoyances.
Sound editing. When the background music is so loud and obnoxious (drum beats especially) that you can't hear the actors speak, the sound editor must not have been paying attention. An occasional scene like this is okay, but a movie full of scenes where the dialogue is overshadowed is not. Almost the entire movie had the music volume way too high during quiet dialogue. This is a trend in movies and tv and needs to stop. The actors and dialogue are the stars; music is an enhancement. Or, in this case, a very serious distraction.
Film editing. At its most basic, this is a linear story, easy to understand. But the director opts for continuous cuts to the past or future, destroying the current scene and losing the audience's concentration. Why should I have to work so hard to keep all the pieces together due to the unrelenting flashbacks and flash forwards? It end up being a mess. Tedious. It is a straight forward story. Keep it simple. Why did Nolan make it so complicated to follow?
Length. The actual film is about 2 hours and 45 minutes, followed by about 15 minutes of credits. The length didn't bother me, but I felt tighter editing would have helped. The film felt a little sloppy.
Performances were great. Story was great. Costumes and period pieces were super too.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Tedious
In a nutshell:
Car chase would never end. Tedious
Plot ridiculous. So many plot turns you finally give up.
Scene at beginning where all the players get cryptic, short sentences. No one could stream together a paragraph of dialogue?
How many villains were there? I lost count and stopped caring. Who is doing what to whom?
Train scene: see car chase comment.
Women were super good at fighting every bad guy there was. But uh oh, couldn't beat the middle aged slow villain.
Dead come back alive to save hero. Obviously writers boxed themselves into a corner.
Editing. Do they know the definition? Long movie and repetitive.
And the famous scene of riding off a cliff and opening a parachute....done 30 years or so ago in James Bobd movie. Except skis were used.
The Baker and the Beauty (2020)
I am Smitten
I am in love, smitten. I told my wife I am divorcing her if Noa Hamilton/Natalie Kelly will have me. My wonderful wife said okay. So, is there a chance for us Natalie? Could you fall in love with me? There have been other love affairs between a 74 year old man and a young woman. Okay, guess not for me as I don't have billions.
Enough fun. Seriously, there is so much to love about this show, so let me begin. I love that it is about people who are trying to live good lives. No shoot'em up, no spies, no secret agents, no drug lords, etc. There are no "bad guys". Just ordinary people trying to get by. Refreshing. Next, I have always loved good writing. This has some excellent writing and only slips occasionally to make the plot line work. I can forgive this as overall it has some great lines. Next is the acting. Noa comes off as believable to me, trying to find her real identity. All the other actors are excellent too. I find that when I like the characters, if the story is half way decent, I love the show. Here,
all the characters prove endearing. I'm usually very good at predicting where a story will go, but the writers fooled me.... I love being fooled because it is such a total surprise. Sets and costumes are spot on. Show makes Miami look better than it really is, but who cares? It films spectacularly.
I just read where the show was canceled. So sad. It's really hard to find anything decent on Netflix, or television for that matter. This show was a winner. How do I know? Because I hate multi-part television, chapter after chapter, but we watched all 9 episodes in two evenings. That's true love!
The Irregulars (2021)
Zero is a more accurate rating
I forced myself to create an IMDb account in order to rate this movie. Everything is bad. Everything. I have read all the Holmes stories multiple times, seen all the shows, and hoped this would really be about the irregulars, street urchins who provided information to Holmes.
The author must have been on crack to write this drivel. If you are trying to capitalize on the Holmes name, at least be true to the times and essence of the stories. He ignored everything in the stories and just used the irregulars as a way to bring in Holmes fans.
Where to begin? The urchins probably hovered around the age of 12, not 17. They were a network of youths, not four. Sex was not part of the story. Dr. Watson had nothing to do with them for the most part; it was all Holmes. The series strives for the proper race balance: Asian, black, white, and another that I'm not sure where they fit in. Diversity isn't the problem. It's the striving for political correctness at the expense of the story.
There is more but why bother. I forced myself to finish episode one. There won't be an episode two for me. Bad story, bad writing (too much to go into here), terrible acting, people look too clean for circumstances, urchins are too well read, on and on and on. Oh, I did like the ravens! Should have killed all the cast and saved us this disaster of a series.