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Reviews
Deep in the Darkness (2014)
A watchable movie
SPOILERS AHEAD. BE ADVISED!
A good doctor moves with his family to a remote town where things are not as they seem. The movie provides a suspenseful first half trying to guess what is going on. But then, the creatures appear and the movie goes all down.
First, the creatures are presented by the town's folk as supernatural beings that can hear and see everything you say or do. But when we finally see them they are dying because of a mysterious illness and when at reach they can be killed with a knife, just like any mortal being.... Then, I start wondering: Why are these people accepting all these killings without rebelling? What do they gain of it? Living in a town without internet where they can be killed at any moment? And what are the creatures motivations?
And finally, the dumb finale. In order to create a big twist they reveal the wife has been a part of them all along. Really?? Sooo, in order to get a doctor to help them (just in case the current one doesn't want to cooperate) they send a girl to the outer world. I imagine the conversations with her mother: "Sweety, you have to go to New York and make a living for yourself there while you make a doctor fall a love with you. You should look for a doctor who wants to live in a small town, who doesn't care for Netflix or Internet and who is not very ambitious. Preferably he shouldn't have a family that may ask questions or phone him while he is round here. Easy, right? Meanwhile your cousin Peter is looking for a teacher, the last one was killed yesterday 'cause she taught Darwin's theory on evolution". Dumb.
Star Trek: Discovery: Forget Me Not (2020)
Weak episode
First dull and a bit boring episode in the season, a classical filler episode. The ideas were good: the Trills and the stressed crew that needs a rest. However, it was poorly developed. If they had focused on a way to unify and calm the crew instead of focusing on the Adaria character, with whom I'm having a hard time to connect, maybe this episode would have been better.
I'm giving this episode 5 stars because the season started great and this one might be just a filler episode.
Hubie Halloween (2020)
An Adam Sandler movie
A Halloween movie with Adam Sandler and friends. Lots of scatological humour and humiliating jokes. Nothing new if you've already seen a couple of the latest Sandler's movies.
My mark 4 out of 10: the fake voice makes the movie unbearable.
The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)
ABSOLUTELY PERFECT
I am a huge fan of ghost stories, especially haunted houses, and although this a ghost story is much more than that. Do not expect a horror story because it is not. It is a story about love. A multifaceted love story (or rather stories) which happens to have some ghosts in it. I personally found it engrossing (much more than The Haunting of Hill House) and almost cried at the end (Why am I lying? I did cry at the lake scene!). A really beautiful story.
A warning :if you are hardcore horror fan, you will probably be highly disappointed.
The Boys: What I Know (2020)
Great Season Finale
It is the perfect ending for an absolutely fantastic season. Much better than the previous season 1. A pity they got rid of Stormfront so quickly. She could have made a perfect villain, she was clever and she seemed invulnerable, but at the end they portrait her as the stereotypical nazi-villain who's not as powerful (She can confront Homelander but she gets hurt by Maeve or Starlight? It makes no sense. There was a lot of plot armor around this episode). Finally, I loved the final revelation with the Senator. Next season promises a lot!
La colle (2017)
A French comedy without pretension
La Colle is about about a boy that is punished to spend two hours on detention with some other kids. These two hours will be the longest of his life as they keep repeating all over again in a time loop.
There is nothing really original in the plot and the characters are quite cliched and plain. However, the film kept me entertained because it has no pretensions. It doesn't pretend to be a great comedy or to introduce original concepts. It is just a comedy to spend an afternoon and it fulfilled its objective.
The Old Guard (2020)
A diamond in the rough
The Old Guard is a movie with a lot of potential, a small jewel on Netflix. It is an action film with interesting characters and great actors. Charlize Theron is absolutely gorgeous as always and does a great job as Andromaca. The rest of the immortals may also have interesting stories but they have so little time onscreen to develop that they became a bit cliché. If there is a second part, it is time to polish the stories of the secondary characters (maybe offering more flashbacks of their pasts?).
Alpha (2018)
Great barbers and dress-makers during neolithic
I didn't expect "Alpha" to be a great movie. I only wanted to spend a couple of hours watching a nice family movie about dog-human bonding. However, I cringed at some things from the very beginning. For instance, they all had trimmed beards and wore nice sewed jackets. Hard to maintain the suspension of disbelief. Even the wolf's behavior is unrealistic. An adult pregnant hungry wolf is very grateful and becomes very submissive and compliant in a couple of days, throwing away all her animal instincts. I can't make my dog take a bath but the human in the movie in less than a week gets to make her jump into a pool for fun. Then the wolf reunites briefly with the pack but they leave the human boy alone, an easy prey, because, you know, they are nice animals.
Another Life (2019)
With this crew, Earth is doomed
Who had the brilliant idea to make a series about a spaceship with a crew of insufferable cry-babies in a mission to save the world? Because if this crew represents the best minds of our planet, we deserve extinction. Please Netflix we know you can do much better!
El aviso (2018)
Good idea, poor execution
The idea is simple: once in a while, following a numerical pattern, someone dies in a "cursed" place. The film starts very promising, with a mystery and some interesting characters but as it develops it turns out to be another big fail of script and execution.
