Jeff White

It felt as empty as if I'd slept through it, but I was actually awake for the whole tiresome two hours. From the very beginning it confirmed what I've always suspected: John Krasinski just cannot act. Like at all, and here he didn't, not even for a single word or crinkle expression of his brow. I didn't register a single moment of him making me think, "ok, maybe..." He made his reputation just being smug and repeating clever japes and jabs written by someone else. And since he, as the lead, cannot act, everyone else was thus forbidden to. To do so would have been like trying to paint on a hastily framed and sloppily plastered wall just as it crumbled. Even if you succeeded it still would've resulted in a pile of prettily assigned rubble. Who would want anyone to see their sincerely offered talent failing to hold that mess together? It looks like failure no matter what you do. But how to coordinate every single actor to not act regardless of talent or aspiration? It's all in the writing: Write it so it just sounds like people reading and repeating it no matter what they do. The writing and the story implicit was just so flat it was like trying to make an action blockbuster out of the children's classic, "Goodnight Moon". No matter what you do it just can't be interesting to anyone over 18. Months. "Goodnight, Man in the Moon." Other reviews tease out the gritty, grimy, turgid details, so I'll just make sure i fairly and adequately cover one single aspect of this magazine-cover movie: John Krasinski really, seriously, just can't act, i mean, even a little bit, for the very briefest of moments. His embarrassment of being exposed as just any guy trying to be a movie star is mitigated by the buckets of cash he clearly got for desecrating his craft in public view, but the people really bearing the shame are those that paid him. And Guy Ritchie.

Somebody is trying to get the immortals, but the immortals aren't going to let them. Or are they? Maybe they could... BRAP BRRRAAPPP BRAPPP! They got away. But then... BRAPPP BUH BUH BRAAPP BRAPP Uh oh, they got away again. See, guns don't bother them, but everyone else is super easy to kill, they even kill guys wearing body armor with one shot to the chest. Weird, but the thing is, THEY HAVE A ROLE IN HISTORY, and they keep trying to explain it with newspaper clips as if those mean anything in 2020, when newspapers are mostly gone for most people. And anyway, no one cares about history, haven't these guys ever seen a high school? Later... Are they walking into a trap? After all, if they physically trap them in a room they have no powers that will get them out. They almost did that in the beginning, tricked them into this basement with thick walls, so all they gotta do is close a thick door and lock it. No, they just don't. So there's a really obvious way they could trap and imprison the immortals for as long as they want, but they just don't do it. They... Just don't. They could, but they don't. That was the movie.

I just... Liked it. 3½ stars rounded up to 4 because Google. It is pleasant and earnest without demanding too much, i just watched it and it was ok. Tbh it was kind of stumbling amiably until the characters of Beth and Vinnie appeared, introducing a kind of human sweetness that dropped right into its proper place, kind of justifying all the semi-random woo that preceded them. By the end i found myself imagining sequels that explored the different colored dimensions, and how Dutch might explore and integrate them into his life without them really changing very much. Maybe we discover that we are all navigating the avocado, lemon, and other dimensions all the time in just living our lives. One thing that seemed extraneous was the drug business of the adopted brother. It mostly seemed to fulfill some vision of the writer/director without meaning much to the viewer, and the scenes of holding the baggie of drug powder and pouring it vindictively on the ground could've been struck without affecting the film in any important way. Anyway, worth a watch if you don't expect too much. For me, Amazon prime just served it up after i finished watching something else and instead of escaping as per usual i decided to just sit back and let the app drive me like Lyra in her vintage black Lincoln. You can too.

This is what i call a "this then that" movie. One thing happens, then the next thing, then another after that, each thing completely predictable and boring in their obviousness. It was simplistic in being like something a sassy child would write. Do not waste your time on this. I only gave it 4 stars to put it in that category so people might read this. It's definitely only worth one. People rave about the acting, but what were they given to act? The main characters were as deep as... Shit, I'm too bored to finish the simile. It plods along as you hope for a twist, something interesting to break the horrible monotony. But it never delivers. She meets the superficial rich partyboy, she fucks and eventually marries him for money, but there's nothing behind the marriage but his desire to keep her around to fuck, and to piss off his parents. The parents find out and they come to force an annulment, end of story. At the last minute, some weird and opaque exchange with a low level tough guy. And it ends with her CRYING on his chest... What? I don't blame the actors, they did the best they could with the lame script and weak, flabby direction. The Academy is usually terrible at picking movies but this is a new low. Every other movie is better than this.

I loved Napoleon Dynamite, and i like everyone in the cast, but even though i like Forte, he always seems to break the required dead pan of anything he's in by always coming off as the SNL gag man. Sadly, even though i love a send up of religion more than just about anything, the writing in this was weak, and it never really jelled. Movies like ND get their appeal from really carefully rendered unique and quirky characters. You feel that the actors that played Napoleon, his brother, and all the rest, really WERE those people, even though they were unbelievably weird. But the characters in this weren't really that weird (tough Jermaine was really trying), and they weren't that convincingly rendered by the actors, although it wasn't all their fault because they just weren't given enough to work with. This especially bummed me out because I'm a long time super fan of Jermaine Clement since the "Conchord" days. And Sam Rockwell, i love him but he never inhabited this character. Honestly this is just a bore from start to finish, better to find something else and skip this. This was a really good idea for a movie but it just didn't make it.

First, shout out to all the conservative reviews who can't get self-parodying jokes like kids asking what the pronouns of dolls are. They're MAKING FUN of these things. At the same time, as a squishy liberal myself, this show does really pound on the liberal tropes a bit vigorously. But the complaints about no "family values" are just stupid, coming from people who just don't want to grow beyond the 50s. We have lesbian and mixed race couples now, we will from now on, GET USED TO IT, it's not "immoral", and we don't have to "protect the children". But that's not what kills this, it's the by-the-numbers, template-based scripts that feel like they're written by chatGPT, before it actually existed. I can literally guess everything they do before they do it. It's like they scraped out an old cheesy sitcom and put new crap in it. This show really sucks and is basically unwatchable. Keeping network TV alive.

