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Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
from the series: Films that can be made worse...
...not that much!
Basically, it's a sequel of sorts to Ridley Scott's pretty flawless original (I'm sure everyone knows that one), except for the various endings, none of which are particularly convincing. That's because the story was fully told and yet there was already an urge to continue it or imagine what would happen next to Deckard and Rachel. You can do that on your own, but a film is, as Truffaut says, a banana, it has a beginning and an end. That's it! Philip K. Dick found a balanced and poetic conclusion in his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". Adding your own dreams fundamentally destroys the story. But forget that for a moment and pay attention to the sequel's narrative weakness. What's truly unforgivable is that K.'s childhood memories are shown where they don't belong (which is absurd to the ears of Joi, his holographic playmate) and not at a time when the timing would have been perfect and convincing: namely When Deckard tells the scientist, Dr. Ana Stelline his memories (instead of showing it to her and us!), who later turns out to be Deckard's daughter. From this moment on, the story would have to take a completely new path. This all doesn't make sense anymore, because Ana knows the truth now. From this point on the film is just bad. Logically, there is only one loud, if not particularly exciting or choreographically interesting solution to all illogicalities.
Beef (2023)
Pretty rage
This is what is probably called solid entertainment. There is hardly any violence, sex or drugs involved. The screen is mainly reserved for the facial landscapes of Amy Lau (Ali Wong) and Danny Cho (Steven Yeun), who engage in a kind of telepathic fight. Anger and frustration darken their souls and discharge into injustice, self-hatred and autoaggression. They are like negative particles that miraculously attract each other nevertheless; like a staircase on which you follow the heroes into the cellars of their souls. Everything is half as bad, but doubly funny. Absolutely worth seeing and even thinking about.
Cocaine Bear (2023)
A true story - like Pinoccio
A plane drops packets of cocaine. The guy who's supposed to pick them up forgets to open his parachute. A bear in the national park finds the stuff and becomes addicted. Apparently insanely funny and based on a true story. Well, sure. But the slapstick and the deliberately put-on B Movie image doesn't kick in. Fu*ing up also needs to be done skillfully. Okay, for what could one give the one star? Maybe for the rabid will to graphics. Right after the first gruesome splatter scenes in the otherwise stupidly cheerful buddy-movie design, it becomes clear Ms. Banks means business. But after the coking bear has struck once, twice, we already know that. What comes next? There's not much to tell: A coked-up bear comes and bites.
Euphoria (2019)
Contemporary Art
This is art. Not the kind of film art that is abused to make the film as abstract as possible, but to make it tangible. So that you don't have to think about what it means, but can get up close and personal with it. What Cameron doesn't succeed in doing with Avatar, for example, you can put yourself in the shoes of these characters here and take on their twisted perspective without losing control for a moment in the chaos. And the world around obeys this principle. The stories are told through the consistent personalities of the incredibly good actors. Add to that great camera and sound and the coolest bike rides ever.
Ted Lasso: 4-5-1 (2023)
Like a parody of itself - a pretty bad one.
Where to begin with this radical fall from grace? Keeley Jones was a pretty fun figurehead, a wonderful underdog cheerleader, now she's degenerated into a joke with a stuffy office. Nathan is having a hard time with the lead role he's been given, and his boss, Rupert, has to be obediently evil, Higgins is only allowed to squawk in wonder, Rebecca has to go on hating senselessly, and Ted is allowed and forced to laugh himself to death. This once wonderful series has nothing, but also nothing of its charm and the tension from formerly small but fine narrative subject can save. One only misses the pre-recorded laughs.
Im Westen nichts Neues (2022)
The dead have nothing to tell us
The film is quite a far cry from the original book, which I first read when I was 20 and was disappointed because I had just read Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and I was craving blood. Another 20 years later, the novel appeared to me in a completely different light. Remarque is much more concerned with the psyche of young men, those teenagers who haven't even touched a girl and are now in bed with a gun. And so "Nothing New in the West" is only superficially a war novel, but more of a romance novel. A coming of age story. As in the previous two films, this aspect is only hinted at. Therefore, this version is ultimately a completely superfluous remake, similar to the recent Wannsee Conference, which in turn was the remake of a mediocre German film and an interposed terrific US remake, Frank Pierson's "Conspiracy".
