Change Your Image
leftbanker-1
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try again
Favorite Spy Thrillers
Movies that Make Us Better Human Beings
My Favorite Movies in Spanish
Reviews
Paris Has Fallen (2024)
Ugh, Another Way Over-the-Top Series With Senseless and Stupid Violence
I gave up on this at 19 minutes which saved me a lot of time. I can't believe it could get better.
Terrible marital arts scenes and shootouts that make little sense. A highly-trained woman agent who knocks a guy out who was trying to kill her, then she moves on and the guy comes back to life in about three seconds and is on her again. She could have stomped on his skull while he was passed out on the floor and that would have been the end of the murderous mime (he had only a minute or two of scene time, yet I couldn't wait for him to die).
A body guard is some sort of Annie Oakley, shooting probably a dozen assassins then misses an easy shot from about fifteen meters on an unsuspecting target, the cartoonish bad guy. Just dumb.
Cartoonish villain gets away, even while surrounds by a division of cops. I turned it off.
Who wrote this? A ten-year-old kid?
Gangster Squad (2013)
This Movie Has it All
Great actors? Check. Interesting plot? Check.
But if I missed a cliché, the director didn't. They're all here.
Cartoonish bad guy? Check. Cops with no regard for the law they are hired to uphold? Check. Silly catch phrases (You know the drill)? Check. Hooker with a heart of cigarette smoke? Check. Poorly-choreographed action scenes? Check.
I enjoyed it, just not as much as I should have. There was a very weak explanation for not killing the cartoon bad guy at the beginning, but at some point, not killing him just seemed stupid. I would have traded every beating, every bombing, and every shootout in the film for one action scene with even a trace of tension.
The final scene is as bad a movies get. Zero tension with nothing at stake as we all know how it's going to end.
The Iceman (2012)
Maudlin Scenes Squander Talented Cast
This could have been a really good gangster flic, but there were too many scenes that dragged on forever. His arrest at the end was SO long and drawn out. The lamentations of the wife pleading for her husband and the serial murderer resisting with ten cops around him. Scenes of Ritchie and his wife fighting that went on too long. The wife and kids crying in court. Do we really need to see this?
The film runs 1h46m so take out sixteen minutes of these maudlin frames and you'd have a nice, tight thriller at 1h30m, what it should run.
The scene where he meets Mr. Freezy at the waterfront park made no sense to me. Mr. Freezy shows him a newspaper with the headline "The Iceman Murder." I realize you aren't supposed to actually read these newspapers as they aren't on the screen long enough, but if you are going to put this in the film, do it right. There is a story that Roy Demeo was found dead in the trunk of his car with a bullet to the head. Then, Mr. Freezy and the Iceman have a conversation about Roy being a problem for them. In another article, the headline reads "Another Mafia Member?" and the story below was about selling helicopters to Guatemala. Huh? Sloppy editing.
Ritchie is set up by an undercover cop, but what was the crime? Accepting a hit that he never did? He could argue in court that he was doing a swindle. Instead of the over-long scenes mentioned above, they should have explained his arrest more thoroughly and coherently.
Driveways (2019)
Neurotic Mother and Squirrelly Son
I really wanted to like this but it was slow, boring, and intellectually unsatisfying. We learn almost nothing about the mother and child. The dead sister is a total mystery except she was a head-case who filled her home with trash.
Brian Dennehy was the only reason I decided to watch, but he was underused and had a weak part. What a waste. There was way too much showing here without telling us much. A father who isn't around, obviously, which explains the kid's neurosis. He phones in once, literally. "Say hi to Cody," is about all he has for being a father, a pretty important vocation in life, maybe the most important. Don't worry, single parent families are great! At least according to fiction. In real life, not so much.
We've seen this too many times before, the single mother held up as some sort of modern saint. The pukey kid obviously needs more than his emotionally-crippled mother if he's ever going to make it on his own in the world. This isn't something that an old neighbor he just met can fix. Little wimp can't even blow out his nine candles. Does he smoke like his mom?
