mattnadler Reviews

Ted Bundy (2002)

Too much focus on the killings

[4/10 · 25 October 2017]

The film take a voyeuristic slant on the material, with lots of lingering shots on the victims bodies.

Perhaps this was the goal of the director, but it blends elements of soft-core porn with the murder scenes. Almost a grindhouse horror movie. But since it's based on real murders, there's no camp factor, and is just bad taste.

For narrative purposes, it focuses on Ted rather than others around his killing sprees, but superficially. It doesn't try get under the hood and becomes repetitive.

It also makes him appear as if he's just a robot doing the killings, one right after the other. But I've seen interviews of him where there's a lot of internal conflict, self-serving fear, narcissism etc.

The script and the director takes chances, but don't deliver. The actors I think did their best, but overall it's a big missed opportunity to make this more than a rated R version of a Hallmark movie of the week.

Columbo: An Exercise in Fatality (1974) Season 4, Episode 1

Great episode, but the end was unnecessarily complex

[8/10 · 1 August 2015]

As others have noted, great chemistry between the leads. It also has taking the case somewhat personally, with his expression of anger. More often in other episodes, he's politely persistent, but doesn't express anger.

However the shoelace trick at the end was complicated and not conclusive, legally speaking.

What would have sealed it for Janus, and pretty obvious, would have been the phone records.

I suppose the writers also felt that was too obvious and wouldn't showcase Columbo's brilliant instincts and deduction, but it would have been more cut and dried in court.

Botched (2014– )

A bit formulaic

[6/10 · 14 June 2015]

The show is fairly shallow and picks people who are good for light entertainment. So they have two surgeries and one rejection per show. The rejects tend to be people who've had a lot of work already and seeking to tweak it - some of them don't really seem all that serious and were picked by the producers to all a little more color.

Since the show doesn't want to show actual details of the procedures to avoid grossing out their audience, it become the same routine of safe shots which are repetitive.

The "playful" interplay between the two surgeons is painful to watch - feels very staged and scripted.

Once you've seen a couple of the episodes, they start to become the same old. If they were more daring, they'd take the leap and get into the intricacies of procedures which would be very interesting to see what I assume are artists at work.

Lipstick & Liquor (2014)

A superficial and slanted view of alcoholism

[3/10 · 30 December 2014]

It would seem that outside of one tragic case, most of the director's subjects are very wealthy women who stopped drinking decades ago, married well and divorced, and live off the largess of their divorce settlements.

Two of the subjects are good friends who are not directly presented as friends, but we can glean that from the clues given in their stories.

It would seem that alcoholism is mostly a problems of very wealthy, white, blonde, comely divorcées who have successfully kicked the habit for most of their adult lives.

The "documentary" doesn't bother with data to support its propositions, and has one "expert" stating that unlike men, women cannot share their feelings or discuss their problems - the exact opposite of most gender studies that indicate women are more wired for conversation and sharing.

I suppose this was supposed to be a study of a few strong wealthy women who have succeeded (and one lower income woman who failed), but it's so skewed to a tiny portion of the true population of women that it comes off as personal passion project to showcase a few friends of the director.