The premise of this show had a lot of promise. Unfortunately it is really disappointing. Every male character is sabotaged or killed until it becomes an oestrogen battle in a tangle of soap opera plot lines like Desperate Housewives, but without the witty sarcasm. The pace is tortuously slow. Sadly some good actors and great production values were wasted on this. I have watched until S2 Ep8 hoping for it to get better but I doubt that it will.
Reviews
4 Reviews
Ellen DeGeneres: Relatable
(2018 TV Special)
Ellen's Challenge - Prove It
24 December 2018
Ellen says she was inspired to write this stand-up routine by a friend who asked if could still be relatable to a stand-up audience.
Well Ellen decided she could, and showed her friend the door.
This felt forced and only mildly funny. The audience laughed a lot more than I did but they looked like they know her from her talk show and I don't watch daytime TV. Like other viewers I felt it was uncomfortable to watch and not in a good way where I learned something new about the world, had my preconceptions challenged and my expectations raised. This felt like Kanye West trying to explain away his admiration for Donald Trump. Yep, that relatable.
With everything that's going on in America now since the 2016 election Ellen tried to prove that she's one of the people by joking about ethnic domestic staff that she and Portia supposedly don't have? What about the undocumented maid working at Mar A Lago? Not one joke about Trump? A mere side reference to how she feels when reading a newspaper these days made it seem like she hasn't read one of those for about 3 years.
I was looking forward to seeing a comedian not a celebrity but she could have condensed this to a 15 minute celebrity guest spot on somebody else's Tonight Show.
Well Ellen decided she could, and showed her friend the door.
This felt forced and only mildly funny. The audience laughed a lot more than I did but they looked like they know her from her talk show and I don't watch daytime TV. Like other viewers I felt it was uncomfortable to watch and not in a good way where I learned something new about the world, had my preconceptions challenged and my expectations raised. This felt like Kanye West trying to explain away his admiration for Donald Trump. Yep, that relatable.
With everything that's going on in America now since the 2016 election Ellen tried to prove that she's one of the people by joking about ethnic domestic staff that she and Portia supposedly don't have? What about the undocumented maid working at Mar A Lago? Not one joke about Trump? A mere side reference to how she feels when reading a newspaper these days made it seem like she hasn't read one of those for about 3 years.
I was looking forward to seeing a comedian not a celebrity but she could have condensed this to a 15 minute celebrity guest spot on somebody else's Tonight Show.
To the Wonder
(2012)
Torture
25 January 2018
Warning: Spoilers
This is the worst movie I have ever seen. It's not a movie it's a screensaver. There is no dialogue except whispered incomplete voiceovers. There is no plot and no character development. There is nice moody classical music and nice moody visuals of people walking and twirling around in fields, supermarkets, streets, houses and churches, interrupted with domestic violence. It's two hours long and nothing happens.
Do not buy or rent this movie. You will have more fun choosing some of your favourite music and watching the gorgeous screensavers on your AppleTV or similar streaming device. This movie is such torture it's probably shown 24 hours a day in Guantanamo Bay prison.
Tree of frickin' Life was better than this! At least it had a story, characters, conflict, redemption, a dramatic arc blah, blah, besides the pretty meditative images of sunlight through trees and inscrutable close-ups.
Ben Affleck is bored, frustrated and angry but maintains an expressionless impassivity throughout. It doesn't matter because we mostly see the back of his head or parts of his work wear anyway. He doesn't have any dialogue at all.
Olga Kurylenko, who has the classic face of a European beauty, plays an undiagnosed, untreated bi-polar single mother who falls in love with Affleck in France, (the title has something to do with the French tourist attraction Mont St Michel) and thinks she needs to live with him in America. She spends most of the time regretting this decision and by turns, taunting and seducing her boyfriend to get some kind of reaction out of him. They grow to hate each other but not as much as the audience hates both of them.
Olga's visa runs out so she takes her daughter back to Paris, where she's lonely because her (obviously sensible) daughter leaves to live with her father and is much happier with him. Olga is unemployed and moping, dreaming of the USA again. She returns to Ben and managers to convince Ben to marry her for a green card. (Bad idea, because meanwhile, Ben has the hots for a normal mid-western American girl who won't do it with him). So he and Olga have a miserable little marriage in a miserable little town and the autumn sunsets are pretty.
