drjgardner

An issue as contemporary and important deserves a better, much better, treatment. The only good aspect is the sound editing. Photography, for a film about photojournalists, is disappointing to say the least. At its best it's merely ordinary. The acting is also disappointing with only two good performances from the major players. In fact, the only outstanding performance is from an uncredited actor. But the real core of the problem is the script and direction, which apparently is the domain of one single person, Alex Garland.

The film is so predictable you could write it yourself. There isn't a surprise anywhere along the way, except at the end, where there is a fatal mistake which I'll talk about later.

(Having just spent a lot of time writing my new book "The Civil War: How it Started and How to End it" I'm pretty much tuned into secessionist movements from the 1600 to 2024, so I feel comfortable with my next remarks)

The writer's conception of how a secession would happen in the U. S. is completely ridiculous. It reads more like it was written by a foreigner (which Garland is). The idea of Texas joining forces with California is so aberrant I needn't discuss it any further.

DON'T READ FURTHER - SPOILER ALERT.

If everything else doesn't indicate what a poor film this is, at the end, the senior photographer (Kirsten Dunst) gets killed saving the life of her junior partner (Cailee Spaeny). Junior then goes on to take the "money shot" BUT she should have picked up Dunst's camera and taken the shot with that camera, indicating the passing of the torch. That's what a better writer would have done.

Usually I don't care for films from India, so when I say this one is "nearly perfect" that is very unusual.

The acting, photography, music, and script are wonderful. Cannot be better. Where the film falls down is the editing. It's too long. Cutting a few minutes would be better. The action scenes, while very well done, could be shorter - we get it. He's pretty damn good. John Wick without the guns.

The other fault in the editing is the use of flashbacks. In the beginning some critical ones are much too short to communicate anything. 10 more seconds would make a huge difference. Near the end, when they go back to the actions that helped set Monkey Man on his quest, the flashbacks are much too long. Maybe the editor/director is trying to make up for the shortened versions early on.

Less would be more, and more would be more.

A disjointed script, poor editing, incongruous music, questionable flashbacks, repetitious shots of NYC, and mediocre acting from the principals do not a good film make. On the other hand, some of the brief series with actors/actresses who play patients are wonderful. Makes you want a new AA category - "best acting in less than 2 minutes on screen."

Why make such a depressing film. Maybe they should have made a documentary? Maybe it should be a pilot for a new TV series? What it shouldn't be is a film.

I knew after 10 minutes I should walk out. 9 out of 10 times I feel that way, and don't do it, I regret doing it. About 10% of the time staying works. This time it didn't. I stayed because I respect Penn's acting, and from time to time it does show up, but all to rarely.

I was and am a big Marley fan. I was alive when he was and couldn't wait fore his next record. He was not merely a revolutionary music maker, he was a revolutionary person. He deserved a bio pic that reflected his enormous talent, contribution, and sacrifice. This is not that film.

It's not completely worthless. The acting by Marley and his wife is exceptional, and her work deserves Academy Award notice. The photography is good and the music, of course, is wonderful, though the visuals accompanying the music leaves a lot to be desired.

The main problem is the direction. I felt like I was watching a film about Marley but was otherwise not engaged. That's a big negative in a film about Bob Marley. He deserves more.

I love time travelling films and this is one that sneaks up on you. It starts as a pretty common serial killer film and slowly changes. The acting is more than adequate but the real star is the script/writer. It's also got pretty good photography and the music is great.

Why not a 10? Because there is an error in the Time Travel storyline. At this point, stop reading if you haven't already seen the film.

PS - almost all time travel films make a mistake in the timeline, so their mistake is really no big deal, but it is a mistake.

The error happens at the end of the film. It's the last meeting of the time traveler and the detective who is looking for her. At this point, he has been tracking her for decades, and he knows what she's doing and he also knows who Subject #1 is. But this is her first trip. She hadn't gone back to 1966 or anytime else. If he tells her who Subject #1 is, she can go back and kill him and avoid killing anyuone else.

