GrassCrown

You have to get people invested into the characters right at the start. I remember the names Buck and Bucky, but really nothing substantial about them (or who was which), or anyone else for that matter. Do they hate or respect their CO? What did they think about joining up? What is the dynamic between the characters?

I mean, I got nothing. So why should I care?

Band of Brothers built up distinct characters within a few minutes. You could see how they relate to one another and what their character quirks were. Here, at the start of the 2nd episode, some air crew are playing dice. I don't know any of these people. Were they introduced before? If they were, I missed it.

There's also a lot of telling rather than showing. A quite fatal flaw.

The production is just sort of okay, if even that. Something you get when you throw enough money at it. Nothing unique. No passion.

It is not offensively bad so far. Just boring, bland, forgettable, and a waste of time for this budget. I don't know why anyone would be emotionally invested in this.

This is really my key concern. In a horror movie/series, you really need to identify with some character(s). You have to understand their plight and you want them to survive. This should be a pretty basic thing, right?

Well, I pretty much wanted every single person in this series to die as soon as possible. All of them are absolute degenerates and supremely annoying. Why should I be "horrified" about any of their fates? Your "behind-the-shoulder-dead-person" jump scares mean nothing in this context.

Moreover, the ethnic composition of the family is most perplexing. How can the patriarch of the family have a 100% biological African daughter? The whole setting is totally out of whack. No one can relate to this.

Horror is about subtlety and deeply-ingrained fears. If you are constantly cheering for every single character to die a painful death, how can that be horror? That might be comedy, at best.

Bruce Greenwood is the only bright spot in the series, but he is only used to lure you in to the rest of the nonsense.

There are many sermons from the Indians about the importance of preserving their own tribe and how their women should not marry outside their tribe at the beginning third of the of the movie. But, despite the movie being 3,5 hours long, we don't really see why these Indian women fall for the White men. It just happens.

I was bored out of my mind in the first 15 minutes. What are the stakes? What is the story? Why should I care about any of these people? And this is really not a TikTok thing either, you really have to get people engaged right away.

DiCaprio and De Niro are not used well. There is no chemistry between DiCaprio and Gladstone (which makes their relationship implausible). When Mollie says "I don't really know if you love me anymore", I'm just throwing my arms in the air. Are we just supposed to believe any woman should automatically love a character portrayed by DiCaprio, even if it is not elaborated in any way? This DiCaprio does not have any charisma. I just don't believe it. Or maybe her own tribe's men are just absolutely dreadful? Who knows?

Scorsese has really crashed and burned in his later years.

"As far as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster.".

Like, okay, I already get the framing for the story right there.

With this movie, nuthin'.

However, Scorsese's point about the irreconcilable interests of different ethnic groups is of course a bold statement. And very timely. It just deserves a better movie.

The biggest problem with this show by far is the horrendous dialogue and writing. The constant wannabe-poetic, deep and ponderous exchanges are so goddamn exhausting. You can't put that kind of stuff everywhere at the beginning of the show, you actually need to earn it. Now, It gets old really quick. You can' get immersed to this when every utterance is expressed in an "epic" and "dreamy" fashion.

It's complete amateur hour here. How they got a billion dollars for this schlock is beyond my understanding. Every moment and supposed payoff feels completely unearned. You can't throw this kind of floaty stuff at us at every turn and expect us to buy in. We need to actually get to know the characters before you start with the serious and epic stuff. The constant clumsy references to the original LotR books and movies don't help either, they just feel cheap.

Then there's of course the obvious problems with the race-swapping of the characters. It makes the whole world seem incongruous, incoherent and artificial. Tolkien's Middle Earth is not 2022 LA or NYC. Peter Jackson's LotR felt organic and historical. This doesn't. It feels modern and fake. Like, did these separate races fly in to these villages yesterday? Why are they so distinct?

And the music, it's so lackluster. I can't remember a single tune or theme. Not a single goosebump. The timing and pacing of the scenes also feels bizarre. Like, when you build up towards the title screen, there should be some buildup. Now it's just thrown in there. The changes from one location to another also feel tonally weird (from high-level political elf stuff to bum Harfoots). The costuming is also really bad, especially the hairstyles. What's going on with these modern haircuts? Are they just incompetent or where did the money go?

The acting isn't great either. Especially Galadriel, it's like she's about to break down crying after every faux-epic line she's forced to deliver. It's all quite baffling really. And all of the other characters are put down to make her seem more grand and wise. It doesn't work.

The fight scenes also do not work. If the troll can grab an elf and crush him against a wall with no damage, where are the stakes? The goofy "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" tier moves don't help one bit either.

And this is the first episode. You really need to hook the viewer in some way at this point, whether it's the writing, music or the visuals. This series fail in every single regard.

In the end, I think this whole thing fails because the writers of modern shows are pretty much not allowed to have profound thoughts because they might be offensive towards some people. You can't even imagine that a modern LotR movie could have a line like "For things are made to endure in the Shire, passing from one generation to the next. There's always been a Baggins, living here under the Hill... in Bag End. And there always will be."

Because that wouldn't be progressive or inclusive. And we can't have that, can we?

The show starts off with a terrible recap, which shows contempt for the fans. I mean, everyone should already know all of this, right?

The writing is very low effort, there is no dramatic punch to any of it.

The antagonists are lame and unconvincing. They look like they're playing dress up.

The cinematography, CGI and blocking are just bad, feels very generic and cheap.

It is all quite baffling, but perhaps it shouldn't be at this point.

This is the last semi-unexplored canon character they have left. You would think they'd give it their all here. But it's just paint by the numbers.

Knights of the Old Republic I & II clearly showed you can still craft awesome stories in this universe, so it's not that I'm categorically opposed to anything new for Star Wars. This just isn't it.