Not really a big thing, but if the sister was a creepy hoarder, her house would have been completely rundown, with everything broken and out of order, on top of the mess of tons of garbage inside.
Find Me Falling (2024)
Awful Except for Cyprus
I really wanted to like this. I love the fact that they speak so much Greek in the film and Greek island life was highlighted. The idea was cute enough, but the dialogue and story were insufferably bad at every turn.
I couldn't finish this, I just couldn't. Harry Connick should have been a perfect fit for this, but he was witless and cringey, mostly. His female counterpart was also not right and there was zero chemistry between them.
I lived in Greece a million years ago and could speak the language passably. After turning the movie off last night, I went to sleep and had a dream about Greece with people speaking Greek. It was a good dream.
Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare (2024)
No Real Catfish Were Caught in this Documentary,
Nope, there is no real fishing at all, and I really hate to fish, but even real fishing would have been better than this thing. What this "thing" is tells the story of an idiot woman who obviously spends her entire life scrolling on her phone,
Here's a suggestion: get dressed up, go out to a bar, find a cute guy, flirt, have some drinks together, then take him home and go crazy. Maybe do it a bunch of times. You will forget all about your imaginary friend as real sex is awesome.
Also, forget about your silly religion, whatever it is. We're in the 21st century, religion is dead. Move on. Tell your parents that you're over it.
Nada (2023)
Getting to Like Grumpy
I started out hating this tale of an old gentry-class creep looking for a new servant to wipe his behind. How about doing your own housework? Ugh, Latin America is the land of masters and servants. Most households with even a middle class income have some other human being at their disposal to do housework. This servant class is highly abused from what I have seen first-hand and read about.
The guy's long-time servant croaks and the first thing that occurs to him is that he needs someone to wait on him hand and foot like else his former doormat.
I held on and became charmed, if not by the protagonist, then by the city and language of Buenos Aires. I enjoyed the language lessons as there is so much new for someone living in Spain. The accent is sort of cool, and the vos familiar pronoun form is something we don't use here.
The weakest link in this is Robert De Niro. Between his pigeon Italian and Manuel's zero command of English, their conversations were just silly and stupid. De Niro just seemed to be phoning it in. If he were left out, this would have been 9 for me.
The Mule (2018)
Cartoonish Villains, Thin Characters
With easy drug money, an old man buys redemption and the love of his estranged family who he has ignored his entire adult life. His daughter hasn't spoken to him in twelve and a half years. I'd consider that a failed human being.
DEA heroes come to save the day, as always. This is why America doesn't have a drug problem. Well done, they put an old man away for life. Granted, he'll be dead soon, but they completely shut off the supply of drugs into our country. Hurray for the DEA!
New rules for the old man but his wife, who hates him, is ill, so he goes off the reservation. Everyone is on his tail.
There is nothing in the way of a surprise in this film, predictable from start to finish.
Wolfs (2024)
There Is More Wrong with Wolfs than Right
I don't even like the title, although I'm sure the director thought it was clever.
The main premise of two fixers arriving at the same time is explained satisfactorily, but from there, things get very implausible. Let me get this straight. A prosecutor rents at $10,000 suite to have sex with some kid she met a couple minutes earlier? Is that the story you want me to believe? The kid dies aft4er jumping on the bed and falling off? Really? It keeps getting sillier.
A guy's mother dies so he can't drop off four huge bricks of drugs, so, he gives them to his friend to deliver for him, like he's asking him to hand over an Amazon package he got from the building's concierge? Is that what I'm supposed to believe? Sorry, just not buying it. The kid goes into a hotel bar and suddenly he's a chick magnet and ends up with someone old enough to be his mom.
Then we have a not-particularly-interesting car-foot chase that lasts for a significant portion of the film (five minutes) with the kid running in his tighty-whities and socks in the snow. He runs through buildings, across many streets, up some sort of structure in the middle of New York, and yet the car somehow intercepts him on a crowded bridge?
The tone just isn't right. Is this a thriller. Nope, just doesn't have the gravitas for that genre. It doesn't have any depth to the humor to make it a comedy. Most of the film has the two protagonists barking and sniffing at each other like two timid dogs too old to fight with the bickering getting in the way of them doing their job.