Given how bad some of the most recent superhero films have been, this one isn't that bad. That doesn't mean it's good, it's just not that bad.

Good things -

The acting is really good, especially from the 3 teenage girls. They steal every scene they are in.

Editing - really nice. A lot of the flashbacks and flash forwards are done so well they created interest and tension.

Plot - it's ok too. A bit far-fetched but it's a movie and it's a superhero movie so the fetched isn't that far.

Bad stuff

Continuity - ok it's a superhero film but it still needs to have continuity.

Loopholes - not related to the poor continuity, there are so many holes in the story you could drive a million giant spiders through it.

This series is designed to teach people about the elements that go into a successful and memorable film. As such, you get to look at (once again) clips from successful and memorable films. Introducing these films is a nice old man who apparently taught this subject to film makers for decades. He's obviously knowledgeable and has a certain charm, but whatever he is trying to communicate gets lost in his many detours and sidetracks.

Occasionally he manages to stay on track, and when he does this, he isn't necessarily correct. At one point (I can't remember where) he talks about the need for surprise and how repetition can be harmful to the film's impact. Nothing could be further from the truth. Repetition is a fundamental aspect of human life. Repetition is a fundamental aspect of human life. Freud wrote about it and called it the "repetition compulsion" and tied it to the basic death drive. It's the core of most comedies and the way in which most action films anticipate a dramatic confrontation. Gun fighters don't meet for the first time. You see them in matches and anticipate what is going to happen in the final match. Substitute gunfighters for chess champions, gymnists, etc. And you see the structure of most effective dramatic scenes.

Not a complete waste of time, and it's always fun to see memorable scenes even if you've seen them hundreds of times. Along the way there are some good observations.

There is a new OC World and it's not much different from the older OC World with one really exception. But more about that later.

There has been a similar program Lost LA which has been on for a few years and is really interesting. Over time the principal interviewer has really grown into the role.

The good thing about the new OC World is that it has a few episodes that model the Lost LA experience, only now they have two people, instead of one. These "history hunters" go out and give us examples of how OC has changed over the years. These episodes are really interesting and educational - far better than the self-serving promos that are often the bases of the other programs.

More history please!

The 6-part series is as good as it gets and was almost perfect (more about that later). There is no way to summarize the plot except to say that you will never have any idea of where you are going on this ride, so sit back and enjoy it. What can be said is that the acting is wonderful, for everyone, but especially the two main characters. The scenes of outback Australia are also great.

Now a little nit picking because all you can do is find a "nit" because everything else is so damn good. (1) The main bad guy could be badder. He's not all that convincing given the story line. (2) The shootout could have been done better. (3) the fat guy and the well just isn't convincing.

These are such small problems, but it's why the series didn't get a 10. FWIW I rarely give 9s or 10s.

So sad this show had only a few seasons. It's one of the best detective stories you'll find on TV. It starts with impeccable writing for plot and characters. Then it goes to wonderful acting from everyone involved, even the minor parts. All the actors seem to be real people with real actions. Even their speech and accents are different. In so many shows, people are just reading lines and you could easily replace any one of them with another and never notice the replacement. In this series, everyone is unique. Words, accent, appearance, etc. - all unique.

As a detective story you have to have crimes and solutions, and this series gives you some seemingly impossible to solve problems along with ever so clever solutions.

Wandering through Netflix I came upon Katherine Ryan. Just to be on the record, I'm not a big fan of women comediennes, though I thought Joan Rivers was the very best and I enjoy Natasha Leggero. My tastes go from Marx Bros., Bob Hope. Don Rickles, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and of course, Jim Carrey. There's a B team too (e.g., Jim Gaffigan) but you get the point.

Then came Ryan. What a hoot. She is not merely funny, she has a different take on contemporary society. Funny, thoughtful, timely, and provocative. And she can sing. What a treat .

