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garrett-53
Reviews
Eating Cars (2021)
Painful to watch, but not in a way I expected
I knew nothing going into this except that it was in black and white and seemed to be a character study of some kind. Low-budget and shot in a stagey way. That's fine; I adjusted my expectations. I began to wish for much tighter editing almost immediately, but appreciated the handheld angles the director chose and interwove. Interstitial scenes of actors reading stage direction appear to be taken from cold readings or auditions because they're all uniformly terrible readings. I don't know why this was done. Most of them could be left out entirely. In terms of acting, the actress who played Megan was a standout: She consistently found the emotional rhythm behind the dialogue and conveyed it, often with little apparent support from the other actors in the scene.
The real issue was the main character of Max. I should say up front: I know I am absolutely not the target audience, because I'm 45, and college was more than half a lifetime ago for me, as well as all the misanthropic bad ideas, self-important manifestos, ironically detached posturing, dramatic tantrums, and awkward romantic flailing that me and my friends definitely struggled our way through. But this script brought it all painfully back. I certainly can't blame the actress: Making the main character likable or even sympathetic was an impossible task. It seems she aimed for entertaining instead, adding in a kind of sustained energy, but even that wasn't enough, and it kept derailing any chance of the viewer emotionally connecting with her until she finally dropped it for the final scenes.
See, Max believes she's a monster - or at least claims the term because sarcasm is an easy defense - and sums herself up late in the film: "It's in our DNA. So, like, calling someone a monster isn't an insult, it's just the truth."
I can see a line like this being spoken by a character in an attempt to garner sympathy and simultaneously show how naïve and selfish they are, but Max (and the screenplay) delivers it like it's a very clever idea and a bold insight and spins up a monologue all about it. Oooh god college all over again... Somebody stop this...
There's a better, much shorter film buried in here, if an editor took a sword to it. One about 35 minutes long. A charitable four stars of ten.
Mars (2016)
Top grade for the science. Failing grade for the forced, moronic drama.
I was really looking forward to this series. Like "Red Planet" and "Mission To Mars" but without the fictional hooey. Like "The Martian" but in grander scale, with many scientists doing their thing, not just one. Bah; I was quite wrong.
Apparently, in the year 2033, we've completely run out of scientists, and instead sent a bunch of backstabbing, whiny hipsters to Mars. If they had any formal training in science, they forgot it all. They certainly don't mention anything scientific in their dialogue with each other. They do not even appear to be doing any scientific work once they arrive - just bickering over their mission, and passive-aggressively hiding useful information from each other, causing bonehead accidents.
What can you do, when you see great frontiers being explored, and cool hardware brought to bear, and you want to smile and enjoy it ... but the people doing it are always upset, depressed, or appallingly unobservant?
Three episodes in, and I quit, because I realized I was actually _dreading_ the next episode, not anticipating it. I was just waiting for them to have their next unnecessary argument or make their next totally avoidable mistake.
How could man's next great frontier be so ... joyless??
Ark (2005)
Derivative and stilted ... a video game cutscene that goes on way too long.
To understand why Disney animation became so legendary, you just need to look at a single still frame from this movie. Pause the action at any point and take in what you see. It looks fine, doesn't it? The expressions look realistic, the composition looks good... Then, unpause it, and you'll understand: Animation is about movement. It's about taking the physics of our real world and recreating them to convey emotion: Excitement, sadness, urgency, rage.
Pixar understands this; it's why they hired so many classical animators. And even their best efforts only match the standard of what Disney and Warner Brothers produced in their prime. Movies like Ark, on the other hand, make another fact painfully clear: Good animators are hard to find, and modelers and programmers are a poor substitute. In fact, there may not even be any animators alive right now who can convey what the artists at Disney did with only a desk, a pencil, and a stack of loose-leaf paper, though some of the people at Studio Ghibli come close.
So any still frame looks fine. But the movement, the changes of expressions, even the inanimate objects - stilted. And with Ark in particular, the problems are worse. The plot is derivative and stagebound, and the pacing is thrown off kilter by tedious exposition, hammering the plot into your ears just in case your eyes didn't pick it up. Frankly, the backstory conveyed in the opening narration sounds more interesting than the film that follows.
Some animation never enters US theaters because of bad luck - take Akira, for example. Then, there are films like Ark - missing them, you miss nothing.