tjpierce-84253 Reviews

Moonfall (2022)

Amazing spectacle

[10/10 · 7 February 2022]

Nutty fun with some of the most amazing spectacle ever put on film. It really should be seen on a huge theatre screen.

But here's my problem, and the reason I voted it a 10 when I otherwise would have given it an 8: who are all these churls voting 1? My best guess is that they're (mostly) evangelicals whose preacher got up one Sunday morning and condemned the movie for proposing an alternate origin for our world and us that doesn't include their invisible sky wizard. Yes, it's a fanciful sci-fi origin story but it's more likely than the superstitious nonsense they believe.

Heaven (II) (2020)

Delusion

[1/10 · 21 January 2021]

Set between delusion (heaven) and reality (uh, reality), the story follows a man who flips out after a loved one dies of cancer and imagines himself in heaven. Yes, it's another Jesus movie to torture the children of evangelicals who drag them to these awful concoctions instead of taking them to see Spiderman or something actually, like, entertaining. But, I mean, can you imagine spending eternity around a bunch of Southern Baptists? You'd be trying to find out if you could get to another level of dead.

Perry Mason (2020–2023)

Not Perry Mason! It's SO much better.

[10/10 · 16 July 2020]

If you want a stuffed-shirt, formulaic snooze fest, watch the old TV series. If you want some gristy, entertaining noir that rakes over some of LAs old scandals, watch this. The Fatty Arbuckle sequence is hilarious.

Brown Paper Bag (2019)

Misses the mark

[5/10 · 10 April 2020]

The film has the earmarks of a vanity project. In his eagerness to catalog the indignities suffered by blacks in the Hollywood of 1942, the writer/director/producer has neglected to include a compelling storyline or characters with depth and unmuddled motivations. He needs to realize that the audience that seeks out a movie focused on black America is already aware of our sorry history and feels patronized by such heavy handedness. The ones who might need that sermon won't be watching the movie in any case. Walter Mosley shoehorns alot of social awareness into his stories, but the plots and characters keep us riveted.

The writing in several scenes is tone-deaf and cringe-inducing, such as the one where the starlet's lover has been fatally shotgunned and our hero, Archie, is dancing about with excitement in anticipation of the studio boss rewarding him with a movie part, seemingly unaware of her distress. That should never have made the cut.

His direction is subpar as well, with performances that often seem embellished and pointlessly busy while lacking in specificity and clear intention. Maybe the actors just needed a couple more takes or some deft adjustments, but they didn't get them.

The acting is a mixed bag. The lead has some really good moments and others where he seems vague or doesn't seem to mean what he's saying. Some of the supporting performances are right on the money, others not some much. But as Spike Lee has said, it's the director's fault if a bad performance reaches the screen. He needs to keep going until he gets a good one.

Technically, the movie's sound makes it into professional territory, though some of the vocal performances occasionally sound under-miked. On the other hand, the photography and look of the film are outstanding, first-rate.

Goliath (2016–2021)

Season 2: Evil Triumphs Utterly

[10/10 · 9 August 2019]

Remember the movie Funny Games, where audience expectations about the underdog victims of a home invasion overcoming their captors are sadistically frustrated at every turn and the entire family is murdered one by one? That's pretty much how Season 2 of Goliath unfolds: the cartel and its evil femme fatale play Billy McBride for a romantic fool whilst killing his totally innocent young client, the client's parents, witnesses who may exonerate him, and anyone else who is involved and whose silence is uncertain. The End.

What's annoying is, most of the reversals come in the last three episodes, after plucky Billy seems to be making headway toward saving his unjustly accused client. Do bad guys triumph in real life? Certainly--look at the criminal dirtbag who's sitting in the Oval Office in 2019. But I don't seek out fiction that rubs my nose in that ugly truth; I have the daily.news for that. And, frankly, after the heavies forced the boy to scrawl a suicide note on a jail rec room chalk board admitting his guilt and hanged him, I couldn't have cared less how the rest played out. Silly me, I thought the story was about saving an innocent, not toying with the audience. The acting and art direction is superb but who cares?

Furthest Witness (2017)

Improbable script, so-so direction

[10/10 · 26 April 2019]

It wants to be Drive--a character-driven thriller about a lone-wolf who gets emotionally involved with one of the subjects on a job--but an improbable, muddled script nixes that possibilility and the director compounds the problem because he doesn't know how to use moments to get us close to the characters.

The script is just an improbable mess. I could buy the premise that a guy helps people disappear from the mob, but, with the help of the mob because, obstensibly, they don't want to be too brutal? Uh, no. You hide from the mob, period.

But it gets worse. Mobster Number One (who routinely hires Mr. Disappear Guy, hereafter MDG) sends a hitman after the hitwoman he hired to kill Mobster Number Two because Mobster Number Two pays MDG to have her disappeared instead of just whacking her. (Such compassionate guys, these mobsters!) What's more, Mobster Number One is mad at MDG because he's working for his competition, and so MDG is fair game, too. Or something--it's hard to keep up with all these logic-defying twists. You see the problem here.