I can't comment on her other venues and roles, but she does a wonderful stand-up routine. Well worth watching.

Imagine the hubris of these film makers who invented an imaginary meeting and imaginary dialogue to do a film about Freud, whose life was so interesting imaginary nonsense is not needed. Think "Freud" with Montgomery Cliff or "A Dangerous Method."

Put aside the nonsense, how good is the film? Not very. Editing and continuity are pedestrian and music is not helpful. Direction is poor, at best. What's most disturbing is that the acting is awful. Everyone is doing a poor job! "Oh no," you think. "I heard Anthony Hopkins was wonderful." You heard wrong. Well, not wrong, but misguided. Hopkins plays a jolly old fat German man who speaks excellent English and is plastered on liquor and morphine. Freud was neither fat nor jolly. Hopkins performance is wonderful if you forget that he is playing Freud. As Freud he is awful.

If that's not enough to convince you this film is trash, think of who Freud was in 1939. His eros and libido theories had been wacked over the head by WW 1 and thanatos (death drive) was more on his mind, so that with the impending WW 2 all the dialogue in this film is woefully outdated.

The show is perfectly good and provides a lot of information about the stagecoach. But it could have done a lot more. The story of the stagecoach is very interesting and can be traced back to the earliest Colonial period and the Northeast where it originated. What it accomplished then and how it was transformed is not given enough time. Also ignored is the question of routes and how they were determined and what it meant for a town where it stopped. Also kissing is the interaction between the stagecoach lines and the mail carriers, how the federal government intervened, etc. Hence, what they have is good and interesting, but there was so much more than could have been said.

John Ford was a wonderful director. He made some of the very best films in multiple genres, not simply westerns, though we remember him best for films like "The Searchers", "Stagecoach", The Man who shot Liberty Valance," and the Calvary films. But he also made "The Informer", "The Quiet Man," and best of all "The Grapes of Wrath." He won many awards as did his associates.

For me personally, he stands alongside Orson Welles and Sam Peckinpah as the very best of the directors.

So how could they make such a miserable film about Ford and his work in the war. The talking heads provide almost nothing. The photos are also not educational.

Many films dicker with the film's narrative. Most commonly there are flashbacks and sometimes flashforwards, and then there are a few breaks in the timeline altogether. Sometimes they succeed. This film breaks anything anyone knows about a film's narrative, so In understand that some viewers may be put off by the complexity of the narrative. It is unlike anything you have ever seen before.

The best advice I can give is "hang in there." It is well worth the journey. You have no idea what's happening nor where it is going, but it is nonetheless compelling.

Forget that the acting is excellent. Ignore the great music and the great photography. These are not the issue. Other films have great elements. This film will knock you dead with the complexity and beauty of the narrative.

It's not really fair to rate this show since I only started watching it in Season 5. But most of the character s in 5 are from prior seasons so I think I got the idea, and what I didn't like about the series is probably true for the parts I missed.

First and foremost, almost everyone speaks exactly the same, at the same speed, using the same arcane references, and for similar lengths of time. If you read the script you could not tell one from the other . In real life, people are not like that!

It's mostly talking heads with an occasional jaunt. That gets pretty dull.

The acting is really poor. Really poor. Maybe after 5 seasons they are simply tired. I don't know. Or maybe saying the same lines so quickly from one head to another prohibits better acting.

This series has so many twists and turns you think you're on a merry-go-round. What keeps it going is the wonderful acting from everyone involved. Not just the main actors, but everyone is marvelous. Given the context of the series, it's unexpected to find such good acting. Equally outstanding is the photography and the music.

Of all the good features, it's the story that compels viewing. In about 90% of the films/series I watch I can tell you the ending right away. But this one fooled me, pretty much right up to the end. Only in the last hour of the final episode did I figure it out, and that gives you some idea of how good it is.