The only two interesting people are the priest having a crisis of faith, played by Javier Bardem and the sweet object of Ben's lust played by Rachel McAdams who is a virginal horse whisperer or something to do with horses. Neither of these two characters are given a story line, much less a narrative arc, although if Ben and Olga somehow died in a car accident and the other two took over the movie it would have been much better... Horse Whisperer goes to Father Javier for confession - Father J falls for the pretty blond and wants to leave The Church - the steadfast faith and pure, simple life lead by the Horse Whisperer instead reignite Father's faith in God and his plan, - the Horse Whisperer joins Father J in his good work counselling and consoling the poor and the incarcerated, and they start a business training ex-cons to be ranch-hands or something... sorry I was daydreaming. This movie will do that to you.
Anyway, back with poor Ben and crazy Olga, at one point Olga goes onto a rooftop to look at the sky, (AGAIN) and I couldn't help yelling JUMP! at the screen. This Malick monstrosity is designed to play on a screen in an art gallery on an endless loop for passers-by to gawk at as if it's a work of art. Pretentious European crap. Avoid at all costs.
For the people who gave this film 5 or 6 because the scenery is pretty - well the cinematography isn't really that good and it's mostly shot in low light in some cold, boring part of the mid-west which most people would just fly over anyway. The story of the tragic lives of the poor locals (visited by the priest) could have made a much more engrossing film.
For the people giving this film a 9 or a 10, you're just doing that to inflate your sense of cultural superiority. These days you don't have to go to film festivals to see arthouse films, they're all over the streaming services, so everyone's seen them. It's just that this one is a complete failure.
Do not buy or rent this movie. You will have more fun choosing some of your favourite music and watching the gorgeous screensavers on your AppleTV or similar streaming device. This movie is such torture it's probably shown 24 hours a day in Guantanamo Bay prison.
Tree of frickin' Life was better than this! At least it had a story, characters, conflict, redemption, a dramatic arc blah, blah, besides the pretty meditative images of sunlight through trees and inscrutable close-ups.
Ben Affleck is bored, frustrated and angry but maintains an expressionless impassivity throughout. It doesn't matter because we mostly see the back of his head or parts of his work wear anyway. He doesn't have any dialogue at all.
Olga Kurylenko, who has the classic face of a European beauty, plays an undiagnosed, untreated bi-polar single mother who falls in love with Affleck in France, (the title has something to do with the French tourist attraction Mont St Michel) and thinks she needs to live with him in America. She spends most of the time regretting this decision and by turns, taunting and seducing her boyfriend to get some kind of reaction out of him. They grow to hate each other but not as much as the audience hates both of them.
Olga's visa runs out so she takes her daughter back to Paris, where she's lonely because her (obviously sensible) daughter leaves to live with her father and is much happier with him. Olga is unemployed and moping, dreaming of the USA again. She returns to Ben and managers to convince Ben to marry her for a green card. (Bad idea, because meanwhile, Ben has the hots for a normal mid-western American girl who won't do it with him). So he and Olga have a miserable little marriage in a miserable little town and the autumn sunsets are pretty.
The only two interesting people are the priest having a crisis of faith, played by Javier Bardem and the sweet object of Ben's lust played by Rachel McAdams who is a virginal horse whisperer or something to do with horses. Neither of these two characters are given a story line, much less a narrative arc, although if Ben and Olga somehow died in a car accident and the other two took over the movie it would have been much better... Horse Whisperer goes to Father Javier for confession - Father J falls for the pretty blond and wants to leave The Church - the steadfast faith and pure, simple life lead by the Horse Whisperer instead reignite Father's faith in God and his plan, - the Horse Whisperer joins Father J in his good work counselling and consoling the poor and the incarcerated, and they start a business training ex-cons to be ranch-hands or something... sorry I was daydreaming. This movie will do that to you.
Anyway, back with poor Ben and crazy Olga, at one point Olga goes onto a rooftop to look at the sky, (AGAIN) and I couldn't help yelling JUMP! at the screen. This Malick monstrosity is designed to play on a screen in an art gallery on an endless loop for passers-by to gawk at as if it's a work of art. Pretentious European crap. Avoid at all costs.
For the people who gave this film 5 or 6 because the scenery is pretty - well the cinematography isn't really that good and it's mostly shot in low light in some cold, boring part of the mid-west which most people would just fly over anyway. The story of the tragic lives of the poor locals (visited by the priest) could have made a much more engrossing film.
For the people giving this film a 9 or a 10, you're just doing that to inflate your sense of cultural superiority. These days you don't have to go to film festivals to see arthouse films, they're all over the streaming services, so everyone's seen them. It's just that this one is a complete failure.
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