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The Alienist (2018)
Standard work with nice settings (Season 1)
The subject and the settings are interesting, the scenery and costumes intriguing. The story arc is the standard three act with complications, so typical of most contemporary series. The character and profession of John Moore (Luke Evans) the illustrator could have been developed more: being an artist in portraying, his POV could have been different than all other characters. Sarah Howard (Dakota Fanning) is not as strong a character as one would expect her to be as the first woman employed in the NYPD. Knowing Daniel Brühl from German movies, I found him miscast for the role of the alienist: he is better suited for more introspective roles. I liked very much how Ted Levine impersonated the old police chief, using facial expressions that seem to come out from old silent movies.
The major disappointment of the movie is the number of false tracks disseminated in the first half for the mere purpose of making ten episodes, but this is a common practice nowadays.
Clickbait (2021)
I feel for the actors
I feel sorry for the good actors because the story is ridiculously far from reality. It seems that the main trend nowadays is to be able to sell 6 hours of video by providing twists and false tracks at each episode than to tell a realistic story to which one can relate. To do this, the last twist is the most ridiculous one. In this case, somebody with no criminal record and a perfectly normal life becomes a psychopath. Yes, the twist is guaranteed, because nobody make this assumption. But nobody can make this assumption because it is plain absurd. I give it 5/10 for the good actors. Hopefully they will find a way to more serious productions.
Salamander (2012)
Does not make sense
*** Warning: major spoilers ahead ***
I have just finished watching the first season and I am not going to see the second one. The series is intriguing at the beginning but soon becomes predictable and cannot keep up the interest. The characters commit silly errors that are clearly fabricated by the authors to stretch the plot by inserting artificial adversities. Nevertheless the show would still be worth 6/10 if it were not for the ending. * SPOILER * This is one of those endings that makes you wonder why the fuss of all previous episodes and whether it has been written by another author who did not care to read the script of the first 11 episodes. Up to the last 15 min of the show you will have witnessed a complex scheme to steal documents from the safes of a bank and use them to blackmail many Belgian VIPs, from politicians to entrepreneurs. Then you learn that the heist is masterminded by a man who wants to revenge his father's assassination, which occurred during WW2 by the hand of the father of a present-day banker. He goes a long way to accomplish this, by hiring a gang of criminals and letting them send the stolen documents to scare the VIPs, who are associates of the banker in a secret society. Some of them are so terrorized by the scandal that they immediately commit suicide. This goes on until the last 15 min of the last episode, when the guy someway decides that this is enough so he enters the office of the banker and just shoots him. So the question while the closing credits appear is: why did he not just kill the villain 15 min into episode 1.
The Ice Storm (1997)
The bigger chill
I haven't read the novel "The Ice Storm" is based on and I therefore cannot say if the cold atmosphere that permeates this movie is a mimetic tribute to the source. I am familiar with many Ang Lee's movies but this one is different, and IMHO not for the better. Most of the time the different actors look alike, as if they were following one single reference character, one emotionless and uncritical puppet, incapable of both common sense and ethical judgement due to the lack of feelings. Only Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline deliver some subtle deviations from this baseline but in general the movie reduces to a cold intellectual play of shadows. The characters do not connect between each other and the audience, and fatally the twist at the end cannot change the surrealistic and comedic mood of the film.
A Quiet Place (2018)
Did I just watch the same movie that has 80+ on Metascore?
I feel compelled to write my first review on IMDB by the unbelievable gap between my perception about the value of this movie and its Metascore. I usually rely on Metascore to fill my watchlist, but how this crap got 80+ points and no single negative professional review is a mistery to me.
I must admit that the script managed to bias my expectation for the worse after just 5 min into the movie and then lost me completely 5 min later. The way the parents lose their youngest dughter by letting her walk unwatched 300 ft behind them told me everything about this movie after the first 10 min.
Still I decided to watch it through by fast-forwarding the lenghty silent scenes and stopping at the action parts. The script is an iteration of the same narrative mechanism: 1) the family try to live in a normal fashion except they do not have to make aby sound, 2) somebody makes inadvertently a noise, 3) the creatures come.
The creatures weakness discovered by the family at the end of the movie (good 1/2 hour after it has become clear to any viewer) is so obvious that in no possible way it could have gone unobserved by scientists and even normal people around the world long before the creatures exterminated its population.
The only positive note is that I managed to watch this crap in around 30 min by compressing it to the salient scenes without losing any detail of the boring "quiet" parts.