northbonmot Reviews

A Dark Place (2018)

An Original Take On A Familiar Story

[9/10 · 23 May 2022]

Andrew Scott puts on an incredible performance in this suspenseful telling of what could have been a very routine who-done-it. Mr. Scott's portrayal of Donny is nuanced and extremely compelling. Donny comes across as someone you'd both like to cross the street to avoid and try to become a good friend to. It's just one of several contradictions the character evokes thanks to Scott's amazing work. And it's the presentation of these contradictions that make the film so riveting.

The rest of the cast does a superb job of supporting the story as well. Each one brings us a little closer to discovering who Donny really is. This is no small feat when the main character is so powerful. Of course the wonderful script helps with this as well, as does the cinematography.

Hunted (2012)

Poor Editing and Script Continuity Made Me Seasick

[6/10 · 23 May 2022]

Pretty good plot and watchable characters and acting. Music was horrible and intrusive.

Nearly every scene was a stand-alone snippet with very little context. It drew attention to the filming process in that you could fully sense the crew setting up the shot, the cast members taking their positions and getting themselves into character, the director saying, "Action", and then the story starts up again. There was no flow between scenes.

Worse, more often than not, the characters displayed wild mood swings between scenes. In one scene, a character might beat another with a pipe and in the next scene they're walking together calmly discussing the situation. Rufus' "adoptive" mother abruptly changes from pleading not to let him stay the night to becoming a nurturing she-bear to protect him. Rufus can sleep in her dead son's room and wear his old clothes but she has a meltdown when she sees him using her son's baseball glove.

Her husband bounces back and forth between wanting to be a father to Rufus to expressing contempt or impatience with him. And I'm not talking about a story arc wherein attitudes change. I'm talking about the attitudes switching back and forth from scene to scene for no apparent reason.

Likewise, the mother of Rufus' cross-street crush who goes from warning Rufus to stay away from her daughter to encouraging her daughter to "go after him", again for no apparent reason for this change of heart. Ditto for the older boy who suddenly switches from being a menacing character in Rufus' life to becoming a heartthrob for him.

In all these examples (and plenty more), the drastic changes are made as a light switch being turned on or off rather than with some sort of revelation leading to the 180 degree turn-about in attitude.

Also, various characters seem to pop up out of nowhere for no logical reason and always just in time to create a dramatic effect.

In short, the script mostly defies reality rather than attempting to support it To be clear, I don't mean the reality of the supernatural elements of the story. I mean the more mundane actions of people within the story behaving in an annoyingly unrealistic way.

Life on the Line (I) (2015)

Staring Off Into Space a Better Use of Your 97 Minutes

[1/10 · 10 May 2022]

In some weird, obfuscated way, there is a parallel to watching this movie that's linked to the old chestnut, "I spend 90% of my time tuning my guitar and 10% playing it out of tune."

This waste of film stock was 90% senselessly contrived redneck soap opera and 10% inaccurate work on power lines. It seemed like the producers blew their technical research and screenwriting budgets on getting John Travolta and Sharon Stone to sign on to this turkey to give the illusion it was a legitimate film.

Blown Away (1994)

A Decent Formula Film Nearly Ruined by Trite Dialogue

[6/10 · 9 May 2022]

It is what it is. Fairly typical 1990's action thriller that brings nothing new to the genre. Plot is so predictable you could list every character who's going to live and every one who's going to die twenty minutes into the film. The dialogue is mostly recycled tropes from every other action thriller that came before it.

Number One cringe: The bomb squad cop's wife learns that there's a genius mad bomber seeking vengeance on her paramour, finds out he's been in her house in a direct threat to her and her young daughter. But when her hubby manically orders them to go hide out at the family beach house, she responds with the unbelievable "This is my home! I'm not running away!" trope. Yeah. Right.

Poseidon (2006)

No Excuse For This Being So Bad

[1/10 · 18 July 2020]

With 34 years between The Poseidon Adventure and this dog, you'd think filmmakers would be able to improve on the original, but it would seem that Hollywood has just decided movies are measured in number of bangs and firestorms rather than story-telling.

I don't know why the producers even bothered hiring actors for this. They could have just had a camera operator stroll through the sets, fire off some pyrotechnics and there would have been very little diminishment in the overall enjoyment. The only way they could have made this worthwhile would have been to provide each audience member with a game controller.

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Puffery

[3/10 · 27 May 2020]

I have to wonder if other reviewers of this film consider what it means to deserve a nine or ten rating given the range of productions in all of film-dom. If RtS earns 10 stars, what do you give Citizen Kane or The Shawshank Redemption? Schindler's List? Gandhi? You get the idea. If someone is rating RtS anything higher than a six, I can only conclude that they are coming from a strict diet of prime-time network sit-coms and middle-of-the-road made-for-TV movies.

The Stone is not the worst film ever made, nor is it unwatchable. I liked the cast but they were undercut by the writing. I thought the premise of the story was quite interesting and offered great possibilities, but again, the script didn't fulfill the promise of the premise. The story relied too heavily on outlandish circumstances and unlikely scenarios. A viewer can be expected to overlook some amount of incredulity, but there needs to be a payoff. RtS doesn't provide a payoff, just plodding and predictability at every turn. There's no real tension and certainly no doubt of the outcome, not only as to the overall ending, but even scene by scene.