The pacing is all over the place, but mostly slow or stopped. Just when things pick up a bit, the director slams on the brakes. It's like some out-of-shape person sprinting for a few meters then having to stop, bend over at the waist, and gasp for air.
And the music was terrible, too. Smooth Operator by Sade?
Average Joe (2023)
What a Great Series - The Soul Train of Gangster Stories...
...and in case you don't remember, Soul Train kicked the snot out of American Band Stand.
I love this series, but I'm only up to EP03, but so far, great! I just finished Big Little Lives, a completely boring series in which almost nothing happened in seven episodes. Not true with Average Joe.
I love most of the characters, but I'm hoping they turn around the character of the young daughter who is the typical whiny kid they put in everything, like all kids are like this. I call this the Meadow Soprano Effect after that horrible creature from our favorite gangster series. Since then, this archetype has been in WAY too many series and movies. Why can't young kids be cool instead of whiny?
And when I say not whiny, I mean like the Cathy character who is a total gangster and bad-a$$. She comes out of the gate shooting.
Update! I'm on EP04 and still loving it. Remember what I said about The Meadow Soprano Effect. Dad sort of addressed this by telling his daughter to knock off the "white girl sh#t." Then Cathy talks daughter off her ledge of drama. Cathy is the only one thinking clearly at this point. She is a great character and the best in the series so far, but I like a few of them.
I hated the wife and the daughter, almost throughout the series. They were always hysterical and stupid and irrational. They could have taken out this family drama and replaced it with something, anything else.
Big Little Lies (2017)
Nothng Happens
Spoiler Alert! Nothing happens, and then at the very end, we still are left with nothing. We don't even see the murder. And duh, the kid doing the abusing is the son of the abusive father? A real Sherlock Holmes mystery there.
Alternative title: Much Ado about Absolutely Nothing. Nothing happens in the in the first (blank) episodes, at least nothing substantial. I was waiting to fill in the blank as I watched each episode, but then nothing happened at all. There is no sort of resolution.
A police investigation shown through a vegetable shredder as we only see bits and pieces in each episode. These flash scenes are completely incomprehensible and annoying as the viewer has no idea what they are talking about.
Next, some rough first-grader sex complete with choking and biting. I guess that's just how kids do things these days. I don't have children and don't care. The parents are too stupid to outsmart their own first graders to find out what is going on amongst the kids. How hard would it be to get the truth out of a first grader? Answer: not hard at all. The whole plot revolves around adults unable to crack the omerta of a class of pipsqueaks.
Spousal abuse comes with rough sex, at least according to the guidelines drawn out in BLL. Nicole Kidman and her man can't seem to shake hands without beating on each other. Battered mom can't put two and two together and come up with her kid being the little molester?
Office Space (1999)
If Ever a Film Deserves a Ten, It's Office Space
How many films or books has ever had the audacity to criticize the American way of life in the late 20th century? I'll wait. I can only think of the novel Generation X by Douglas Coupland. This movie was a much more poignant examination of our society than American Beauty, the winner of the best picture Oscar that year.
Not only was this film laugh-out-loud funny (Yes, it's OK to write that out), it also had so much to say about work, corporate America, our car culture, and many other things. The film deserves praise just for the scene of the workers having to cross a parking lot no-man's-land without a sidewalk just to get a cup of coffee. Why do we build our cities like this?
The movie is worth watching just for the discussion of a worker commenting that, "It looks like someone has a case of the Mondays." Its take-down or corporate America's version of a restaurant is also brilliant
Evidently, this wasn't very successful at the box office, but no one is a prophet in their own country, as the Bible says. This film is much more clever than The Office series to follow which I'm sure were inspired by this movie. It's grown into a cult classic and can be quoted extensively by most thinking adults.
The Boys (2019)
Great Except When it Was Frustrating
I watched the first season on a friend's recommendation a couple years ago (it's now August 2024), and I liked it a lot. For some reason, the second season lost me almost immediately. I got back to the series a month ago and started from the beginning, this time skipping happily through the first two seasons. Sort of slowed down with S03. I got tired of The guy with the bad British accent as his character seemed to drift back and forth a bit too much.