The people involved with this clearly had no great vision for the show, and no passion to create something great. It's just a pay check for them. And that seems to suit Disney just fine.

I didn't go into this movie expecting much so I was only mildly disappointed. The Desolation of Smaug ended in a pretty awkward cliffhanger and The Battle of Five Armies tries to pick it up from that very spot. All of the buildup with Smaug was in the Desolation of Smaug and quickly disposing of him in the beginning of this movie doesn't work from a story-telling standpoint, simple as that. Clearly there was material here for one, maybe two, great movies as many others have pointed out and chopping up the movie into three pieces and bloating it up really screws up its pacing.

Legolas again defied all laws of physics and essentially became Neo and Super Mario wrapped in one in this film. If a character can do anything with no consequences and doesn't have to follow any kind of internal rules of a movie, there's no tension or drama. Shouldn't Jackson & Co understand this? Legolas wasn't the only on either, pretty much anyone could apparently kill dozens and dozens of these orcs so where's the danger? The decision to implement the antagonists of the trilogy, Azog and Bolg, as CGI characters also really flattened the whole experience because they simply don't have the kind of screen presence a real actor in makeup has. There's really no awe and weight in much of what we see.

Bilbo should've been the absolute focus of this trilogy, not the sideshow he ended up as. When he's on the screen, you're actually interested. No one cares about Bard's family or about Laketown politics. The tacked on romance between Tauriel and Kili never felt organic nor fit the universe. All of it failed to generate pretty much any emotional resonance in me. The stuff works only insofar that it keeps your attention if watched in a cinema but that's as far as it goes. The serious ponderings about greed and so on don't hold much weight because we aren't really invested in the characters.

The visuals were a bit better than in the previous two, it didn't felt as saturated or dipped so wholly in CGI paint, maybe they had more time now that they didn't have to invest as much effort on Smaug? In spite of the improvement, the movie still looked too much like a video game and the way Peter Jackson swirls and twirls the camera around really highlighted the fakeness of it all at times. At times the whole thing completely breaks down in scenes like when Thranduil gets four orcs trapped on his elk's antlers and then does a quad-beheading or when Legolas is running up a set of boulders that are dropping through the air. This is not light-hearted but over the top silly slapstick and well, it just doesn't work for me. The tone wanders too much from serious to utter schlock. The trilogy should've had more more funny and lighthearted moments like the ones in the original trilogy. Moments like Merri and Pippin comparing their heights after drinking the water of Fangorn and Legolas and Gimli's drinking competition and general banter. That stuff worked. Here we have the cowardly Alfrid in a woman's dress stuffing his chest with money and making it look like he has huge boobs. That's just way too much and not funny at all, he's almost like the Jar Jar Binks of this trilogy.

Also, what's up with the alternate Galadriel look in this film (the same that was in the Fellowship)? I thought that was like an evil version of her that would come about if she would get the one ring and succumb under its corruption instead of what she looks like when she does magic things. I'll just keep to that original idea, I think it works better. Galadriel carrying Gandalf really weirded me out also. Does she work out a lot or something? For me the elves are all about skill and graceful finesse and stuff like that. These kind of oddities and inconsistencies are so numerous with these films that I could probably go on for hours about these.

The thing is, pretty much everyone who went to watch these Hobbit movies saw the original trilogy which established what Middle Earth looked and felt like. If you're going to use a similar visual style you pretty much have to adhere to the tone and rules of the original or otherwise everyone's going to be constantly having this jarring feeling that everything's not right. The ring wraiths for example reminded me more of Final Fantasy or something like that and not the original. In the original the magic was more subtle and subdued, not banging around like in this one. It felt like my imagination was completely shut off by this film. The eagles were also really used as a deus ex machina in this, I didn't think they would risk such a dangerous frontal attack? I get it that they took part in the battle in the book but the way they portrayed it in this? I don't know. In the Return of the King I thought they were done really well as they fought the Fellbeasts in their element high up in the air but here they're bashing through army formations like it's no big deal.

Time will not treat these Hobbit movies kindly, no one is going to sit down and watch the extended editions of these at one sitting unlike with the original trilogy. What a shame. It's entertaining at parts in a pop-corn-movie sort of way but again there's too much stuff that continuously keeps chipping at your enjoyment. Not really sure the pop-corn-flick style really fits in well with Middle Earth either. Oh, it would've also been nice to know what actually happened to that gold, I thought it was sort of central in the movie? I guess that's reserved for the director's cut. Anti-greed indeed.

I get the hype, really. Linklater's Before trilogy was fantastic (I especially loved Before Midnight) and people were justified in expecting great things from Boyhood. What I don't get are the numerous and nearly uniformly raving reviews this film has been getting from the critics and everyone else. I'm utterly baffled by this. Critics are using words like masterpiece, monumental, profound and so on to describe this movie. The film is currently sitting at #58 on IMDb's Top 250. All this praise is making me feel like a crazy person because I felt Boyhood absolutely didn't deliver on the hype. In fact, the movie can't even be described as mediocre.

I feel like I need to make on thing clear here. Just because Boyhood had the novel idea of shooting a film with the same actors during a long period of time doesn't grant it any automatic points. A novel idea or approach may pique my interest and convince me to see a movie but that's as far as it goes. We don't appreciate and enjoy movies simply because someone put some effort into them. There has to actually be something there to justify spending our precious time and money to watch pixels on a screen for a couple of hours.

Now, let's jump into my gripes with the movie.

Firstly, Boyhood has absolutely no distinct style. It is a lifeless husk without form or anything resembling a cinematic look. Just like one other reviewer put it, Boyhood felt like watching a home movie about someone you don't know and don't care about. I can't remember a single scene where I thought "Wow, that's a neat shot" or a moment where some cinematographic choice actually enhanced the scene. That tells a lot about the cinematographic effort and choices that were put into this film. Bland and uninspired is to put it mildly.

