Trakt for iOS
Works on iPhone and iPad.
Love, death and Robots gets off to a rocky start. The first episode "Sonnie's Edge" has beautiful imagery, but rapidly becomes crass. The second episode is annoying. I found myself fast forwarding through them. However... episode 7 is great. Then it's back to fast forwarding through episodes again... until episode 14 "Zima Blue", which is another good one.
So season 1 has 2 or 3 out of 18 episodes worth watching.
Season 2 has 8 episodes... with a few worth watching. So a higher hit rate.
Season 3 though... really seems to raise the game. Most of the episodes are worth the effort with some very entertaining and creepy efforts. "Night of the mini-dead" and "Swarm" being two standouts for me - episode 2 "Bad travelling" is also extremely well-made.
So stick with it. The quality is variable, but the 3 season seems to have much higher quality control, and the entire shows is a demonstration of how good computer graphics have become.
This show is written by Orson Scott Card - if that puts you off because of the near-constant howling of outrage mobs - well shame on you.
It's made by Brigham Young University - The Mormons.
But don't let that distract you... as I did at first. This is a well made and interesting show. There's no religious lecturing in it... but it's quite unlike a lot of modern TV/movies. No gratuitous sex or violence... no crass woke... no LGBT inserts... but a lot of interesting SCIFI ideas.
The show really deserved a better fate than just one obscure season. It's perfectly enjoyable.
Great stuff. I went into this with few expectations. The first episode looked good and it just kept on getting better.
Beautifully shot, well acted (use the Japanese audio and English subtitles)... it keeps you guessing. The only criticism I can actually think of is occasionally overdoing the extreme emotional close up (esp the end of the first hearts game)... but this is minor and probably personal taste.
This is a great series and it seems it's been renewed too. Nice.
This series is breathtakingly ambitious. The first season is science fiction as it should be done on TV. It didn't expect it to go even further in the second season.
The story begins, no spoilers, with the idea of the first humans who upload into computers and how this triggers the SF concept of "singularity". All I have told you so far is what you can read on a "premise" of the show.
The show is animated but don't let that pit you off. The voice talent is stellar. The story in season 1 takes its time to get going as it begins in the mundane and then launches into SF. Trust me when I tell you it's nothing compared to where season 2 is eventually going.
It's a well made and intelligent science fiction TV show and deserves your attention.
A genuinely awful butchering of Henry James' work. Not all the actors are terrible, but most are. You have some genuinely creepy ideas but stitched together by awful dialogue and woke-isms. I went to see who'd written it... and was suddenly struck by the realisation that this series has one of the most blatant author self-inserts I've ever seen. Honestly... I took to fast forwarding through lots of it.
Each episode is short - between about 35-45 minutes.
And honestly, that's it's only saving grace. The show starts well, with a NATO solider hijacking a plane and demanding it fly West immediately to avoid the sun. Ok... but that's about the only interesting thing in the show.
The rest is just some unlikely coincidences and a lot of manufactured interpersonal drama between the passengers and silly logic. The show is extremely low budget... and it shows by rarely if ever leaving the plane interior. There are some very rudimentary occasional FX.
That said, low budget isn't really a bad thing - see the movie Cube for example.
But Into The Night starts to become annoying as you realise that the story doesn't seem to be really going anywhere beyond the sun becoming lethal. There's no real expansion on the mystery and in my case I started fast forwarding through the episodes towards the end of S1.
And then you realise that S2 has just moved from one interior micro-budget set to another.
I honestly don't know whether I can pluck up the stamina for S2. Maybe I will fast-forward through it.
This is clearly a well-budgeted and well-made show.
However, I was left feeling out of place with it constantly. Maybe it's my fault - I did watch it sporadically so I kept having to catch up with the thread of the story.
Nevertheless I just didn't connect with it and didn't feel the sense of danger that (I presume) I was supposed to feel.
The acting is fine and it's full of nice shots and cinematography. But it all felt very clinical - even with the subtitles (I find dubbing often puts me off) and left me baffled why I should care.
The original film has a dumb premise. A perpetual motion train engine that keeps running around the world on the oddly still maintained single global track - despite a global catastrophe freezing the entire world.
It never made a lick of sense.
But ok... the film used this conceit to tell a fairly tight story about class.
So why turn it into a TV series? Desperation for content perhaps.
The result is a boring mess that after a reasonably competent opening then follows it up by showing how infected with "modern" writing it is.
I managed to get three episodes in before I just couldn't bring myself to invest any more time or effort in it.
Low budget. Contains mostly teens. That's not a good recipe... but... I have to say this is a small gem. The teens aren't annoying and the story is cleverly constructed - no-one is stupid or obnoxious.
