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Pretty Little Liars (2010)
PLL rated way too high by the fans who unfortunately are more likely to use sites like this
It's no surprise that shows like this which have a huge teen following have such disproportionately high ratings online when every teenager and young adult who sees something "shocking" happen in a show like this and gives it an automatic 10/10. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, that score means that they didn't see something coming, they enjoyed not knowing who did it, or at the very least they liked the episode.
The first few seasons of PLL were entertaining. It never had good acting or even very good writing but it was compelling and creative and it was clear that they cared about the characters and the story somewhat. Very quickly, things picked up and the show became ridiculous, badly acted, terribly written (in both dialogue and plot), and shamefully executed. Things were drawn out three times longer than they should've been, rules were set and broken, logic was constantly defied, any realism the show might've had were tossed out the door, actors playing high school students grew older and older into their 30s, countless clues and story lines from previous episodes and seasons were completely ignored and changed. The show disrespects its audience very much at this point. It treats them like the idiots a lot of them are, by giving them more and more garbage with less and less substance.
Nightcrawler (2014)
Nightcrawler, False Evidence Appearing Real (Abridged for IMDb)
Nightcrawler is like the Network (1976) of news footage. It brought me into a world I didn't even know I wanted a movie about. It shows just how easy it can be to sell a manipulated reality to the public to serve an agenda. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Louis Bloom, nicknamed Lou, a man who has finally found his calling as a journalist of sorts, filming footage that he sells to the news each night. "I'm thinking", he says, "that television news might just be something I love as well as something I happen to be good at." Close to tears, he looks at a newsroom backdrop of the city at night. "On TV, it looks so real." He goes on to take that televised reality to many extremes throughout the film. Gyllenhaal's performance is a wonderful character study. How can Lou be so determined to film what he does at the cost of people's lives and his own human decency?
Riz Ahmed who plays his assistant Rick gives a really good, natural performance of a guy with clear motivations in their relationship. It starts out with Lou talking about skipping the "bad" neighborhoods while Rick himself is clearly a minority and he laughs along. He watches what he says and films things that turn his stomach. He puts up with some frightening glimpses of a darker side to Lou who always seems to be on the verge of actually doing something scary. Eventually, Lou's demands get to be too much and Rick needs more compensation to be okay with everything that's going on.
In the daytime, Lou stays home, archiving his work, watering his plant, watching his footage from the night before on the morning news like a husband watching their wife give birth. Always there alone, he never has friends over. There's nothing to indicate that he has any. "What if my problem wasn't that I don't understand people" he asks, "but that I don't like them?" Are all crime journalists as cold and reckless as Lou? Of course not. That's not the point. It's the kind of stories he exploits and twists with the help of the local news that is so rampant all around us.
In another movie, a character would make a decision that could later lead to trouble for them and we'd think "okay, how can they not see what's going to happen?" This movie is smarter. On a 911 call, Lou gives a very detailed description of two suspects whom he earlier told detectives he didn't get a look at, but, the reason he's doing it here, and why it works, is because of the tension and the importance of the situation he's in. It's not that what he's doing can't still be trouble for him in the future, it's that he has a real reason for doing it. He cannot afford to mess up the situation by having the cops confront the wrong people. He's orchestrating an explosion between the cops and criminals and he can't leave any loose ends. A great thing about his character is that he seems to figure out what his plan is just before we do and when we figure out where he's going with something, it's not because the movie gave him clunky expositional dialogue telling us what was going on. He tells the cops he sees a gun and we figure out ourselves how that's going to help him.
One night, at a dinner with Nina, the news director, Lou reminds her just exactly why somebody in her position, one bad rating away from unemployment, needs him. "I recently learned (that) most Americans watch local news to stay informed" he tells her. "I also learned that the average half-hour of Los Angeles television news packs all of its local government coverage
into 22 seconds. Local crime stories, however, not only usually led the news, but filled 14 times the broadcast." Nina, played by Rene Russo as a news director who knows exactly what she needs to sell, knows his threat is one he can carry out, with ease. She knows what the viewers want to see and that Lou is the best at finding it. "We like crime" she tells him when they first meet. "Not all crime. A carjacking in Compton, for example, that isn't news, now is it?
think of our newscast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut." He's a fast learner, like he says.
