1. My left ankle still suffers from the period of the last winter's similar entry of this kind. 2. That's not even close to the top of my current problems (but tries to climb there...). 3. To conclude, let's keep the reasoning for choosing a "brief version" six months ago, also for this preview round = one piece of incoming title per month. Summer goes first...
Remember "Shaft"? Me neither... Maybe the June re-reboot won't be as forgettable as the last try. Although I have a feeling that the trailer pretty much sums up all you'll get to see there...
There's something about summer and fishy horror movies... sharks, sharknados, piranha 3d, piranha 3dd (I still don't know what that means). Are we in danger to also mix alligators in the "fishy" category? We'll see in July in "Crawl".
"Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" looks like a more solid option for the month of August. At least with the army of writers it seems to have gathered ("The Collector" movies, a part of the "Saw" series, "The Lego Movie") + Guillermo del Toro. Or maybe the piano cover mixing of "Somewhere over the Rainbow" in the trailer was too cool to resist :) ...
I wasn't planning for writing something on "Game of Thrones" (I generally avoid series - it's just too complicated). Still, the latest episode in the final season provided such a good opportunity for a quick entry that I can't miss it :) And since what I'm watching lately is mostly TWD or old Hong Kong stuff after midnight as a zolpidem replacement for falling asleep, I'm not seeing any better option coming this week. So... Disclaimer: this is not a series review - no intro, no story summary, it's just an opinion on the current status of season 8 ( very soon to be obsolete :) ).
It seems that the current, last GoT season managed to gather some "hate", culminating with "The Bells" = the episode when Daenerys, the mother of dragons, just snaps, and decides to slaughter all life in King's Landing. Stuff that's apparently so outrageous, and to which we also add some collateral disappointment, to lower GoT in IMDb Top Rated TV Shows from 2 to 4, with ratings around an average 6 for the unfortunate episode compared to ~9.5 for all time, and accompanied by plenty of websites claiming that the script is a lousy mess.
Let's make it brief and efficient: The writing is not that bad, it's just lazy... Let's just take as granted the producer's decision to end it in 6 episodes (honestly I think even less was possible - there's plenty of artificial filling also in these 6). Not having more material, it's again something that's on the side of "lazy writing". But why isn't that bad... Taking just three points: a) the Hound vs the Mountain; b) Cersei and Jaime vs the bricks; c) Daenerys vs Daenerys (let's keep the best for the last :P).
a) the Hound vs the Mountain - There was a long expected clash between the two (long enough to get its own name: Cleganebowl), and probably it was frustrating to not have it. The issues here seems to come from two sides: the context of a confrontation and the fact that both die. For the first, maybe there would've been indeed better to link the fight to a more serious motivation than just a simple clash to the death - there were speculations for a "trial by combat" as we've seen in the past (from this perspective - the Mountain vs the Viper sticks to probably the most remarkable 1vs1 of GoT). For the second part though: 1) what future could have had the Hound after? everything is about revenge and as bad as that is it's accepted consciously by the character - at least that's what we get from the short dialogue with Arya, and 2) as a nuance you have the choice of jump into fire as a last step for somebody with a fear of fire - not that bad writing ;)
b) Cersei and Jaime vs the bricks - It seems that somewhere in the novels we have a prophecy telling that the last woman of the Lannisters dies by the hand of a smaller brother, a reason for complaining on why Jamie's job was done by the bricks. 1) Maybe I'm wrong, but we actually don't have this particular prophecy in the series, so it had all the right to not fulfill. 2) However, we do have this ending in the series. Really. Maybe it's too subtle to be obvious. Who leads Cersei to a dead end ( pun intended :) ) ? I find this actually very good writing (what would spoil it would be to see both of them surviving somehow... we've just seen falling bricks there, right?)
c) Daenerys vs Daenerys - It's obvious the intention of producers for a shift from a positive to a villainous character from the moment when the mother of dragons finds about another living Targaryen, and doesn't seem to give up on her claim for the throne, but to try securing it even more. So, it was sort of predictable. How can you make a transition to evil/mad character in just 2-3 episodes, in a convincing manner? The fact that the burning carnage had such an impact to the public and generated so much "hate" looks to me like a great success for the "convincing" part. So again: good writing :) (the transition being too fast... well: lazy - but I said, we take as granted the 6 episodes length).
What's left? We'll see in a couple of days but the most predictable seems the theory of only one Targaryen left, and his name is not Daenerys. Just that she dying from somebody else's sword would seem to me a bit anti-climactic in the ending. Spoilers for what I don't know yet :)) : My bet, is that in the last episode, she will be given a final sane moment to redeem herself. Maybe something like a final "Dracarys", face to face with her own dragon ;)
My first reaction after about 15 minutes of "The Negotiation" was a sort of deja vu of "The Negotiator", a movie that was released 20 years ago (damn, I'm getting old...). Deja vu that got even more intense after about 30 more minutes. It's not exactly the same story, but we have plenty of common elements. Let's get back though to minute 0...
