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Reviews
The Shallows (2016)
Beyond stupid
The "meat" of this drama, if you will, starts with a 30(?) foot shark choosing the kicking, bony non-natural food item Blake Lively over a lifeless whale carcass that'd be much safer and nutritional to eat. It only goes downhill from there.
The shark inexplicably circles an outcropping of rock inexhaustibly, trapping Lively and eschewing its natural inclination to roam the sea in search of prey. Maybe it's the vengeful, near-human obsession with eating this surfer. But for an ocean-going creature, it's oddly clumsy, bumping into nearly everything it comes near. It does manage to nip her on the leg but all's well - not only does the gash nearly instantaneously coagulate and close on its own, she manages to stitch it with a necklace she's been wearing.
Meanwhile, Lively manages to stave off her life-threatening hunger after ONE DAY by munching on live crabs and makes a friend of a seagull who - after she fixes its dislocated wing - stays by her side in a show of seeming solidarity. Think Little Mermaid. Several people come to her aid, all to be eaten in gruesome ways because she belongs to the shark, damn it.
Inexplicably, Lively decides her salvation lies in reaching the buoy 30 yards further out to sea and makes it by swimming through a neon forest of jellyfish, which she instinctively knows the shark will dislike. Once on the buoy, she unlocks the flare gun box (c'mon, we all know ancient buoys have flare gun boxes) but fails to flag down a passing ship.
But all is not lost. Because there's apparently no current in the Pacific ocean, the oil slick leading from the buoy to the dead whale (which the shark has ignored for two days running) is intact and immediately catches fire when a flare is fired into it. This burns the shark but succeeds only in making it angrier. It follows Lively as she sinks impossibly fast to a trench in the ocean ell ahead of the shark, who nonetheless is on her heels. But alas, our clumsy aggressor impales itself on the remnants of the metal buoy it only moments before ripped apart. Lively is washed ashore and rescued by a boy and his father only live to surf another day.
Seriously.
My Normal (2009)
Makes My List -- The Wrong One
The greatest redeeming quality of My Normal is that it's so awful it becomes fun (I use that term dangerously loosely) to watch. There are so few truly quality movies produced in the lesbian genre, a quote from a genuinely good movie comes to mind, and forgive me for paraphrasing: (Audiences are|) so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand." The LGBT audience too often praises movies that in the mainstream would be considered unwatchable. When crumbs are all you get, you learn to appreciate even the most indigestible morsels.
The acting here, with the exception of Nicole LaLiberte and Ty Jones, is routinely atrocious. Other actors here simply act as set dressing for the leads. But the producers seem set on damning even their lead character by constantly placing a lit cigarette in her hand. The problem? She so obviously doesn't smoke, she looks like a 12-year old playing at grown-up. Ty Jones, playing a street-wise writer, is given such an astonishingly lack of vocabulary you wonder how he ever wrote a page of dialogue.
It's probably a good idea to have some vague knowledge of the content about which you write a script, but that doesn't stop anyone here. This film's projected as an erotic romp, but with the exception of a single scene or two, it's as innocuous as any prime-time show. Unless, of course, you define erotic as dildos sitting on counters, tables, chairs and stools.
There are few redeeming qualities in the script. The dialogue is actually laughable; see if you can get through an hour and 15 without talking back to the screen. Emotion is non-existent. The answer to stress relief, stress, employment and social lubrication is drugs. And what exceedingly few plot lines are interesting are never followed to their end. This film would much rather go for a broad laugh, yet it misses over and over. Truly, people from all walks of life should be offended by this movie.
There should be more LGBT content out there; God knows there's an audience. But of what does exist, there are scores of better choices than this self-satisfied "comedy."