Change Your Image
Esme867
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Upstairs Downstairs (2010)
Go Back to the Drawing Board
Love Downton Abbey. Has complex yet relatable characters, interesting storylines, style, humor, great fashion, beautiful country homes and life lessons. I had the same high hopes for Upstairs/Downstairs. Upstairs/Downstairs got off to a great start. It was romantic, light and plausible. I was excited, until I got to the second season, where the characters become stock caricatures of themselves. No real plot, no real direction, annoying characters that live unabashedly and hedonistically, but claim to fake the moral high ground when it suits them. Everyone is running around looking busy, but no one is actually doing anything. A disappointment and a let down. Should be called Devolution for Dummies.
Anesthesia (2015)
Too Self-Aware
What's the point of life? The film begs the question. Tim Blake Nelson has made one of the most pretentious and bombastic films, pandering to pseudo-intellectual movie "buffs" to converse over their vegan, 5-calorie, triple shot macchiatos.
Every character is too self-aware of their existence. They all question, rather than investigate the point of life, which is lazily done through characters reflecting out loud why they do the things they do.
At the beginning of the film, Walter asks why we continue bringing children into a world so cruel. Why bring children into the world and not teach them respect so they can't say lines such as: "So dad can be gone all the time and you can be drunk all night?" This, by a 10-year-old. In another scene, teenage kids tell their parents to "F off" and that smoking weed every day is less potent than the parents' 4 glasses of wine at night. Right.
Throughout the film, Kristen Stewart goes on various diatribes informing us pseudo-intellectuals how unhappy she is, because she is alive and can't stop being alive. She harms herself with a curling iron and when asked why, she says, "to remind myself of why I'm here." She's mad at the world that they can't change and even more mad at herself that she can't change either. That is exhausting to try to translate. I half expected her to take out Romeo's poison and drink it as a last "screw you" to the world, but alas, she will have to endure the curse of life like the rest of us.
Also, don't do drugs.