bucataru

IMDb member since April 2020
    Lifetime Total
    10+
    IMDb Member
    4 years, 1 month

Reviews

Babylon 5: The Road Home
(2023)

Babylon 5: Multiverse of Nostalgia
Technically the animation is mediocre and low budget. There are too many instances where they flashback to previous scenes just to pad the runtime. The voice actors they found to replace dead cast members from the series are talented and not distracting.

The story itself is very similar to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Using pseudoscience and the word "quantum" seems to be en vogue but I wish they would have written something fun instead. Wringing out every last drop of nostalgia to make a sequel didn't work for Picard and it doesn't work here.

I guess the Shadow does win in the end. We'll all happily succumb to AI written films since they will be far more entertaining than what we're viewing now.

The Orville
(2017)

Season 3 needs to be the last
Fifteen minutes of each episode are of ships landing, taking off, flying with a background of abusively loud orchestral music.

Every other episode is about Moclans. They are an uncharismatic one-dimensional species. I can't explain why Seth MacFarlane is obsessed with repeating the message that heterosexual relationships are bad for the galaxy.

The other four episodes were about Kaylons, an equally banal race of sentient robots.

If anyone else would like to file a class-action lawsuit against this show for destroying our speakers and our headphones, please like this review.

The Princess
(2022)

Brilliant!
70 minutes of extremely well choreographed fight scenes and 10 minutes of sappy dialogue and flashback exposition. I haven't been this entertained by continuous, well-paced, smoothly filmed action since Crank and Hardcore Henry. With advances in camera rigging and mixed martial arts training, movies like this should be more common. Plus Joey King is ridiculously talented. I don't know where they found her but she's a very natural fighter. I hope to see more action flics staring her.

Finch
(2021)

Mad Max Geriatric Road
This is the first bad film I've seen with Tom Hanks. I truly hope he hasn't hired the same agent as Nic Cage, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. Time will tell.

As for this nonsense, 30 minutes of it are Hanks's character coughing up ketchup packets and another 30 minutes of it are close-ups of the ridiculously expresive dog. There is no narrative, no protagonist, no antagonist; no reason at all to care whether any of the three characters survive their ill-defined journey.

If I had seen this in a theatre I would have walked out and asked for a refund.

Legends of the Hidden Temple
(2021)

Modern Family, The Game Show
It is directed like a mediocre episode of that show with non-stop narration. And so much bokeh effect that only the absolute middle of the screen is in focus.

The contestants themselves were selected by a nefarious algorithm who's sole intention was to encourage social media trolls and to cancel this reboot after a single season.

I miss the days of focus groups and of producers who actually tried to find who their audience is.

Life Is Strange: True Colors
(2021)

The Bachelorette: Colorado
The first had a supernatural murder mystery to solve and lots of interesting characters to discover. This has a dating game where you literally give a rose to someone. It's also about a fifth as long - maybe 3 hours of gameplay.

Cry Macho
(2021)

A film about a chicken ... and I loved every moment of it.
It's not as good as The Mule, but still a treat. Clint Eastwood is a masterful storyteller.

Professor T
(2021)

A lesser T
Do yourself a favour and watch the Belgian Professor T. The story is preposterous since the relationship between the Dean and the Professor is utterly science fiction in a British style University; but it does make sense and is completely natural in a French style system. To clarify, the US and Canada have British style Universities.

Army of the Dead
(2021)

Blurry mess.
Nothing other than the very tip of the actors' noses are in focus for most scenes. If I were a part of the makeup and costume crew, I would be offended since none of my hard work and talent is visible. Peninsula (2020) was a Korean film with the same zombie casino heist story and it was infinitely better.

Chaos Walking
(2021)

A lower budget episode of Supernatural
They even reused some of the sets from Supernatural. And all the extras are veterans of the Vancouver film industry. The Alien from the trailer has about 30 seconds of screen time, so this isn't a sci-fi flick. And Daisy Ridley is stuck salvaging enormous derelict crash-landed space ships again. I have a feeling the casting and screenplay were auto-generated by a Netflix AI. Luckily this will never hit theaters and I never paid to see this so it gets my one star for helping me fall asleep last night.

Monster Hunter
(2020)

All the battle scenes are in broad daylight!
Almost all the battle scenes are in broad daylight! I've never seen a monster film where they don't hide their low budget by setting it in perpetual darkness (I'm looking at you Godzilla 2019) . This film also has the prettiest, scariest dragons ever rendered - even better than Game of Thrones. 1.5 hours of pure fun with minimal dialogue and refreshingly minimal exposition. 10/10 I love you Constantin Films! Also the cat is better than any cat in Cats.

Absurd Planet
(2020)

Ze Frank does it better.
Watch his YouTube channel, zefrank1, and you'll pee yourself with laughter. He has been doing this shtick about animals for a decade.

Vox Lux
(2018)

I stopped watching at exactly 11:00
Once the ending credits started rolling in and filling that screen at 11 minutes into the film, I realized the director is an idiot. He graphically murdered underage children, then decided the modern convention of credits at the end is not for him - nor the original convention of credits at the beginning. What a rule breaker. So avant-garde of him. Damn millennials and their rich parents producing their films.

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