Reviews

I went into "If" with high expectations. I am a huge fan of most of the cast, and I think John Krasinski is a competent director.

About 30 minutes into watching this, I realized it wasn't going to have the broad, universal appeal of many films in this genre. It's extremely sad in parts, and then shifts to total silliness, then back to sad again. Films can be a lot of things at different times, but it was sort of whiplash here going from silly to sad and back again.

I was really looking forward to Steve Carrell's reunion with Krasinski, and that was all sort of an overblown letdown here. Steve's "Blue" character is basically a beanbag chair with eyes and emotions. He had almost zero impact on the film, in fact he really didn't even have that many lines at all.

The writing in this film also isn't the best, there are times where ithe plot just sort of wanders.

There's a scene about 1/2 into this movie that I think showcases what I'm talking about. The main protagonist girl wanders into a retirement community for imaginary friends, and stuff just happens. It has no bearing on any of the rest of the plot whatsoever. Like the film got lost on its way to a purpose for existing.

Overall it was "fine" but it has absolutely zero replay value.

Late Night with The Devil is a decent film most of the way through it.

It begins with good atmospheric building, and the late-1970's feel was very authentic.

I thought all the acting performances were great, and also rang true for the time period depicted.

The film was made on a low budget for Hollywood, but I don't think that detracts from (most of) it. Instead, I think the "low budget" feel made the film seem even more like the time period it was in.

So why only 4 stars? It's because about 90% into the film it loses all steam. What should be the climatic moments of the movie are detracted from by some odd plot choices and the appearance of a big white turd.

That last sentence needs some explaining.

Although the low budget practical effects work for most of this film, when the most important special effects in the entire movie fall flat, it hurts the outcome, and this mainly comes in the form of a ghost that literally looks like a big white piece of dog poo.

Then there's another weird special effect involving...I don't know? Steppenwolf? Before the film ends.

As per usual with modern Hollywood horror films, it seems like the writers had an idea for a story but just absolutely no idea how to end it, so it ends with a thud.

A 8-9 stars film pulled down to 4 by the end of it.

This film starts out decently enough. If you're a fan of trashy thrillers the "shock jock who tangles with.a crazy caller" is sort of an old troupe found in cheesy movies from the late 80's / early 90's.

But when executed well this style of film can be quite entertaining. When it's executed well. This was not one of those films.

Again, the premise was fine, but the execution left a lot to be desired.

For one thing, having a movie with twist after twist gets tiresome from an audience perspective. Around the 3rd twist people stop caring. I know I did.

But then at the very end this film just falls completely apart by committing the ultimate mortal sin of cinema: not mattering. Absolutely nothing that happens in this film ends up mattering, it's a complete waste of the audience's time.

I know Mel Gibson hasn't been mainstream successful in a long time, and he's a trash human being, but at least his films usually have a purpose. This one doesn't. Avoid, it ls a complete waste of your time. I promise.

I'll start off by saying I loved the first film in this series. I thought the 2nd film was "okay". The 3rd film, well...it has a great shooting location, I'll say that much.

When crafting any story a basic requirement is some level of tension. An actor can be an absolutely amazing one like Denzel Washington, but if your script gives you nothing there's not much you can do with it.

This film lacks ANY tension. The outcome is a foregone conclusion. The protagonist has, slowly, between each film, become more and more a "John Wick" level killing machine but his opponents in this film are about as tough as your average street thugs.

There is never any moment when you think Denzel's character could lose. The final shoot out is a non event.

The film pads its length considerably by adding in a pointless subplot to reunite Denzel Washington with Dakota Fanning. Fanning, playing the least believable CIA / NSA (?) operative in cinema history, exists in this film to be this weird nepotism favor Denzel gets involved with part way into the film, but her true purpose is to make a short-ish plot light film somewhat higher stakes.

This was a big disappointment from previous Equalizer films. Go watch it for the scenery and nothing else.

I think "What If" is the absolute best example of how the "downfall" of the Marvel franchise has happened. It's not racism, hating of genders, or political ideology. It's just bad writing.

"What if" is an anthology show. Apparently the powers that be at Marvel have forgotten that or they are just so obsessed with interconnected stories due to the whole "multiverse" angle that they feel an overwhelming compulsion to connect absolutely everything.

