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Reviews
The Orville: Electric Sheep (2022)
Excellent Writing, different tone
The crew of the Orville deals with bigotry and suicide.
That's it. There's your logline. This is ground that Star Trek, at its best, used to cover and it's great to see a show like this go for gold. The folks over at Disney/Marvel/Star Wars/DC should look at work like this and at least make some effort to do better work.
1BR (2019)
Timely Suspense for Rent!
In an age where movies seem to bang audiences over the head with their storylines and action from the outset, 1BR reminds us that a well told and properly structured film can land a far more powerful punch.
IBR is about a young woman who finds herself trapped in an LA apartment complex by a cult, unique in design and complexity. That's about as much synopsis as I'll give as I would not want to give spoilers. 1BR is a modern horror story of cults, paranoia and torture. As horror films go, it's nicely paced going in all the right ways (at first). The small doses of violence and gore are carefully, even artfully placed. Nothing is done purely to shock. The pieces fit well together and the performances work. The director as worked hard with the cast to create highly believable performances that sell the premise and make it believable. 1BR moves slowly, grinding suspense out in much the same way Polanski's Rosemary's Baby did, but with a modern and even more relatable angle. By the end of the movie I found myself caught up in the suspense and rooting for the lead. The audience at the LA premiere reacted strongly, especially in the 3rd act. My high rating of 9 out of 10 does make some allowances for what is obviously a smaller film without big stars, but frankly it all adds up to a viewing experience that feels more genuine than what we often see from larger productions. Check it out, give it a chance to work its way into your psyche and I think you'll have a good time!
A Christmas Story Live! (2017)
God Awful
You won't be humming any of these horrible tunes and the numbers add nothing to the story because they're generic & vapid. The whole production looks like an Old Navy ad. Watch Little Shop of Horrors and learn what good music actually is. This all wrong, from the casting on down...a Titanic level disaster.
Finding Bigfoot (2011)
They will never find "him."
It seems sort of unsportsmanlike to attack a show like this. Obviously they will find nothing. Think about it. If they FOUND Bigfoot, it would be front-page news worldwide and not awaiting post production to air on Animal Planet. But it can be entertaining to watch this unspool in the same way it's fun to watch bad B movies like Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Deadly Mantis. The problem is that we get to SEE the monsters in those movies, cheesy or not, you get the cookie in the end. This show has no cookies for you beyond CGI work that makes Sharknado look like Jurassic World by comparison. So dig in and if there's no old shows on how to make stained glass birdhouses, this may be just the ticket.
It Comes at Night (2017)
Very weak writing and execution.
I don't know how something like this gets financed and gains traction with reviewers. Perhaps it's a lack of education or something even worse. What we have here is essentially a melding of Cabin Fever mixed with the slowest elements of The Walking Dead minus zombies. Characters are incredibly dull. Dialogue is uninspired. And the plotting is on-the-nose predictable to an extreme. In the mid 80's this might have been an okay thriller, but barely. You can be creative when lifting concepts from other movies. This never is. And the audience here in LA absolutely hated the entire film, groaning when it ended, following a ponderously predictable finish. I heard that the screenplay came out of the very real pathos of losing a father, but perhaps he was too overwrought to generate anything new in a first draft that took but 3 days to complete. Watch it streaming and save your money. This is a highly pedestrian effort.
The Babadook (2014)
Weak story derails spooky effort
I don't know how people grade a movie like this with 8 or 9 stars...or even 7. It's a fairly interesting and well acted film, but the screenplay is an utter mess. Never once do we understand what the Babadook is, what it wants and the storyline essentially morphs into each setup with little originality. Using elements of everything from Exorcist to Signs, The Babadook just never finds a story it can tell with any hint of coherence. Instead, it floats along on scene after scene of admittedly unsettling moments, but never seems to know for a moments what it's all about. Ultimately The Babadook cannot come close to delivering on what is promised in the book read by the mother and this unrealized groundwork makes for a grade C effort. Whether it's Ghost, Ghostbusters or the Evil dead, a good story needs to have a direction that is both clear and dynamic. The Babadook has neither.