hotemeile Reviews

Sweet Home (2020– )

Solid 7

[7/10 · 8 May 2024]

SEASON 1 ------------

STORY: 6 Anime plot. Don't take it too seriously and you'll be entertained. Script is pretty bare-boned, which is a good thing in an action flick. Some weird lines here and there, but it's possible language barriers played a role there.

DIRECTING: 7 Not an easy task to translate the source material into the screen. But while there may be nothing exceptional to speak of in the details (that i noticed), the result is a very solid and artfully storyboarded adaptation. Pacing is somewhat slow at some points, with the camera lingering on way after the scene has been exhausted. But this can be forgiven in a TV show trying to hit the runtime mark for each episode - not an easy editing task. And this filler is minimal and doesn't affect engagement too much.

ACTING: 9 I'm always extremely impressed with the average level of South Korean actors. Whatever they're teaching in those Drama classes, everyone else in the world should be taking notes. The whole cast is incredible expressive, colourful and nuanced. Can't fully rate their competence on line delivery though, since i don't speak the language.

CINEMATOGRAPHY: 9 Just spectacular. Camera work is excellent and lighting is on a class of its own. Grimy post-apocalyptic sets with cranked up to 11 saturation filters are the ultimate eye-candy.

VFX: 7 Hard to rate this. Not a huge budget for a very ambitious ensemble of monsters with a lot of screen time, often too well lit. So it's barely above passable, basically on par with your typical video-game cut-scene, at times better, other times much worse. But creature and set design alone would push the rating closer to a 9 and gore effects are a solid 10. I'm still scratching my head on how they pulled off those nosebleeds.

SEASON 2 ------------ Don't bother.

Space Sweepers (2021)

Should've been 10 stars

[6/10 · 2 March 2023]

I really really want to award this movie 10 stars. Its heart is in the right place. It's Serenity, Cowboy Bebop and Fifth Element. An ambitious space-opera with magnificent visuals and epic action sequences.

Unfortunately it's riddled with directing, acting and storytelling issues. There's way too many extras with lines in this movie and i suppose there was no money to hire that many real actors to fill those roles, so it seems they just grabbed people from the street for a buck an hour. Some lines are bad enough on paper, but give them to a bad actor to spit it out in mangled English with a horrible fake accent and you're in for a masterclass on "How to make a 20 million dollar movie feel like a low-budget film school project." It's a must-watch in that sense. I mean that. This movie deserves to be studied. It's hard to find a greater gap between potential and execution in a film with such high production value.

DIRECTION is a fusion of styles, that really don't work together in such a hodgepodge. There's first-person narration, newscasting interludes, dream sequences, flashbacks.... It's a cascading showreel of storytelling formulas. With a Deux ex machina MacGuffin at the center being chased by a megalomaniac old-school Bond Super-Villain with a classic penchant for endless expositions.

Most CHARACTERS apart from Dorothy are either unlikable or irrelevant. So, when anything dramatic happens to them it's very hard to care. Which just makes the already wobbly story completely fall apart... I get the intention: everyone is on a redemption arc and Dorothy is the catalyst. But it doesn't matter how many Kodak scenes of the characters-falling-in-love-with-the-little-girl you show us, if on the very next scene you're rehashing their greed and selfishness. And it all makes that happy ending feel very very fake. That final scene of Captain Jang meeting his deceased daughter in The Matrix being especially corny and contrived.

STORY I've watched this movie twice and i still don't know why the Big Bad Guy keeps having Hulk episodes every time he gets angry. Has the Jekyll and Hyde archetype become so popular in our culture it doesn't need an origin story anymore? Or did i just tune out while listening to another one of his long-winded Nitrous-Oxide-voiced evil-mastermind-soliloquies and missed out on that crucial detail? And the central plot? His reason for tracking down a nanobot-enhanced super-human child (who made his dream of terraforming Mars a reality), just so he can strap her to a giant bomb? It's all expertly explained in a 2 minute scene narrated in an amazing Pidgin Nigerian:

"We done follow dis Mars program since when start. We not think say strange? If Mars wiffin harsh environment witton green land, wittin rest of us? Dorothy no be no ordinary begin, de born a continental (*congenital*) sickness."

Just an absolutely spectacular decision by Jo Sung-hee, that apparently wanted to have his own Jar-Jar Binks bad-press for this movie. And managed to go way above and beyond whatever affronts that character ever made.

