Reviews

The main character Sugar is just too good. He's a private detective not above working for the Japanese mafia, but the only jobs he takes are finding lost persons. He's so good at what he does that he doesn't need to take any other kind of private detective work. And he has perfect integrity. He sees a homeless person on the street and goes out of his way to rehabilitate him and reunite him with his family. He won't have sex with a woman if she's drunk. He doesn't like carrying a gun. We're supposed to believe he's a saint. Sorry, not convincing but rather off-putting. I've only seen the first episode, but that's what it is so far.

This has to be one of the lamest Sci-Fi films ever made. The plot premise is completely ridiculous. Time travel has been invented, but the only ones who use it are gangsters, and the only thing they use it for is disappearing people; because disposing of a dead body is supposedly next to impossible in the future. Let's face it, the trope of the time traveler who has to kill himself is the biggest and worst cliche in the history of science fiction. I love time travel movies. A recent one that is pretty good is Predestination (2014). Don't waste your time with Looper. It's not enjoyable to watch, and the plot interest is zero.

When I first starting watching, and seeing how this very vulnerable teenage girl was being mistreated by the other students, I thought to myself, "this is a revenge flick," and I wasn't wrong. It had an interesting dynamic at first, in that the girl in the mirror was teaching her to stand up for herself. But when she took over, she ended up being a total psycho who kills rather indiscriminately, even one who is on her side. The people she kills die rather easily and unrealistically. I was also bothered at the beginning by the fact that this incredibly beautiful and rich girl was so unhappy and let herself be abused by those around her. That didn't seem realistic at all. I guess the plot premise is that she was traumatized somehow by the events surrounding her birth, as was her mother. The acting of everyone in the movie was completely convincing, it was just the script that was not always so.

The reviewers that think this film has any commentary on class are off the mark, no matter what the director may have been intending. It's just a sad and sobering portrait of a couple of psychopaths who are apparently high-functioning apart from their occasional murders. The postal clerk kicks and kills her own 4 year old child "by accident," although she says she can't really remember exactly what happened. The maid is also apparently guilty of a murder in her past. So predictably, they kill again for absolutely no reason except for their resentment at anyone who has more happiness than them. It's true that the killers and their victims are from different social classes, but that's not really relevant when the killers are psychopaths. It could have just as well been reversed. Psychopaths are never lacking in reasons for killing.

I read most of the other reviews here, and I have a different take on the film. Admittedly it was tedious to watch at first, but it works as a mystery. I read the plot summary which only says that the family is plotting something "sinister," but not what. So there's the mystery of what that is. There are hints that something is wrong, and what the ending will be is revealed about 3/4 of the way through. Most of the reviewers here see the film as critique of the protagonists and/or the society they live in. I didn't see it that way. They are not zombies with no purpose, soulless machines, as other reviewers say. Rather they are normal people living normal lives with normal purposes and dreams. They love each other! There's nothing really wrong with their lives or their world. But they make the decision to end it all, and they do it methodically and completely, taking their daughter with them when she agrees to it. What's puzzling is (1) that they feel the need to destroy everything in their home before they check out, (2) that they feel justified in letting their daughter die too, and (3) why they do it at all. For me the point is that they do decide, and while I don't condone their act, they are heroic in a very ironic sense. Camus would undoubted approve! I don't think it's realistic, however. Because they aren't miserable in their lives, they have each other, and they love each other. Such a family doesn't choose to commit suicide.

The blueprint, staged setting is a defamiliariizing effect that tells us that this film has a larger meaning. It's not meant to be completely realistic, although the psychology of all the characters is wholly realistic and convincing. The name of the protagonist, Grace, has obvious allegorical resonances.

First of all, this is study of how a community or group of people can victimize a vulnerable person. What's remarkable is that the film shows how this process, step by step, appears perfectly rational and reasonable to the community. By the end of film, Grace is dragging around a large heavy iron wheel, wearing an iron neck collar with a ringing bell, performing punishing physical labor every day and hour, and suffering repeated rapes on a daily and nightly basis. Even though she has done absolutely nothing to deserve any of this, everyone in Dogville is convinced that she is getting exactly the treatment she deserves, and that there is nothing unusual or remarkable about her treatment. They are perfectly convinced that she deserves her usage and that they are acting in good conscience. In fact, they perceive themselves as the victims and her as the persecutor. It's a psychological study of the process of victimization. For me, this is a most interesting and valuable lesson of the film.

Second, the film poses the question of personal responsibility. Is a person who does something terrible a victim of circumstance, say a bad childhood or other trauma? Or, on the contrary, do those who victimize another person, even with the conviction that their actions are justified, deserve a similar punishment? Grace starts out the film firmly believing that people are not fully responsible for their actions, and that they must be forgiven. But her father, a gangster, points out that this is arrogant, since it places her in a position of hypocritical judgment. She would not tolerate such behavior from herself, so why should she tolerate it from others? Grace abruptly changes her mind at the end and hands out rather horrific punishment to the town, except the dog, which is only following its nature.

Such is the allegorical meaning. But there are several problems with any straightforward interpretation. First of all, her father is a gangster who makes his living from crime and murder, yet somehow he is supposed to be the "good guy" of the film. We're supposed to believe that Grace would put up with her treatment even though she could leave at any time. And we're supposed to believe that the whole town with no exception would participate in her victimization. Tom, Grace's sponsor, is reluctant at first, but eventually he becomes her worst persecutor, while claiming innocence. There are many other complicated factors. I'm guessing that the director wanted to confuse any simple and straightforward meaning by introducing all this complications, because it's supposed to a modern, sophisticated work of art, but they seem gratuitous to me.

I thought "Crazy Diamond" was a compelling show, right up there with the best of the other "Electric Dreams." I only had one problem, which is how Jill dumps Ed at the end. Ed's boss is holding a gun to Jill's head, threatening to shoot Jill, unless Ed uses the QC gun/vacuum to vacuum out Jill"s consciousness. Meanwhile, Jill is begging Ed not to do it; but if Ed had point-blank refused, then Jill would be dead. By going along with his boss, Ed arguably saves Jill's life, since he gives her time to get a gun and kill the boss. Nevertheless, she judges him harshly and elopes with his wife, which seemed like a sop to the LGBT movement. The fact that Jill and Ed's wife take over what was Ed's dream seems deeply unfair. Ed's wife, after all, was considering turning in her husband to the authorities, and she considered Ed's dream to be a farce. So it doesn't make any sense that she gets rewarded at the end. I think if Ed had been allowed to sail off by himself at the end, while Jill and Sally went to Vegas or somewhere, would have been a much more satisfactory ending. But except for the ending, it was an entertaining story. The acting by Ed's character and especially Jill's was superb.

The basic idea here is pretty simple: In some vague future, humans create a robot which will kill all the people. A little more context about who created the robots and for what purpose might have added some interest. But really it's a just a chase story with nothing surprising. I don't think the teddy bears at the end were really any kind of big surprise. Their discussion earlier made it clear that they weren't going after anything essential. I thought it might be morphine. It was a teddy bear. So what? My only question is why there's only one robot dog for most of the movie, and then at the end suddenly they're everywhere.