The editing does the film no favors either. Right when something emotional or important could have happened, the movie simply cuts to another scene and doesn't reference or deal with what happened previously in any way. It all felt terribly directionless. For example, Mason (Ellar Coltrane) gets bullied in a school bathroom. Okay, great. Probably something many of us can identify with. How did it get to this? How does he deal with it later on and how does it affect him? We simply don't know. It's a wholly detached scene with no meaning. At one point they're planting Obama signs on people's lawns. Great, maybe they're idealistic about the political system and they'd later revise their views or something? Nope. None of that is ever mentioned or dealt with in any way again. Most of the scenes are like this and go absolutely nowhere. When the film actually goes back to something that was introduced earlier it feels extremely contrived like with the bit about Mason's mom advising a latino immigrant about going to school and how he later comes back to thank her for that encouragement. Really subtle guys!

There were a few scenes where I was slightly amused (and that mostly about how awkward the scene was) but mostly I was just constantly cringing at how bad the acting and the writing were. I guess that's the risk you run into when you cast young actors and stay with them for twelve years - they might just not be that good at acting. Ellar Coltrane seemed like he'd had a shot of horse tranquilizer before every scene. He's that apathetic and dull. The characters have no real depth or character arcs and I didn't care or get attached to any of them. Mason's philosophic rants were cringe-worthy and uninteresting. They also seem to come out of nowhere and therefore feel unearned. At no point did I think that they really struck a chord with what it was like growing up during the 90s and the 2000s. I was simply depressingly bored for most of the movie.

Many have complimented this movie about being close to real life. Well, that's debatable but that shouldn't be an automatic positive either. Watching paint dry and standing in the line in the grocery store is real life too. I don't want to see banal mindlessness when I go to the movies but maybe that's just me. A film this ambitious should really have something original to say. Instead it just wasted my time.

A Million Ways To Die in the West is more vulgar and crude than MacFarlane's feature debut Ted (think sheep penises and quite a bit of poop jokes). Yeah, he may have gone too far in a few places. I loved Ted, it was consistently funny and it had a real heart to it. I remember cracking up really hard when I saw it in the theaters. I had a decently good time with A Million Ways To Die in the West as well but I wasn't laughing uncontrollably at all and some of the jokes fell a tad flat and some of them could've been edited to be shorter. They were mostly amusing at least though so it's not that they didn't work at all. I just wish MacFarlane had aimed a bit higher and built more onto some of the stuff that was in the film (like the running gag with Sarah Silverman's prostitute and her hapless boyfriend in Giovanni Ribisi, it was the same joke all the way through).

I'm not quite sure what to think of Seth MacFarlane as an actor. He's terrific as an voice actor but he doesn't quite have that cinematic look for live acting in my opinion and he looks out of place in front of a camera. That actually sort of works to his advantage here because the whole thing has this off-kilter feel to it. Also, being the voice to a raunchy teddy bear or a baby makes stuff funnier just by itself and let's you get away with more stuff so I hope he sticks to his voice acting in the future. Charlize Theron looked gorgeous in the film and she had pretty good comedic timing as well. I sort of have this hunch that all of this was just an elaborate plot by MacFarlane to get some action going with Theron. Can't fault the guy for that I guess. Liam Neeson works well as this hard ass counterpart in comedies (watch his sketch with Ricky Gervais in Life's Too Short if you're not convinced) but I do wish that he had more screen time and depth here though. There are also a few funny cameos in the film so that's something to look for.

All in all, I liked A Million Ways To Die in the West but I was expecting more from MacFarlane. If you liked Ted and Family Guy, go see the film but with tempered expectations. I'm still expecting good things from Ted 2 as it will play more to MacFarlane's strengths as a comedian.

You could describe this movie as a dizzying combination of Groundhog Day, Starship Troopers, Source Code and The Butterfly Effect. Edge of Tomorrow borrows from these films and while some of the individual ideas may not therefore be groundbreakingly original, the way they're combined and put to use in Edge of Tomorrow by director Doug Liman certainly is. As aliens have invaded Earth, humanity's only hope lies in a cowardly PR officer Bill Cage (played by Tom Cruise) with no combat skills who is sent to the front lines. His only advantage? A save point, sort of. Are you excited yet? You should be. I don't want to tell you more specifics about the plot because it's best to experience and discover this great piece of work yourself.

You have to love Tom Cruise as an actor, he always gives his roles a 100 percent and he's phenomenal in Edge of Tomorrow - Physical, funny and determined. I'd say this is his best performance since Collateral. Emily Blunt is fantastically badass as the poster girl of the war, Rita Vrataski. This is her first real action film and she knocks it out of the park. Cruise and Blunt also have great chemistry together. Bill Paxton and Brandon Gleeson give great supporting performances and most of the supporting soldiers have distinct personalities even with their limited screen times.

Edge of Tomorrow's world building is slick and credible. The CGI and the special effects are seamless and bring the great set pieces and the relentless aliens to life. The action is really exhilarating (the cool exoskeleton suits definitely help here) and the script is very witty and inventive as it needs to be when you're dealing with time travel (or time resets if you will). Despite its action thrills Edge of Tomorrow finds plenty of room for character development both for Cruise and Blunt. The script also manages to pull off some quite funny scenes (especially in the training segment). I also have to mention James Herbert's snappy editing because it's that good. The the situations could get old really fast if it wasn't for the fast-paced editing that concisely and freshly shows the differences in each repetition Cruise goes through. The pacing is absolutely relentless and there isn't a boring moment in the film.

The tone of the film is pretty much perfect for a summer blockbuster. It's not overly morose or gloomy despite the backdrop of an alien invasion. Instead it opts for wit, fun and action thrills. I was really gripped from start to finish and I had this big grin on my face when I left the theater. I really liked the other recent blockbusters in Godzilla and X-Men: Days of Future Past but Edge of Tomorrow surpasses them both. If only every summer blockbuster was such good fun.

