Rod Burkholz – Google

I can understand why some people didn’t love this remake of the 1979 version but I found it actually very fun and entertaining. I noticed about 30 minutes in, without having any knowledge beforehand what to expect and realized it felt very similar to the vague memory of the 1979 version I hadn’t seen in decades. I think I watched it twice before. They truly paid homage to it by making it in a very similar ‘feel’. It’s almost comedic in places with its outrageousness but that’s what I loved about it. Nowadays people are so focused on what errors to point out about movies or make detailed comparisons to originals that they forget to just push Play and try to watch and let themselves be entertained. It’s a fun movie. I grade movies now by if anything truly jumps out at me as I'm watching it as bad or weird or whether or not they nail or botch the ending and nothing stood out to me as negatively distracting all the way through. I just watched and enjoyed it. Then it ended. It was entertaining to me.

Now I know the real reason Disney fired Gina. She’s a really bad actor. Everyone in this movie is. Dreyfus was a great actor throughout his career but even he is out of character. There are moments where you see his talent come through but I really think he just wasn’t right for this role. He played it the best he could, all things considered. My guess whoever the director is, just not cutting it. Show runners and production team get an overestimated D- for the effort. Don’t waste your time.

This show is so weird in THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY :) Sorry for the all caps but it warrants it. Not weird just for the sake of being weird. It hits so many of my “good show” sensors. Strange, intense, captivating, nostalgic, deep, a little confusing but not so much you lose interest, mysterious, emotional. I mean, the soundtrack music alone, Do You Remember…” I could go on and on. I love this show so much.

I’m usually really easy to please with most reboots or prequels. I could say a lot but will stick to just one main thing. Tony. Not Michael Gandalfino. He’s awesome. It’s not his fault. His father would be proud of him. Young Tony is only a side character afterthought. Having to set aside his moral upbringing to decide whether to keep a set of stolen speakers. We know what Tony became but they did nothing at all to show any real conflict that led to decisions or life events or how he got dragged into the life of becoming the Tony we know. I liked some things. Was happy with the casting. The feel. The cinematography. …but there was so much about the story and pacing that was just weird, pieced together, scattered. It’s like the pieces were there but it didn’t come together right. I wish they would have ended it with a real conflict Tony would have been faced with that was like the first major moral choice he’d have to make that dragged him into that world in which he ends up.