The premise: A small group heads into a cave system only to find that it contains some very odd time effects.
I can't even remember why I ended up watching it, but it really took me by surprise and vastly exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations. Definitely worth a watch if you can find it.
I gave up after two episodes. It looked really promising. The first episode is shaky, but they often are... there's a lot to introduce. Things get worrying when the gratuitous progressive inserts start - even in the first episode. "man-splaining"... really. Seriously get some better writers.
Imagine lifting the single player story from Titanfall 2 - and then spaffing it up the wall.
Atlas is badly written, badly acted and a total mess. The FX are kind of well done, but you just don't care because it's so annoyingly awful in every other respect.
Zack Snyder's films are immensely frustrating. He clearly has bags of talent for striking visuals. He rarely seems able to turn that into a good film.
The same is, sadly, true of Rebel Moon.
OK, so it's clearly choosing to take The Magnificent Seven as an influence. Fine. That's a solid story to work with.
But this part 1 just blows it. It's annoying in almost every way - the constant slow motion, the lack of any logic. As you would expect, there are some really striking visual sequences, but they are just not enough to keep you engaged.
And it all ends in an empty sequence with characters you don't care about doing things you don't care about either.
And we've got part 2 coming - which you certainly aren't left eagerly anticipating.
Bad. Basically unwatchable. I fast forwarded through most of it despite its relatively short run time.
The dialog is atrocious and the storyline is paper thin. None of the jokes land. It's just annoying and loud.
One episode was enough. I usually give shows at least two, even if they are bad. I want to give them a chance to redeem themselves. But this was so awful I couldn't manage it. Stupid people writing about smart people is never a good idea. Everyone in this show behaves like an imbecile. That tells you a lot about the writers. And the acting is awful too. Unsalvageable... hence one episode.
Avoiding spoilers:
Unreliable narrator story
It begins quite effectively as the countryside where Harper stays get weirder and weirder.
It has some truly grotesque moments... but in the end it is deeply unsatisfying and really rather shallow.
Should you watch it? Well, if you're a fan of highly stylised film-making... sure. If you're looking for an intriguing or interesting film... no.
To be honest I flirted with the fast forward button several times.
The drug trials run by the US government are a potentially interesting subject.
This documentary largely fails to capitalise on the subject.
It has the same failing as many modern documentaries. It's only very tangentially about the Edgewood experiments. It's actually about the female journalist and her team of intrepid investigators. It's a "personal journey".
They even cut away from an interview with the doctor who was there to focus on the female journalist as she writes in her notebook while watching the interview.
It's such a rotten style of documentary and betrays the material.
Absolutely spot-on sequel.
There's really nothing bad to say about this film. It hits every bit of fan service without being gratuitous and the story beats are pretty much perfect.
It hits the mid-point and everything is going wrong... and without spoiling things, Mav rescues the situation and it all plays out awesomely.
Into the final act... which again is almost perfect. It stretches a little with one attempt at fan service (those who've seen it will know what I mean), but at this point I didn't care. I was just enjoying the thrill ride.
I'm sure there's an element of rose-tinted glasses here. So many films have been disastrously bad in the last few years. This one represents a major return to form.
Thankfully the money it's raked in is demonstrating that real film-making is still needed. It's been an enormous hit. It should be pretty embarrassing that a return to a style of film from 30+ years ago was needed to show filmmakers the way forward. The money men are watching... get back to crowed pleasing.
Make films that people want to watch. Not full of politics you want to preach.
The bad:
The good:
Honestly I'm left kinda empty after watching it. The cameos fly past... the box ticking. It's all vacuous in the end and mostly doesn't make sense. I get it. Sometimes directors want to do go for a cool visual and ditch logic, but at least make an effort. This is mostly tiring to watch. Sam Raimi is a talented director (he made the 2002 Spider-Man) - and before any of that he made The Evil Dead movies - full of comedy horror. Lots of references to that show up in here.
Should you see it? I'd recommend giving it a miss to be honest, or catch it when it hits a streaming service.
The MCU hit its peak with Infinity War and tied that up with End Game.
But the movies and TV shows you are seeing now are long after Disney sunk its claws in and infected the movies/shows from the start. It's not worth saving now.
Remember it as it was.
Looking back at a remarkable series. I remember watching Millennium when it was first broadcast in the UK. It was a miserable, downbeat, depressing and fantastic show. Unrelentingly bleak for the most part. It was probably funded as a series due to the success of Se7en at the cinema - astonishingly dark film (also brilliant). Millennium depends almost entirely on Lance Henriksen to carry the show. His care worn, lived in look and carefully measured delivery are everything... the world around him is spinning into insanity as the millennium approaches. Frank's only refuge is his family. Each week is a new depraved layer to the story as he's pulled closer to the mysterious Millennium Group. If you haven't seen it, you are missing one of the great underappreciated TV shows. So ideally don't watch this first! But if you do... hopefully it will prompt you to spend time on the show itself.