The neat opening credits set the tone for the movie really well combining old military footage and redacted documents for great effect. This movie's approach is more serious than Pacific Rim's for example but not too much so. Visually the movie is absolutely tremendous. The beautiful cinematography conjures up some jaw dropping scenes and the CGI monsters and the destruction they cause are quite awe-inspiring. The way they dealt with the fighting between the monsters and the soldiers also made sense and really highlighted the enormity of these creatures. I'm glad they set a good part of the monster action at night so the monsters aren't always blasted front and center on the screen so we can use our imaginations to fill in the gaps. When the monsters are truly revealed, it's hard not to get chills at that point. I thought there was just the right amount of Godzilla in the film but for those who expect this to be another Pacific Rim there might be too little of the big guy.

I perhaps wanted more heart from Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Ford Brody who was a bit generic as the movie's protagonist (though I think that's due to the script because Johnson put in a great performance in Kick-Ass). Bryan Cranston delivered the best performance in this film with great emotion as the nuclear engineer and Ford's dad Joe Brody. They also play well off each other. Elizabeth Olsen plays Ford's wife who is also a nurse but we don't really see much of her in that role despite all of the destruction around them. I have no doubt some of her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor but I guess something has to give when you try to get this many characters in and keep the movie at two hours. I also wanted to see more Ken Watanabe, I thought his character was a tad under used. Then again this movie is more about how humanity overall would deal with a situation like this so it's understandable that all of the characters don't quite have the depth we might hope.

Despite some of the underdeveloped characters, I did get really immersed in the movie and had chills in many places. The great sound design and rousing score together with the truly awesome visuals definitely helped there. I was gripped by the movie throughout and the buildup to the showdown in the end was expertly crafted by director Gareth Edwards. If you're looking to have a good time at the movies, Godzilla definitely fits the bill.

Seriously, why is almost every scene in this movie using slow motion? This one visual trick screwed up the film's pacing and tension so badly that whatever else might've been there couldn't have saved it. Slow motion is usually used to amplify powerful scenes, not to blanket the whole movie with it. It can obviously enhance a scene in a movie if used sparingly but the filmmakers really went comically overboard with its use in this one. The movie's laughably propagandistic sentimentality does it no favors either though I guess Bondarchuck's pal Putin might appreciate it (Bondarchuck has publicly supported Putin's moves in Crimea and otherwise).

The script and the dialogue were absolutely terrible and cringe-worthy. Who actually speaks in those propagandistic terms? They also set up the characters so badly, I could scarcely remember anyone's name and didn't care about any of them. They're ridiculous caricatures with no humanity behind them and their actions are illogical and baffling most of the time. The characterizations are so minimal you'd struggle to see them with a microscope. The setup in the beginning and the narration overall didn't work either, I mean was that Russian aid worker really telling the story of the bloodiest battle in human history to a group of scared German girls trapped under ruins? Way to depress them even further.

The movie wasn't really about Stalingrad either but about this hastily put together group of soldiers defending some random building in Stalingrad. You could've transplanted them to any other random battle and nothing would've changed. There's the Barmaley statue of the dancing children and boats crossing the Volga to remind you it's actually Stalingrad but that's about it. If they chose this as the film's context then the movie should've been about resilience and brotherhood but none of that was to be found. Instead the film's focus was on the explosions and slow-motion combat. Michael Bay would surely be proud. I have to say I did get a few laughs from the movie though. When the few defenders of the building suddenly decide to storm out of their defensive positions à la 300 and when a gun crew manages to bank a shell off the armor of a broken T-34 to a German position around the corner, I just couldn't contain myself. I don't think the filmmakers intended those scenes to be funny though so make of that what you will.

All right, so a bit of background first. I'm not a hardcore Batman fan or anything, meaning that I haven't read the comics and so I don't know everything about the universe and how well this movie adheres to its source material. I've seen Under the Red Hood, Mask of Phantasm, Year One, Dark Knight Returns and obviously Nolan's new trilogy and I enjoyed The Arkham Asylum and Arkham City games immensely. I thought all of those movies were great - Dark, gritty, intense and serious. Not so with this film.

First of all, the voice acting is terrible overall and the cringe worthy dialogue didn't help either. It tries to be humorous while failing at it badly. From the voice actors I'd highlight Thomas Gibson as Deathstroke, he didn't portray any emotion or intensity at all. None of the other voice actors didn't even rise to average. That's really a show stopper when it comes to animated films because so much of the emotion is conveyed through voice. I'm not sure how they recorded the lines but it felt like there was little to no interaction between the actors, it just sounded like they were delivering their lines independently.

I'm not really sold on the animation and graphical style either, Bruce Wayne especially looked really wrong to my eyes at least. Talia al Ghul had her boobs on display quite...prominently. A big problem with this movie was with the physics and how they tried to bring completely different elements together here. The kid Damian is supposedly fighting almost equally with Nightwing and he's also kicking a 200 kg muscle monster through windows and parries his attacks with ease. Then he just goes ahead and casually goes for a 50 mile swim, just like that. I mean, come on. That's completely over the top ridiculous. There's always some suspension of disbelief you have to give these movies but this was just too far. There could be a way to have Damian fight these different larger and stronger guys with speed and stealth while making it at least plausible but they didn't go for that approach.

Then there's an arrow minigun and some catapults dropping helicopters like they're flies and Ra's al Ghul using a katana like a lightsaber to deflect assault rifle bullets from soldiers who are surrounding him. It all seemed so preposterous and set this nonsensical tone for the entire movie. You don't feel any tension or suspense when they try to bring up anything serious. The tone is all over the place. Damian hacking into NORAD at age six? Daffy Duck on TV? People being impaled to a wall from their hands? My brain can't handle this, this movie just differed so radically from all of the Batman related stuff I'd seen before. No surprise that this is the director's first crack at the Batman franchise. I just didn't find anything interesting or evocative in this film.