Forget anything you ever thought about the original series. This one stinks! Terrible acting. Terrible music. Terrible writing. Terrible direction. Everything is simply awful. If I didn't have such high regard for the original series, I would have stop looking after a few minutes. But I continued for an entire hour. Forgetting the original, it's not even any good for a n ew series. And how stupid are the writers? Doesn't Detroit have traffic cameras so they can see what happened. Apparently not. Do everyone a favor. Scrape the entire series. Have mercy on us and show no more. Then get a new set of writers and return him to Kentucky, revive the old characters, and give us something worth seeing.

This film purports to authenticate a photo that shows Lincoln after he died. There has never been any indication that such a photo exists, but that doesn't mean it doesn't. But the person in the photo is not Lincoln. It doesn't even look like Lincoln. Match it with any of the photos of Lincoln at the time and you can see that for yourself.

Well, maybe being shot in the back of the head changes your appearance? OK, maybe. Unlikely, but maybe.

The photo is a type that according to the expert interviewed, who was supposed to be the world's best in this area, that type of photo was only taken in the 1850s. After that people switched to paper, not glass. Lincoln died in 1865. To prove that the photographers used this type of photo, the woman who made the film interviews the archivist for the photographer who says of the 1600+ photos they made, there is one that is on glass. All the rest are not. But that proves nothing, since the photographer was taking pictures in the 1850s, and since he was a state-of-the-arty photographers, he wouldn't be using an old fashioned photo in 1865.

The she wanders off to see her father who shows us why the bullet shot in the back of Lincoln's head didn't go out the front. She shows him shotting all kinds of bullets into material from a distance of 6 feet and then she does the same with the derringer, only now she doesn't show us the 6 foot distance. The bullet stays in the material, which she says proves that the bullet didn't exit. What she doesn't show is what happens if Booth was closer than 6 feet. What happens if the derringer is against Lincoln's skull and they you fire. That she doesn't show.

The photographers did take 2 photos of the empty bed where Lincoln died. Look at the bed linen and the pillow cases. They are not the same as the ones that show Lincoln.

I could go on. This is hokum at its worst.

Anyone who thinks of themself a film fan must see this film.

I consider myself a film fan. I have 6,419 ratings on IMDB and only 2% (109) had a rating of 10. This one was #110. (BTW if you don't know what IMBD is, maybe you're not a true film fan).

What's so great about this film. It's a 2022 look back and two famous Hollywood creators and two famous films and it shows how the films they helped create were a reflection of the "blacklist" era in the U. S. For those who don't know what that was, it was a time in the U. S. when right wing GOP members sought to cleanse the country from communists. It was a byproduct of the "McCarthy Era" and HUAC (House Unamerican Activity Committee). The hay day was between 1945 and 1950. Future President Richard Nixon (then a Senator) made a name for himself here.

Of course we know that art reflects life (and vice versa) but this is a stunning example of how this was never so true.

The two people are Elia Kazan and Carl Foreman.

Elia Kazan (1909-2003) did such wonderful films as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gentleman's Agreement, Pinky, Panic in the Streets, a Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, East of Eden, and On the Waterfront (the subject of this film). He often worked with Marlon Brando. His films won so many awards I won't list them.

Eliza Kazan is the villain in this film and in life. He was one of many cowards who appeared before HUAC and named names, which created a "blacklist" and virtually destroyed lives of the people he named and also their families. Few of the people named were truly Communists, none of them had done anything to jeopardize national security, and most had been a communist before WW2 when it was a trendy thing to do. Kazan was only one of many cowards, but Carl Foreman was one of only a handful of brave people who refused to betray his friends and associates. He is the hero in this film.

Carl Foreman (1914-1984) was a writer-producer-director. Some of his unforgettable films include Champion, Home of the Brave, Young Man with a Horn, The Men, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and High Noon (the subject of this film).

Voiceovers are taken from the subjects' writings, and done by Edward Norton (Foreman) and John Turturro (Kazan).

