Change Your Image
sharkovski
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againReviews
One Week (2008)
Utter trash
A Canadian man discovers he has cancer. He buys a motorbike and goes to Tim Hortons to buy a cup of coffee. He rolls up the rim that tells him "Go West" - so he heads West. You start with a cliché and it doesn't stop there.
Bike trip. Lots of open road, nature, etc. Postcard as a film. A tourism promo masquerading as a film.
Meets a random stranger who also had cancer. What are the chances? Lots of Canada clichés. Meets some kids who ask him (of all people) where's the nearest Canadian Tire.
Meets a cowgirl and goes horseback riding. Meets a girl and they have a moment by a campfire, singing French Canadian songs(!!).
Random animals. Random forest stuff. He falls asleep and is awoken by a Native American drumming ritual. Token wise old native man? Check.
So we've included nature, Quebec (folk song), Natives, nature, sunsets, cowgirls, forests, animals, nature, Tim Hortons, what's left? Swims in a lake. Oh, random German tourist couple tell him that Canada is beautiful.
Oh, and he goes on a hockey rink and kisses the Stanley Cup.
When people think Canada is an uninhabited country, just one large forest with a micro-population that's just enough to man the Tim Hortons outlets at truck stops, can you blame them? It's a postcard, not a film. It was one Blackberry and a maple syrup donut away from being a total joke.
It's fake depth. There was nothing deep about the man or his experience.
If someone made a Swedish film about a man who travels Sweden, stops at an IKEA, listens to ABBA, stops somewhere for meatballs, everyone would laugh. But that's exactly what this film is.
There's more to Canada than forests. It's sad that Canadians don't want to show the world the real Canada.
This is a sorry excuse for a film. It's an Instagram feed, a series of Vines with a loose narrative and a weak soundtrack. Fake depth, shallow emotions, sepia filters, lens flare and photos of sunsets, desperate and needy, asking for likes, shares and retweets.
Better Call Saul (2015)
Solid 7, but I doubt people would watch this if it weren't a spin off
This show has very little to do with Breaking Bad, but it's still a spin off. The immense success of Breaking Bad has brought a lot of goodwill and patience to this show.
This is the Fly episode, which so many people complained about, except here, every episode is a Fly episode. The whole show is a Fly episode.
It's not that fun to watch. Seeing Saul, Mike, Tuco and co. gives viewers patience for watching this show that they'd never have with another show. Had this very same show been done before Breaking Bad, it would not last a season.
Show this show to non-Breaking Bad fans and they would struggle to enjoy it. It's not good enough as a standalone show.
It's just too slow and there's too little story. It's piggybacking on the success of Breaking Bad, definitely, and I don't blame them for that. But there's just not enough meat to sustain this sandwich.
Standalone (new) shows have to try so much harder to get this kind of success, but no show can survive with so little story and so few events. A season of this show has fewer events than 2 Breaking Bad episodes.
I give it a 7, but I think one of those 7 stars comes directly from it being related to Breaking Bad. I'm not overrating by association. We know these characters and where they're going, so there's more to the show/story/characters than what's on the episodes.
Had we not known the futures of Saul, Mike and co. we'd really be watching a show about a goofy lawyer and a parking attendant wondering where it's going and when are we getting there.