Tag: review

Capsule Reviews Vol.3

A collection of spoiler-heavy mini movie reviews.

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365 Days

2020 – Director: Barbara Bialowas & Tomasz Mandes

I’ve been wanting to write a review of this dreck since my wife and I finished watching it. It was on the Netflix Top-10 for a good length of time and I assume that a few of her friends recommended it to her because I see no other reason to be attracted to it save for fleeting exhortation (more like extortion). What draws women to this kind of subject matter? The “50 Shades”-style “meek woman who doesn’t understand her own sexual power seduced by an overly-aggressive and socially-distant hunk of man-meat” story is all well-and-good for your dime-store Harlequin romance (and I’ve read a couple of those in my time), but as a movie – to make it work – you have to decide what side of the subject-matter line you toe. “365 Days” is pornography. And it’s hilarious, that right now, you can go on your regular Netflix account without any additional parental lock and watch a movie where there’s a full face-fuck blowjob scene with a fake dick and everything; frequent nudity (male & female); and enough bumping-and-grinding to give Sonny Jim (sic) that first uncomfortable feeling in his pants. And much like pornography, the story takes second-fiddle to the diddling, and what we are left with is a provocative experiment in adult-only content on the platform and not much else. For some, that will be enough.

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Selected Scenes: Stargate SG-1 111

A spoiler-heavy single-scene TV episode analysis.

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Television takes the over-diversification of cinema and amplifies it to 11, with the same plots and the same beats being repeated ad-nauseum by every nation and orientation inclined to make their own show for the platform. Short-of-it: there is simply too much TV to watch. It’s ridiculous! Sure, maybe a cop show filmed in Germany will be a little harder than one from the States but, a cop show is still a cop show, whether it’s a “buddy” cop show or a “traumatized female detective” cop show or a “murder in a small town” cop show, etcetera. Same with sci-fi shows: how many “teen-aged vampires join a secret society in a Magic School to stop the werewolf invasion of an alien planet that secretly controls the fate of mankind” shows can you name? Same with wormhole shows, apparently.

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Selected Scenes: The Long Good Friday

A spoiler-heavy multi-scene film analysis & review.

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Allow me to be a peg self-righteous for one moment, much like the aggrandizing protagonist of this week’s Selected Scenes, Harold Shand (played by the inimitable Bob Hoskins). Really, I should be writing a review for every movie I watch, at this point. There really is no excuse, especially if it’s something that I’ve been looking forward to watching. If it’s your garden-variety Netflix this-or-that then I get it: I’m maybe only looking at a couple of paragraphs (which wouldn’t sum-up to much more than the usual “I hate it, I hate their model, I hate everything” sort-of diatribe you’ve all read before), and then I need to find a way to get screenshots or (God-forbid) draw something, because this is the Internet and you need a flash screen to get people’s attention, as much as a wall-of-text is criminally-fascinating.

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Jay’s Take: Damnation

2009 – Publisher: Codemasters

When it comes to games, I love a good narrative as much as the next guy. But when I’ve had a shitty day and feel like blowing off some steam – or I’m home sick and my attention span lasts less than my orgasm – then I love me some mindless shooting; particularly if it can be completed in the span of a week. I was angry writing my first draft for this review, not the least of which because I only wanted it to be one paragraph and it was turning into a Jason Joint. I had just finished an extended session ending with the final sequence before the Big Bad Boss and didn’t realize almost three hours had gone by and it didn’t feel like I had gotten anywhere. I was frustrated with the sloppy controls and the unintuitive level design and the brain-dead AI that seemed to hamper any progress I was making, and I just wanted to be DONE.

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Selected Scenes: Walker

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A spoiler-heavy movie review and personal analysis.

1987 – Director: Alex Cox

I haven’t been fortunate enough to watch Alex Cox’s other populist films Sid & Nancy and Repo Man, but if Walker is anything to go by then I should be adding them to my list. He’s fallen off the radar since this – his last major studio production – but similar to other cinematic artists like Richard Stanley and Richard Rush who Hollywood execs refuse to work with (since some of us have integrity beyond a paycheck) they never really went away. Stanley just released his Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space; Rush is old AF but still working as a film professor (and I liked Color of Night, but I also like Jane March); and Cox seems to be pumping out independently-financed features whenever he can get the money, in addition to teaching. It’s a twofer.

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