Then they turned Frenchie gay? Like they didn't already check off enough boxes on inclusivity in the series that they felt they needed to double-down on gay? I never liked Hughie's dad and his character got stupider as the series progressed.
What I really hated, absolutely hated about the series were most of the fight scenes with the Supes. They dragged on forever and we as viewers never understood why one Supe was superior to the other. And why did the humans keep using guns against them when they were completely ineffective? For this same reason, I despise the traditional, comic book superhero movies. Some hero will be thrown through a brick building, only to spring back the tear into his opponent again and again.
Starlight seemed mostly freaking useless as a protector of her group. I got bored and annoyed with the mute girl and her powers were also all over the place.
Daddio (2023)
Six Stars Just for the Idea - Execution? Not so Much
I don't know about other viewers, but I wouldn't watch this film again if you paid me by the minute. The dialogue wasn't that good, it wasn't Waiting for Godot in a taxi. The visuals are unspectacular as can be. I give it credit for putting something on film on a shoestring budget (I assume), but that doesn't mean it's good. In addition, I really hate it when a film forces me to read text messages. I don't even like reading my own. It's like asking me to wash your dishes. It defeats the purpose of watching a movie, unless you are watching it on your phone which makes no sense.
My first thought about this movie is why isn't there a train to take New York passengers from the airport to the city? Unthinkable for any city in Europe. One car to take one person over this distance and we wonder why the planet is coming apart at the seams. It's just so completely unsophisticated in this day and age. Get with it NY.
Then he bemoans the coming end to taxis. Great, I can't wait. Ah, no more foul-mouthed moron spending his entire day honking his horn over nothing and screaming at pedestrians for daring to walk across the street. Won't that be terrible.
Then we're supposed to think it's cool for a taxi driver to make judgements about his fares. "It's nice you're not on your phone." Why would someone care? Then she is all over her phone. And then he gets into her sex life?
Who is he? Bernie X from National Lampoon magazine, the world's filthiest cabbie?
Spartan (2004)
This Really Earns Its One Star, From Start to Finish
People write here all the time saying, "That was the worst movie I've ever seen," or the grammatically-challenged will write something like, "Worst movie I ever seen." I've never said that and won't say this about Spartan. I will say that I've never seen a movie that made zero sense from start to finish. I'd also have to say that this rates right up there with the worst films I've ever seen, and I sat through a couple of Steven Segal's films and most of Nic Cage's recent work.
Where's the girl? I wonder how many times this was said in the movie. Too many is the answer. How many people had to die to track down aforementioned girl? It was more than enough to rate in the category of natural disaster.
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024)
Long, Boring, Plotless, and Long
The only thing worse than a story not making much sense is five or six stories not adding up to anything. It's basically a TV series but the episodes will be years apart. Does that sound like fun to you?
"An American Saga Chapter 2 has been delayed from August 16, 2024, to an undetermined date to allow the first installment more time to find its audience."
Maybe its audience is hiding down in the cellar, too afraid that the second installment will be as pointless as the first?
This just made no sense and jumped from one story to the next with nothing in the way of a story. The music is reason enough not to watch this and is so bombastic and run-of-the-mill that I think they just took it off the free option for phone ringtones.
Shrill (2019)
Mixed Thoughts on this Series with Serious Subjects
This is the only thing on film I can remember seeing in which an abortion is carried out. Why should this be so taboo when most Americans (61%) continue to say that abortion should be legal in all (27%) or most (34%) cases.
In the first episode, right at the beginning, we see the protagonist eating. She's standing in the kitchen while she eats some sort of foul crap right out of the plastic tray from the supermarket. There is a lesson to be learned here that viewers aren't taught. Respect what you eat. If you are going to eat crap, at least treat it like real food. Put it on a plate, then sit down at the table and have a proper meal. No one is too hungry or too busy to sit down and have a meal like a human being.
