milenahaustein

If you like morally grey/complex characters and figure skating this show is good. I really enjoyed it, and I will try to have sort of a structure in this review.

Plot/ Pacing: The main plot is not insanely creative, but the side plots make up for that in my opinion. The pacing gets quite slow in the middle and I actually stopped watching for several days here, but when I continued (around episode 6) it was pretty fast-paced, while leaving room for slow emotional moments. The plot at times felt a bit too convenient, a lot of problems were fixed surprisingly fast, but this wasn't that bad, there were quite a few things that actually took a long time to resolve, so it was a good mix.

Depiction of mental illness: Very exaggerated. Especially Kat in the later episodes felt even to me overly dramatic, and looking at the reviews from people with actual experiences made that even more clear. Nonetheless, I do think they nail some conversations about mental illness that hit close to home, just when it came to actual depiction of it they could've done it better.

The Skating: As a figure skating fan, but not a skater myself, I'm not the most reliable person here, but I personally enjoyed it. From my understanding it was portayed fairly accurately and there are several beautiful choreographies you get to see, so I enjoyed this part of the show.

Characters: Like I said, be prepared for annoying characters, because at some point in this show, everyone is completely stupid and mean. That being said, I liked that part a lot, I thought it was realistic. I liked to see the different perspectives of a situation and it was pretty easy to understand most characters even when they were being stupid. But yeah, if that's not your thing I can safely say you're not going to enjoy this show. My favourites here were definitely Jenn and Dascha, who were just amazing. Serena, despite being very whiny and annoying, made me feel a lot, she felt pretty realistic for being a teenager in my opinion.

Wokeness?: I saw some people talking about this in their reviews so I thought I'd mention it too. It is a very diverse show, but for the most part I liked how they portrayed this. The most obvious example of this is probably Marcus, who later has a very explicit storyline about being black, but I did think a lot of the conversations about this topic are really good.

Sorry, I can't write more, I've been searching for BEANS all day and it's 3 in the afternoon so I'm exhausted.

I'm not sure whether this movie is intentionally bad. It surely felt like it at times. I first gave this movie 3 stars, but I was far too entertained to keep it that way. My personal highlight was the transition of the movie where a picture of a fish was duplicated a lot, it was very weird. Another highlight was the scene at the end with the cars, which felt like a fever dream, but to be honest this whole movie sort of felt like one. But in general, this movie failed on every single level. I usually don't notice bad music or cinematography or acting, but in this movie it's was too much to not notice. Made me laugh nonetheless. In conclusion, if you want to watch an obscure movie that you just want to laugh at, this one is perfect. I'd recommend watching it with a friend also.