Scottie Mac

This is an awful movie. The people we're supposed to root for are criminals. Without giving spoilers, the principle characters designed their own demise. There is nothing redeemable about them. Every time they do something bad, they do something worse in the next scene. I generally enjoy Tommy Lee Jones and Ben Foster, but this film is just awful.

With respect to Michael Keaton's brilliant acting record (he's one of my favorites), he just can't play this type of role anymore. Age seems to prevent him from doing the physical comedy this character demands. I was also somewhat concerned about the delivery of his lines. I don't want to say that Keaton mailed it in, but often times I had to rewind to catch what he said. As for the story, it left a lot to be desired. Movies these days fail to build tension, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is no exception to that fault. We move from one action to the next without time to feel any way about the previous action. By the end I wasn't sure who was good and who was bad.

Season 1 was very good. Season 2 is a bit difficult to watch. Harrison Ford is simply too old to play the role and it is starting to show. His lines are slow and he doesn't appear to mean them the way an actor should. It doesn't help that every one of his lines is filled with sarcasm, which is both difficult to believe and difficult for him to deliver. Ted McGinley is a highlight of the show as the indifferent husband of the busy-bodied character played by Christa Miller.

I feel like there was a lot more movie than there was story to tell.

On the surface, Starfield is a masterpiece. The culmination of several years of dedicated development. The problem is that they forgot to work on the story. Anyone who has floated through the temple popping bubbles has to have thought, "who decided this was a good idea?" There does not appear to be any reason why the protagonist needs to finish the main quest. No urgency. One could play for years and never do the main quest, which makes that quest seem unimportant. Another factor is with base building. It might be fun, but there is no point to it. It is not necessary for the completion of the game, and is inconvenient as compared to simply buying whatever the character would make at the base.

Many times we are forced to suspend reality in order to enjoy a movie. Things will happen that are impossible, but for the sake of a good time we just go with it. The Black Demon is not that kind of film. It hides it's plot behind a killer-shark theme. The real plot is that offshore oil drilling is bad and the corporations are evil. The shark is secondary to the story. The message we receive is that if the evil, corporate overlords of the oil companies have their way, gigantic Megalodon sharks will appear and kill everyone. If we look at The Meg, that was a fun movie. It was scientifically impossible, but that movie made up its own science for the sake of a good time. The Black Demon makes up its own science to virtue signal. It is not a fun movie, and its science is so bad that any environmental message is thrown out the window. This movie is not worth our time.

Like with Anderson's The French Dispatch, Asteroid City lacks focus and clarity. We move continuously from the description of a play to the movie set piece, to the play backstage, back to the movie, to a strange scene where the entire cast repeats one line over and over, back to the play, and we have to guess what the story is about. Is it about aliens? Is it about the kids and their science camp? Is it about Jason Schwartzman and his strange relationship with the playwright? The talents of Tom Hanks and Steve Carell are wasted. There was no real point to Adrien Brody's character, other than to be in the movie. The cowboys? No explanation. It goes on like this until Schwartzman has some sort of epiphany, which is never really explained. Anderson needs to stop trying to build movies around huge, big-name casts and simply focus on one story. There was no problem with The Grand Budapest Hotel or The Royal Tenenbaums. These films told a story. Even the much maligned Darjeeling Limited had a story.

The biggest problem with Triangle of Sadness is that they didn't bother finishing it. We sat through 2.5 hours of mostly boring movie just to see how it ends, and they didn't end it. I paid to watch a movie, not to think of my own ending to someone else's story. It's supposed to be some ambiguous ending where we're left to wonder. That doesn't work with this type of film.

The science, while based on a long disproven myth, is interesting. No idea why they had to add the monster stuff to it. Guess they couldn't think of a sting enough story.

This is a bad show. What makes it worse is that they know it's a bad show. The producers ran a bait and switch. The first episode was free to watch and was filled with action. Twenty minutes in and I was telling everyone how great this show was. Even bought the Paramount subscription. Since then, a show that is based on an FPS video game has not had a single weapon fired. There has been no action ever since those first twenty minutes moving right up through the fourth episode. We have seen more bare bottoms than scenes with any action in them. This is not a show about Halo. It is a science fiction show that happens to have a Halo character in it. To summarize, they lured people in with a great opening sequence so everyone would buy a subscription, and then they made the show about something completely different.