The most disturbing thing for me (white male 65) is how she seems to have zero respect for herself. I happen to live in a society (Spain) in which obesity isn't nearly as common as it is in the USA. I just think it is really sad to see overweight children because their parents probably know nothing about proper nutrition.
Munich (2005)
Spielberg's Best
I can't believe I've never reviewed this before as it's one of my favorite films and definitely my favorite from Spielberg. Based on a book that seems mostly apocryphal, at least to me. Even when I read the book way back in 1984, the parts outside of those that could be verified sounded like fiction. Still, it's a great story and sort of a David and Goliath tale, except when it drags down into a pointless blood feud between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This seems to be a hobby for both sides.
On that front, nothing has changed in the entire history of this conflict that I'm tired of hearing about, to be honest.
Malcolm in the Middle (2000)
Not Fit Entertainment for an Adult, But...
But this series has moments of pure brilliance.
I never had a TV back when this show first aired, and I wouldn't have watched it if I had. I was too sophisticated to watch network TV. Now, in 2024, I'm a man creeping gracefully into old age (I hope gracefully), so why would I watch this pabulum fit only for mouth-breathing half-wits? And why am I laughing at it? What's wrong with me?
I envy anyone who watched this show at the perfect age, say between 12 and 20 years old. It's dark to the point of being sinister, even disturbing, something I never had on TV back when I was a kid.
I can only take watching this in small doses, like no more than an episode every couple of weeks, so I probably won't live long enough to see them all, but I'm glad I discovered this show, even though it was too late.
American Rust (2021)
Why Would Hollywood Hacks Think They Are Better Writers Than The Original Author?
A terrible adaptation of the book. I don't even recognize this from the novel, or just barely. The murder is shown as something along the lines of a vague memory or a bad dream which changes the time-line of the story completely. In the book, Poe is immediately fingered for the killing and Issac heads out for the territories leaving his best friend in the lurch. The victim was a hobo in the novel, and here it's a former police officer recently fired by the Jeff Daniels character. I don't understand why they would change this.
Their big mistake was trying to wring out more than one season from the book. There's nothing about unions in the book while this seems to be a big part of the series. What the series doesn't talk about is maybe Pennsyltucky's problems stem from their godawful taste in music which is beaten into the ears of viewers, all of them songs I hated when they were released a million years ago.
Issac are Julia Hispanic, or half Hispanic and they speak Spanish while their invalid father can't even pronounce "Alejandro," her new husband's name. How does that happen anywhere other than Hollywood. This was barely touched on in the novel.
I counted thirteen different writers, not including Philipp Meyer whose fine novel this series sprang from, or should I say crawled out of? Note to Hollywood: few good things have ever come from a committee of writers. I'd guess all of them studied creative writing, the graveyard of good writing.
Just two episodes in and I hate how so many scenes are too dark to see anything, a film technique I have noticed all too frequently in recent years. Why bother making a movie if you can't see anything? Maybe you'd be happier in radio. Black is the predominant color here and black reflects no light, meaning we can't see much. Even at night, humans have very good vision, but evidently directors prefer for all of us to be blind.
S01E02 - Do we really need to sit through an entire hick wedding? Been there, never want to repeat that experience, not even if I got married. What was the point? Deer Hunter homage? I thought that movie was too long.
Law Abiding Citizen (2009)
Torture Porn and Hyper-Violence Wrapped in a Ridiculous Premise
So, this guy is a force of nature who makes the entire city of Philadelphia tremble with fear and he allows two random hobos to rape and kill his wife and daughter before his very eyes? How did that happen? This story goes from gross and repugnant (rape and child murder as entertainment) to completely, hyper-violent (woman judge's head exploding and mass-murder), to the dumbest plot device in the world of movies (he has a tunnel dug into his prison cell).
The prison guards would have knocked the smug look off his face in about fifteen minutes of torture.
Forget about the entire premise of the film: a guy infuriated with the American justice system because they make plea deals with criminals. That is the stupidest idea and only one a child would harbor. How about the prosecutor just say something that it would be statistically impossible to bring to trial every criminal case presented before the court.
