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alexlomba87
Reviews
Trenque Lauquen (2022)
An excellent first half followed by a disaster of a second half
The first half of the movie (part 1) is a fresh and interesting piece. It shows great premise, despite a not particularly sustained pace. There's plenty of space to grow attached to the main characters, interested in their story, and attracted to the mystery surrounding Trenque Lauquen. There are long, atmospheric pauses that implicitly say much more than any dialogue could. There's poetry. There's a truly inspired sub-plot (Carmen Zuna). There's also much, much more, and the length of the movie - over 4 hours, 2 hours at the first half point - doesn't feel overambitious by its halfway point. All the ingredients of a great work are in place, in the right number to engage and keep engaged. The actors are great, the music is creatively understated and descriptive, the writing and photography masterful.
Then, the second half arrives. Here, instead of starting to unravel something, additional stuff is thrown in the mix. And it piles up. Previous sub-plots are explicitly and intentionally forgotten, in order to make space for new ones. Interesting ideas get lost. The pace slows further, until the last segment brings it almost to a halt. No satisfying conclusion is sought or found.
The main issue is that it wouldn't still be as bad if the movie was cut short earlier. After the long final drag, the ending is so uninspiringly cryptic that it made me regret spending 4 hours of my life on this movie. It simply felt very lazy.
I honestly do not understand. It's really hard to figure out the choices done in the second half, in light of the great results of the first half. It almost feels like they found themselves with too many things on their hand, and thought, so how do we make this work? Simple, we leave it as it is. It's a common issue I find in most smaller art movie productions - sadly, the perfect recipe to be confined to the smallest public possible.
Shenmue (2022)
Mediocre writing and pacing, decent animations
The series mostly respects the original plot, showing occasionally good animations and emotional moments. However, it fails the challenge of adaptog the slow pacing of the game to a short series. It features poor dialogues, missed introspections, missed characterisations, too much screentime to secondary characters. It skims over some fundamental events, dedicating too long to secondary content, it overlooks the Kung Fu learning process of Ryu, it misses to enrich the contextualisation with important characters, and it features some embarrassingly designed scenes that weren't even in the original plot.
It's not a disaster, but I wouldn't recommend it at all.
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Oh my god, that editing
My eyes are bleeding. Please do not ever cut every 1-2 seconds for periods longer than a minute, let alone an entire movie. Or put Nirvana in a cabaret. Still, the incredible artistry in this thrashy and clichéd musical makes it a not too despicable production, if you have the stomach to overcome the seizure of the first 40 minutes, the forced overacting that even causes Nicole Kidman to fall from her grace, the childish and gaggy sound effects over aduld scenes (what is the target audience?), and some awful musical choices amongst, admittedly, many great ones. One of the most confused movies I've ever seen.
Kulüp (2021)
Quite simply: a good show.
It may not be the most accurate historical reproduction of 1950s Instanbul, but this show entertains, and it does it well.
The story is original, the cast is exceptionally good, and everything just works. There are just a few things that I wished worked better: some plot points, some of the storytelling, and more contextualisation of the Club and its music.
All in all, very good.
Tenet (2020)
Ambitious beyond merit
A movie that continuously shouts to the spectator "shut up, don't think and let me show you what happens next. See? Wasn't it smart, coherent and cool?"
First, Time-travel is hard to handle as a narrative device. Second, the suspension of disbelief needs to be handled with care too.
The movie refuses to care about both areas, focusing on a plot so forced that every "surprise" feels like a cheap, arbitrary event, ending included.
Additionally, the poor handling of the time travel defeats its very purpose: it deprives every action of its meaning and almost instantly kills any interest in following the movie.
Finally:
- dialogues are really poor
- most action scenes are just confusingly directed, particularly the last scenes
- all combined, the movie is extremely boring
- defenders of the movie focus on saying "let it sink for a bit to understand it" which is false: there is nothing to understand, it's just a poor plot masked to seem smart.
Do yourself a favour and avoid it.
Karafuru (2010)
Slow, cheap, predictable
I honestly did not expect to dislike the movie, particularly this much. The plot is a sequence of cheap ideas badly sticked together, and the main glue that should come from the characters is appallingly weak. The characters feel terribly flat, and worst of all they behave unrealistically and inconsistently with their imaginary background. Dialogues and general script feels cheap, childish at times, often cringy. This made me feel interest in the plot and in watching the movie after less than 30 minutes.