The movie begins with a female negotiator of the Korean police who interrupts her day off to solve an incident with two hostages. Fail. We continue not longer after, when the same negotiator is summoned from her vacation where she was sent after trying to quit the job. A Korean arms dealer helds hostage a small group of people somewhere in Thailand apparently, and asks precisely for her presence to carry the discussions via a video stream. The negotiation doesn't really progress well, but I won't spoil much. What I can say, is that the situation escalates to a higher and higher level, and we soon find out that the guy doesn't want money. His immediate scope seems to get high positioned people in front of the camera and compromise them in from of the rest of the police involved in the action.
Unfortunately, the description above might sound a bit more promising than the movie goes. It's not a bad one, but it's predictable. Moreover, up to some point I really had the impression that the actress playing the lead female role, doesn't really do a good job. Up to some point = when even her opponent describes her as a weak negotiation, too emotional and a bad liar = maybe that explains the acting... I don't remember much of "The Negotiator" of 20 years ago, but the last time I've watched that it definitely created a better impression than what we have here on a topic that is quite similar. And somehow unexpected, from the vague memories I keep on that, I think it was maybe more... dramatic and gritty let's say than this one, stuff that's typically reversed in a Hollywood vs. Asian cinema comparison. But well, there are exceptions...
I should've picked "Shazam!"... Well, not that I really had a choice, just sayin'. I didn't watch any "Avengers" in cinema up to "Endgame". The first was ok-ish, but didn't impress me much, and "Age of Ultron" was... let's just skip it. The surprise arrived with "Infinity War", which finally had a narrative that was actually good, and a bit more complex than what could a 15 year old screenwriter do in a PlayStation break. So, with high hopes, although I was convinced that this is over-hyped, I decided to give it a chance. Call me hater, but it's a worthy candidate to the most wasted 3 hours of my life for this month, even though we're at the beginning.
You know that after "Infinity War" what follows is a "time travel" movie, so that's not a spoiler. You know that the lost team will be back in the end, so no spoilers there. You know that you'll also have Captain Marvel to save the day in the end (well, sort of), so again, no spoile. You know that the finale will have a big battle, where we finally get rid of Thanos and all his kind, so I'm really not spoiling anything. What you don't know is that the reasoning for time travel in "Avengers" is "smarter" than in all Hollywood's history (I'm not the one claiming it), because we're not going back in time to change history - that will wreck the law of physics, and destroy our present. We just need to gather those 6-7 stones in the past, bring them to the present time, make an "undo" for the missing people, and move them back into the past exactly where we took them from - no harm done (they say...). I'm too lazy to start arguing why it would be pretty much the same thing with that bad classic version of time travel. But let's get over this... Let's also get over the finale of "Doctor Strange" (some of the few MCU movies that I really found to be good) where everybody was aware that a stone is called "the time stone" and used it precisely for its time powers. Let's also get over building a time machine, just to realize towards the end of the movie that the one in an abandoned mini-van is perfectly usable (although we don't really use that in the end). Let's also get over the effect of "erasing people" of the magic glove, which one time is random wrt who's spread into dust a la the undeads in GoT (at least that's what we see in the end of "Infinity War"), and one time is not random anymore (at least that's what we see in the end of "Endgame"). And we can also get over other stuff, but I have better things to do than add more to "you're really a hater" :P
It's not a secret for who's bothered to check some stuff on this blog that I'm not a Marvel fan, and generally I don't like superhero movies. There are exceptions. I mentioned one before. Guardians of Galaxy is another example, and actually a decently sized part of the DC Comics universe before getting "Marvelized", which happens lately. I'm not gonna give spoilers on for whom "Endgame" seems to be really the end - that's indeed some of the few unpredictable parts, but I have doubts that Marvel will give up on making money out of the characters that end their story here. It seems to me like a continuous money making machine using thinner and thinner story lines. Again, we have an excessive amount of CGI - somebody should tell Hollywood that 1 minute of VFX in a movie with no VFX is more effective than 30 minutes of continuous VFX - who's still impressed of how fine are rendered the shrapnel particles at the n-th explosion; your brain is effectively saturated at that point to react to this anymore. We also have tearjerking finale (quote from Tony Stark), way too long, which probably appeals to people residing in geographical areas that have less stress in daily life. I've never referred to the cinema public before in a post, but I've read somewhere that in Netherlands there were applause and tears. Around here... let's just say that I wasn't the only one often checking my watch in the last half an hour of the movie. The part that maybe saves what we have here for becoming completely forgettable (really, try in a couple years to describe the action in "Endgame" - I'm curious for how many that would take more than 3 minutes; do a test with "Age of Ultron" now), is the comic side. Indeed, the jokes and all this part are ok, and help a lot on getting through this. The rest... again, call me hater, but I've seen enough movies in my life to place the new top 10 IMDb entry, below my first 30%.
Rating: 3 out of 5 (objectively... if I would be subjective... not even 20 infinity stones could save what we have here)
Posts