A fundamental weakness of this film is that it wants to be an anti-war film and doesn't acknowledge that such a thing doesn't exist. A war film just because it positions itself thematically against war is no more an anti-war film than "Revervoir Dogs" is an anti-Diamond Heist film. Rather, Germany is a traditional anti-film country (where all non-German films are dubbed and for that reason alone one learns nothing from Hollywood) without its own pop culture, even if it is probably the best war film of all time by Wolfgang Petersen's "Das Boot".
Berger's adaptation of "All Quiet on the Western Front" (not a good translation of the original title, by the way: Nothing New in the West) is also dramaturgically problematic, since our narrator dies at the end, which doesn't go over well with Erich Maria Remarque's novel either. In the novel, Paul dies in the last days of the war, as an "anonymous narrator" reports. That was also necessary, because the dead have nothing to say to us. Only the army report noted the rather quiet day at the front with the message: Nothing New in The West.
The Last of Us: Look for the Light (2023)
Fast forward, fast
This now extremely sloppily told story reaches the nadir of entertainment in view of the grandiosity of the original,
One barely comprehensible idea follows the next: At the beginning, a heavily pregnant woman flees through the woods into a house, where she is attacked by one of the zombies, which could actually already be considered extinct, because you haven't seen any for a while. Pretty disappointing, for a zombie series. But at least they seem to still exist. Anyway, she manages to kill the monster with a kitchen knife while hurriedly giving birth to her baby. Unfortunately, she gets bitten in the process. Sighing, she gives the child to the Firefly crew and asks for her death, which is kindly granted.
But don't worry, none of that matters anyway, because in the meantime our heroes Joel and Ellie feed giraffes and are captured by the fireflies. If you think it's about saving humanity now, you're wrong. Because while Ellie is already in surgery waiting for her brain amputation, Joel manages to shoot down all the fireflies, which seem circus-ready incapacitated like annoying flies.
Then the two take the car home. That's it.
So what could follow next season? I see only one way out: Joel, who is actually Dr. Frankenstein, has grown the mutation himself and is making sure it can't be cured - or something.
The Last of Us: When We Are in Need (2023)
lost in transfiction
Okay, after endless boredom there is at least a trace of action. But dramaturgically again completely wrongly threaded. The idea is to go into the unknown with Joel and Ellie. So in the broadest sense a POV story. How can it be that the omniscient God first leads us to another place, of which we of course immediately suspect that the preacher and his people will meet our heroes. But this is wrong. Rather, our heroes have to meet these guys, that's the narrative agreement. And everything else is nonsense - and, so to speak, freely invented instead of dramaturgically sensible narration. Meanwhile it's just amateur stuff with a good camera.
Let the Right One In (2022)
What is it? Or is it me?
After three very exciting episodes, this series, which started out so promisingly, completely crashes. Reminds me of 'Shantaram', 'Resident Alien' or 'The Last of US'. Suddenly the air is out. From my own experience I know that the most difficult thing with series is to keep the premise of the basic story, because there is always the danger of escaping into the arbitrary. If you don't know what to do, you resort to escapism. You expand the combat zone and don't notice leaving the ground of the narrative agreement. In 'Resident Alien', for example, an alien lands on earth and pretends to be a doctor in a small town. It's terrific acting and hilarious because he doesn't even know what a doctor is and you can't get enough of how the patients and everyone reacts to him until he suddenly starts looking for his Ufo and so on and the story trundles off into mournful nirvana. In 'The Last of US' a normal guy tries to save a girl with the greatest of all abilities a human can have under the circumstances of this story for humanity because she is the only one immune to the contamination and gets lost in increasingly absurd and contrived mock battles instead of following the storyline. In 'Shantaram', a high-crime Australian flees to India to escape domestic justice - and bizarrely ends up slumming it with a touch of Ghandi as a kind of bush doctor. And in 'Let The Right One In' a good father tries to provide his vampiric daughter with blood under the greatest of obstacles. All of these stories have a clearly defined premise that is suddenly stripped of its foundation. This happens in this series when Eleonore, the wonderful little vampire, confides in her little buddy Isaiah without real need already in an early episode. But the job of this story would be to keep the secret of her illness and not to reveal it. Suddenly, what was grandiose before becomes ridiculous.
