Kate Gentry

Every Christmas for the last few years I have gone with my family to see the next Star Wars film. The first one showed promise. The next one was okay. I had a few issues with some of the story. I won’t go into that right now. I want to go over my issues with this new film. As I sat there watching this movie the first thought that came to my mind was “gosh, are they trying to stuff two films into one?” So I have been trying to figure out for myself. What is wrong with this story? You have to understand that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As a storyteller you bring your audience into a story and you give them a piece of information about a character or event. They hold on as you bring them to another piece of information that develops the first and transforms it into something more important. Then you bring your audience to the reason why this information is important. Then comes the climax where the information is used and the fall happens. Where every decision the character has made, every act they have preformed takes effect and stuff happens. Sometimes there are consequences for their actions. The problem with this film firstly is that we are being given too many things to focus on and the plot keeps changing. First they have to find this thing and then they have to find another thing, but oh we found this person and now we can find this other thing. It’s exhausting because you are waiting for relief and it doesn’t come. Secondly, we are not allowed to see our characters feel, mourn the loss of someone, and everything is numbed for us. You can’t connect with what they are dealing with mostly because it isn’t shown. Thirdly, the main Question of this film is answered lazily in the names of nostalgia and franchise. I’m not saying nostalgia is bad. It is being used to give us those warm fuzzy feelings. However, being paired with the other, which involves dollar signs should make us question the purpose of this new trilogy. So the question is who is behind the rise of the dark side? I’m going to tell you. However, they bring a character back from the dead. Bringing a character back from the dead when there wasn’t even foreshadowing for him. It’s lazy storytelling. It cheapens the character. They couldn’t come up with a good villain to bring into the franchise so they brought back an old one. They clearly didn’t think the audience was important enough to create a new character. Overall, it’s not an awful movie. There are other issues I have with the story, but these were my main problems with it, and I don’t want to go into detail. I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie. I give the movie a 5/10. The acting a 9/10.

Refreshing, entertaining, and the acting is top notch. Loved the artistic feel of this and I sat through the first episode wondering if this was a movie because halfway through the plot gets thicker and interesting. I know where the story is going, and I know at times it can be a bit cliched, but I still want to see it through to the end. This is a very refreshing way of telling a story. It’s kind of like a love letter to music. It’s interesting how the music is used as a metaphor for what these characters do, say, and feel. The concept that every song is a love song is an interesting idea. A song is a story that is told to us as we listen to it and this series is using them to show us a bigger picture. How these small stories translate into these characters lives. It’s really good. Definitely check this show out.

This is not what I normally would watch on Netflix, but it was in my recommended. So I was hooked into the story after that first episode. After the first 20 episodes everything just seemed absurd. So I feel like I need to be fair to this series because there were a few gems in this story. I can’t go off of the writing because I’m going off of subtitles. The Princess Weiyoung is the story of the third daughter of the Northern Liang Dynasty, a princess, who’s family is murdered when a general from the Northern Wei Chiyun clan forces her out of her home. She ends up in the household of a Prime Minister of the Northern Wei clan after Li Weiyoung, a woman who helps the princess to safety and is murdered later by her Father’s wife. Posing as Li Weiyoung she meets the the Northern Wei Prince Tuoba Jun through the Prime Minister’s wife’s many attempts to get rid of her and everything gets interesting from there. I’m going to start with the acting, the two leads (Tang and Jin) have amazing chemistry. There were a few times when their acting got a bit too cheesy for my taste, but I forced myself to look past that because I was interested in the story. Their love story is worth following because they go through so many obstacles in order to be together. Sooo many obstacles. I really liked Vanness, he portrayed Tuoba Yu, the prince’s uncle, who’s also a prince. The character he plays is cold-blooded and ambitious. Vanness was actually one of the best things about this show. After the love story because there were times when I didn’t like Yu, and other times as a viewer, when I was glad he was there to push things forward. Granted most everything he did was to benefit himself. Vanness portrayed all of that well. Another one of my favorite story lines was Li Min de’s. I won’t get into that story, but I really enjoyed Zhenlun’s acting. Okay, now the plot. As I said before, after the first 20 episodes everything gets a bit absurd. There are a lot of miner plot holes. (Spoilers ahead) For example, the princess has this piece of jade that makes her this promised powerful empress, she ends up losing it, but when she finally gets it back this plot is never brought back to be explored even further. Trust me they had the time to explore this part of the story. Weiyoung was accused of murder a few times and those set up episodes took too long to drive to the point. I ended up skipping a few of those episodes because I couldn’t handle the tension. You don’t need to drag an audience through two episodes of tension if the character is going to prove that the killer had cracked nails and out of fear of being discovered trimmed them. Then there was that one episode where the scene was 20-30 minutes long because the characters were having a discussion on who was guilty of some sort of family crime. The tension was so unbearable. Drive to the point. Don’t drag it out. Use your characters don’t have them standing around for thirty minutes of wasted dialogue. We never explored anymore of the princesses’ past and we don’t know anything about her real mother. I will say that I didn’t expect that ending. I kind of hoped for something different. I’m okay with how it ended though. If you decide to watch this show at least do it for the acting. The story is really interesting. I just wish they had explored more of the plots they introduced. They do finally drive toward that ending though. I will give the acting an 8/10 and the story 6/10.

