Etxpeme Reviews

Greed (I) (2019)

Could have been good. But it decided to be in-your-face patronizing instead.

[1/10 · 24 May 2020]

It was good at first. I quite enjoyed the style and the comedy. It criticized by showing. It even taught, with respect to taxes. But then in the end it got too preachy, too obvious, patronizing, moralizing, self-righteous. And it was just awful. If the movie had kept the not-so-subtlety, it would have been a solid film. But the over the top emotional preachiness just ruined it.

Then, to top it all off, (because the rich avoiding taxes and teaching the lower classes pretty poorly, and the refugees and the bad working conditions, and the exploitation of the poor in developing countries wasn't enough) it needs to make the most ludicrous, absurd point of sexist inequality by pointing out that 80% of garment workers are women, and 9 out of 10 billionaires are men. Just like that, out of the blue, at the end of the movie. Why?

I guess because men being the victims of job accidents and as 23 times more likely to get killed at their job doesn't matter? Because the people who clean septic tanks without gear, the ones going to war, the ones getting melted alive at chemical factories, the ones dying in gang violence, the people with lower life expectancy... being mostly male doesn't matter? No, the only men we should compare poor women to are rich men, because that way we make women the victims here, not because they're poor, but because they're women; and poor men are just a fantasy. And rich women don't exist.

Absurd, really.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Great cast, great story, great dialogue. Awfully distracting animation.

[8/10 · 24 February 2019]

The problem I found with it was the mixing of several animation styles. The faces of the characters were in 3D and had a lot of depth to them, but the shadows of their faces and their expressions were in 2D and had no depth, and looked like a transparent plastic screen with lines put on top of a TV screen. Which added a very strong, very annoying uncanny valley effect to their faces.

Then the low FPS in some scenes made it seem like stop animation. And lastly, the halftone comic-like effect was too distracting and looked like camera noise in some scenes, specially the shadows.

Now, I'm not opposed to different or experimental animation styles by any means. I have loved films like The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Le Tableau, La Tortue Rouge, Lucky and Zorba... which are all a bit out there in terms of animation.

But that's the thing, they combine a couple of things and come up with a new nicer thing. But in this film, they combined so many new things that it's just hard to focus on anything when at every frame you have so many new distracting elements.

At the end, I did end up not noticing the animation so much, because at that point I was really into the story. But at first, it was an absolute tour-de-force getting through the mismatched popourri of styles.

And, again, Disney/Pixar style is not the only style I'm familiar with.

I think if they dialed it back it would have been much nicer. Had they done the faces normal (by normal I mean of one style and stick to it, instead of mixing two very different styles that don't work well together) and a consistent cinema standard FPS. I could have dealt with the rest.

I still give it a 7. But it's in spite of the animation. Not because of it.

Self/less (2015)

Good or bad depending on what you expect

[4/10 · 12 May 2016]

I think the premise is very good. The idea of using another human being's body, the relation with the relatives, new life, new opportunities, mending mistakes... is it ethical? is it fair?... But that only lasts a bit. A few minutes into the movie and it becomes a mediocre action film.

I mean, he was zillionaire businessman, wasn't he? So, you would assume he'd be smart enough to figure out that the hallucinations were memories. You don't have to be a genius to know that. Do you? And just what did he think he would say when someone answered the door, which was opened for every burglar and potential movie murderer? Like, for real, dude?

From there on, it was more and more and more stupid and predictable.

But, maybe it's my fault for expecting an indie smart sci/fi similar to Ex Machina, Safety not guaranteed, Mr. Nobody... Maybe they should have clarified it was an action film with some mediocre sci-fi tones.

So, if you just want a simple action film, it's a fair movie, pretty average much like the majority in the action genre. However, if you are looking for a ''kinda smart'' ''kinda original'' sci-fi, you won't find anything in this movie besides the title and maybe the poster.