Wait, did i say it was expertly explained? Sorry. I meant to say "vaguely." The best i can surmise is that leaving Dorothy alive would allow Earth to rebuild and somehow ruin his vision of a eugenic revolution on Mars, where only the most bestest of humans can inhabit. So, yeah, i'm afraid everyone else has to die and the whole planet needs to be turned into a giant ball of magma. Makes sense. Completely believable motivations. That's the thing with space-operas... so easy to take them too far and make the whole thing laughable.

But hold on. It gets better. Now imagine the Big Bad Guy actually catches the crew and retrieves the MacGuffin plot device from them. What to do now? An evil mastermind can't just kill the main characters, right? Even if his troops just murdered everyone else on the ship including Dorothy's father, surely he will chose to make a special case out of them, no? Yes, of course. After obtaining the critical item to the success of your evil masterplan, you always leave the people who were jeopardizing your whole enterprise alive as witnesses and not only give them a chance to escape, offer them millions of dollars as a bribe. Just so you can revel in the knowledge that they will suffer watching the Earth being destroyed... Ah! Tropes, delicious tropes. This movie has them all.

And now we come to Captain Jang's great epiphany, the moment where he stops being that selfish, greedy character who steals from his crewmates and is constantly and desperately trying to trade Dorothy for some cash at every turn... He actually accepts a bribe in exchange for her from the Big Bad Guy who's been sending super-soldiers after them the whole movie. This, mind you, seconds after watching him murder everyone on the ship, including Dorothy's father. Jang then uses it to get his daughter's possessions retrieved (by what kind of techno-magic we are not told) and suddenly realizes in a flashback that he was always too worried about money to actually pay attention to his daughter while she was alive. That's it. He is now a good guy. Comes back to the ship and is ready to give up his life to save Dorothy. I told you this was a trope-fest.

This story could've worked if it was told right. And the proof is Serenity. If you've watched that movie, there's nothing for you here that won't suck in comparison. But it's still 6 stars worth of entertainment, if you can stomach all the plot flaws and an actual gem of a case-study if you're interested in investigating what makes such a high quality movie feel so cheap.

In Search of Darkness (2019)

In Search of Darkness ...with a metal detector.

[3/10 · 26 February 2023]

I wholeheartedly applaud the phenomenal idea of documenting the vast treasure trove of 80's horror movies.

...And that's about all the positive things i can say about this (hence the 3 stars).

The execution is just downright abysmal. The format is a horror movie lottery where you pick a title out of a box and a celebrity out of a hat and mix a few seconds of footage with a few minutes of random ramblings. With about the same amount of attention (or lack of) given to each particular title. The Toxic Avenger gets about the same handful of minutes as The Fly. Hey, i love Troma and their wacky movies, but i doubt even they would be comfortable with such an arrangement. One is a fun b-movie, the other is a masterpiece. Sure, they both deserve recognition for their place in cinema history, but that's the tragedy here, this documentary doesn't care a bit about history. There's no guiding thread between these movies and no consistent effort made to break down each of their contributions, apart from the occasional mention of some iconic scenes, often focusing on the animatronics alone.

This feels less like watching an actual movie and more like you just got invited into the musty man-cave of the typical horror movie geek of the 90s to look at a wall full of VHS titles.

Considering this was crowdfunded i'd expect its backers to be screaming for refunds after watching the first half hour. But apparently they actually screamed for MOAR and 2 sequels have since been produced! This is utterly baffling to me. There's only two possible things a horror fan has to gain from In Search of Darkness:

• a list of curated movies of that genre in no particular order.

• random snippets of interviews with more or (often) less relevant people associated with those movies with more or (often) less pertinent observations to make about those movies.

This is a terrible option to satisfy both of those. If all you want is a list: it takes only a minute to get much better results with an imdb search; if all you want is the interviews: you'd be much better served watching full length ones on youtube.

I fell asleep 3 times through this marathon (i wouldn't advise anyone to watch it all in one sitting) and at the end i can kind of understand the screams for MOAR. Not because you actually want more of this specifically, rather it feels like nothing was properly covered and the history of 80s horror cinema remains untold.

I hope this trilogy's existence hasn't irreparably damaged the possibility that one day such a thing might be produced, in a mini-series format preferably.

Carnival Row (2019–2023)

All ambience, no substance

[5/10 · 21 June 2021]

This show is the definition of baroque, where everything is secondary to aesthetics. When selling a fantasy world to an audience, special care must be given to fleshing out not as much its environment, but crucially its inhabitants. Characters are just characters in this show, they do what the (cheesy) plot tells them to, not what their consciences and personalities would, because they portray no signs of having any.

This is the abysmal flaw of an otherwise enjoyable and promising show. And, yes, a spectacular world I for one would love to be immersed in. But the suspension of disbelief is constantly broken by terrible unimaginative writing.