This series could be so good. Viewers have no idea what they are missing. The comic series had such strange and insane ideas, and all that potential goes to waste in season 2 of "What If".

I just don't particularly care about Captain Carter. It was an okay idea in season 1, but in an anthology series where you can literally do ANY story, for some reason they just keep going back to the same one.

"What if Thanos was right? ", "What if Red Skull won?", "What if the other half got snapped?". Just a few ideas.

But no, we get "what if. Nebula was a cop?" Like, really? How pathetic.

Marvel, you will wither and die if you don't hire competent writers. Perhaps it's already too late.

I watched it all. The whole thing, because I wanted to be fair in my summation of it.

This series is not in any way enjoyable to watch. It wants to be deep, it REALLY wants to be thought provoking, but the Netflix format just gives it too much room to wander, and this results in the story itself drowning under its own weight.

The series starts very quickly establishing that the world is ending due to an incoming comet, and everyone has basically stopped living their regular lives in an attempt to hedonistically ride out the end. Well...most people, some like our protagonist Carol decide they want to spend the end working to give their aimless lives purpose, and that's where the writing on this series started to lose me.

There are a lot of crazy things people would do with 7 months left to live in the world, but going back to a M-F 9-5 job is not one of them.

There's this weird Animal Farm / cringey "The Onion"dystopian idea by the writer of this show that regular people would just go insane if they couldn't work, but let me tell you, that's just not reality. Not in this scenario.

Speaking of inconsistent writing, at various intervals it's obvious society has broken down and public transportation is gone, yet somehow people are still flying and taking trips. Who is flying these planes? Who is handling the luggage? Who is feeding these people?

The military seems to be the only functioning government body, yet also not, at the same time. The world building is either wildly inconsistent or carelessly discarded.

Carol, the protagonist, is meant to be this audience view of the world, but she's so hopelessly unlikeable. Being a neurotic depressed individual while the world is also ending was already handled by the film "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" and it was done with more interesting writing in much less time.

Seeing that Carol is so boring, the series attempts to branch out into other characters later in the show, but I didn't like any of those, either. This series feels like one of those late-night Adult Swim "deep thoughts" cartoons that were 10 minutes long. Too bad these were a half hour, getting through almost every one was a huge slog.

I say "almost every one" because the episode where Carol reunites with her sister was pretty decent, I don't know why they didn't stick with that mindset throughout the whole show. By episode 8 when the Somali pirates hijacked the nude cruise (yes this happened) I was about ready to call it quits, yet I soldiered on.

The series itself is also incredibly crudely drawn. When is it "okay" to say animation isn't a style choice, that it's actually bad? Because this one, was bad. All the naked wrinkly people just looked absurd, too, btw. Was that supposed to be funny?

The worst part is that in the end this series is just a bunch of painful stilted dialogue and staring, but is also somehow incredibly pretentious and preachy at the same time (Carol teaches us all that if you just learn people's names, "everything is gonna be okay", barf).

You ever want to watch animated characters just stare at each other? Then this one's for you.

Do general audiences just not have brains anymore? The audience score for this film is either artificially inflated or people just don't demand absolutely anything from films they watch now.

The literal second the blonde cop shows up, I looked at my partner and stated "oh! The love interest is here!"

Everything about this film is telegraphed a mile away. There is an attempt to build a sense of dread but the film shows its hand almost immediately. The video game this is based on does so much better of a job building a sense of dread.

Once you see the the animatronics in full CGI glory it's over. All tension, all scariness. All the air goes out of the room and I'm like "Ah, cartoons. So Scary!"

It's also obvious immediately that the ghost kids want the little girl. That the thugs the woman hired are going to quickly die. Even the cop being the villain's daughter, the big reveal, was not in any way surprising or shocking.

Mr Blum, this film could've been so much better with better writing. I'm available. Lol.

Starfield is the first RPG game I've played to completion in years, so the fact that it engaged me that much says something for it. This review is detailed, so thank you to any who actually take the time to read it all. To fully explain my rating this review contains some spoilers.

The Good:

-Although not easy to get used to from other space flight simulators, once I got the hang of space flight and combat it was very fun. I wish way more of the game took place in space (see below).

