This is a hard sell, a documentary about a 1980s powerhouse band that has no interviews with the band, but looks into the band dynamics of the most famous album by the band which came out just months after the death of their charismatic lead singer. Some of the musical analysis by members of AC/DC cover bands is worth its weight in gold for anyone who wants to write popular music, and the insights on how the band positioned itself in hard rock history are significant. The usual raving fanboy stuff is kept to a minimum and you will come away from this with a better understanding of the band, even if not a listener, as well as how they helped propel a generation back toward rock after disco ate up the music scene.
Reviews
11 Reviews
The Other Zoey
(2023)
Classic tropes, light and creative retelling
21 January 2024
A rom-com built in the house that "Pride and Prejudice" built, this movie uses an elaborate plot device of the mistaken identity double love triangle to advance the argument that human consciousness is the enemy of human biology. Essentially, women overthink, and the men who are good do not overthink, where the men who are bad rationalize their bad with complex theories. Human rationalization here is represented by computer science, which seems fair to me, and acted out by two people you would really like to know who are both trying to get over illusions about romance that lead them astray. You would want them as neighbors, and you will want to see them get together in this twisty and turny film which manages efficient scenes that rocket past the awkwardness and get to the character drama.
Repo Man
(1984)
Postmodern collapse tour
29 August 2023
If you do not like postmodern fiction, this movie will make no sense to you: it is a comedy about the collapse of civilization from an inability to focus on what matters, seen through the eyes of its most peripheral people, namely repo men (these are rarely popular, which is the point). In this comedy serious points are made but not spelled out for you; you have to parse it like literature, philosophy, or the User Guide to your 2014 fridge that posts to Twitter. The frequent references to Burroughs should give you a hint. The humor is dark, the society is as empty and haunting as it was in the 1980s (it's worse now), and the characters are as lost as many of us feel in this modern landscape of empty promises and false symbols. In the end, it convinces us that there is something worth striving for, just not what everyone else is trying to obtain. This and its soundtrack (specifically "Institutionalized") were part of the artistic core of Generation X.
Jack Ryan
(2018–2023)
Misses the point
29 August 2023
Jack Ryan in the Clancy books is a thinking action man, not an action man thinking. That is, he thinks before he acts but then does so decisively, and specializes in skipping heaps of rumination, emoting, and searching for reasons why. All of that occurs in his internal dialogue. This series moves too slowly, has too much repetitive discussion of what is about to happen, and relies too much on periodic bursts of violence to support what is otherwise a sort of boring sitcom about office politics and being a loner in a world of NPCs. The lead character was known to me only through the whiteboard meme but he is convincing and I think with tighter plots and a more consistent character could go very far in this type of role.
The Terminal List
(2022– )
Expanding the adventure genre
29 August 2023
The excellent cinematography makes this series visually compelling, but the tight dialogue and purposeful scenes keep its energy high. Pratt was a surprise here because he plays the role convincingly and sparsely, looking slightly like a young Roger Moore. I could have used fewer flashback scenes after the first couple of episodes, less annoying rock and country music, and maybe dropping one of his causes for revenge from the plot because having your troop wiped out is compelling enough for a revenge story. I might call this an avenging, not revenge story, since it is about the betrayed dead. The director brought out the best in all of these actors and each is convincing, which makes it easy to slide into this dark world for a few hours. Differing from some commenters, I do not think this would have made a good movie... it would have had to be much faster-paced, missing some of the confusion and endurance that drives the story. On the whole, this is one of the better things on television.
Code of a Killer
(2015)
Adventure documentary
16 February 2023
How can you make the spectacle of people, laboring to discover knowledge whose utility is not yet proven, seem interesting? You show their vision, the struggle, and then a real-world case whose power is hard to deny. "Less is more" seems to be the mode of this series, which focuses on quality character acting and placing the viewer into the struggle instead of excessive emotion. We are there to feel what motivates these characters to try to assert order amongst the chaos, and by seeing their motivations, can connect to their emotions without being clobbered over the head with them. It is a tale of human triumph even when confronting our darkest behaviors, and makes for good casual watching if you like true crime, science, or documentaries.
Repetitive and factless
28 September 2022
Warning: Spoilers
The basic presentation of this story could be done in about twenty minutes. Instead, we get this drawn out drama where everything must be covered six times, and in the end the investigators had nothing to do with solving the case and were unable to find a resolution. This series as a result feels like "much ado about nothing" in a repetead loop where conjecture, innuendo, and supposition are flung about but lead to nothing, and then the whole thing suddenly comes to an end when the local police finally investigate the guy they should have investigated twenty years ago. My true crime tastes run toward "Forensic Files" which is fact-based rather than the drama-based, mostly empty vlog that is this series.
Lies, Crimes & Video, HLN
(2019–2023)
Solid reenactments ruined by repetition
18 September 2022
Most true crime follows the Forensic Files pacing and moves rather slowly, which works well if you keep up the flow of information; this show, despite having cinematic quality of re-enactments, repeats itself (literally) up to nine times on any data point. That makes any story start moving slowly to the point where the episode bogs down two thirds of the way through, then skips over vital details to get to a conclusion. These producers know a good story to pick but do a terrible job of planning out each episode, resulting in something even more boring than the news that is also even more dramatic. If you let me edit one of these episodes, it would probably be closer to Forensic Files twenty-one minutes (apparently, a half hour of TV minus commercials, PSAs, and station identification) and have much more punch because they really are beautifully filmed.