1917 (2019)

Worth a watch, but not the price of a ticket.

[5/10 · 1 January 2021]

*Cinematography and Production Design: 10*

No need for words here. It's been said in every review. Cinematography alone makes this movie worth watching. Don't demand more from it and you might actually enjoy it.

*Story: 6*

Straight survival story. While quite poor, this isn't the downfall of 1917. A movie doesn't need a complex plot to grab your attention, deliver a great experience and convey a powerful message at the end.

*Script: 3*

This is where things start to go very wrong for 1917. The dialogues are appallingly weak. At some points i felt like i was watching a broken dub of a foreign movie. The lines are so insipid and delivered with such bad timing and conviction, that it's hard to take any of it seriously and engage with any of the characters. Everyone apart from MacKay is an extra in this movie, and a cheap one it feels. This is not necessarily a fault on the acting, but often on the directing and the script itself. Add to that all the plot devices that were used to tell the story, like Chapman getting stabbed off-camera, a lone sniper missing all his shots against a single target 20m away, a rat triggering a tripwire at the precisest of moments like it was being radio-controlled by the Reichswehr... It's just cartoonish.

*Acting: 5*

This is a tough one for me. MacKay does a stellar job carrying this movie on his back. On that alone, this rating should be much higher. But Chapman is at best unremarkable and every other actor, as mentioned before, is given very little room to deliver an interesting performance and all the lines are blurted out awkwardly and unconvincingly throughout, making the entire narrative fall apart and seriously crippling whatever immersion its brilliant production could have otherwise offered.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

Unwatchable

[5/10 · 3 January 2019]

Horrendously discombobulated narrative, riddled with absurd premises and gasping plot-holes. Visuals are the main protagonist here and everything else takes a backstage, ridiculous twists and annoying distractions in the story are taken to elevate the superfluous imagery that's so dear to the Andersonian baroque.

But incongruences and annoyances alone can be forgiven when we're feasting our eyes and our hearts are engaged in the struggles of the characters ...If only Anderson gave us a chance to actually fall in love with them that is. Not only is this story bad to begin with and fatally crippled by the excesses of style, every line is delivered in that particular customary journalistic affection this director so favors, a monotonic barrage of tautological verbiage that is perhaps conflated in his mind with cleverness, but is ultimately no more than an inadequate unjustified formalism that just turns characters into lifeless drones. All the abundant tears and sentimental music in this movie fall absolutely flat because of it.

Wetlands (2013)

The German Amélie

[8/10 · 16 October 2014]

This movie is certainly not for everyone. If thinking of a oozing zit makes you gag, if you get queasy at the sight of blood, if you suffer from nosocomephobia, or tomophobia, or if any mention of bodily fluids instantly offends your sensitivity, i'm sorry to say you'll never get to enjoy this beautiful little movie.

If, on the other hand, you're one of those people who, like me, see Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings as a bittersweet shift from a brilliant career in gore (Braindead, Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles); if you share a morbid fascination for human anatomy (in all its scatological glory), or simply find the cultural taboos surrounding it ridiculously irrational; you'll absolutely love this movie.

Trying to describe Wetlands, to me, instantly evokes Jeunet's Amélie (as weird as that may sound). They are of course two very different movies, but in the same way, i think, as the modern tale of Sleeping Beauty is so prudishly different from the original Grimm's tale. Both movies essentially revolve around a quirky and naive young woman with family issues striving to find love and meaning in her life through the weirdest and most hare-brained schemes imaginable. And, in that regard, Carla Juni's prodigious embodiment of her character perfectly rivals Audrey Tatou's equally spectacular performance.

If you can only find the same charm in Helen's quirkiness as you did in Amélie's, and get past all the visceral lewdness, you'll find Wetlands doesn't really aim to offend or disgust, as some critics would claim. The fact is, those who could only point at that aspect of this movie, were just sadly incapable of braking through that moral wall and seeing beyond it. Some people, of course, will never be able to appreciate the beauty of a garden, because they're too repulsed by the smell of manure...

