Change Your Image
Evac156
Reviews
New Girl (2011)
Kind of cute, but male characters are completely flat and tedious
I'm not sure why I am watching this show. I like it enough to keep watching, but it isn't great. Zooey Deschanel (Jess) is great: Funny, cute, sexy, and endearingly sincere and awkward. Cece is pretty, charming, and much more balanced than any of the other characters. The three guys? No appeal whatsoever. All three male characters are simply stupid and annoying. Schmidt? Rich, elitist d-bag type, with clichéd insecurities. Nick? Angry dropout slacker drunk, with no personality. Winston? Placeholder comedic prop, with no discernible attributes other than "the black guy." And did I mention that the four lead characters are played as being unrelentingly stupid? I don't watch a lot of sitcoms. Many of the ones I've liked over the years (Frasier, Big Bang Theory, 30 Rock, Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Mad About You) have had a tradition of smart characters who sometimes do stupid things, because stupid can be funny, if written well. This is different. The lead characters in New Girl (Jess, Nick, Schmidt, Winston) are sometimes stated to be smart (school teacher, nearly a lawyer, undefined high-paying executive thing), but are never shown behaving as anything other than complete idiots. Also (burying the spoiler), the romance between Jess and Nick was telegraphed pretty much from episode one. I had been hoping that it wouldn't eventually become the tedious centerpiece of the show, but unfortunately now it has. I might need to find a replacement sitcom after I finish season 3.
Timeline (2003)
A movie as generic as its title
Why, oh why, did I bother watching this movie? Take every time travel movie you've ever seen. Distill them down to the most common elements and clichés, and string them together. Scrupulously avoid doing anything remotely interesting or original. Package together with appallingly bad science, characters as generic as the story, and bland acting. And how has Richard Donner sunk so far? Not long ago he was an A-list director. Now he's doing this...is this what happens to old directors when they fizzle out? Or maybe someone looked at his work on the Lethal Weapon series, and said, "Hey, all we need is a guy who can film big explosions! Let's get Donner!" If I had a the time machine from the movie, I would use it to go back and tell myself to skip this abysmal tedium -- even risking the "time travel genetic damage" the characters in the movie had to worry about. Avoid this movie at any cost.
The Break-Up (2006)
Not a comedy; a tragedy, with a few comedic moments
I was very disappointed by this movie. All of the ads I had seen for it pitched it as a comedy centering around the fight for the apartment that neither character wanted to give up, and it looked quite funny. This was entirely false advertising. This movie is not in any way a comedy. It is a tragedy about a couple who are completely wrong for each other, but have realized it too late, after apparently fooling themselves, as well as their friends and families for years. It starts off light enough, but as soon as the actual break-up begins, it is nothing but sadness and pain. There is some comic relief, coming from supporting cast Jon Favreau, Justin Long, and John Michael Higgins, but Aniston's and Vaughn's characters are robbed of nearly any opportunity to do anything funny; they are too busy with the painful parts of their roles. Vaughn does get to do a few humorous bits: his reactions to Aniston's naked walk through the apartment, and his trash-talking as he hijacks of her date, are amusing, but for the most part he is just playing the part of a sad, immature man who is realizing he's wasted years of his life trying to be someone he isn't, for a woman who isn't who he thought she would be.
Hardly ever funny, and not at all the "date movie" it's supposed to be.
The Ninth Gate (1999)
Decent buildup that goes nowhere
Caught this one today on Bravo -- or rather, I should say, it caught me. I thought it looked like an interesting idea, researching demonic summoning and opening the nine gates of the title. Instead, all we get is a rather interesting buildup of Johnny Depp trying to figure out which copy of a book is real, figuring out the roles of the various sinister players, and being rescued by a mysterious woman. Unfortunately, once he figures out the mystery, nothing happens. I am not exaggerating here. I do not mean to say, "not much happens." I mean, NOTHING happens. One person tries to grant himself omnipotent demonic powers and fails. Johnny Depp then thinks he may have solved the mystery, and walks toward an old castle. Fade to black. Nothing happens. That's two and a half hours stolen from me by Bravo, Roman Polanski, and Johnny Depp that I will never get back. Do not make the same mistake I did.
Savage Planet (2007)
Even among truly awful movies, this was truly AWFUL
We all know that a movie billed as a "SciFi Channel Original" is pretty much guaranteed to be terrible. But in a galaxy of terrible movies, this is about the worst I have seen. Worse than "The Bone Snatcher." Even worse than "Dog Soldiers." When I saw the ads for it, I thought it looked like it might be along the lines of "The Legacy of Heorot," an excellent Larry Niven sci-fi action adventure novel. Not even remotely like it, unfortunately.