The movie was extremely chaotic and hard to get a handle on because it keeps jumping from one plot thread to another. There were no characters which you could get invested in. It was also hard to get a read on who was who and was their relation to one another. After a while the whole movie just started to feel boring and exhausting because I didn't have a stake at anything.

They really should've focused this movie a lot more on one of the characters through whose eyes we'd see the story unfold. In the end they suddenly shove a bunch of facts about the Camorra crime organization which took me aback. Was this movie really about that stuff? If the director wanted to highlight the chaos, pervasiveness and huge growth of the Camorra, then he should've made a documentary.

There were a few effective scenes portraying the brutality and ruthlessness of the Camorra. Those really added to the darkly depressing and nihilistic tone of the film. There were also a lot of scenes about the minutiae of the mob business like people counting money and negotiating between themselves and so on. Why would I be interested in watching characters I don't recognize and care about doing these banal things? How this movie is hailed as a masterpiece by the critics is beyond me.

The cast of Blood Ties is impressive enough. Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, James Caan, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana and Marion Cotillard is an impressive collection of talent but I'm not sure if any of them is terribly convincing in their roles. Crudup and Owen didn't really have the kind of chemistry on the screen you'd expect from brothers. There's really no bad acting here but nothing great or memorable either, just average. It was kind of funny seeing Jamie Hector (Marlo from the Wire) as a cop, a bit of a miscast because it was too distracting.

The plot didn't provide any surprises and it was very generic. The central idea is as old as it gets: Two brothers, one a criminal and the other a cop. We've seen this before, haven't we? I was just about interested for the first hour but I became increasingly bored when it hit me how dry and tedious the whole thing started to look. There's nothing new, edgy or clever about this script really and it lacks energy and flow. The running time was a bit too long for this kind of film and the pacing suffers as a result. It wants to be an epic crime drama but ultimately fails at this.

Cinematography felt "normal", whatever that means. I guess it achieved that 70's grainy feel successfully. The few action scenes were quite well done and they had some zest. Too bad you I really didn't care about the characters because the whole thing just felt so bland overall. I think the film makers didn't want to take any risks with the movie because everything was just so average down the line.

I decided to watch this because film critic Mark Kermode thought it was great and he almost felt compelled to leave the screening because the film was really getting to him. Kermode is a huge horror fan so that's really saying something and I had really high expectations for this movie. Luckily, I wasn't disappointed.

I really don't have anything bad to say about this movie. The actors were great, they all felt very natural. Despite of its found footage style it doesn't forget plot and character development. They took their time in setting up the characters and didn't throw a lot of scary stuff at you in the beginning which made it all the more compelling when bad stuff starts happening. At no point was I baffled at the characters or wondered why the hell they were acting as they were. The character dynamic between Gray and Deacon is especially interesting and entertaining.

On the technical side the sound design was especially brilliant. If you have a good pair of headphones, all the better. I had some proper spine-tingling moments with this one watching it in a dark room with my headphones on. The movie really has that feeling of everything getting worse and more horrific till the end. The tension and suspense were absolutely terrific and built up perfectly culminating in a brilliantly frightening ending.

The movie didn't feel gimmicky at all which is always a risk with these found footage movies. I'm not sure if it's groundbreakingly original and all that but it was very effectively made. This is the best found footage horror movie I've seen besides the Blair Witch Project, you should definitely give it a chance.

I'm a huge fan of Mads Mikkelsen (The Hunt, A Royal Affair and Hannibal especially) which is why I wanted to see this movie. Mikkelsen has a good performance in this though I think his character was written to be a bit too understated and calm for him to truly shine here. I didn't quite feel his character here. I haven't read the novel but when you adapt books into movies, you're allowed to make changes in order to make it work as a movie. The baron didn't really have a presence also which isn't a good thing when he's supposed to be the movie's antagonist.

This movie is sort of a mixed bag. The scenery and the sets were quite breathtaking. Cinematography was stunning at times but it also often went too artsy which made it hard to see what was going on and in the end made the scenes ineffective. The music was decently atmospheric but nothing memorable or mind-blowing.

A lot of important stuff seemed to just happen off screen. How did Kohlhaas gather his army? Was he a charismatic and popular speaker who convinced people to join his cause? Had his troops themselves suffered injustices? Who was that woman in the abbey and why was she protecting the baron? Why did Kohlhaas' troops go there, shoot some flaming arrows and leave immediately after? What were they trying to accomplish there? Why was the Governor protecting that slimebag baron when he was shown to be a friend of Kohlhaas' in the beginning? The motivation of many of the characters remained in the dark. It's hard to get emotionally involved in scenes where you're completely baffled at what's going on because the movie just jumps from place to place without any explanation.

All in all, I found the editing to be quite perplexing which makes the pacing of the movie feel rather slow. There's no real force or energy running through the movie and eventually it just sort of fizzles out. In the end, there's just too many things that didn't work for me and the movie simply wasn't exciting or engaging to watch. Mads Mikkelsen makes watching this movie bearable but even he can't save this one.

The film uses few really long takes and this works really well in some instances to create tension. Some scenes in In the Fog are really impressive and the first long tracking shot of the hanging of the three railroad workers really captures your attention. The Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days used long takes like this to great effect but this movie doesn't quite reach the effectiveness of that movie overall despite some striking scenes. It isn't surprising that these movies reminded me of each other because they both had the same cinematographer, Oleg Mutu. That movie did a better job in creating that crushing atmosphere and it had better and more expressive actors. 4 Months really glued me to the screen as every single scene provided more information or improved the atmosphere and so on. Here many scenes seem either completely pointless or they're simply too long. For example, at one point a man comes out of a forest and starts walking towards a house. Great, I got it. Instead the movie decides that this scene should go on for a complete minute with the camera staying put following the guy slowly walking across a field. What did those tens of extra seconds really provide? Nothing other than boredom.