Night Train to Lisbon (2013)

A journey into one's self

[7/10 · 26 March 2013]

Night Train to Lisbon is one of the most philosophical movies to hit theaters in the last couple of years. The trip started by Raimund is not between places but between identities. An existential journey into the great unknown of the soul. Some say we take ourselves everywhere we go. This movie tries to tell us instead that we *find* ourselves in those places, we discover a new way of seeing with our own eyes and, when we leave, a part of us stays in that place forever. Returning there is a way of visiting ourselves, like we would an old friend... There's so many layers, so many subtle metaphors, so much poetry in the imagery and storytelling, that despite being such a straightforward story you can't help feeling like you're walking through a maze, a labyrinth of emotions and thoughts, where present, past and future merge into a vast uplifting eternity. One of the best crafted uses of mise-en-abîme i recall ever seeing in a movie! Raimund is Raimund, but he's also Pascal Mercier, and also Amadeu Prado and also You. There's a fiction within a fiction here: a book within a book within a movie. A lie within a lie: a poet within a reader, within a spectator, within a person. This dilution between fiction and reality and between the actor and the audience often occurs, but rarely is it ever a theme, rarely is it ever presented as a question to the audience and rarely so beautifully answered. This game of mirrors will leave you full of wonder and hungry for life. There couldn't be a better outcome for a story that starts with a suicide attempt... There's too many reasons to watch this movie and too little space to review it properly unfortunately... The scenery of Lisbon, the universal anguish of the characters, the excruciating portrayal of the Portuguese dictatorship, the lessons it offers on some of the most important questions one can ask oneself... Do yourself a favor and go see it!

Rango (2011)

Watch out Pixar!

[10/10 · 28 January 2012]

I approached this movie with caution. I anticipated entertainment from reading some reviews, but was weary as always of its blockbuster character. Let's be honest: Nickelodeon has been consistently pouring out terrible movies; Gore Verbinski has yet to prove himself outside the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise; John Logan, despite all his brilliance in other screenplays, hasn't shown to be at the same level with animation, as his work in Sinbad attests to. So, critical acclaim aside, i wasn't convinced...

But scratch all that! This is a new age for Nickelodeon, a defining moment for Verbinski and a testament to Logan's literary genius.

Rango has everything: masterful CGI, impeccable storytelling, radiating creativity, surgical attention to detail, humility, depth, vision; and almost none of the usual handicaps, clichés and mistakes of the genre. And let's not forget humor, a cascading, gushing, showering deluge of humor: meta humor, black humor, adult humor, satire, parody, and of course, potty humor. But its crowning moment is its referential humor, its homages - the Spirit of the West, the Fear & Loathing... All beautifully interwoven into the story in a way that separates it from what so many mash-up comedies try to do (and fail horribly).

The western genre is made fun of repeatedly, but never is it ridiculed or tarnished. It's a story made with love and admiration for its themes. A wondrous thing in this cynical world and a rarity amid comedy. Humanity is reflected perfectly in this fable. And viscerally. With all its flaws and weaknesses, and all its charms and achievements. And despite the many anecdotes, despite the myriad caricatures, it's never shallow, never false. It remains true to its principles and offers as many laughs as lessons. And by that, i am truly amazed.

Real Steel (2011)

If SOPA was introduced to avoid movies like these from being copied, I'm totally in favor!

[1/10 · 27 January 2012]

I only found out this movie was a Spielberg production when i saw it on screen. I immediately knew i'd be faced with a lot of cheap kodak moments and teary-eyed kids wrapped in a formula of family-fun Steven has been repeating since ET.

I wasn't wrong. But i had no idea how bad it was going to be. At least Goonies 2, i mean... Super 8, managed to actually be entertaining. This movie has no surprises, it's just predictable turn, after predictable turn.

The acting is terrible across the board, but i can't blame the actors for not putting an effort into such a depressing tale. Goyo is a promising talent, unfortunately the lines he was given are so out-of-character and cheesy for a kid his age, no amount of talent could be convincing. He likes Robot boxing and he's so into video games he's even fluent with Japanese, but he's no nerd, he's all grown-up and can haggle like a moroccan couscous salesman on a couscous black Friday, and to top it all off he looks like the coolest kid ever, even though his mom has just died days ago. And, like that's not horribly incongruent enough, he spends half of the movie showing off his dancing skills like a Bieber wannabe. That's one seriously schyzophrenic kid!

But the bad acting and atrocious storytelling doesn't end there. Some of the people in Real Steel are more cartoonish than the robots: Ricky, Tak Mashido, Farra, look like villains out of a Disney Channel Show. Most of the footage of James Rebhorn and Hope Davis should've stayed on the cutting room floor. They are lost on screen, clearly with no chemistry as a couple and not enough lines on the script to work with. Every time they're interacting on screen you can actually crack a laugh at how they flay their arms at each other clueless, like two crash-test-dummies in slow motion. But the way they keep awkwardly eyeballing Hugh Jackman during every lousy dialog like they're asking to be put out of their misery just makes you terribly sad again.

The final scene with everyone crying in rapture at Hugh Jackman performing video-fitness, had me ripping hair out of my head! I'm in awe of all the positive reviews this movie is getting. Either this movie premiered on IMDb's opposite day, or i had no idea this site had such a huge userbase of 9 year olds.

