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Reviews
Falling Skies (2011)
Good acting, horrible script
When I stay over with family, I have to watch this because they like it. We watch several episodes in a row. The acting is pretty good, no problem with the directing or producing, it's a big budget series and it shows. Too bad the script is so terribly, horribly bad. EVERY single episode, they take every cheap shot available to script writers, there's nothing surprising, nothing that saves the story. EVERY single time they meet a new group of people there's some dark power play going on in that group that they have first get surprised by and then have to deal with. EVERY time they meet some military people they're either gun-toting lunatics or up-tight love-the-chain-in-command types. The series is about fighting back an alien invasion but half the characters act like they're fighting some other political party in local politics, and the other half are so gullible it's the miracle of script writing ONLY that keeps them alive. I have not seen ONE single character in the whole series that acts like a real human being in a bare-knuckle survival fight. Acting and directing gets an 8, producing and props a 7, and script gets a minus 1000 for being utterly puke. This is supposedly a sci-fi survival series but it gets totaled by being written like a soap. I gave this a 3 out of 10 because you can see everybody else BESIDES the script writers are really trying hard to save this disaster of a series.
Melancholia (2011)
Sad, sad filmmaking..
I have nothing particular thing with Lars Von Trier or the whole Dogma thing. You can tell some of the Dogma heritage in the sometimes shaky and flinching camera-work...it shows.
This is a film that really tells us nothing new, it just tells us how LVT likes to make movies, how he sees women, especially the most beautiful and successful ones, and what he thinks the world should do. As in: be destroyed. This is a truly pessimistic movie, and some self-deluded people mistake utter pessimism for artful invention, and consequently think this is a great movie. There's not much story at all: she gets married, the world might end, very little in between, and then the world DOES end. Now when there is no story in a film, it ALL revolves around atmosphere and character development. Too bad..the characters are shallow and the atmosphere is simply one of chronic depression and suicidal thoughts. Hint for LVT: nice poetic looking scenes don't replace storyline.
To cut a long story short:
-If you are a normal person, you don't understand this film and don't know what all the hubbub is about. After thinking about this film for 10-15 minutes tops, you'll go home, wake up next morning, take your kids to school and go to work.
-If you are a depressed emo kid, you'll think this movie is the absolute mirror of your soul, is the pinnacle of movie development, that it connects to you in soooo many different ways all the 'normal' persons mentioned above can't relate to at all (and you love the many ways in which this movie justifies your self-pity for feeling cr4p) and you will most likely want to tell ALL the world how explicitly excellent this movie is in the vain hope that you will finally find a soul-mate, or at the very least, that you will be more understood by the people around you once they see this movie. Too bad kid, you suck. Get help.
-If you are a bit of a cynic like me, have seen many thousands of movies of all kinds, and you're more interested in actually enjoying an interesting movie, you're going to get bored and annoyed. This movie has a shallow script while the very fact that the whole plot is made obvious in the first 5 minutes necessitates a deep, well thought out script for the whole duration. Acting is decent but the actors are visibly let down by the pathetic script. LVT fails at directing, instead he seems to focus more on photography. Pretty pictures a story don't make...maybe it works with shorts but not with a full feature film. I feel sorry for Dunst getting an award for this, must feel pretty empty getting one for something you don't feel you deserve. I liked her minimalist, stuck up performance in Marie Antoinette much better and she deserves more credit for that movie than for this one.
Unless you feel depressed and LIKE feeling depressed, SKIP this one..
Bwana Kitoko (1955)
Colonialist paternalistic view of late Belgian Congo
Basically this is a documentary to commemorate the first state visit of King Boudewijn of Belgium to it's then-biggest and most profitable colony. It is a classic text-book example of colonialist paternalism captured on film, both in subjects and supporting dialog. It is certainly not poorly done, and I can recommend it as viewable for educational purposes about colonialism in school viewings. Funny thing how only a few years later the 'rock-solid stability of the everlasting Congolese colony' was turned into a half-dozen years of instability and brutal civil war. Shows you how completely blind they were in Belgian governmental and cultural circles at that time.