Blue Sky – Google

The storyline is great, the cinematography is great, actors are pretty good but the first two episodes already made me not want to watch more of the series. They were so stereotypical and discriminatory in my opinion, especially demeaning towards the French culture and making the American girl as the savior with great ideas, which in real life, based on her personality, she would never come even close to being one in France. The writers managed to talk trash about the French so much and of other different groups of people (German, Asian, older women) that it became obnoxious, especially because they kept pushing that as comedic relief. It shows the tone deafness of the writers themselves. It's like someone in the writer room said, "as long as we stay way from trashing Blacks and LGBT, it's OK. Our culture is superior and everyone should agree with us." They also portrayed this idea that French men are so enamored with American women and are all over Emily but the reality is very different in France towards American women. Regarding Emily as a character, I can say as an American that Emily's character isn't that likable. She isn't that charming or funny even though she's fun. She's tone def just as much as the French she complains about, she's portrayed as the typical ditsy American, shallow, ignorant about the world around her with unrealistic expectations about her surroundings, a typically portrayed Los Angeles girl that everyone is kind of sick of watching in TV series geared towards a female adult audience especially because she "conquers" her surroundings through female-empowering social media campaigns, the typical feminist plot we're also tired of seeing. She's only appealing to women that have some of these traits in their own personality. But she's not appealing enough to most women and certainly not to most men. Additionally, everything about her demeanor says Los Angeles yet she tries to be portrayed as Midwestern. There's nothing Chicago or Midwest about her and if we can see that difference in you, you didn't do a good enough job acting. The cybersex scene on the first episode is also so unnecessary. I can't stand when series use sex as a cop out. Why have a sex scene on the first episode if the scene doesn't help tell the story or establish relationships in any way? It's just lazy writing. It has potential but it's been wasted in my opinion. I don't see this series going passed a second season. And a lot of the reviews here are very obviously written by paid critics.

The show is good overall, a lot of fun, a bit shallow/childish and quirky. I really liked the pace in the 1st season, but starting halfway through season 2, I saw myself fast-forwarding scenes, especially ones with slow music involving moments where we're supposed to feel bad for Eleanor. Those scenes would make me bored. I just never connected with her inner troubles (I connected with everybody else's) and I think it's partially because I didn't connect with her personality. Her personality doesn't appeal to me as a savior type and it just never sold me. It's like the actress is trying too hard to portray something that's not in her. She has this uptight suburban mom vibe that she can't shake off but in the series, she tries to be a cool, edgy, low-life white woman. All her "man", "dude", "babe" and "bro" didn't feel convincing to me. In fact, it was annoying that everyone kept saying "man" at the end of almost every sentence. It felt purposeless, outdated, and unnecessary. It got old. They didn't sound exactly cool saying it. The show was pushy about promoting the vaccine so that part was definitely annoying. The show somewhat promotes a Buddhist philosophy. They didn't make a point to disrespect Christianity like so many Hollywood shows do and there were no references to Christianity on the show or Christian characters. They show a heaven where people have no problem having sex, drinking, or smoking weed or cocaine (Hollywood has a ridiculous fixation with those 4) and engage in their primal, carnal desires. They show demons feeling bad for the evil they do and changing their nature, becoming more caring about humans, partnering with humans to do good, and ultimately even being in charge of heaven, which is extremely unrealistic (the show isn't meant to be realistic though). They had a few inconsistencies too when it comes to curse words not being allowed in heaven. The show drives the ultimate point that heaven isn't so much a place but a state of elevated consciousness. The usual mystic Hollywood stuff we hear out there. It drives the point that you earn heaven by trying your best to be selfless instead of the Christian belief that your good efforts aren't enough to earn heaven and that the only way to reach heaven is through Jesus Christ as the bridge between God and men. The show also drives the point that everybody is sad about dying but that's what also brings meaning to life, which differs from Christians, who teach to be joyous about death because of how exciting Eternity will be in comparison to this life. The show portrays heaven as a place of boring perfection. The show also shows demons collaborating with the Judge (a female, unclear God-type) who was represented as someone shallow and careless about humanity, annoyed by it and quick to eliminate whoever gets in her way. The people who enter heaven in the last episode are a mix of people of all kinds and religious practices. The show attempts to be edgy by these choices and, even though they don't bother me as an audience, religiously, I completely disagree and reject the depictions made on the show. The Pakistani-British girl who played Tahani (Jameela Jamil) was superb. The guy who plays Chidi did a fantastic job! He's super likable but I don't like that every Black person on the show was portrayed as weak on some level while the lead White people, mean and messed up on the show, still got the main positions of power, had their evils overlooked and got praise by all, playing the white savior role. Ted Danson did great as Michael and turned his demon role likable. All in all, a show fit for entertainment, not for spiritual guidance.

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody

I grew up with Whitney's music, was very inspired by her, and had high expectations for this movie since watching The Bodyguard growing up. I still can't believe her family was involved in this movie and all I can say is there is no way the positive reviews here are genuine. I don't want to disrespect the family but maybe the "experts" convinced them to go with their take on the scenes because this movie is absolutely awful and unauthentic feeling. It lost me the moment I saw the actress playing Whitney Houston. She looks and feels nothing like her on top of not having half her singing skills. Her demeanor didn't match Whitney's, her face looked very generic, and she looks a ton like Brandi, not Whitney, and her singing voice wasn't believable either. She couldn't even convince me that she was singing the songs. A terrible casting choice. It felt like she was bored every time. I don't know who this actress is but if you're gonna put someone to play such a cultural icon, please cast a strong actor. I also really dislike that out of all of the facets of Whitney's time, the first thing they choose to highlight is her gay life. So sick and tired of the narrative pushing too. Overall, this movie was a total bust. The fact that this movie got award nominations and a win sounds like this is a typical case of "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" in Hollywood.

The series has a really cool and smart concept and had everything to be a huge hit but they really missed out on an opportunity to have a more mainstream audience because of the way they portrayed angels, which becomes very disrespectful to an audience that largely believes and has deep respect for the figure of angels and believe them to be moral creatures. But, on a personal jab basis, we shouldn't be surprised something will be disrespectful to others when Kefera is in the project.

This was great and disappointing at the same time. Cinematography was great, music, choreography, acting was strong (except that the male leads were much stronger actors than the female leads, both in acting and singing). But the only characters I was sometimes drawn to were Usnavi and the grandma. Benny and Sonny were likeable too and the hair salon owner was fun. The rest were blah, especially the lead girls. And that's partially to blame on the writing but knowing they had an open casting call for this movie, you can certainly blame the Casting team for this too. The storyline didn't grab me because so many characters were given so much attention with their parallel plots and there was too much singing compared to spoken lines so you couldn't solidify the story in your head. It's a thrilling musical but if you ask folks leaving the theater "what was the story about?" most won't really know. You'd expect someone like Lin to be true to the Dominican Washington Heights roots. However, this was very clearly a white washed cast. They had 1 actual dark skinned lead (Benny) and Nina got some blonde highlights to make her skin look whiter and give her more of a "halfrican" look. The rest were sprinkles of other darker skinned ppl, always hidden in the background. Reality is Lin doesn't decide who gets cast. It's the ones who fund the movie and those ppl will never give prominence to dark skin people in a Hollywood production. Melissa Barrera looked and acted more like a white American brunette from LA than Latina. It wasn't surprising to see she's from CA. Good acting would have known to turn the LA off and the NY on. Her singing voice is also mediocre compared to the rest of the singing cast. No personality in her voice and it needs technical work. They could have definitely cast a better fit for this.