Interviews with Black, Gallagher, Chris Carter but sadly no Terry O'Quinn.
Girl gets on a flight and sits next to a guy during a storm. In a drunk panic she starts spilling all her inner thoughts and secrets to him. Only to find out he's the big boss of the firm she works for. All this is in the trailer.
The leads are charming enough - Alexandra Daddario can do comedy, but when it comes to delivering lines about how ordinary she is... That doesn't quite make it. She's not remotely ordinary. But hey, that's a standard Hollywood flaw for these types of movies.
The film is short enough that it doesn't stick around and bore you. It never really surprises you either. Worth a watch if there's nothing nothing else.
This shows a lot of promise. The tension builds as the mission progresses... and then suddenly it all ends. I understand there were major ructions at the studio and the director was fired. The result is a deeply unsatisfying ending - neither one thing nor the other.
Probably worth a watch as a historical curiosity.
Ok, Morbius is not a great film... but honestly it's not quite as bad as people claimed.
Lehto isn't that bad and has to work with a pretty poor script.
The action sequences are pretty poor - confusing, poorly lit and with a slow-mo/pause to give you time to see what's going on. But it doesn't help much. It's all a blurry mess.
It's mostly crass, predictable and dull... but it's better than Venom.
I know, "better than Venom" is a very low bar. I actually did watch Morbius all the way through and even liked small parts. Venom (and its sequel) just had me fast forwarding chunks of it.
So... I suppose if you have some time to kill and it's on a service you already have, then it might be worth a watch. But it's not worth going out of your way to watch it.
Wow... episode 5 goes wrong. Episodes 1-4 are pretty smartly written. They build the tension and intrigue - and have genuinely scary moments.
Episode 5 rams this into reverse, the episode bores you to death... and you suddenly have a flash of insight when the woke insert arrives. Who were the writers on this... well... 1-4 were written by men. Can you guess who wrote 5? Tip: it wasn't a man. It was a writer from the atrocious Cowboy Bebop adaptation.
Now to be fair, the middle part of seasons tend to be slower as they try to establish the characters more and save up money for a blow out at the end of the season... but even allowing for this, the episode is just childishly written and annoying.
I really hope the rest get back to 1-4 quality and they send the writer of 5 out to write greetings cards or something.
Great stuff. I went into this with few expectations. The first episode looked good and it just kept on getting better.
Beautifully shot, well acted (use the Japanese audio and English subtitles)... it keeps you guessing. The only criticism I can actually think of is occasionally overdoing the extreme emotional close up (esp the end of the first hearts game)... but this is minor and probably personal taste.
This is a great series and it seems it's been renewed too. Nice.
Are you looking for:
A Star War documentary about how things went down at Elstree in 1976... forget it. Well... this isn't for you.
On the other hand, if you are person who goes to cons and likes to meet people who were there as extras and minor roles (or major in the case of David Prowse), well then you'll probably enjoy it.
I'm the former. I wanted to watch a doc about what went on in 1976 so it wasn't much fun to watch really.
Still, it's well made and if you are interested in that subject probably worth a watch.
Clancy Brown is decent. The stories let him down... weak and silly for the most part.
The story of Basildon... a UK "new town". Created to get people out of the wretched post-WW2 slums of London. It's a story that moves from good intentions (fresh air, light, new homes) to neglect and decay. It does take a frustrating detour into claiming that people buying council houses was bad... and before that happened it was a socialist heaven with all classes living mixed together and somehow art will fix the world's problems.
But for the most part it's an interesting record of Basildon's rise and fall.
You can't help feeling that lots of the original building work was the result of the architect's 'vision' rather than actual human need - basically 'Brutalism' in a nut shell.
Still... if you want to judge Basildon you have to remember where that story began. In the slums of East London. People crammed together, disease, decay, stench and poverty. Utopia is beyond reach, but Basildon was an improvement.
slog definition: 1. to work hard over a long period, especially doing work that is difficult or boring
and the show goes downhill from here.
Joss Whedon's Justice League was a huge failure. I don't hate Whedon for it because... well, he had to work with another director's material. But it's great seeing the original vision ... and the result is 10x better than the cinema version. This is just a way better film in every way. Released from the constraints of a modern blockbuster cinema screening and the need to pack is as many showing as possible the length gives the story time to breath. The look is far, far more impressive and menacing.
Even at an epic 4 hours, it left me wanting more - and that's a sign of a good film.
God help me I was actually looking forward to this. But it's awful. I gave up after two episodes.