Let's put it this way: No story. No acting. No production values. Not even any interesting action sequences. The only, and I must emphasize ONLY, thing that raises this from a 1 to a 2 is that Reagan Pasternak ("Allison") looks rather nice in a few scenes.
Hey, I knew it would be bad going in...but no way did I ever expect anything this bad.
Bugs! (2003)
Good, but I would've liked a different approach better
I enjoyed the film, and the IMAX 3D effects were very impressive. However, instead of just focusing on the lifecycle of two creatures and giving the occasional side note about others, I would've preferred more of an overall survey about insect life. The lifecycle isn't all that fascinating (unless you're seeing it for the first time, which most viewers probably aren't), it's the visuals that we want to see. A more survey-style presentation that allowed us to get a look at a variety of interesting bugs would be more satisfying in this regard.
Two of my favorites, visually, were the dueling rhinoceros beetles, and the praying mantis shedding its carapace whole.
Daredevil (2003)
Much ado about not a heck of a lot
There's really not much to it. Some of the action scenes are pretty good, and the first confrontation between Murdock and Elektra is fun to watch, but that's about it. The story is superficial and predictable. Colin Farrell is entertaining as Bullseye; I can see why he's been getting so much work lately (Farrell, that is -- not Bullseye), but his over-the-top psycho bit can't compensate for Affleck's deadpan Daredevil.
I was never a fan of the Daredevil comic. Why? Well, what makes superheroes interesting? Easy -- superPOWERS. Daredevil doesn't have them, and hence the movie doesn't have the flash and dazzle that make X-Men and Spider-Man so appealing (I won't compare it to the Hulk, since I couldn't be bothered to see that one).
With neither an involving story nor a big bucket of eye-candy (Jennifer Garner's stunning cleavage notwithstanding), there isn't a heck of a lot to recommend Daredevil.
Cube 2: Hypercube (2002)
Money saved on sets should've been spent on script!
It wasn't awful. It held my attention. Interesting things kept happening throughout... I just hoped that eventually the "interesting things" would come to a coherent conclusion, and there would be a plot that made some sense.
But no. All we get is a non-ending and a non-explanation. Although I did notice that at the end someone said "phase two is complete." I suppose that means the original movie "Cube" was "phase one." So perhaps, never having seen the first movie, I'm missing something?
But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)
Best "camp" movie since Meatballs
It's the classic heartwarming tale of summer camp romance... Girl likes girls, parents think girl should like boys, girl meets boys, girl isn't interested in boys, girl meets other girls...
If you don't mind a few obvious cliches (hey, a film about gay kids being sent to "straight camp" and the misguided attempts to "straighten" them out is bound to have them...) then this film has a lot of good humor on its side.
It may not handle the issues of being young and gay with sufficient "sensitivity," but there are other movies that try to do that. If my various gay, lesbian, and bisexual friends aren't offended by it, then I'm certainly not going to be. This one isn't about consciousness-raising. It's about fun, and a little romance.
(It's also about RuPaul dressed as a man, something that we don't see often, and I am assured many will find most appealing.)
Don't see it if you are homophobic; or if you think that everything in the G&L film section needs to be PC; or if you are simply humor-impaired. Otherwise, give it a look. I gave it 8 out of 10.
Signs (2002)
A huge disappointment for science fiction fans
An incredibly bad movie. I was expecting science fiction, not a "family drama." Instead of an interesting story of an alien invasion, we get a tedious story of a man trying to find his faith and keep his family together, with some of the trappings of a bad 1950's sci-fi film -- M. Night Shyamalan seems to be attempting an homage of some sort here, and there are even references made to "War of the Worlds."
(Possible spoilers below.)
Instead of finding out what the "signs" mean, or anything about the aliens and their intention, we just know "they come down to do bad things and are beaten by an amazing low-tech solution." Nothing about this film makes any sense, or offers much entertainment. We have aliens capable of star travel, but they need to leave each other messages in corn fields? They're incapable of getting through something as simple as a locked wooden door? They can blend into the background like chameleons, shoot poison gas from their fingernails? They dissolve in water, but didn't reckon on earth being a watery planet? Instead of the suspense and terror promised by the trailers, all we're getting here is a bunch of bad, poorly organized cliches.