Damian Smith

This show was recommended to me by a close friend whose opinion I trusted, a fellow writer with a similar sense of humour. We are not friends any more. If I can praise The Good Place for anything it's that it very accurately portrays my own personal hell. This show is as bland as a communion wafer and as invigorating as a long taxi down the tarmac after a 16-hour flight in economy. Is Ted Danson's charm enough to salvage the television equivalent of headbutting a table until the Xanax kicks in? No, no it is not. Sorry Ted. The Good Place is an excruciating exercise in onanism, where you can almost hear the tendons in the writer's shoulders pop with every line as they contort to pat themselves on the back for being so clever. "I don't belong here" says Whatshername "Something something Immanuel Kant" replies puppet number 2 "I don't get it" responds Kitchen Utensil Bell Fart noise, sad trombone, humanity devolves. This show is The Big Bang Theory without a laugh track. The writing is tedious and inane to the point of being offensive. Kristen Bell is so stiff and plastic you could easily replace her with a Furby taped to a dishmop and free up 80% of the show's budget. The rest of the cast act as though they were recruited wholesale from the local amateur production of Twelth Night, thus explaining the remaining 20%. The writers, presumeably, work for free - being liberal arts majors who won't ever find a real purpose. The acting is so hammy and the scripting is so cheesy that you could close the show down and open a deli. Then they could make some double entendre about the meaning of epicureanism, only no one would be forced to listen to it.

The public reaction to this film is a sad bellwether for the state of the Star Wars franchise. When this incoherent nonsense and mawkish pablum is praised as "fun" simply because it wasn't as bad as The Last Jedi or Solo, much in the same way that pouring hot sauce in your eyes is preferable to having your genitals burned with a curling iron, your intellectual property has serious issues. And Star Wars has been in critical condition for a long time. There was a slight pulse when Jon Favreau gave it some CPR, but now Abrams is back to finish the job, smothering it with a pillow like a disgruntled Praetorian. I can't entirely fault JJ Abrams for this one. Admittedly his lack of ability kicked this whole mess off, but it's not his fault that Rian Johnson drove Star Wars off a cliff, into a crevasse, salted the earth so that it might never grow again and then pissed on the corpses just to be sure of things. Ernest Hemmingway couldn't have written the trilogy out of that mess, no less someone with the middling talent of JJ Abrams and his trademark "here's some cool concepts I'll never flesh out in any way." The script is horrible, stupid and insipid. Not as sanity-rendingly abysmal as The Last Jedi, not as dull and uninspired as Solo, but still 12 parsecs from anything resembling a good movie. The worst thing is that Star Wars has shown us that it can be good in the modern age - The Mandalorian is exquisite. Which makes Ruse of Snoteater all the worse. Being awful is one thing, but being capable of making something great and choosing not to is an insult to everyone who ever called themselves a fan. The positive reviews for this film are coming from those fans who have been so beaten down by the dross of talentless clowns like Abrams and Johnson that they've developed Stockholm Syndrome - just tell everyone on the internet that you fell down some stairs when you rediscovered your childhood.