The Last of Us (2023)
Follow the brute sinus curve and hope that things will pick up again
I suspect that the author threw in the towel after the third episode and a sleep researcher is continuing to write the books. Yet it had all started with a wonderful nightmare. After the outbreak of the apocalypse, Joel, who lost his daughter and wife in the turmoil, tries to smuggle fourteen-year-old Ellie, who seems to be the only one immune to the Cordyceps infection and could be the key to developing a vaccine, out of the quarantine zone.
After the promising beginning, the third episode then offers a rare kind of dramaturgically deft and narratively fabulous television. A built-in gay story that spans 20 years since the outbreak. Suspenseful, emotional, romantic until the bittersweet ending, perfectly spun into the big picture.
But then the story itself mutates and becomes a kind of zombie, the narrative a kind of daily soap. After a roadmove episode, we end up in Kansas City, where a rebel gang makes the area unsafe and a highly implausible, uninspiredly acted and basically completely irrelevant plot unfolds.
From episode 5 on, only irrelevant stuff is told. Whether Joel finds his brother - that seems to be the goal in the meantime - or not, doesn't matter, but he finds him in a great, snowy Wild West scenery, in which unfortunately only trivial quacking follows. But zero action, zero violence, zero rock'n'roll. Simply nothing.
Only Resident Alien has ever given me such a series crash, where a highly entertaining story is violently run into the ground. But see for yourself, we're only on episode 7....
Sharp Objects (2018)
Feels like reading a book - a good one.
The spartan and enormously slow-moving frame story essentially serves as a vehicle into the inner life of the main character played devotedly by Amy Adams, creating space for a masterful construction of the mathematics of emotions without dissecting them.
To be and not to be, to do and not to do, to love and hate, to be heartfelt as well as heartless - an oscillating panopticon of possibilities between stirring experiences, wishful thinking and bitter truths literally carved into the skin.
Great cinema, the kind that can actually only take place in the mind and slowly unfold as in a book. A stylistic masterpiece.
Tulsa King (2022)
Keep the horse, change the saddle
If you're into guys bursting with power and confidence, no matter how stiff in the hip they come across, then you've come to the right place. The washed-up stud Stallone - admittedly not aging badly - celebrates an incredibly silly one-man show with an extremely thin story and without the slightest premise. He and the car - an Escalade, of course, the mute main character, who is apparently contractually guaranteed to be highly present in the frame every 2 minutes - his black driver, who would also like to be a mobster, and a few completely unimportant supporting characters populate the set. Tulsa presents itself as a city full of clumsy farmers and stupid inhabitants who have been waiting for a superman to show them the ropes. Entertainment that is hard to undercut in terms of content and relies solely on an old horse. Shuddering.
Shantaram (2022)
Starts very promising, but...
Hitchcock once said that a film should start like an earthquake and then slowly build up. At least a thriller. This one actually starts very exciting and brings us to Mumbai, the former Bombay which is really perfectly realized here. (which I can attest to, as I lived there myself for a few years in the 90s - and wrote a novel "Exit Goa" about it).
The adventure there begins immediately. "Lin", as locals call our hero, who escaped from a prison in Australia with no plans of ever becoming a criminal again, quickly makes friends and immediately gets involved in criminal activities against his will: Drug trafficking and violence all the way to the mafia.
The wonderful premise here is that despite serious trouble, he cannot turn to the authorities and must hide out with his local friend Prabhu in a quaint as well as huge slum. Here, as a former paramedic, he develops into a doctor of sorts, accepted and popular and doing good. But too much of a good thing.
Now the story clearly loses tension and grip and turns into a kind of Bollywood Romance. The carefully built serious pressure by the different gangsters loses seriousness, so that at least I begin to nod off from episode 8. And I fear that it will not go uphill now either.
The Americans (2013)
The cruelest thing you can say is: I love you
While Walter White (Breaking Bad) and Carie Mathison (Homeland) hibernate, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings (The Americans) try to take over. While neither achieve the depth of character or psychological dimension of the aforementioned, they still do a damn good job.