Alphaville
(1965)
Gnarly cognitive chew
17 September 2022
This is both a high concept film and a gritty noir adventure into the decline of the West, probably perfect for fans of Houellebecq or Celine. It uses the limitations of cinema like a weapon to unsettle the consciousness while telling a somewhat familiar tale of escape from decay. At first its conventions may be offputting, but ignore them, since they are not meant to work on the conscious mind anyway. After a few scenes, the startling new wave cinema fades and you drop into a 1930s detective film, maybe Maigret crossed with Marlowe and Burroughs. Lose yourself in the adventure like a river of time. I always thought the Motorhead guy got his name from this movie.
The Assets
(2014)
Essential Cold War lore
3 April 2021
The future repeats the past in slightly new form. We're in a new Cold War now, so we might as well study the old. It makes sense to explore the Cambridge Five, Kim Philby, Ronald Pelton, John Walker, and probably Benedict Arnold. This series, driven by the immensely powerfuly Jodie Whittaker, explores the search for a double agent in an organization utterly unprepared for the wave of betrayals that happened after the 1960s.
DeepStar Six
(1989)
Excruciating tedium punctuated by poor judgment
6 November 2014
People keep making excuses for this film and how it doesn't have the budget or flash of a James Cameron movie. Actually, what it lacks is a script editor or writer who has any idea what it is like to watch a movie.
The first thirty minutes demonstrate utterly nothing happening. The crew recycle old jokes, complain, and chatter on all without establishing any real personality to the characters. You could cut this down to a five minute montage of one-liners and lose nothing. Then, there's lots of stumbling around while trying to figure out what is happening. Are we supposed to believe the Navy entrusted this crew of people with a $600 toilet lid, much less a submarine? Once the movie gets going, it improves marginally, but not really. Characters cannot identify a reason for any action they take. Instead, they just flail about and burn screen time doing stuff that tells us nothing about the characters, doesn't contribute to the plot, and builds an "atmosphere"...of tedium. It is excruciating to watch the filmmakers stumble again and again without making a point or providing any kind of actual tension. Instead, it's like watching a second-rate imitation of Seinfeld that got filmed underwater by accident.
As others have noted, the short synopsis of this is: incompetents undersea are trying to build a missile base, dynamite a cavern, and unleash a terrible monster. Everything else happens exactly as you would expect past that point. Then at some point, anticlimax happens when the monster turns out to be not as exciting as you might hope, and implausible as the terror of the deep that keeps these people in "suspense." What makes all of this interesting is that aspects of this movie are well done. The sets are beautiful, the cinematography is great, and the soundtrack is well-above average. But it feels like a sitcom, has cardboard characters, and never gets any depth (har-har) to the motivations of anyone in the film, so it ends up being like "Moby-Dick" retold by the town drunk. I got a lot of laughs out of this film mocking it MST3K style but definitely do not recommend it.
There are films with $30,000 budgets that beat this one palms down simply by having edited their scripts for what an audience might find interesting. Did anyone read this script? When they typed it, maybe, or when they started filming, or when they xeroxed it for crew members? It's as if no one could look at this and think, "You know, that's going to be a COLOSSALLY BORING MOVIE, let's drop the shtick and go for the action... or add some personality to these stick figures." But nope. Zero out of four billion stars.
The first thirty minutes demonstrate utterly nothing happening. The crew recycle old jokes, complain, and chatter on all without establishing any real personality to the characters. You could cut this down to a five minute montage of one-liners and lose nothing. Then, there's lots of stumbling around while trying to figure out what is happening. Are we supposed to believe the Navy entrusted this crew of people with a $600 toilet lid, much less a submarine? Once the movie gets going, it improves marginally, but not really. Characters cannot identify a reason for any action they take. Instead, they just flail about and burn screen time doing stuff that tells us nothing about the characters, doesn't contribute to the plot, and builds an "atmosphere"...of tedium. It is excruciating to watch the filmmakers stumble again and again without making a point or providing any kind of actual tension. Instead, it's like watching a second-rate imitation of Seinfeld that got filmed underwater by accident.
As others have noted, the short synopsis of this is: incompetents undersea are trying to build a missile base, dynamite a cavern, and unleash a terrible monster. Everything else happens exactly as you would expect past that point. Then at some point, anticlimax happens when the monster turns out to be not as exciting as you might hope, and implausible as the terror of the deep that keeps these people in "suspense." What makes all of this interesting is that aspects of this movie are well done. The sets are beautiful, the cinematography is great, and the soundtrack is well-above average. But it feels like a sitcom, has cardboard characters, and never gets any depth (har-har) to the motivations of anyone in the film, so it ends up being like "Moby-Dick" retold by the town drunk. I got a lot of laughs out of this film mocking it MST3K style but definitely do not recommend it.
There are films with $30,000 budgets that beat this one palms down simply by having edited their scripts for what an audience might find interesting. Did anyone read this script? When they typed it, maybe, or when they started filming, or when they xeroxed it for crew members? It's as if no one could look at this and think, "You know, that's going to be a COLOSSALLY BORING MOVIE, let's drop the shtick and go for the action... or add some personality to these stick figures." But nope. Zero out of four billion stars.
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