Phillip Brock

Liked it, didn’t love it. I liked most of the elements — the performances were all on point, the scenes well paced and the world of the film, the look and the era, authentic (I lived in NYC during the time it is set). I found the dialogue clunky and trope-ish, and though I love a redemption story as much as the next guy, that arc fell a little flat for me. It’s not really ABOUT anything. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. Austin Butler has a big career ahead of him if he continues to choose challenging material.

Watched “The Old Guard 2” on Netflix. This is like some kind of goddamned torture. At first I thought, “This thing had to be written by AI,” and then I found myself praying that it had. To think humans actually strung these sentences together severely tests what’s left of my championing of the human soul. If there is such a thing yet as AI direction and acting, it is on full display here. You know how, like, when you can’t read French, if the words are spelled phonetically, you can pronounce them and make some sense of what’s being communicated? Well, this is like phonetic acting, it resembles something that was once perhaps authentic behavior, but it takes you in the opposite direction — farther and farther from any clarity or understanding. And it has the usually at least resourceful and charismatic Charlize Theron, and at least one other actor who isn’t usually a slob. So disappointing. The first one was a sort of clever diversion of the Wild Bunch archetype. But this thing…