Phillip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) are spies in the Cold War of the 80s. To the outside world, they lead a low-key family existence with 2 children though just outside Washington D. C., but very close to one of the two power centers of its time. Controlled from Moscow, they belong to a sleeper cell of the KGB, which now, in times of the Reagan administration, gains more and more momentum. The
Jennings conspire, rob and murder for all they are worth. But they do not do it for themselves. As convinced socialists, they are also convinced anti-capitalists.
Unlike his wife, however, Phillip increasingly doubts whether life in the U. S. is really that bad and whether what they are doing is really the right response to what America is doing to them. They live in affluence, their kids are real Americans, and their sham marriage is slowly beginning to evolve toward actual love.
The contrasted, of course, by the fact that pertinent information can often only be bought with sex, except with cunning and violence. Which is true for both of the Jennings and adds a good pinch of poison to the love story.
While glasnost and perestroika glimmer on the horizon and Reagan and Gorbachev move toward each other, behind the scenes the rapprochement exacts a greatly expanding toll of blood.
Oscillating between extreme violence and caring attention to its characters, especially the children growing up and the Jennings' simply wonderful-to-watch FBI agent and neighbor, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) this season generates a terrific firework of storylining and entertainment.
Especially through the maturation of the Jenning kids, this show makes another leap forward and now also convinces all along the line in terms of character profile and sharpness.
Highly entertaining and with sex, love and conspiracy as fibriating entertainment ingredients.
Brotherhood (2006)
As if one Irishman wasn't enough, he has another brother
Rhode Island is the smallest US state. The capital is called Providence. The science fiction god H. P. Lovecraft lived and died here; the Farrelly Brothers also came from here, as did the legendary Robert Aldrich. Generally less well known is Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who denied Warlord Bush his support for the Iraq War, was kicked out of the Senate in 2006, later left the party, eventually supported Obama, and now serves as the state's governor.
Series creator Blake Masters had that senator in mind when he unleashed Tommy Caffee, a character as headstrong as he is career-obsessed, who pulls strings in the Senate for his Irish community, that Providence district called The Hill. Tommy Caffee, the prince of the hill. A high-clever, shirt-sleeved, down-to-earth character who believes in the power of family like a bricklayer believes in a trowel. His wife Eileen takes care of their daughters, tries to avoid Tommy's overbearing mother, and otherwise keeps her head above water with occasional flings and moderate drugs. Business as usual.
The show quickly ignites the booster, however, when Tommy's brother Michael, thought to be deceased, shows up. A hoodlum in his own right, he immediately does everything he can to be reintegrated into the family and from then on leaves no stone unturned to reclaim his old territory in the mafia-like Irish mob: with cunning, with violence, with feeling. He is supported by his mother, who also has her fingers in the pie when it comes to politics. Fought by corrupt cops and tough criminals
If you love The Sopranos, you'll love Brotherhood: Family, sex, violence, it's all there and wonderfully explicit. A set design of the finest, great music score, terrific actors and intricate plots make for fast-paced, intelligent, breathtaking entertainment.
Misery (1990)
"Misery cannot die!"
It doesn't get any better than that. Anyone who has ever tried to write knows that often the only thing that saves you is escapism, the flight into the distance, the establishment of new places, new people and new problems, in the hope that this will breathe life into your story. This is also what the writer Paul Sheldon hopes in his own way, who achieved fame with his Misery series of books, and who sets off - though he always does - from New York to the solitude of the Rockies. There, quartered high up in a hotel, he puts the finishing touches to his dime novels. And when he indulges in the ritual Lucky Strike and a bottle of Don Perignon after his work is done and then heads back home, he is surprised by a blizzard, loses control of his car and ends up in a ditch. And if Annie Wilkes hadn't come along, his biggest fan, who sees this encounter as a divine coincidence, Sheldon would probably have been allowed to freeze to death peacefully in his wreck instead of being subjected to a horror trip of the highest order.
Fans have it in them to be fanatical, and Annie is no exception. The trained nurse, who lives lonely in a cottage, at first only cares for Sheldon's wounds, but eventually also takes care of the writerly matters, because she does not like the twist in the case of the novel character Misery at all. Shelton's last novel, which is currently available in bookstores, was supposed to be the conclusion of the series - with the demise of the eponymous heroine. No way!....