Scene by scene the film shows how the character and the people in the film reflect what the directors were going through. In "On the Waterfront" Brando rats on Lee J Cobb just as Kazan rats on his nearly a dozen of his friends, who included ironically Lee J. Cobb. In "High Noon," Gary Cooper is isolated (as was Foreman), faced with an overwhelming and powerful opposition (as was Foreman vs. HUAC), but he refuses to give up. Everyone tells him to leave town, an d he seriously considers it because he knows his life and his family's life are being threatened, but he turns around and faces the forces pitted against him.

I'm not doing justice to the film. You need to see it if you really enjoy films.

Postscript. - The coward Elia Kazan continued to make films, but he never made a great film after this. Orson Welles called him a "traitor." In 1999 the Academy gave him a "Lifetime Award." Many in the audience booed, refused to clap, and some walked out.

Carl Foreman was never named as a "communist" but he was not a "friendly witness." He was forced out of his film company by Stanley Kramer and got lots of pressure from high ranking people in the film industry, but he refused. Because he was primarily a writer, he continued to work using a pseudonym. Others whose lives were forever changed included Dalton Trumbo, Lillian Hellman, Edward Dmytryk, Dorothy Parker, and John Garfield.

If you're chronica;ly depressed and unhappy with your appearance and your life, why go on stage and show it to everyone. Of course, some people (Woody Allen, Joan Rivers) could do it and do it well, but it's really hard and that's nowhere in evidence than in this depressing demonstration. What's worse, if anything could be worse, she's not very funny. She got a few snickers and one or two laughs, but otherwise it seemed to be like listening to a boring person at a cocktail party drone on about their life. If you're not ready, why do it? Even the audience is only luke warm, which speaks volumes itself.

This show is obviously a homage to the "Searching for Italy" which itself was suggested by the Anthony Bourdain series. I wasn't very impressed with either of those shows but I do travel a lot and so I watch them initially but eventually their personalities prevent me from continuing. This show did the opposite. In the first few shows Longoria got on my nerves. She was so conscious of looking good and saying the right thing that it annoyed me and distracted from what should be the focus of the show - the food, the people, and the place. To my surprise, she changed. She's able to focus on the people and the food and the show is now one of my favorites travel shows and sits just behind Huell Howser's. So if you start and you're a little put off, hang in there and it gets much better.

I get it. Having a travel show where people go around and explore places is a cheap way to produce a show. The earliest one I recall is the wonderful Huell Howser "California Gold" that ran for 20 years. Recently we have a travel show that only looks at high-end hotels.

Travel and feed your face started about 20 years ago with Anthony Bourdain. Then came "Searching for Italy" which seems to be a never-ending quest, and more recently "Searching for Mexico."

All these shows have at their core the hope that you will enjoy the people who are giving the tour. Sometimes this works, like in the case of Huell Howser who was so folksy you could cut it with a knife, but it worked.

This show is the opposite. The two "stars" are so obnoxious and so self-centered that it's painful to watch. Scotland is a wonderful place with so many interesting things to see. But if I have to put up with these two, I'll switch off.

Arnold promised "I'll be back" and here he is, back again. T his time it's a eight episode series about spies. It's OK. Arnold is Arnold and he really tries to act in this one. And his stunt double is good. And the idea is good and everyone does a good job supporting him.

For me, the two standouts are Fortune Feimster who steals every scene she's in, and Barbara Harris who looks and acts like someone in her position.

It's pretty predictable and the hanging threads are very obvious, but, nonetheless, the series works and it's clear they will try to have another season which would b e OK with me.

If your identity has been exposed and your picture is all over the news, do you continue to look exactly like you look in the picture or do you shave your beard and head and wear different clothes? Maybe even add a scar? And if you're attacking a car from a helicopter, do you attack from the front, or from behind and to the left? And tell me how with no survelieace at all, you know the exact location of a car your chasing? These are but a few of the flaws in the film that detract from taking it seriously.

It has good photography and good music, and the direction is good, giving us an idea of just how crazy this war was/is.