I thought the acting was a bit too understated to really take full advantage of the long takes. You would think a bleak situation like this would bring out some passion or emotion from someone for a moment at least. It's hard to say if the actors delivered the lines really well or not because I don't speak Russian. I'm sure native speakers can really pick up on tones and other smaller things and get more out of the movie. It was also unclear at times who was speaking in some scenes because everyone was talking in that same monotone voice. I had a bit of a problem with the pacing because the movie jumps many months very suddenly from fall to winter with flashbacks and so on, it took a while for me to figure that out.

The movie did highlight many interesting things about the randomness of war and the moral complexities of occupation. There should've been more discussions in the film though, I'm sure it couldn't have been that hard to come up with some topics relating to the dire situations of the main characters for them to talk about. I also appreciated the efforts the movie made towards being authentic, I really believed it was the 1940s again. The actors wear cloth wraps instead of socks for example so there's really nothing anachronistic there to take you out of the movie. It's a decent movie all in all but not a masterpiece or anything.

I saw the movie in 2D because I hated the 3D HFR in the first Hobbit movie. I thought the HFR just made the movie sets look like sets instead of being part of the movie universe. I much preferred the 2D experience here and it was easier for me to try to immerse myself in the movie. Regrettably there were too many things that were wrong with the movie for me to achieve that.

This movie had a budget of something like 200 million dollars, over double that of any of the individual movies of the original trilogy. Where did all that money go? To that mostly horrid CGI? There was just bloody too much of it like in the first movie. Everything looks so damn fake with the CGI slammed front and center with no artistic attempt to hide its shortcomings. For example, when Legolas starts chasing Bolg out of Laketown, even his horse is made with CGI. Why? Couldn't you afford to rent one horse? The orcs were mostly made with CGI and they weren't menacing in the slightest. The few scenes with actual actors with makeup playing the orcs were far superior. Erebor looked quite good in general with its mountains of coins and treasures but the melted gold looked unbelievably bad. Many of the actual sets in the movie were very well done and I'm really puzzled why they didn't use them more. The CGI in LOTR looked far more convincing and epic, the large establishing shots looked like grand paintings come alive. What happened here? I don't get it. It felt like I was watching a video game and I don't want to feel that way when I'm watching a movie. Granted, the original trilogy did have a bit of silly looking CGI here and there but at least it was constantly grounded by real sets.

There was also some really weird editing here too. The movie is already way too long and they still include absolutely pointless scenes. For example, when Gandalf is climbing the stairs by the mountain and the ledge gives up, the movie suddenly cuts to a sweeping shot of the mountain side. Why not just stay with Gandalf, it would provide more intensity. There's many examples like this. In Mirkwood when Bilbo is snapping at the spider web they shouldn't zoom deep into the web with the camera. Stuff like this tells nothing and adds nothing to the film. This also takes time away from the character development. When one of the dwarfs oversleeps and misses the boat to Erebor, I couldn't even remember who he was and why I should care that he was stranded in Laketown. Also, the most puzzling and distracting choice in the movie was using that weird POV camera footage in the barrel scenes, it looked so utterly different that it took me out of the movie completely.

The action could've been cut down significantly too. There was no real context or meaning for most of it anyway. Also, after Legolas has killed his umpteenth orc in yet another physics-breaking and miraculous way, you simply lose interest. He can apparently do anything. My feeling is that in the original trilogy the "laws of physics" so to say were merely bent somewhat, here they're completely shattered. All of this may sound nitpicky but I'm essentially doing this because the movie didn't get me emotionally invested in it in a positive way at all.

The movie wasn't particularly funny either despite its lighthearted source material, I laughed much more heartily in many parts of the original trilogy. The Gimli joke was quite funny though. There was also absolutely no memorable music in this movie and none of it moved me like much of the music did in the original trilogy. I didn't get shivers at any point of the movie.

It wasn't all bad or mediocre though. Smaug was magnificent and Benedict Cumberbatch did a great job voice acting the dragon, definitely something to witness in a theater. Smaug's discussions with Bilbo were also great. Gandalf's venture into Dol Guldur was also interesting though that is mainly because Ian McKellen is such a fine actor that he can catch your attention with ease. The cameos by Peter Jackson in the beginning eating the carrot and by Stephen Colbert as the Laketown spy were fun even though I think they might've been too distracting had I loved the movie. The pacing in the movie is a bit of a mixed bag. The first movie had bad pacing because it was overly long without anything really happening. Desolation of Smaug swings the pendulum to the other end with endless action sequences pasted after another. Sure it's more exciting to watch but it was dearly missing some slower sequences to digest everything.

I'm a massive fan of the original trilogy but the first two Hobbit movies simply haven't captured the epicness and magic of those movies at all. And if the Hobbit wasn't intended to feel epic, then why make it into three movies? There's also something else I don't get. The original movie trilogy adaptation established what the LOTR universe looked and felt like. Is the Hobbit trilogy still supposed to happen in that same universe? I didn't ever feel like anyone was in any serious danger because they survive crazier and crazier encounters after the next and because of that there's no tension. This wasn't the case with the originals. Huge spiders were very dangerous in LOTR, here Bilbo is just killing them off left and right. I just wish they'd taken much more liberties with the material and really placed this story into the grittier universe that was established by the original trilogy. Or maybe they should've done something completely different instead of trying to imitate the originals and coming short of them. Anything but this.

I was really excited to see this movie because I thought it had a great premise. Parents trying to deal with a sociopathic child and his actions is a very topical subject and deserving of attention. But the movie shies away from showing the violence the kid is actually causing and really examining his reasons for it. He just seemed like a caricature. Why is he like this? Just a bad seed? The movie never really cares to examine him deeply at all.