One minor detail which I don't mean to nitpick is the search engine he uses a few times for research. It looks pretty bad, like something out of the 90s. It would've been more immersive had they just cut to shots of the websites, which had all the information that the search results had anyway. I get that they didn't want to use Google but there were better ways to handle it.
It felt repetitive to have the same sequence happen twice with Rick wasting time messing up so the exact same guy could get to the scene first and taunt Lou, sirens already flashing, victims all gone. The repetition could've been more effective if it was cut down to just show that he was too late and it would still display the rivalry and get him in trouble later. Of course, such minor flaws were pretty much forgotten by the end of the film and didn't affect its overall power or quality.
"Do you know what fear stands for?" Lou asks. "False Evidence Appearing Real." Nightcrawler is definitely saying something about the way the media manipulates what we think is going on as well as what and who we should worry about, and how much. Throughout the film, I noticed a few ads, playing on the TV or the car radio in the background. Another way to sell something to the public.
It Follows (2014)
With so many boring horror films out there, It Follows is a real treat
If it has weak moments, it's after the pool scene. Although, those scenes do give it some more depth, things to think about. That's the great thing about this film's writing. It's just so logical. It's so common in horror, especially horror as creative as this, to have a lot of characters making stupid decisions or leaving the audience to wonder what the hell is going on or why it's happening. That's not the case with It Follows.
This movie works on different levels. On a completely real world level, this well- directed, very well cast (as in, the characters look real, they're not celebrities), well- written, and well-shot movie, it is totally plausible and scarier for the fact that it plays so well with the thriller trope of somebody in distress, terrified by something others don't see, believe, or understand (Orphan, The Good Son, many horror movies where the parents don't believe the kids). It also works on another level. This could all be inside the people's heads. Sure, that theory is kind of debunked with chairs being thrown. But, when it bleeds, only the effected one can see it. That's another thing. Can the last person that effected one had sex with also see it? It's brought to our attention when Jeff, formerly known as Hugh, is afraid that he sees it, a girl who turns out to be just a stranger walking by. That's part of the great tension in this movie too. It could really be anybody. This movie has stripped bare some of the greatest elements of horror and made them even scarier. There's even less comfort in having your friends there to protect you now. You may be safe now, miles away, but it's still walking, and it'll make it to wherever you are by nighttime.
This movie has a great soundtrack with detuned attacking tones that almost give the film a 70s horror vibe while still staying fresh and creepy. Possible homages to other horror classics that this film brings to mind itself: The Exorcist, with a certain something dripping down the leg of one "girl". The other is Halloween with almost everything on TV that the main characters watch being some retro horror film, although that could be a coincidence.
It's surprising. You get crazy visuals like a zombie-like girl dripping with her own urine, a very broken leg, some very intense incest(?), but it never feels like it's there to shock you or make you scream. This film isn't cheap. It has some jump scares but none of them are really "false" in the sense that what's revealed after the scream isn't scary. It's that you don't see anything that's scary. If Bruce the Shark takes a bite out of your boat, which do you think is scarier to find next when you look out at the sea? A great big shark coming toward you? Or waters completely still. The latter is the great strength of great horror movies like Jaws and It Follows, and, from what I hear, The Babadook (which I hope to see very soon). What a great movie this was. It was superbly entertaining.
Scream: Pilot (2015)
Almost Nothing of Interest in this Introduction to Scream, the TV Series
Beyond the poor acting of cookie-cutter characters- jocks, awkward nerds, popular people who aren't jerks (wow, way to change it up!), there's nothing holding this together to make the viewer interested in what's going on. The most interesting moments of this first episode were the mother's relationship with a possibly dead or alive killer (who, for whatever reason, and I can't believe nobody's questioning this, was shot by one of twenty officers and then... left in the lake? after killing multiple people? for the sake of... the plot?). Everything is a rehash of a hundred other horror movies who did it better, especially the original Scream series that this is pretty loosely based off of. At least in the original cult movie, the meta references to horror movies weren't so contrived to the point that you're wondering whether somebody made a mistake in post-production. It's really not that hard. In the Scream movies, characters liked and knew some aspects of horror movies. In this TV series, we get characters forcing obnoxious lines on us in one of the show's most expositional and self-serving scenes. One character barely connects the Gothic theme of the class's book to Gothic horror being all over TV, referencing American Horror Story, Bates Motel, and Hannibal. Then, just like we saw in the trailer, the obnoxious Noah Foster character, played by John Karna, corrects his classmate who asks about movies like "Halloween" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in a monologue so contrived and unrelated to what's going on, you can picture the screenwriters at the last minute putting together its flimsy frame just to give the character something close to a reason to be saying it.