If it's risky for a writer to create a two-person chamber drama and expect people to want to read it, it borders on megalomania for a filmmaker to expect a movie audience to see it adapted for the screen. Instead of the house on the moor, we have a snow-white frame here as a black backdrop. Bright and peaceful and nothing intrusive or subcutaneously threatening that pushed one toward horror. Except for the vivid psyche of two people, the fear of the writer versus the fanaticism of his fan, incessantly pouring oil on the fire and keeping the cogs turning.
Lead flies too, but the film also delivers a sequence that is almost unparalleled in brutality, which Annie carries out with calculated ruthlessness and all peace of mind. Truly demonic. If you haven't seen this film yet, you should make a note of the following sentence: "There is a justice higher than that of man, I will be judged by Him!
Rob Reiner converts Steven King's original congenially; in atmospheric density and tension, within the framework of its minimalism, unique.
The Old Man (2022)
Pretentious posturing at it's best.
Dark in the sense of not bright, slowly, very slowly, so as not to miss a moment of boredom - from the beginning until minute 15 - when my eyes fell shut. Later I went back to the table of contents and realized that I also don't believe a single word of the story. What touched me was that, for once, it's not a superhero myth with superpowers. 3 of my 4 stars therefore go to Hollywood.
Resident Alien (2021)
LOST IN SPACE
Supposedly, Hitchcock said about story development: start like an earthquake and increase steadily.... Well, this show does the opposite. Starts at the top and surrenders to gravity without resistance. The terrific trailer actually shows how the story should go. After all, the unbeatable premise is how an alien disguised as a doctor goes on the rampage in a small town in the mountains. This damn good starting point is totally sold out with extremely unnecessary subplots and plot twists that no one cares about. Such as the several levels of searching for parts of the spaceship as well as a device to eliminate humanity. This device, unfortunately, only destroys the story. Remaining in distant memory are some very funny moments and characters that still made the beginning of the series a great event. For example, the policemen who are the first to deal with the strange Doctor. What also immediately pulls the dramaturgical teeth of the plot is the completely wrongly used overvoice from the protagonist's brain. Someone watched too much "Desperate Housewives" and still didn't understand.
True Detective (2014)
True Disappointment
This is even worse than the second season, but HBO at least tried something new back than. Well, what you get here is strictly back to the roots. Because the producers be fooled into believing that the former trick was the kind of narration-style, ...telling the story by those questioners. Therefore the same ingredients, the very similar music, the exact same brand overall - like presenting an old story on a used bowl. (The same mistake that Westworld made)
But even if every detail seems to be back on track, nothing matches any more. Particularly the interaction between the new guys in relation to Rust and Marty. They drove a blazing touch of buddymovie despite the tragedy around - that was the truth in that detective-story. Now it goes the wrong way round...tragic of course, kids are missing, but no humor inside.
As much as I devoured the first season, I can not swallow this. Yes, good filmed, well plottet and all homework done:
Anxious and intense kind of boredom
Skyfall (2012)
close your eyes and bond over
Who the flower gave 7.9 to this totally brain dead production? Even if there is nothing to spoil what could ruin the suspense, because there is none,let's whisper: "Take the bloody shot!" Well, let's melt this sentence on our tongues. It meant, shoot the bad guy even if you hit the good one too. And we don't talk about some collateral damage here, we talk about our hero. This is the opening of an awful construction without any sense, humor or inner logic. Plot as plot can: Apparently somebody knows all the codes and secrets of MI6 and is able to hit them badly, yep, just blast the headquarter. Nobody can do anything against it. Even not the politicians in the Westminster Palace can be saved from this man - deep frustrated, apparently homosexual ex-MI6 sociopath-agent Javier Badem - who storms in with a bare pistol in his hand. Yes, they're truly lost down there in London. So tremendous lost, that the story finally leads to the childhood house of James Bond in the Scottish wilderness. This is the last resort where him an M seems to be save. Sure, it's just a bait, and sure, the old housekeeper is still there. Now: Three against the evil. We just miss Pater Brown up there in the highlands and the steamy moor. Beside this facts of raging stupidness it dismantles Bonds background secrets as an agent and as well as his character. Like conspiracy in own matters the myth of a serial hero has gone forever: Thank you for watching.