Robert Douglas

This title has always been a shit-show. The gameplay is unbelievably bad. The game engine seems to have been designed by someone who thinks the AND1 Mixtape from 10 years ago is what basketball is.

It’s so good and it’s so much fun to watch. I refuse to post a florid purple prose review of Tulsa King, ‘cuz that would be ridiculous. So just trust an Abel Ferrara movie super-fan when I tell you that this show will make you want to cobble together a group of cowboys and stoners to go shoot at meth peddling bikers with.

I really enjoyed this film but it’s not fit everyone. If digital-effects laden franchises and comic book inspired dispatches from this or that cinematic universe are your bag, skip this one. If you like 70s cinema, crime drama or westerns, you will probably like this one. Watch this one with your cool uncle who has great taste in movies.🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

It’s pretty much the same episode over and over again.

Goliath has great potential of which it falls disappointingly short. The performances by the cast are the real draw on this show. Thornton is terrific as per usual in a role that seems tailored perfectly to him and Nina Arianda delivers a superb turn as Patty Solis-Papagian. Unfortunately, those are the only two characters with any real depth. The rest of the cast does it’s level best with what are often shallow, if not cartoonishly over-wrought, characters. Molly Parker, Olivia Thirlby, William Hurt and Tania Raymonde are better than the material they’ve been given. Goliath’s downfall is its love of obtrusive weirdness. Whether it’s the bizarre amputee fetish in season 2 or the elevator with a mind of its own which brings the audience to the office of Hurt’s Donald Cooperman, who looks way too much like Dick Cheney in that role for me to be comfortable with a nude scene, lying in wait for Thirlby’s Lucy Kittridge, Kelley & Shapiro’s preference for stylized, pretentious eccentricity over narrative substance is a burden on the show. It’s not without its charms but it ultimately disappoints more often than it satisfies.

The writing is preposterously bad. Things like subtext or foreshadowing are delivered via the bit of a jackhammer. All of the subtlety and nuance of a heavy metal concert, but not fun or exciting. It is engrossing in an anthropological way. Like wondering how the writers and show runners advanced past the 7th grade or wondering what it’s like for the actors to have to ploughing through a big stupid Canadian train wreck with the knowledge that this will be broadcast so as to be viewed by the general public. It stinks, skip it.

My mom likes it and the little girl is funny but I find the lead character intensely annoying. The lead actress was funny on Mike & Molly because she had a better material. Even Dietrich Bader, who’s been a consistently funny TV actor for a long time, is wasted.

I don’t think the negative reviewers who are hung up on the impracticality of the premise get the show on a fundamental level. It’s supposed to be ridiculous. It’s basically Looney Toons with real people. There are tons of shows for teens and kids that focus almost entirely on the kids lives at home and at school. With Game Shakers, you never see the kid’s parents or siblings, other than GG of course, and very few scenes take place at school. It’s a workplace comedy with kids that works and it works primarily because the four kids along with GG, Bunny and Ruthless make a good comedic troupe and the show’s lead, Cree Cicchino, was a better comedic actress at 14-years old than most veteran TV actors with decades of experience. Also, if anyone is looking for a TV show with positive role models for young females that doesn’t just keep recycling the same empty, girl-power-sloganeering memes that most series rely upon, I would suggest Game Shakers.

When I studied film criticism in college, I had this professor who basically detested the concept of plot in a film. She was of the opinion that all films should be meandering studies of themes, driven by the emotions of the characters and that the events which take place during the run of the film are incidental. She probably loved this smoldering train wreck. True story: A particularly shiftless sloth on a handful of dilaudid told me he thought the pacing of this film was painfully slow. But pacing implies that one is on a journey, en route to an eventual destination. Can one justifiably gripe about pacing if the film just isn’t ever going anywhere? American Honey is a meandering, plotless, pointless character study of a group of thinly drawn, pernicious yet pathetic characters whom are totally inauthentic and exist more as a collection of tropes than anything else. I’m a native Floridian, I’m acclimated to being surrounded by trashy, obnoxious, gun-toting ignorance and you’d need a flamethrower to compel me to get in a van with those characters. Speaking of authenticity, American Honey is completely lacking in it. The film is about middle America as much as it’s about anything and the director Andrea Arnold, a British woman, appears as though her only experience of the United States is eating scones for breakfast and reading the Guardian. No, one cannot run around the suburbs in the middle of the day waving a pistol around without the police getting called. No, there aren’t roving bands of middle-aged cowboy caricatures prowling the streets in vintage Cadillacs looking for girls to rape and no, you can’t have a shootout with them in the backyard without consequences. Perhaps the most tragically inept scene in this movie misadventure is one in which Star (Sasha Lane) and Jake (Shia Lebouf) con their way into an idyllic suburban home in which a preteen girl is having a party with her friends. I think Arnold was trying to make a point about the crass and shallow sexuality of contemporary pop culture and the role it plays in the sexualization of children. To say that it fails badly in the opposite direction is a fantastic understatement. What we get is another interminable scene featuring a group of twerking ten-year-olds trying to give Shia Lebouf a boner. It’s infinitely worse than the raunchiest Carbi B song. The fact that American Honey won the jury prize at Cannes, was nominated for a BAFTA and is generally lauded by film critics not a validation of the film but a testament to the enthusiastically self-imposed irrelevancy of those institutions and individuals. This thing is flat-out bad, I recommend skipping it.

I’m glad to see such positive reviews. As long as you remember not to take TV shows or yourself too seriously, it’s a fun viewing experience. The element to this production that’s always worked is that the show always contains a fun little caper in each episode. Yes there are clueless cops and security guards who’d never actually last a day on the job. Yes there are campy storylines and low-budget-action-movie fight sequences and all the rest of the conversations of the genre, but it’s just so much fun to watch, especially if you developed an affinity for the characters over the run of the original show.