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SusannahPruett
Reviews
Friday Night Lights (2006)
Shows the Peabody Awards are a Joke
We're supposed to give Friday Night Lights a chance because it got a Peabody Award... Well, after watching an episode, all I can say is that the Peabody Awards don't mean anything when it comes to quality television.
This show is amateurish at best, except that amateurs would not be trying every opportunity to downgrade their own show.
Visually, this show is a disgrace. The much talked about and rightly derided shaky-cam is a major hindrance for anything good to come out of this enterprise. But worse, the use of unneeded and unmotivated rack focus just attracts the attention to the fact that people who don't know how to tell the story visually are at the helm.
Film being a visual medium, not much good can be seen after such bad camera work.
I give them points for having good older leads, but they are wasted in this dread enterprise.
Friday Night Lights is one of those shows that most people won't watch, and for good reason.
Augusta, Gone (2006)
Just badly made
people have seemed to want to excuse the poor quality of this film because of its topic.
While the general subject matter of this film is indeed interesting, the end result is so poorly made that it remains a total failure as a film.
I'm not sure what the director and the people at Lifetime were thinking. Maybe they bought into that old horse of "we got to attract the MTV generation by making it as bad as we can because they like bad movies". It's hard to tell, but the end result speaks for itself and it's a result that the people involved should
Lords of Dogtown (2005)
Catherine Hardwicke ruins a great idea
Lords of Dogtown was a great idea for a film. A true story involving a lesser known but potentially riveting aspect of recent American life.
Unfortunately, someone bought into the Hollyweird hype and hired Catherine Hardwicke. Instead of a director, they got someone whose only directorial move is to constantly shake the camera.
Frankly, this is a great example of the state of current studio cinema that someone as incompetent as Hardwicke would get assignment after assignment. Somehow, the studio executives have bought into the "MTV Generation" nonsense and can't seem to see the sinking box office for what it is: a rejection of bad films made by bad directors like Hardwicke.