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Reviews
Bob's Burgers (2011)
Bob's Boring Burgers
Admittedly a fairly lame effort with a few funny moments.
Sadly lacking in the animation quality department and most of the voice actors sound like they would rather be doing anything other than this show.
H. Jon Benjamin puts in a reasonable effort but then that is what he does... Although basically he seems to be simply doing Archer, again, without the decent writing, animation and supporting voice actors. It appears as though the actors were told to sound as mono-tone as possible, even when their characters were expressing extreme emotions...
Sorta boring, sorta annoying, sorta not worth watching.
6/10 - and that's me being generous... I doubt this will last beyond the first few episodes
The Goode Family (2009)
The Goode family, more like the annoying family
Having just watched the first three episodes of Mike Judge's new show "The Goode Family", I must admit I was disappointed.
Judge has been at the helm of some of TVs funniest animated shows - unfortunately this just doesn't seem to be one of them.
The premise could be amusing - a family of over the top environmentalists who do battle daily with the world around them, trying to make it a better place. Sadly, all Judge did was manage to get an amazingly accurate rendition of these types on the screen. Sadly because, really, when was the last time a rabid Eco-vegan made you laugh?
Yes, the show has its amusing moments, but they are few and far between, and for the most part don't involve any of the main characters. Interestingly the Goode family seem to be drawn with a lack of detail when compared the rendering of the rest of the characters... strange. The single funniest thing in the entire show is the family dog Che, who is forced to eat vegan dog food. Che gets his fill of meat by hunting down squirrels, birds or cats in the neighborhood while the Goode family is blissfully ignorant of the killer dog they have inadvertently created.
One of the odd errors in the show is the mispronunciation of the character name Ubuntu... Judge insists on pronouncing the word "You-buntoo", and not the correct "Oo-buntoo". A minor mistake to be sure, but a painfully obvious one to anyone using the Ubuntu operating system, or having bothered to, you know... look it up...
Basically anyone who finds "real world" Eco-crusaders and militant vegans to be tons of fun will probably find the show amusing - anyone else, not so much.
Shutter (2008)
Interesting if not very realistic...
An interesting five minute short that takes a look at a young photojournalist who is obsessed with getting back to Iraq to cover the war the moment he returns home.
Some of the problems of short films are very apparent in this one - shallow characters with no real depth who seem to be archetypes, but not really great ones, being the biggest problem.
The acting is acceptable, given the stilted and unrealistic conversations that take place. Visually the piece is well filmed and tends toward a minimalist style, especially in its scenes that are supposed to take place in the middle east.
As a photojournalist myself, was puzzled at the fact a hot-shot young photographer would head into Iraq with an old manual film camera instead of a new digital... essentially useless in today's world of digital transmission and instant deadlines.
As a fan of soundtrack music, I do have to comment on the score to this short - it was ethnically inspired and obviously designed to put the viewer in a "middle east" frame of mind, which it did quite effectively. The downside to it was the entire score seemed to be the same thing over and over, and although it did set the tone, the vocals are quite simply incredibly annoying, comparable almost to Inuit throat chanting at times... an interesting auditory journey for a short while, but far too annoying to be used exclusively or extensively as it was here.
The film claims to be an exploration of the photographers addictive obsession with the war in Iraq which leads him on a journey of choices. That isn't what one sees in the short - photojournalist Alan Blaine just falls down the same old paths he seems to have fallen down many times before, never considers the cost of his actions and never seems to try to make a decision - he seems to be an automaton who will only be happy back in Iraq, leaving the viewer to question why he would even bother returning home to the US anyway? Given the statistics presented at the beginning of the film, the ending will come as no surprise to anyone.
I will recommend this film to my friends - it is a good effort at tackling a complex plot, albeit in too short a time. Perhaps even two minutes more would have made the story much deeper and the characters much more multi-dimensional if the filmmakers used that time to explain Blaine's obsession, and how he gets into the film's final predicament.
The Mindscape of Alan Moore (2003)
A look inside the addled mind of Alan Moore
Basically all this film manages to do is prove how superior Alan Moore feels to everyone. Early in the movie he comments about his already huge ego as a 17 year old, and it seems that balloon has continued to become over-inflated throughout the intervening years.
Moore does go into some detail about his childhood and how horribly bleak the world around him was - how he was saved by comic books and set about to write comics of his own. Interesting, but really of no value to anyone wanting to know 'how he did it'.
The entire second half of the movie is Moore waxing poetic about magic, how he is a magician, how science knows and can prove nothing, and how much better his own ways are. He even goes so far as to quote a few others who he believes are "in the know" and then either overtly takes credit for their ideas or usurps them into a twisted notion he claims is his answer to life the universe and so on.
Essentially, Moore seems to be trying to set himself up as a latter-day Alistair Crowley, rather unsuccessfully. As he goes on about his theories of meta-physics, pseudo-science, amateur psychology and spiritualism, it becomes quickly apparent that Moore not only wants, but craves attention - strange for a man who claims early in the film to have no use for his own celebrity.
When I watched this film I thought I would get a look at how Moore created such amazing tales as V for Vendetta, From Hell, The Watchmen and others - instead, it just left me wondering how the poor fellow could have become so deluded about the world and his place in it.
It will not surprise me to hear Moore has attempted to start his own cult, I just seriously doubt many people will be lining up to hear his brand of new-age meta-physical strangeness.
He should have just stuck to comics...