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Paulo Alegria
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Army of the Dead (2021)
When low expectations are still very high.
I wasn't expecting a great fun ride like we had with the Dawn of the Dead remake, but... Wow!! I also didn't expect such a stinky garbage. This thing is just terrible at every level, everything is a waste from the writing to the extremely ridiculous zombie acting that feels a lot like a mix of novice parkour with amateurish ballet. It's astonishingly pathetic, it's so bad it makes House of the Dead look like a horror masterpiece.
Furthermore, the cinematography, proudly signed by Zack Snyder itself, is insane. But in a very bad way. There's no doubt that we're living in the era of the worst cinematographic work of all time. Even so, this blurry crap still manages to be way worse than any today's bad cinematography you can think of. It's horribly filmed, poorly planned and the color grading is beyond horrendous. They were probably trying to make it look like a fake domestic cheap flick, but they went so far that they turned it into a genuine mediocre production.
Overall it's a really, really bad and uninspired movie. There's nothing good to point out, even the song's placement is bad. It's all pure trash. It's not even one of those cases when a movie is so bad that it's funny. It's just overweening and tasteless.
This year it'll be hard to beat this rotten tomato. But I still have faith that someone will make it.
Underwater (2020)
Lazy production.
A potentially satisfying movie ruined by a terrible cinematography and an absolutely pathetic and messed up digital colour grade. What a shame! I miss this theme a lot and I really wanted to enjoy it, but it's all lazy and there's very little to appreciate. I guess that The Abyss is still ahead of time, even in its most basic technical aspects of image capture.
The King (2019)
Sloppy cinematography
I enjoyed the props, costume design, battle recreation and sound effects - which means that the research team was capable - but that's all. The acting and script is very weak and specially Pattinson is attrociously awful playing a dumb French character. Finally, the worst of all is the sloppy visual aspect of this thing.
The cinematography is so bad that it almost looks like a current North American film production. Any perfectly calibrated screen or accurate projector may look like a damaged device while playing this movie. Somehow the mediocricy of digital colourists is spreading across continents, like a disease outbreak infecting all cinema. The imagery is so poorly captured and manipulated in post-processing that most of the movie seems to be shot in the light of the weirdest candles ever made, casting an orange light with greenish shadows. Also the sunlight coming from the windows is intensly yellow but casts green and blue reflections on the wooden or stone walls. It's ridiculous. Even the few exterior takes have an awful use of light and colour capture - the sky is often green and the moon is cyan, but the whole scenery, including clouds and people's skin, turns dark blue in the ocean scenes. All the lighting and colour work of this movie looks terribly careless and incompetent.
Dolor y gloria (2019)
Faithful to his roots
A perfect use of light combined with his usual outstanding set design has allowed Almodóvar to continue achieving a lush and honest colour rendition, faithful to his roots, that most directors already lost in this age of post-production tampering dependence. It's clearly the most beautiful and compelling cinematography I've seen this year - a real pleasure to watch, capable of relieving our mind from all the visual noise that invades us frequently. The script seems almost autobiographical, which is especially appealing to the followers of his work. Also surprisingly memorable is the flawless performance of Antonio Banderas.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
Unneeded and Apathetic
A cheap take on Breaking Bad with a broken and bad cinematography that doesn't even come close to the competence level of the TV series production. An unneeded and apathetic episode that only serves to remind us that some things are best left dead.
Defying Gravity (2009)
This show could have been really great if the writers were more creative...
This show could have been really great if the writers were more creative and have kept focus on the six-year mission through the solar system instead of the the extremely boring and absolutely uninteresting flashbacks. It's a mission through the solar system, obviously there must be something more interesting going on to tell than the pathetic frustrations of that horrible group of astronauts. The show looks good, it has a great art direction, it's really well produced and most actors are trying to do their job, but, unfortunately it's terribly hollow, uncreative and awfully written. More decent scenes of a solar system adventure and less flashbacks and lame crying babies drama, might have saved this series.