The director doesn't help things by rushing past every opportunity to slow the pace and get us close to his characters. The actors, for the most part, are up to the task, but they aren't given the opportunity, so when the big smoochy clinch arrives it seems to have been shoehorned in out of nowhere. Oh well.

So why did I give it a 10? To cancel a vote of one of yet another large group of knuckleheads who gave it a 1 (think paint drying) for reasons they would be hard-pressed to justify. No, it's not Drive, but it's watchable, if only to see Sean Patrick Flanery give his considerable acting chops an outing as the psycho hitman.

Us (II) (2019)

Avoid Santa Cruz!

[8/10 · 2 April 2019]

My main two takeaways from this hugely entertaining flick:

One, the allegorical message that our veneer of civility and our technology and wealth do not much separate us from our primitive, destructive natures. They lurk just beneath consciousness, fighting to emerge and take us down.

And two, stay away from Santa Cruz. No, seriously, this is a deeply weird town. The Mystery Spot, the earthquakes, the serial killers, the vampires, and now this--it's just a place humans weren't meant to trespass on. Avoid at all costs.

Designated Survivor (2016–2019)

Bitter Clingers Conspire Against the U.S.

[10/10 · 29 November 2018]

This show has a provocative premise -- that a serious conspiracy to overthrow the United States would most likely come from the radical right -- the bitter clingers who stockpile weapons, Bibles, and bile. The targets of the writers are spot on: the scapegoating of Muslims, the racial profiling, the trigger-happy generals, etc. Kiefer Sutherland and Kal Penn lend their substantial acting chops and get great support from the rest of the cast. I'm so happy to see a show that blasts away at America's internal enemies rather than pandering to right-wing narcissism.

PS I see all the targets of this show--e.g., Friends of Peter MacLeish--have logged in to opine how terrible it is. What they lack in character is compensated by their predictability.

The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)

Missing Episode of The Queen

[6/10 · 16 November 2018]

In this untold story of the Windsors, Princess Margaret goes to the dark side, conspiring with Russians to steal nuclear secrets. Young Queen Elizabeth, not trusting MI6 with family secrets, goes undercover as "Lisbeth" to get them back.

Hereditary (2018)

A Long Day's Journey Into the Occult

[5/10 · 9 June 2018]

This generations Exorcist? Mm no. More like our Burnt Offerings. There are some good things here, but what a mess. I was impatient and fidgeting through the entire thing, and judging from all the cell-phone browsing, many others were as well. Where to begin?

Okay, first, if your movie is heading into the heavy occult, there ought to be some clear foreshadowing and a somewhat crisp, linear path, sprinkled with recognizeable clues, for us to follow, rather than the murky, glacial slog that comprises most of this flick. It's just all over the place, and sloooowly. The events that might have been clues are presented as happenstance, e.g., Mom's attendence at a grief support group. What's more, she appears to begin the story a few cards short of a full deck, so her unraveling into madness becomes predictable, overwrought and, frankly, tiresome.

Then there is the WTF plot device of Peter taking his 13-year-old sister to a high school party. In what universe? It's silly and jars our willingness to suspend disbelief. And Peter himself, the natural son of this utterly Anglo couple, has obvious South-Asian genetics. You can do this kind of color-creative casting on stage, which is more like French Impressionist painting, but film is literally photography, and this casting is a puzzling visual non-sequitur. Are we supposed to wonder about Mom snagging an illicit quickie in the storeroom of the 7-Eleven? Was Ben Kingsley replaced as the father after shooting began? Yes, nagging questions.

Most of the inanities lie in the pace and story structure, garnering unintentional guffaws from the audience during what should be solemn moments. I liked where the story ended up, but felt ill-prepared for the arrival. Oh well, I guess Roman Polanski wasn't available for the rewrite.

A Quiet Place (2018)

Touchy-Feely Alien-Monster Chick Film

[6/10 · 23 April 2018]

I just saw A QUIET PLACE, which I found about equal parts novel and irritating. I would sum it up as the best touchy-feely alien-monster chick film so far this year. We are dropped into the strained family life of the Abbotts (religious ex-patriot Berkeley vegans from the look of things) six months into an invasion of predatory aliens who hunt using super-sensitive hearing.

As we move (glacially) through the story, we see endless closeups of the sweaty, frightened faces of the Abbott children, endless close-ups of the sweaty, paternal fear on their parents faces, and endless dashes into sweaty group hugs after each close call (I thought the aliens were supposed to hear running!?). Moreover, Mrs. Abbott bears a (rather quiet) baby in the midst of all this.

And, finally, we're expected to believe that all of the world's scientists have somehow missed the aliens' great weakness, which becomes apparent when the eldest girl's homemade hearing aid creates shrill audio feedback.

Somewhere in the middle of this slog, I thought, I've never missed the macho crew of the Nostromo so much.