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jstephs
Reviews
Deception (2008)
A movie to veg out to: when you're bored, want to watch something to occupy your mind, but don't want to think too much.
This film is both easy and difficult to review. There are good things that happen and bad things that happen, and the arena in which they happen is normal, everyday life operating in the background. In that, it's a limited character study of the three main characters living in a decidedly non-epic environment with barely any detail to it. All of the human interest comes from the interactions among the characters, not from their interaction with the world around them.
So, I say that "Deception" is easy to rate because it's just not that good and difficult to rate because it's not that bad - but putting it in the center somehow doesn't fit, because the bad parts keep screaming at you to give it a 2 or 3, and the good parts keep saying, well, it's got some really good elements to it, so why not a 6 or 7? My rating of a 5 is mostly a compromise rather than a firm judgment.
There's Hugh Jackman, Ewan McGregor, and Michelle Williams, all doing as good a job as they can on a predictable script, and "as good as they can" from such wonderful actors is a decently high level of performance, everything considered. The acting is solid.
And when I say "predictable script", it's not that that the plot twists are not twists, it's that they aren't all that surprising. The plot could have gone any number of ways other than the direction it took, but it didn't (which demarks a lack of imagination in the screenwriter and producers).
It's very much like watching a rerun of a show you've never seen before, a show that you liked well enough to want to watch a rerun of it, even though it's new to you. You've never seen it, but you just know you've seen it before.
This is a movie for the viewer who wants to leave his or her thinking cap in the closet for the night. If you give it too much thought, you'll ruin your experience of it. If you just let it happen, there's enough in it so that, at the end, you won't say, "Well, that was a complete waste of time." Again, a compromise 5 derived from a mix of 2-3 and 7-8.
The script is good enough, the acting is good enough, the production values are good enough, the directing is good enough, but I am very surprised that this movie won some awards. I'd hate to have to watch the competition. Still, someone of some importance somewhere thinks highly of it; I don't, but then I don't relegate it to the trash-heap, either. A 5/10 for want of any other applicable rating, with 3 and 7 there for you to hate and to enjoy.
Nekrotronic (2018)
Best B movie of all time?
The other reviews cover this film well enough that I have little to add, other than to say that IMO, this is the best B movie I've ever seen. I say "B movie" because, well, it's about the supernatural and the internet, fighting demons, and having some gory scenes, mixed with some stupid joke material that nevertheless is funny. (Anyone who's laughed at a Dad Joke will recognize how stupid can be really funny.)
The production values are excellent - this isn't a cheap B movie, like so many can be. The acting is super - the actors are truly invested in their roles in a way that makes the characters seem believable, given the unbelievable context of the film. The casting is great too - the right people for each person portrayed.
There is a certain light-heartedness to the action, despite all the death and mayhem which helps make the film entertaining. Somehow, the violence fits the scripting - it's not gratuitous, even if somewhat explicit.
I don't think you could say that there are any real twists to the plot. The "hero" is brought into the fight against demons, and he fights against demons, helped by some other demon fighters. There's a couple little surprises, but they don't direct the plot-line into a new realm.
So, I think it's worth a watch. You don't have to be into gore to enjoy it, although being turned off by gore would disqualify the film for you. It's a fun film.
Radius (2017)
One of the best low-budget films I've seen
The other reviews cover the movie pretty well, so I'd like to simply add that I think this is one of the best low-budget films I've seen. (I'm going to be vague here, to avoid possible spoilers, but specific as to my reaction, without revealing any plot elements.)
The acting is top-notch. (I'm always pleasantly surprised when I can say that about a Canadian movie, which have, in my 50 years of watching them, matured in production values and acting by huge amounts. But that's a different topic.)
The main concept of the plot is incredibly fresh, novel, and well maintained. It's a difficult idea to present to a viewing audience, so there may be what some would call minor faults to it (one of the main characters figures out what issues he faces perhaps a little too quickly, but then the movie would drag seriously if he didn't). The concept is carried through to the end, with the main reveal not something that I had any feeling of certainty about until that very end. Some big questions are never answered (like what caused the difficulty faced by the protagonists), but that's not what the movie is about. Exploring the ultimate cause would have been a real story-telling landmine the movie adroitly avoids, which could have blown the film into a big scifi ditch it the plot had taken on that challenge.
There aren't any high-tech effects, but the concept doesn't require them - there's enough there to make the idea real, and that's all that's needed. I think that, in this movie, more would have been a lot less.
So, I thoroughly enjoyed the film, even though I didn't realize I was liking it that much until I got to the end and realized just how cohesive the production had been.
The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (2016)
"Contrived" only begins to describe this film
Two reasons for 2 stars instead of 1:
1. Jessica Biel appears in it (not stars in it, otherwise it would get 3-4 stars)
2. 1 star is reserved for truly stupid films.
Oh, wait. This IS a truly stupid film, so Jessica Biel is the only reason it's got 2 stars.
I don't want to reveal any plot lines, even though it's difficult to see how this terrible movie could be spoiled any more rankly.
The only explanation for this monstrous work of cinematic bathos I can conjure up is that, one night, two (or more) hack script-writers got stoned with extreme prejudice and set to work on a bet that they could produce - in one night - the worst and sappiest collection of unlikely plot-lines ever devised by even semi-human minds, yet fill their to the brim with asinine emotional conceits which could tug mightily at the heart-strings of the most gullible of tear-jerk junkies.
Part of the bet had to have been that no re-writes were to be done, and it's quite apparent that none were even contemplated. Perhaps the worst thing about the film is that the story inhabits neither reality nor fantasy, but rather a two-dimensional world fabricated entirely of artificial notions of what it would be like to be alive. Verisimilitude was literally ejected forcibly from the movie at scene 1, take 1, never to be allowed back into the studio.