So, I ended up watching this show in a day. Now I want to take back those hours of my life. I feel like I could’ve done something more productive. Like painting a picture, or vacuumed my floor, or even dusted some furniture. Oh well. It wasn’t that bad. Someone on here says that it’s very Hallmark channel. You should include a dash of soap opera too. The main character Mel moves to a small town to start a nursing job with an old cranky doctor (Do you remember Hart of Dixie?) who doesn’t want her help. She gets a trial run for a month to prove to him she can do her job.🤨 I hate the story now that I’m going over it in my head. ( She was an experienced ER nurse and midwife🙄). So she meets the main love interest. Jack is your dream leading man. Yes, you will fall for him. (Sarcasm) If he could just get away from what’s her face and get with Mel. Why everything would be perfect. Lots of bad stuff happens and Mel saves the day with her nursing powers. Jack is there to always help her through it. He’s the knight in shining armor. So what’s saving this show? The acting is actually good. Mel’s backstory is spaced out enough that you keep coming back because you have to know her. You care about her. That’s what kept me from leaving the show. Jack’s backstory is pretty good too. The secondary characters are also interesting. I really like Annette O’Toole in her role and her opposite Tom Matheson. By the time I reached the last episode I wanted to shake the writers. They did this story a terrible disservice. I’m gonna spoil the ending, and it’s bad so if you don’t want to know, then don’t read after I tell you to save yourself from the drama. The plot in the last two episodes, why? Gosh, save yourself from watching the last episode. Don’t do it! Don’t go there! Run away! If you do, I suggest you have the best movie/ show you’ve ever watched standing by, then save yourself from that awful drama. There .... is.... an unnecessary, accidental pregnancy. This is the 21st century. Women have ways of preventing pregnancy. Men have ways of preventing pregnancy. These are adults. It’s just a weak storyline. It makes the character look like she got pregnant on purpose. Even though she denied it. 🤦‍♀️ They will probably go there in the second season. If there is a second season. If you are a writer, please, treat your audience better than this because this is lazy writing. I’m still learning and even I know better. So I give this a 5/10. That last episode really cheapens everything.

It’s been a while since I watched the first season and despite how disturbing it is I thought it was okay. The characters were well rounded out by the writing. The first season was pretty solid. I’m relieved that the scene of Hannah Baker’s death was cut down. Having lost relatives to suicide it was a little traumatizing. Mostly, I felt it was too dramatic and there was no reason for the scene even to exist. “Less is more” and we didn’t need it. If the first season was solid the second season was just there and the characters were standing around making random decisions. Netflix should have left it alone. I get that they want to address school shootings, rape, and so on, but there is a right way to do it. This is just a bunch of dramatic teen garbage we could watch on the CW. I can’t take it seriously because it doesn’t round out all the perspectives and you’re left confused at how the story got so lost from the source material. Then there’s the third season and I’ve only watched the first couple of episodes so far. There is a new character who is doing some narrating in each episode. It brings in a new perspective and I’m not sure if that makes the story telling any better. Everything just seems all over the place and there’s no real focus. One of the episodes decided to touch on abortion and that’s fine. I personally don’t like abortion, however, it was an opportunity for Netflix to properly educate on what’s done in those clinics. Of course they took the mainstream position. I’m not going to tell someone that they should, or shouldn’t have an abortion, but it sends a bad message when you have people encouraging the character negatively on whether she should or shouldn’t get the abortion and not enough time is spent on her inner frustration. On top of that they portray religious people as crazy standing outside a clinic and they don’t explore that perspective. It’s lazy writing if you don’t address that perspective properly. It’s stereotypical. There are so many perspectives and they are all lazily addressed. It’s like they didn’t have time to fully develop each character this time around either. So I’m not impressed with the season so far. I hope that it improves. I’m just not sure it’s worth hyping up right now.