In my opinion, some big mistakes and flaws are the following:
The "cursed place" is nowadays a 24-hour shop as it was ten years ago, but the main character finds out that the mystery can be traced back to when it was a bank, almost a century ago. We are always offered the same exterior image but it is quite clear that this shop is in the outskirts of a city, probably an industrial area. Who in their right mind would put a bank in that place 100 years ago? It would have made more sense if it had been in the city centre.
The main character happens to have schizophrenia. Of course a cheap resource to make him appear mad and illogical (again another example of poor knowledge about mental illnesses from script writers). But the thing is that he has physical proof of what he is saying but no one, absolutely no one, believes him or makes an effort to listen to him. Great friends! And why should he be a famous mathematician in order to solve the mystery? The numerical relationship between the murders is quite obvious. Anyone could have easily connected the dots even the so-called friends.
And the ending. Oh! what a cheap ending! The main character talks, out of the blue, with the boy from the future throughout a mirror in order to save him. In the end the movie is like "hey as we can't explain why this curse is happening, we can create an unexpected connexion to the past using magic in order to save the boy. We are not going to provide any explanation basically because there is none." Rubbish. It would have been much much better for instance if it has been their friends from the past who after his death found out about his investigations and tried to save the boy or something like this. Anything but the mirror.
Finally, what kind of mother would bring his son to a place that makes him so scared that he peed on himself and tried to avoid at any costs? What kind of school knows about the bullying and does nothing to prevent it? Why did they show us that the daughter of the first murderer didn't have a hand? It had nothing to do with the plot.
5 out of 10 and I am being generous. Although its flaws what it really ruins the whole experience is the cheap ending.
Grave Encounters (2011)
Excellent horror movie
I am not a big fan of the found footage genre but this is one of the best horror films I have watched in a while. It is scary and the atmosphere in the asylum is truly creepy. The concept is as simple as it is effective: some film makers spend a night recording a documentary at a very haunted old asylum.
It is a great film to watch on Halloween night.
Eli (2019)
Entertaining
A boy who suffers a strange illness goes to a facility that promises a cure. Once there, strange things start to happen.
It is not a horror masterpiece but it entertains and I liked the twist at the end. However, I would have liked a creepier atmosphere and a bit more of mystery around the house and the children.
A film for a rainy afternoon.
Wounds (2019)
If you love horror movies avoid this one.
There are a lot of people involved in the production of a movie: producers, writers, actors, directors, etc and it still amazes me how some scripts with no sense or coherence end up being a movie.
This is the case of "Wounds". This movie is full of plot holes, a ridiculous ending and dumb and illogical decisions made by the main characters that after ten minutes into the movie I did not longer care what happened to them.
A waste of time.
Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne (2019)
What it is and what it could have been
I can't describe how disappointed I was after finishing the series. I won't be able to rewatch the series for a long time without thinking what a waste of story lines and characters. How many possibilities and they chose the worst outcome! It is full of fanservice for kids. What were they thinking? If only they have let their characters do what they were supposed to do: John and Bran fight the Night King, Daenerys break the wheel, Arya be a useful faceless assassin, and so on.
The worst:
- "Bran the Broken" hahaha. Really? Really??? Bran was supposed to be the magician, the "witch" that helped humans against the Night King. His role was to be the "3 eyed raven" ... whatever that was! It's like as if at the end of LOTR instead of Aragorn they offered the crown to Gandalf. Absolutely ridiculous!
- The council. The only thing realistic in that council is what Sansa did. After an empire is broken, small kingdoms appear. All of them should have decided to be independent. There is no reason to keep having a king or queen, after everything that has happened! And why a council? To have all these characters reunited? (Fanservice?) Grey Worm should have gone berserk and killed Jon and Tyrion after finding out what happened to Daenerys!
- Drogon. It finds its mother dead and it destroys the throne. Why??? Why didn't it kill Jon? (Plot armour?) Are dragons now intelligent creatures? (more intelligent than some humans in this show, for sure)
- The Unsullied and the Dohraki. They procreate at highly speed. They were almost anniquilated at episode 3 (for shock purposes) and now they are thousands again (why are the showrunners tend to forget everything they have previously established????). And WHY didn't they start going on a rampage after Jon killed Daenerys? Why are they so diplomatic now? One second they are blindly following Daenerys and now they are obeying a council??? It's OUT of character!!!!
- Michael Sapochnick's conception of Arya and the white horse at the end of 8x05 hasn't had, of course, continuity in this episode.
- The freefolk. Waiting for Jon to go back to their home. Didn't they know there was a HOLE in the wall?
There are so many things bad done I could go on forever. I won't even talk about Daenerys (making her a morally ambiguous character is not a bad idea but if she is mad or not it should have been something for us to decide, an open ending should have been more appealing) or the Night King (I can't get off my head the idea that he should have been the MAIN conflict in this season. I can't buy the idea that he was only a subplot. You can't start a series or dedicate a whole season to a subplot!!)
What a waste!!