Badland (I) (2019)

Steals From the Classics and the Fads

[1/10 · 30 March 2020]

I echo the many reviews theorizing that any strong reviews are manufactured or bought. It stretches the bounds of credulity that someone could see any value in this plodding, uninspired, unoriginal (on every level), pretentious piece of pablum. This film is disrespectful to the cast, the genre and to filmmaking in general.

"Badland" felt like somebody sat down with a yellow legal pad and listed every cliche in the Western genre, prioritized them based on frequency of use, then went to work on a script that was designed to check each and every one of them off the list. The only one they left off was the "man with no name" trope, but they still managed to elicit a cornball connection by having Breecher be a character echo with Jack Reacher, the highly skilled man with the mysterious past traveling from town to town righting wrongs for the oppressed. Alas, the process of outlining the script must have expended 99% of the script budget because there wasn't enough left to develop an interesting story.

The dialog seemed to be inspired by the attention garnered by the charming and quirky cadence and vocabulary heard in "True Grit" (2010). It didn't work in "Badland" because the writer didn't give the characters anything meaningful to say and didn't give the audience any reason to care what they said. If the goal was to make this look like an enactment of one of those old 19th century dime novels (which is loudly hinted at during the final showdown), they just didn't pull it off. This attempt was perhaps lifted from the similar device employed in Eastwood's "Unforgiven" which incorporated the sense of a pulp novel without buying into it too strongly.

The cinematography was flat and rudimentary. It was 95% medium shots except for the obligatory extreme close-ups leading to the final shoot-out. The purpose of cinematography is to frame the scene in a way that elicits an emotion or provides insight into what a character is feeling or the state of their circumstances. In this case, I think the camera crew knew how to set up a camera, turn it on and adjust for the lighting, but that's about it. They must have skipped the class that covered composition.

The cast was loaded with potential. Every one of them has a proven capacity to put out a memorable performance. I don't understand how a cast like this thinks it's a good idea to work with a writer/director like Justin Lee who has a pretty solid history of churning out poorly crafted films. I also weep in anguish for the untold number of up-and-coming directors and writers with talent, artistry and devotion to craft that can't break into feature films while this guy gets to put out up to four features in a single year. How does this guy get a budget? He must work cheap. Unfortunately, his films show it.

America's Book of Secrets (2012–2021)

History Channel Sinks Further Down in the Mud

[1/10 · 24 September 2019]

I watched a couple then started the Free Masons episode. Alex Jones popped up as an "expert" and off went the TV. People like Jones and other conspiracy freaks are a threat to the world and have no legitimacy. Another stain on the History Channel.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Time's Orphan (1998) Season 6, Episode 24

So Much for the Wise & Compassionate Federation

[2/10 · 10 May 2019]

The Trek franchise is renowned and beloved for addressing OUR societal issues in the context of the enlightened future Star Trek inhabits. This episode takes a run at addressing the care of special needs children and utterly fails with gusto.

A child in today's reality would have fared much better than Molly did in this vision of the future. Parents, friends, institutions and professionals of today would have done so much more for her.

Molly's initial rehabilitation is left almost entirely to her parents with virtually no support from the Federation's vast resources. Bashir does little other than stand by with sedatives when things get out of hand. The Enterprise had a ship's counselor but there doesn't appear to be a single psychologist in residence on the much larger and far more psychologically demanding environment of DS9.

They create a holosuite version of older Molly's environment to help her feel secure during the rehab, but she's forced out of it because two Klingons won't give up their reserved time. Sisko could have demanded the facility be appropriated to deal with this emergency. Worf has been called upon to convince other Klingons to make more challenging accommodations than give up a recreational holosuite reservation. And when Molly responds to the trauma of being forcibly removed from her comfort environment, the response is to put her in jail.

Molly's parents don't fight for her care. They decide to throw her back to her life of isolation and deprivation AND destroy the time portal so she can never be recovered. Wow! With all the resources of the Federation this is the best they could come up with? Jail, institutionalization or disposal.

Star Trek offers an optimistic vision for many aspects of the human future. But if you ever find yourself in need of compassionate care for an individual with special needs or psychological trauma, you'd be far better off pointing your temporal portal to early 21st Earth (as imperfect as that is) than to the Final Frontier.

It's that or hire better writers.

Watership Down (2018)

Pointless Remake

[4/10 · 24 December 2018]

Having been a great admirer of the 1978 version, I was hoping this newer version would exceed it. After all, the producers had no excuse not to know what made the Martin Rosen version so powerful and to at least match it. I thought perhaps the newer version running at 3 1/2 hours (compared to 1 1/2 hours for the '78 version) would be able to add some depth to the story.

Neither was the case. I can't even say what new story elements were added with the extra two hours. The '78 version was crisp and concise while the '18 version was plodding and scattered in it's editing. The original 2D animation was far more creative and beautiful. The CGI version was lifeless and cheap feeling. Others have mentioned that the rabbits looked like hares. I thought they had more of the body features of lanky cats.