-Ground combat is also fun. There are a lot of weapons, weapon modding is cool, and the guns do what you expect them too. I enjoy combat in this game much more than all previous Bethesda games, easily the biggest win over Skyrim and others (although I miss the unique joy of VATS from Fallout 3).

-An impressive amount of voice dialogue and the acting is great.

-The Skill system is a carryover from previous Bethesda games although it's larger. More specialization available but kind of grindy.

-Once you get the hang of it ship customization is fun and being able to walk around and explore your own ships is just a great thing to do in this game.

-Parts of this game look amazing. Almost photorealistic. The best looking Bethesda game from a purely realism standpoint.

-New Game + (NG+) is handled by the main quest in an original way, and makes narrative sense in the storyline. The first Bethesda game to have a legitimated "explanation" for NG+.

-The music is great. Not varied, but it's pretty great in certain parts of the story. You'll feel like a bada** when you level up.

The not-so-great

-Ship building is fun but the game in vanilla form imposes lots of restrictions on what you can do early on. You won't make that ship you love until you are well into the game. There are also learn pains in building. Expect to spend a lot of time here, not all of it fun.

-Character facial animations are uncanny valley. Just not right.

-They got rid of gore. Boo! When you finish a hideout infiltration it feels like you just left a big slumber party because everyone is so sleepy. D'aww. This game didn't need to go to Fallout or Oblivion extremes but it's so so tame for a "Mature" rated game. It's "barely" MA. Space drugs are why it's MA. Lame.

The Bad

-The worst thing about Starfield by a country mile are the repeating points of interest. There are over 1000 planets you can lend on, but there are only 4-6 major city locations spread over all the systems, some minor city-ish locations, and then there's a set of 30-50 handcrafted points of interest used for enemy hideouts. That."30-50" figure is me being optimistic by the way.

Any time you land on one of those 1000 planets, you'll have the option on most to walk 300-1000 M (meters?) to one of those 30-50 locations . Where you'll encounter a repeating set of enemies, loot, and location lore.

"Wait...aren't planets big? If they are going for realism, wouldn't only having 30-50 points of interest (poi) for each entire planet mean that there's the potential for a lot of repetition?"

Yes.

About 1/3 of your way into the main story your game will really open up and allow you to explore. When this happens you can go on a lot of bounty hunter style quests, and that's where you'll begin to realize the repetitive nature of those places.

I can't oversell how repetitive it gets. You find the same enemies and lore bits in every single hideout of the same layout. Luckily there are other things to do besides loot hunting, but the game needs to fundamentally change how it handles hideouts.

-The story is very uneven at times. There are bits of incredibly engaging story, and a lot of meh or so-so. Too few dialogue options, and the final outcome to each quest only has limited variety, and only in 2 of the faction quest lines. True choice is somewhat an illusion in this game.

-The main quest involves "Multiverse" stuff and that's so Marvel 2019, I'm sort of over that sci-fi troupe. Here we are again. The storytelling feels lazy compared to Skyrim or Fallout, especially the main quest line.

-Way too many faction quests involve "take item or note to another person". There is nothing that happens along the way. You just go there. And since you can fast travel basically everywhere you can usually, after a load screen, just immediately arrive at your destination/delivery location, giving you the impression no time passed at all and you completed the quest in seconds,

-Some quests, too many, can be completed literally in seconds, especially once you know where you are going.

-No city maps. It's almost like Bethesda knew the story was too short so they introduced. / excluded game mechanics just to make the game take longer to complete. For example, getting lost is very possible, especially early on going. Cities are not easy to navigate, dungeons and mines far worse. I hated how a Series X gen game could launch so unfinished to not include an overhead map option or true world map, the ground world map is laughably bad. You use it for fast travel icons only, nothing else.

-Speaking of fast travel, it's way too much of what you do in this game, Almost no travel is seamless. Typical travel in this game, this is 100% real: In New Atlantis, a city walking around, I decide to "travel" to an outpost on the other side of the galaxy. Load game menu, star map, fast travel to my ship, load menu, star map, fast travel to the outpost, load menu, I'm there. There "was" travel to my ship, travel into orbit, warping to other system, system travel to planet orbit, land at outpost, get out of ship, but all of that just became 2 menu loads and 2 loading screens.

-Complete lack of ship travel planet to planet.

