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Reviews
Tommy Battles the Silver Sea Dragon (2018)
Ambitious but muddled vanity project
Strong theater kid meets sundance vibes, this is an overly ambitious vanity project for its writer/director/composer/star. It's actually well shot and acted for this kind of low budget movie, but ultimately you have to be really insightful to make a movie about how dating in your twenties sucks interesting, but instead we get the lame conceit of the main character being put on trial (In his mind!!!) mixed with a lot of screams of anguish. The music doesn't quite pass muster, the story is thin like a lot of musicals but also kind of muddled, and there is nothing really interesting about the main character Tommy. My experience watching this movie-immediate laughing out loud at how silly this because it opens with a long coutroom sequence and the protagonist metaphorically? Killing his brother, giving it slight chance when it shifted to be about dating, and then gradually becoming more bored as it becomes a generic bad relationship drama. At times it also plays like a half baked concept album from 2008, Pitchfork would not approve.
The Creator (2023)
Beautiful looking movie, derivative script and incoherent world
An 'original' sci fi movie with little original about it, it plays out as a pretty routine action movie where a soldier wanders through cyberpunk southeast asia with a special (robot) child looking to end a war and see find his wife (who he presumed dead). You know a movie isn't working for you when it feels like kind of a mechanical exercise to get to various action set pieces, or like a bad video game where cutscenes just exist to stich various unrelated levels. Yes, some of the action scenes are pretty cool-a cryberpunk city is nicely designed and the orbital laser platform the go to in the finale are exceptionally cool, but it's still stuff we've seen before. The other thing that took me out of the movie was just little bits of worldbuilding that didn't make much sense, specifically how there are robots performing all roles in society even when it doesn't really make sense, like robot peasant farmers or robot sweatshop garment workers. It just reeked of a director who didn't think too deeply about the logic of his story besides going to Thailand and thinking "what if half these people are robots". Also. For supposedly being involved in and endless with this block of robot friendly countries the american space marines can seemingly fly or drive around an enemy country at will. Little things I would overlook if i was entertained, but the movie wasn't bombastic or interesting enough for me to overlook obvious faults.
My Son Hunter (2022)
Shoddily made propaganda for true believers but not the worst of the worst
Aping various Adam Mckay and Scorsese movies, this is like a horny wikipedia article, but duller than that sounds. No real plot to speak of this is 90 minutes of Hunter Biden doing drugs and explaining to a fictitious person who he is and his various shady (but probably not illegal) business dealings. To pad out the runtime you get a couple scenes of unrelated conservative hobbyhorses, like the anti blm sequence at the beginning that has nothing to do with anything. Not giving it one star because there are a few stylish shots, which elevates it above most super cheap conservative/Christian movies, and I actually did like the main actor as Hunter, he actually brought intensity to the role.