50/50 (2011)

More than a cliff-hanger. A movie that will hang with you for a long time.

[8/10 · 26 January 2012]

I walked into this movie expecting to be shocked into laughter with all sorts of grotesque black humor. I didn't get what i expected, and i'm glad i didn't.

I did laugh. I laughed like i would if i was hanging out with Kyle, getting hammered and chasing skirt, trying desperately not to take life too seriously. Because this is one of those rare movies that make you forget you're watching a movie. I felt like one of the guys, truly disturbed by the tribulations, truly relieved by the few good news. I was spitting insults at Rachael, like i'd been waiting for years to let her know. I wanted to hug Adam's Mother. And i think i might have fallen a little in love with Katherine.

I feel like an idiot saying this, because after all the hundreds of movies i've seen in my life, i was sure i'd be immune to this gullibility. I really really wasn't prepared to cry like a little girl at what should've been just a fun creepy comedy. I must have some weird eye disease or something.

But that's how good this movie is.

John Levine has crafted a flawless pearl. His directing is so perfectly impartial, so focused on the characters instead of style, that it allows for the actors to become their parts in such a complete way, you'd be surprised if they were actually different people in real life.

A must-see work of art which will leave you staring endlessly at the credits all the way to the last line, directing the rest of the movie in your head, like you were planning to meet them all again tomorrow...

Sucker Punch (2011)

Worst porn flick ever

[3/10 · 21 January 2012]

I'm confused...

There's more grunts than dialog in this movie, so this is clearly a porn flick, right?

On the other hand, unless i got the censored version or something, there doesn't seem to be any actual sex in it...

That is, if you don't count guns as phallic symbols and all the explosions as ... well, you know what i mean.

Then again, this is certainly a work of masturbation with no real plot to talk about and horrible acting across the board, so it really can't be anything else than porn.

The lack of sex scenes however forces me to award a very low score.

Another Earth (2011)

Probably the only sci-fi movie worth seeing

[9/10 · 21 January 2012]

I'm a huge fan of science fiction and will pretty much gorge on every written or filmed title of the genre. So much so that i sometimes find myself watching an utterly hideous mass-produced junk film like, let's say, X-Men First Class, knowing full well before-hand that i was going to hate every minute of it, but still clinging to the hope of taking pleasure in seeing another gloriously outlandish world unfold on screen.

That's the most enticing promise of science-fiction, isn't it? The promise of travel to a completely new dimension, where our present lives are a thing of the past, our hardships now as relevant as those of a neanderthal would be to us. Global warming, unemployment, lack of freedom, crime... one or another, made obsolete, already solved and forgotten. Humanity peaked and faces new incredibly inspiring challenges. Yes, there's dystopias, of course, but those i think transcend the genre, they are tales of caution, more than fantasies of the "If". We all know how close that precipice always is, we talk about it constantly on or everyday lives, how this or that is going to bring about the end of all that's good. It's the chance to bask at how amazing the future will be, that is what makes science-fiction so appealing.

And that's why this movie is so brilliant. Because it tells us that the ultimate mystery is not in the infinitely small or out there in the vast endlessness of the universe, it's right here, in us. And it invites you to bask, not at the possibility of exploring new planets, but how there's less worlds in the entire universe than there are dreams inside you. And that's for me, after watching this movie, the only relevant science-fiction. Because it's both the goal of science and the purpose of fiction. To know ourselves.

Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–2008)

Could be one of the best animated series ever, but fails

[6/10 · 6 April 2010]

The premise for Avatar is a great one, the universe is brilliant, the animation is very good, but that's all. It seems like the creators don't quite know how to handle all the power they've given to the characters. Fighting techniques and technology in action sequences are pretty boring. You can summon fire but you're still using knifes and medieval war machines? Serious lack of imagination there. This sort of top-of-the-head mundane approach to what could otherwise be an epic and innovative narrative, pretty much pervades the whole series on all levels and leaves it unfulfilled. The storytelling is rushed and primitive with no space for nuance and no respect for rhythm. This robs both the characters' depth and the worlds' seductiveness. Dialogues have no pauses, landscapes have no protagonism. This in my view is the biggest flaw of avatar and the one reason why it has no soul. The esoteric side of element bending and Shintoism was another great fountain of inspiration not allowed to gush forth. In the end Avatar is all action, and not very inventive at it either. But don't let me discourage you from watching it. It's still an entertaining an fun show as long as you can bear all its critical flaws and aren't frustrated for its infantile shallowness.