Lynne Ramsay should've spent more time working on the story instead of trying to make the film look all artsy with fancy shots and editing tricks. The cinematography was simply bad. Way too many long and boring shots just focused on Tilda Swinton's (Eva) blank face. We can see the pores and everything! Seems like half the movie is like this and it drags like hell. The plot is constantly bouncing from one timeline to another with little connectivity to anything and this made the movie feel really fragmented. With a movie this boring, it just gets confusing and frustrating very fast when you're struggling to pay attention to it.

The plot could be interesting. Parents trying to deal with a sociopathic child is a fascinating premise but this just wasn't engaging at all. The parents behavior is inexplicable. Not once do they go to a doctor, a psychiatrist or a therapist about their son's issues. Well except when they have to set a broken bone but you get where I'm going with this. So in essence, they never really...talk about Kevin. And they really should. At one point, Eva realizes that Kevin dropped the family hamster in to the garbage disposal. You don't think this would be a time to seek some professional help? The movie is just full of moments like these where the characters act like complete and utter idiots. I just can't respect, care or empathize with pretty much anyone in this movie.

I didn't even care about the acting either. Eva just has the same monotonous expression on her face the entire movie. John C. Reilly's parts in this movie were so minor that it made me wonder why they even cast him in it? Why not just get someone else if you're not going to use him? Ezra Miller was decent as the sociopathic child, I just wish the characters would've been better written and that there would've been more focus on Kevin. All in all, the movie just left me completely unfulfilled. Beautiful Boy (2010) was a much better examination of the parents' of a school killer, see it instead.

I just can't fathom why this movie is getting such good reviews. Most likely the first and last Wes Anderson movie I'm seeing. There's nothing genuine or charming in this film. There's just this forced intentional quirkiness to this film that I can't stand. It just tries too hard to be quirky and cute and ends up feeling pretentious. The line between quirky and annoying can be very thin indeed and for me this movie crossed it by a mile.

The film is partly categorized as a comedy but I didn't even get a slight chuckle during the entire film. Was I supposed to? Everything's delivered deadpan and I didn't buy the dialogue between Sam and Suzy at all. Deadpan humor is good and all but you can't have everyone doing it for the whole movie. Also, I didn't like this whole idea of kids delivering adult dialogue and ended up disliking the protagonists a lot. They didn't feel like kids in the slightest so how is this whole first love between kids angle going to work here then? They're just flat and emotionally detached. All of the characters are essentially missing a human core.

I also didn't buy the love story between Sam and Suzy and that makes everything else pointless. I'm supposed to think they're in love but it didn't even seem like they liked each other. Didn't care for the rest of the characters either despite there being some serious talent behind them. If there had been at least one or two there who I liked somewhat I wouldn't give this one star. Visually it was kind of interesting but without a good story and characters, what does it matter?

A funeral is really the perfect setting for a British comedy. There's just something about the British and funerals contrasted with all the silliness that's going on that makes me laugh hysterically. The start of the film really sets the tone so well. You think it's going to be something serious but then the screw up by the funeral home's staff immediately changes the tone to a comedy and everything starts to carefully build up to a grand farce of mishaps, secrets and misunderstandings which eventually come together at the film's climax. Farce is definitely a better description for the movie than black comedy because you don't feel guilty when you're laughing at all the horrible things that are happening in the movie.

Yes there's crassness in the movie but it is also smart, subtle and it has a ton of heart. You need to have patience with this film in the start though because it carefully builds up the setting and tension and puts the needed pieces in place in the beginning for the later hilarious scenes to work as intended. When the comedy really starts going, boy is it worth the wait! The way the family tries to deal with the problems in secret while also trying to keep the funeral going is absolute comedy gold. The disruptions of calmness and decency the British appreciate are expertly crafted in this film.

The cast does a wonderful job. Andy Nyman does an especially awesome job as a hypochondriac stressing about his skin condition (he just can't catch a break!). Alan Tudyk absolutely steals the show, his reactions and behavior during the funeral are so comical (loved that guy on Tucker and Dale vs. Evil by the way) and he can do a surprisingly good British accent. Matthew Macfadyen was a great choice to play the straight-faced son who is in charge of the funeral arrangements. Peter Vaughan as Uncle Alfie was also entertaining as the slightly anachronistic swearing old uncle. There's really too many good performances here to count them, everyone simply acts fantastically. What was also great was that the many characters aren't put there just to do one thing but they're cleverly woven into many hilarious subplots.

The music is used sparingly but when it's used it definitely enhances the comedic moments well. Oh and that toilet scene, wow, I've probably never laughed that hard. Gross-out humor is used where it's appropriate and the situation and the characters are properly primed for to get those priceless reactions. Man, I wish I could watch this movie over and over again without knowing that I've watched it before. It's just such a perfectly crafted farce. Few comedies have ever made me and my friends laugh out loud for as long as this one. Definitely give this film a go.

I had seen people reference and quote this movie ad nauseum on different message boards and so on so I thought I should finally check out what all the fuzz was about. Naturally I was expecting to have a great time watching this movie. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong on that. This is almost without a doubt the worst movie I've ever seen, it has absolutely no redeeming features. It's hard to describe how much I hated this movie but I'll give it a go.

Napoleon is without a doubt the most boring, gross, annoying, idiotic and obnoxious character I've ever seen in a movie besides the rest of the characters in this film. Napoleon is someone even the most hardcorest of nerds would try to stay away from. Everyone makes fun of him and for good reason. His voice is like nails on a chalkboard and his brother's voice is maybe even worse if that's possible. The movie doesn't even try to show anything sympathetic or noble in his situation, we're just supposed to laugh at this moron because we're all better than him? It just seems mean. At no point do we get any deeper understanding of his motivations or personality. In fact, pretty much every character in this movie seems to be just so completely out of it that I wonder how they can even manage to survive day to day. It looks like they've all received a huge dose of heavy animal tranquilizers, that's how lethargic everyone looks!

