Reviews
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
awful, on many levels
I only give this thing any stars for the visuals, which in many cases were pretty good, although so many people saying "stunning" is surprising to me. Even when good, they often are recreations of images from the anime which lose all impact because they don't mesh with the new plot. Ah, the plot: such as it is, is lame and shallow and doesn't even attempt to address any of the questions that GITS was all about. The anime movie took a chapter of the manga and expanded it a little to make a coherent story. This flick took the core idea of Robocop and dressed it up as GITS. Awful. Was Scarlett miscast? Well, she's a white actor playing the part of a Japanese woman. And she doesn't seem to make any effort to behave like a Japanese woman. She does seem to try and behave like a robot, which is pretty much the opposite of what GITS was saying, and is symptomatic of the complete lack of understanding of the source material displayed by the script, the director, and herself. Maybe she shouldn't have watched Robocop. If you know nothing about GITS, maybe you can watch this movie and see a second-rate sci-fi flick with some good visuals. If you know anything about GITS, this is a mockery.
Dr. Simon Locke (1971)
formula, but
I watched this show in England in the seventies, and actually preferred it to many of the other American series of the period that were treated much less harshly by the critics. It was formulaic, so I was puzzled why I felt that way. Eventually I decided it was because it was only 30 -minute episodes. Most of the hour-format series seemed to take 30- minute plots and stretch them to approach an hour, so that copious commercial breaks wouldn't hurt. Taking an exactly similar plot and pacing it for 30 minutes (showing in England, without the monstrous commercial breaks) was better.