The word that best describes it: "hacky". The word for Seth Rogen's acting: he can't. The cinematography is like you gave the camcorder to your 9 year old on vacation because everyone else was too drunk. So you have lots of things like dialogue sequences where, instead of cutting, the camera literally whips from one character to the other and back and forth again and again until you feel like you just got off a roller coaster after a heavy lunch. It's fucking intolerable but we have to put up with it because it's CREATIVE. And it's not just a special thing done occasionally, they do it all the time, like it's the basis of the whole show. Why didn't anyone turn to Seth and say, "Just no, that's against the law, and we're all gonna wind up in prison in El Salvador if you don't stop immediately." Seth is so bad his studio had is probably the only one that pronounces "Cannes" like "con". People who have actually been, or just know, pronounce it to rhyme with "man", and if you don't know that you're revealed as pretending, which would be clever if that was intentional, but it definitely wasn't, because nothing about this show is. Clever, that is. Ike Barinholtz was charming in the way he ridiculously overdid his character in "The Mindy Project", but it doesn't transfer. You just wanna scream "Relax, already!" The show is swinging REALLY HARD every single scene, going for clever like it's chemo and they've got cancer, and no, that joke wasn't funny. Get me? Like the extended argument between Seth and actual doctors about how making low brow movies is every bit as important as cutting pediatric cancer. Not just in passing but as a while, long segment of the show. And Seth played it straight, as if he meant it, and he's making a brave point in favor of poop movies. Not as a joke or even self-parody, dead serious. What? WHY? I just want something to watch, it doesn't have to be perfect, but watching this makes me hate everything, and it's cringe beyond the point where you hate watch it anyway. Rogen's last show "Platonic" was bad (Rose Byrne, with her accent, as the female "bro", are you kidding me?), but this new show is so much worse it makes me want to go back and rewatch the old one. In case I didn't mention it, SETH ROGEN CANNOT ACT. Never forget that. That he has a career and wealth makes him the luckiest stoner of our times. Good on you Seth. Now go away, please. For good.

"Heretic" is not really a horror movie. It never filled me with dread, fear or even disgust. It's a "talk" movie, in the tradition of "My Dinner With Andre", where a small group of people explore certain ideas. In that sense, it was a pretty well-written film. The dialog was intriguing but natural, delivered with such great skill that it always sounded like actual people talking, and never like a turgid deconstruction video. I liked this movie because it was a nice, clean, and cohesive survey of what religion actually is, which to me was its sole purpose. Conclusion: All religion exists with one purpose: to control others. Each new religion is a play on earlier ones, even those like Islam that deliberately break some rules, in denying that Jesus was resurrected. But they all have the same aim, which is an inescapable conclusion that points to the greatest horror of them all. Human beings. What an inexpressible nightmare we are. We don't deserve an afterlife, in indeed that is actually a good thing. (I don't think it is.) And to me they all share a quality that i can't over look: They all seem in every detail exactly like what a human would write if they were making stuff up to control people, and they're all "backfilled", with details added as time went on to fill the holes. You are going to hell. "It won't be so bad." Oh but there's a lake of fire. "Sounds bad, but I'll just get used to the pain like i always do and stop noticing it." Yeah, but this is a special kind of pain you CAN'T get used to. "I'll just concentrate on not committing any sins." Doesn't matter, you're BORN with the worst sin built into you. And on and on, forever, because no matter what, they always patch it until, by now it barely makes any sense. But my favorite detail was one that was so obvious no one seems to have gotten it besides me. The name of the primary character, "Mr. Reed." It's the past tense of the word "mystery" used as a verb. Lol.

So far I've seen "La La Land" and now "Babylon" by Chazelle, and they're both basically the same. Epic visions that never cohere and, while they do look absolutely amazing at times, they end up just fizzling out without making any kind of a coherent statement. I'm both movies the end were just weird patched on alternate stories or just crazy visuals. Babylon actually ends with a bizarre slide show interspersed with psychedelic 60s-style oil and water light shows! Nostalgic Hollywood stills nostalgia, it was like padding at the end of a high school project, like he was thinking, "If i don't make 3 hours i won't get a passing grade!" I watch good movies and marvel how they came up with such interesting stories that are expressed intricately, and i think, i could never come up with that!" With both Chazelle movies i think, "I could write that." Could i stage them as beautifully as Chazelle? No way. But the stories are like outlines: This guy does that, and then this, and this woman comes along and does something else. So what. Babylon is really like a beautifully decorated Christmas tree of a cliche about Hollywood. And the great thing about it is how it renders it with such immediacy. The situations never seem quaint as in most movies of this genre, they seem like people we know going through what they did as if it were happening now. And that's what really happened, it was insane drug and liquor and sex fueled pandemonium. But in both films, time is his enemy. The 3 hour Babylon could easily stand to lose a full hour and only end up better. Some of the scenes i found myself thinking, "Why is this going on so long?" And it's well known that audiences absolutely hate movies over 2 hours, so why do people make them? Conversely, i saw the brilliant "Beau Is Afraid" and i was sitting up and captivated for its entire 3 hours, never a wasted minute, but i was home, not in a theater. Most people just have no tolerance for this. The question is, why do people like Chazelle do this? People looking for movies to go see notice the running time and say, "Next." So as far as being sketches of what it was like, Babylon is brilliant. A bit pointlessly excessive at times. As a movie, not so much.

Made death seem very appealing.