There is absolutely nothing funny or clever in this movie and there doesn't seem to be any message in it either. It was just thoroughly depressing and draining. I watched this movie with the deepest of frowns on my face. At times I just watched away from the screen with the most puzzled look imaginable and actually said "What?" out loud. The plot is completely inane and it was utterly uninteresting. It's just one mind-numbingly pointless scene after another pointless scene.

Some people apparently love this movie and I don't understand why. I feel like the awfulness of this movie actually damaged my brain. Napoleon is so completely unlikable as a person, why anyone would find him interesting is a mystery to me. I simply can't grasp the appeal of this movie because it makes no sense. In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, "This is pretty much the worst video ever made". And I can know that.

This seriously might be the best cop film ever made. It was just so well put together that I almost forgot I was watching a movie. It had great pacing, really kept me interested throughout the movie. There was some insanely good chemistry between Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña who both pulled off their best performances to date. The banter between these two in the police car was absolutely hilarious, I could really watch an entire movie's worth of this stuff. The long form dialogue about their lives was really interesting and it felt amazingly natural. This is then contrasted with their jobs which puts them into really dangerous circumstances. Usually cop movies are about cops and criminals and how they're really just two sides of the same coin. In End of Watch the cops are really just the good guys and the tension is between their work and their private lives and whether they can keep them separate. I was really emotionally invested in these characters and the film does a terrific job in building up suspense.

I thought the filming style worked really well here. Hand-held and cell phone cameras are tied in to the story nicely. Some might complain about the bad guys carrying the cameras but aren't Mexican cartels kind of famous for the fact that they film their crimes? I don't know, it worked for me though. The action sequences were nail-bitingly great, you really feel like you're right in there. The action is really gritty and doesn't hold back.

So what we have here is a powerful and emotional cop movie with great directing, amazing performances and writing that was both funny and authentic. This is really a unique film that is definitely worth seeing.

I don't get the hate this movie is getting, I mean a 6.7? This movie was excellent. It had great pacing, not quite like Bourne Ultimatum but then again that film was going almost non-stop. For me the little over two hour running time went by in an instant. In Legacy there's more time for reflection and developing the characters. Director Tony Gilroy was also responsible for the screenplays of the original Bourne movies so he's been with the film series from the beginning. And it shows. The plot is very plausible, interesting and complicated in a good way. This is a more cerebral action movie than usual so you really have to pay attention as some of the dialogue is very technical. I loved it though. The movie takes place in parallel with Bourne Ultimatum which was a smart idea. I enjoyed the background story and conspiracy angle this movie had, it was very intriguing. It was also nice to see that there were some real limitations on the capabilities of the CIA search team, it made the movie feel very real and grounded.

Jeremy Renner is charming and menacing as the new Bourne lead Aaron Cross, I really bought him as a professional spy and assassin. Rachel Weisz's character Dr. Marta Shearing was very well done. She acted in a realistic and very human way, being scared and bold when it was necessary. Edward Norton does a solid job as colonel Eric Byer who is tasked with cleaning up the mess Bourne left behind him. Matt Damon is only seen in a photograph but the casting is very strong even without him.

There's fewer action scenes (which are very good yet again) and longer stretches of exposition and talking than in the original trilogy. I appreciated that there wasn't too much shaky cam which is common in these sort of fast paced action films. The visual style felt very clean and effective. I loved how ton of stuff was implied by little actions and mannerisms. For example, when Aaron Cross starts to count down from 100 he does it in Russian which implies that he was meant to be a spy in Russia (he speaks other languages too but that's what he went to as his first choice). There's really a huge amount of tension during the entire film. I especially loved the cabin scene in the beginning and the intense lab scene. The music or lack thereof was also instrumental in building the tension, great job there by James Newton Howard. The ending fitted well with the tone of the movie and hopefully they'll continue making this series.

All in all, this is an excellent espionage thriller with a great plot, smart action and strong performances. You should really give this movie a chance, especially if you're on a Bourne marathon like I was.

There was nothing engaging in this movie. Robert Downey Jr. was obviously the best thing about the first Iron Man but here he just doesn't seem to care. I wasn't emotionally invested in any of the characters and I didn't feel the romance between Tony and Pepper in the slightest either. Jon Favreau was his usual unfunny self. A bad kid actor can really be the death of a movie by himself and in this movie we have a very annoying one. Unfortunately there's a lot more that's wrong with the movie besides that kid.

Character motivations were the absolute caricatures of super hero movies. I mean, Tony Stark ignores Killian at a party and that is the reason that he became evil? Come on, are we supposed to believe this? Come up with something more interesting and unique, please. The dialogue between the characters was extremely poorly written, it wasn't funny and witty at all like in the first one. I laughed only once (the bit about one of the baddies throwing away his gun). Otherwise the jokes were simply cheap. The Mandarin plot twist was so bad. The film went way overboard with it, I just couldn't buy Ben Kingsley's acting in it. Also, why would you essentially sacrifice a villain of Mandarin's caliber for laughs? I was really annoyed about that, they could've made a great character out of him. Then the burning people? Luckily their clothes don't burn off though. The end fight was just so overdone, they went full Transformers on it. Usually there's only one or two Ironman suits in the fights so there's at least some tension. In the end fight there's dozens and dozens of them. Completely unexciting.

All in all, the plot was clichéd and dull and the writing horrible. Something just felt to be terribly off with this film. The movie relies on its CGI battles to deliver thrills to the audience in hopes that the audience forgets about the horrid plot and dialogue. But how could we be emotionally invested in these battles if we don't care about the characters? Don't waste your time on this.