Brats (2024)
Wanted to Like it, Comes Up Short
First of all, no one read the stupid article and knew whether it was being critical of the kid actors. This was before the internet so an article in New York Magazine wasn't read nationwide. The name stuck as it was easy to remember because it plagiarized the other pack. The article (I just read it for the first time a minute ago) is total crap and if it weren't for the name he coined, no one would have ever spoken of those few thousand words again. It was nothing more or less than a hatchet job by a journalist who probably wanted to sleep with one of them.
It's ironic that the one I despised the most in this group as an actor and the one with the most punchable face, Andrew McCarthy, has had an interesting career lately as a travel writer and now this film. I haven't read anything he's written so I'm beginning with his memoir of walking the Camino de Santiago with his son.
Nothing much of anything is revealed in this film. Once upon a time there was an article written that coined the name. The supposed members of this Brat Pack, young actors, made a bunch of films dealing with young people. There was never much to this story and thus not much more can be said about it all these years later.
The film itself is awkward at times with way too much time inside of a car, too many shots of the film crew lurking around in the background, and there wasn't much at all of what their lives were like 40 years ago.
The strangest thing I learned from the film was that none of them were even friends and haven't had any contact with each other in all these years. It just seems like they'd at least call once in a while to comment on a recent project they had finished, either to compliment each other or ask if they knew about it. In the end, they weren't any sort of pack at all.
One True Thing (1998)
Maudlin Tripe
First of all, the boy flunks out of American literature at summer school? Yes, that does make you a moron, unless English is like your third or fourth language
The dad is the biggest creep ever. She argues with him constantly when what he really needs is a horse whipping. Does the daughter even have one of those? The dialogue is stupid and cliché-ridden. Then she gives Santa a lap dance which could have been cool but was interrupted by her mom croaking, or coming close, on the nearby park bench.
What needed mercy killing more than anything was this film that clocks in at a totally inexcusable 2h7m. Ugh.
Wild (2014)
Just Walk it Off
The perfect movie (or book) for those who put a lot of credence in motivational slogans and posters of cats hanging from tree branches with a line about how crappy Mondays are. If you're the type who thinks that all of life's problems can be remedied with some made-up challenge, like walking form Mexico to Canada, then this is tailor-made for you.
What if she listened to motivational audio books all along the trail? Wow, she'd end up even more fixed and would forever be spitting out piffle like:
1. "Believe in yourself."
2. "You are your only limit."
3. "Dream big, work hard."
4. "Embrace the grind."
5. "You've got this."
6. "Chase your dreams."
7. "Stay positive, work hard, make it happen."
8. "Be the change you wish to see."
9. "The only way is up."
10. "Never give up."
How is this for an alternative ending: At the end of the trail, or "her journey" as they love to call these, none other than Tony Robbins is there with an engagement ring in his hand.
There's nothing that can't be fixed with a long walk. Dead mother, heroin addiction, dangerous sexual promiscuity, and stupidity are child's play for a long hike, or maybe a running a marathon, or climbing Mount Everest, or running a marathon up Mount Everest.
This movie dealt more with toxic masculinity, or whatever they called it back in 2014, and had little to do with the wonders of the outdoor world.
Tires (2024)
Spoiler Alert: It Doesn't Get Better
There was almost nothing worth mentioning in this new series. I sort of liked the fat guy, Dave, but I didn't like him enough to give this anything but One Star. I sort of liked some of Shane Gillis's stand-up stuff, but this was not good.
The whole idea for this wasn't fun. A tire store? Who cares? I mean, this could have worked, a tire store as a backdrop for a comedy series but it didn't. Not even a little.
If there was a single joke in this, someone needs to remind me because I must have missed it.
None of the characters were fun to watch or funny. Annoying isn't funny and all of them never rose above being annoying.
This is what I would expect if you gave a bunch of guys who work in a tire store money to write and act in their own TV series. Maybe that's being classist, but what I took away from this was that there wasn't much thought put into the writing, if there was anything written down. Maybe they just improvised the whole thing.