So when I went to see this film. I was really excited to see a female marvel character even though I wasn’t familiar with her. Now, I can say without a doubt that marvel dropped the ball on this character. I like Brie Larson in this role however, as a viewer I had trouble connecting to her character, and I don’t think that’s Larsons fault. (So there might be spoilers from this moment on. I can’t predict what I will use as an example to get my point across.) Firstly when we meet our main character she is learning to control her powers and training with Jude Law’s character. I don’t really know what his character’s there to do except being a stock secondary character and he’s there simply to take up space. The character isn’t written well, and when this happens I don’t think the actor has an easy time understanding the personality they need to have in order to become a character. Which is why Law is just this bland faceless character who doesn’t even seem to have a real purpose. I didn’t like Carol Danvers back story, and mostly because it was barely there, and it’s difficult to connect to a character when this is an issue. I say there wasn’t enough back story because we only know that Danvers and her friend have known each other based off the flashes of being in pilot school together. That’s nice..... a flash here..... and a flash there........ with some dialogue. It just doesn’t cut it. We need more back story, more history, we need a full scene. We get nothing and we don’t know enough about Carol to care about her. We just want her to be there in the future to save Samuel L Jackson from being dust. A long time ago I sat in the theater watching the second Thor movie thinking, “why do I care about this character?” This was the same situation. I appreciate that marvel wanted to dig this character out and use her to change the face of super hero movies. I just think they got a bit carried away and forgot about building the character up. She’s lost in a mold of being the most powerful woman character they have, and they will probably try to make her bigger, and better. Honestly, I just want a story that builds her up, instead she felt like another stock hero, and they just pulled her out of their warehouse full of missing treasures. She looks great, and the special effects were great, it’s just great. The humor was okay. Fury was okay he maybe could have gotten a little less screen time. It felt like he was the only thing keeping this movie together. Which I think takes away from Carol’s story. It’s not a terrible movie after the first watch. I just don’t see myself rewatching it anytime soon. I give it a 6/ 10.

So before I went to see this film I heard it wasn’t good, and I decided as someone who grew up on this film series that I would watch it anyway. So I prepared myself for the worst and went this weekend to see it. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. The acting was good and I have always liked the casting choices for all the characters. The story was weak. We never get a lot of background story on Chastain’s character. I seriously don’t know what that character was and why she was something to fear. It felt like they cut that piece of the story out while they were editing. So is this movie bad? No. Weak? Yes. The plot? Weak. It never went anywhere and we were just kind of floating from moment to moment. There wasn’t a big revelation at the end. There was a lot of character development and I was okay with that, but I felt that a lot of the characters and actors were wasted. There were characters that could have been used. Actors and actresses who could have been used, story wise, to move things along and it felt like they were just their filling up space and time. It wasn’t a great movie. It was okay. I will give it a 7/10.

I genuinely thought I wouldn’t like this show. I grew up on the original and I loved that series. Granted, I felt like the original got away from it’s path, and it always left an unfinished taste in my mouth, but the ending was satisfying. After I watched the first episode of this reboot I couldn’t watch anymore because I started to pick up on the political agenda in the writing. However, I decided to try it again. I felt like I wasn’t being fair to it because I thought the Charmed reboot was a mess. I watched the first and second episodes and then the third...I’m on the eleventh episode now. I have to say it actually works. I like this reboot better than the Charmed reboot. Here’s why: - there is actually a good plot. -the political stuff actually works well into the story because it informs and entertains at the same time. It’s woven into the characters so well that it helps move the story forward. - we are still getting a syfy story and the rest is just extra. - the acting is good. - the writing is good. - the story is different in a way that isn’t too disappointing. -these are still characters we can care about. Which is why I couldn’t continue to watch the charmed reboot. The writing wasn’t good enough to make me care about the characters and also I don’t think Charmed needed a reboot. This show did need one though because of how the original ended. So far, so good. I’m definitely watching the second season this fall. So if you are like me and got burned on the other reboot give this one another shot. If not, please, give it another chance anyway.