-Many other systems that feel very incomplete. Unique ship habitats that have no purpose. Ability to assign companions to outposts who do absolutely nothing. Many instances of fast travel, but you fast travel to just outside the location you wanted to go to, rather than just in it, forcing you to endure yet another load screen. For example, traveling to your main outpost early in the game is 2 load screens for absolutely no reason.

-Load screens! The game loads very fast on Xbox X and about the same on a good PC but there are so many load screens between areas and common places you travel to. But which location has a load screen and which does not is weirdly arbitrary. It really feels like a game engine on its last legs. The worst was a big space battle that included 4 load screens in the middle of it,

Is this game worth buying? Sure. But it feels like 60% of a game.

I'll say upfront my rating of "4" overall for the series as a whole is due to the incredibly annoying voice host and some of the repetitive sound effects.

It's not a cartoon, it's a real voice actor behind a cartoonish character. I don't have a problem with that per se. But unfortunately it's just played out in a slightly too childish way. Either it needs to be removed entirely or made much stranger. And that alarm sound when the conveyor belt moves plays way too often. It's terrible.

But the headline of this review, isn't so much about my rating, it's my own personal commentary on the finale (and this outcome did not affect my overall rating, it's just an observation).

It's interesting to me how the finale was structured the game intentionally or unintentionally subverted the expectations of the players themselves.

Lanky, the eventual winner, was the only player in this game who wasn't self editing his reviews, he was willing to be "mean", and by the end of the game clearly the other players wanted Leon to win.

I think off-the-screen discussions were made between the ex-contestants (the finale judges) at the finale, that they were going to discern which dishes were made by Leon, and vote him the winner. I believe this decision was made before the dishes were even judged.

Ultimately, due to his "meanness" in his voting, Lanky drew the ire of the other contestants so much so they decided to vote Leon the winner by default. The only problem with this strategy was that they guessed the wrong player.

Ironically, if the ex-contestants had voted based on the merit of the dishes alone, Leon, their preferred winner, would have won, because he actually made the better dishes, but the spite of the judges caused them to vote emotionally, causing the opposite result that they had intended.

It's a kind of garbage show, but the finale did contain a Poe-ish twist of irony. So there's that.

I really, really hope this series gets a season 3. I say that because I'm honestly a fan after watching all of season 1 and 2, but they better not let the entire story end like they did after the season 2 finale.

TV content has gotten so dicey in the age of streaming, you never know when making any series if it'll end or get renewed, so as a writer you have to self-contain each season enough that you'll have a satisfying conclusion if the series isn't renewed, or else your show gets to end on a real down note.

Case in point, the finale of season 2 of Killing It.

It may or may not be renewed for a season 3, and if it does not get renewed....what the heck did I just watch? Is this supposed to be seen as an edgy hard look at American greed, or is it just an incomplete story?

If this "was" the end of it all, Craig Robinson's character "wins" by...betraying all his friends?

Again, I'm assuming it's playing out so Craig learns some better lessons in life in season 3...but if there is no season 3, then this show was just a terrible waste of my time.

"So, you just didn't like how it ended, so that makes it BAD?" You ask. No, that's not why I'm rating it poorly.

I'm rating it poorly because "how" it got to its finale was only accomplished through incredibly contrived dumb coincidences that just kept happening throughout this series, but really went overboard in the end.

This series should've been titled "Craig Robinson's A Series of Unfortunate Events" because that's what it literally was. Over and over again. The man has worse luck than any human on the planet.

But at the end...how the heck do you miss the gigantic snails on the very top of the berries? Why were they there, suddenly? Why was Jillian just over-the-top conscientious at the very end of the story? Oh! To cause a very contrived falling out with Craig at the very end.

I don't mind "bad" endings. I mind shows heaving bad luck on people relentlessly in order to give us contrived endings.

(It reminds me of an episode of "Married, With Children." I loved that show as a kid. But around season 4 or 5 the Bundys win the lottery and use the fortune to buy enough lottery tickets to win "even more." Of course they lost, it was just a super contrived way for them to lose a fortune instantly. But it was a bridge too far for me as a kid, it was just "too dumb" so I stopped caring about the show afterwards. The giant snails was the "Bundy" moment for me and "Killing It".)