As for whether this show is scary... it's not, unless you're afraid of scary music and children's songs being sung slowly in the dark. Perhaps there could've be a sense of dread in some scenes if these 29 year old actors weren't so bad at playing 16 year old stereotypes. They only have about 1000 hours of footage to work from of the exact same characters in different shows and movies.
It doesn't feel like the creators of this show tried to make something unique and good. There were some, but very few moments that seemed original or interesting, like Snapchats from a killer, something ominous, smart, relevant; but even those were surrounded by such bad writing that they didn't really make a difference. At almost every turn of the episode, you can hear producers filling in the blanks of what to include based on what people liked in other shows and movies far more original than this.
It was also annoying to see another form of media try to incorporate "viral content" so unsuccessfully yet again. A video of two random, same-sex, unknown high school students kissing... in 2015... is viral? And just because you want some characters to be evil, doesn't mean that they can't be well-written. Are you telling me that these teens just go around finding students to film so that their videos can become viral? And that people at their school still respect them? Why are so many teenage characters written after 2010 obsessed with only three things- sex, popularity, and going viral? Do networks think we'll care about characters less if they're, I don't know, slightly unique at all? Complaining about characters being too unoriginal is not a new complaint in itself, but it's still a valid one here. Even if this show had invented all of its forgettable, cookie-cutter plots and characters, they're all still executed so plainly that nobody would even bother trying to copy them.
Louie: The Road: Part 2 (2015)
Louis CK Really Starts To Have Fun
You could see that Louis was going over the edge of parody similar to films like "Synecdoche" where all the events shouldn't necessarily be taken as a fact but rather for their meaning to the story or message. This episode felt personal and not as lazy as a few filler episodes that seemed to repeat the same material earlier in the season. The "sad clown" character study of Louie finds a great balance in this episode. This episode is as entertaining and artistic as the dream episode before and as personal as the duck episode from an earlier season. Just like a comedian who Louie meets in this episode tells him, he doesn't need to "try to be funny". He hits all the right notes of realism and satire when he does less "writing" of material and more thinking out loud.
Pretty Little Liars: How the 'A' Stole Christmas (2014)
The plot has progressed about 0.5% with this boring, obnoxious episode
This is really one of the worst episodes yet. The show's been going downhill for a while. I'm pretty sure Keegan's acting has actually gotten worse. Stop trying to please fandom "ships" and f*cking reveal new information to the audience. The director(s) are thinking of their audience as stupider and stupider with each episode, especially in this one. This episode was filled with jump scares and music that tells you what you're supposed to feel in the scene. It's like watching a kids' show with laugh tracks except we're supposed to sit through all the terrible acting and pretend like it's the situation that's scaring us and not the stupid music. Seriously, just bring the art and plot back into the show already. Viewers had to wait months to see THIS episode? Nothing happened! People were spooked but nobody found out anything! Nothing HAPPENED to ANYBODY! This is a filler episode at its worst.
Young & Hungry (2014)
The worst thing ABC Family's churned out in a while...
I can usually handle laugh tracks in shows but the pilot episode for this one was totally unbearable. The dialogue and character's actions were so unnatural, it felt as though I was watching some sort of high school script writing project.
The show tries to get us to like the main character, Gabby, by making her funny and poor. She's given struggles like a death in the family that's mentioned too early in the series for us to even care about it and the constant bombardment with jokes about how little money this 20- something aspiring chef has is just painful to watch.
The pilot had cliché after cliché, with characters acting and saying exactly what you'd expect them to. Every two seconds an audience was laughing at a joke and then waiting to laugh at the next. Don't waste your time with this one.