Reviews

Initially, I was hooked. Shadow and bone has a promising setting: late 19th century technology with magic on top. You get a lot of lore thrown at you and hardly any explanation, but, hey; I am okay with that. They explain things later, right? Well, perhaps or.. perhaps not.

Unfortunately, they slit their wrists by using happenstance, contradictions and cliches to tell the story. And they add insult to injury by introducing new characters, while they haven't established old ones. Less is more? Just throw that under the bus.

The writers are the culprits. They organized the story around cool moments. And then they had to connect them. And there is where it goes wrong.

A key moment is when Alina's powers are revealed. She is on a ship that is trying to cross this mysterious fold, a rift filled with monsters. The ship is open, and the crew exposed. Then flying monster's attack and this crisis invokes her powers.

The problem here is that the people know obviously that this attack can happen, but did not take any precaution against it, like roofing over the ship or putting most of the crew under decks. Or use a better transport. And a few episodes later a better transport exists: the conductor uses a metal train as transport the Crows across the fold. A train he apparently has built by himself, including laying tracks through that dangerous fold.

And here we see the writers at work. They first needed a cool moment to reveal Alina's powers, then another to carry the Crows across. And thus they create an inconsistent world: open, vulnerable transport versus protected one. If the latter is possible, it makes no sense to use the first. Unless you need it for the story.

The story is rife with these inconsistencies. Is the fold impassible? Well, no, because apparently entire armies cross it to fight each other. And people seem to go back and forth all the time. Or do they? Too dangerous, just perilous, or merely a challenge? Decide, please?

Enemies teleport in whenever and wherever. Alina's party gets ambushed soon after her powers are revealed. They give a flimsy excuse: someone must have noticed her powers. Really? Because they saw her powers from afar? But even that is inconsistent. The people at the edge of the fold didn't see her powers, but the enemy did? And then quickly concluded what she is, who she is, where she is and where she is going? I mean, even the General was skeptical, but they knew for sure? It makes no sense.

Alina's persona is also inconsistent. We get introduced to her as a bright, determined and inventive person. Then a few episodes later her character flips. She becomes a whiny, annoying and docile person. And not to mention she killed her fellow cartographers, but this hardly seems to bother her. Instead, she wines on and on about how hard her life is and about Mal, her friend from the orphanage.

And Mal, the male protagonist, suffers too. He somehow became an expert tracker and an expert boxer between the orphanage and the army? How? When? Please explain? But no.

This sort of writing is insufferable. You just make it up as you go along. They brush aside rules that are established at one moment, the next moment. The conductor tells the Crows not to move because it will throw the train from its course. One does and nothing happens. Baghra, her trainer, throws Alina out and tells her to come back when she believes in herself. Do we see that happen? No. Does she train Alina anyway? Yes!

Is this worth your time? Well, perhaps. If you don't care about consistency and relatable characters? I guess you give it a ten. Hilarious.

I have given this movie a three out of ten not because it is a bad movie, in fact it isn't. The acting is great. The story, although sad, is decent enough and the setting, although dominated by drab grey is okay, if not a little dull. You can say that while it isn't a master piece, it is an okay movie.

So why the low score? This is because the movie infuriated me.

Let me explain(spoilers ahead).

Contrary to what you might think the central character in this story is not Rachel Weisz although the story is told from her perspective. In fact it is Rachel McAdams. She is married to Alessandro Nivola and they are part of a orthodox Jewish community. In fact he is a Rabbi. The three of them used to be friends until Weisz left one day for New York. The movie kicks off when Weisz decides to return after hearing that her father has died.

The center theme in this movie is duty versus freedom and this is expressed quite bluntly at some point when McAdams asks her husband to set her free and tells him that she is pregnant and does not want her child to grow up in a world that left her no choice. Another blunt moment is when Nivola makes a speech about duty near the end of the movie.

The movie is quite blunt in other things too. For instance, Weisz finds out that almost nobody wanted her to come back and this is pointed out by a newspaper article that says that her father died childless and when she hears her father left her nothing in his will. Her existence is not merely denied: she doesn't exist. There is more. When she enters her father's house together with McAdams the song Lovesong by The Cure is played and specifically these lines: Whenever I'm alone with you make me feel like I am home again. But even more! Prior to Weisz leaving New York we get an unloving short sex scene between her and a man that is contrasted against the drawn out sex scene between Weisz and McAdams later in the movie. In fact any sex that is mentioned with a man is made out to be obligatory and loveless.

During the movie we get a few things revealed. The two women had a love relation, something that is and was unacceptable in the community. Nivola and McAdams married because he wanted to help her get over 'it' and she was told that she was not right in her head(this is literal from the movie). We also get told that McAdams was the one who informed Weisz about the death of her father and that she did it deliberately to get Weisz to come back. The two girls always were attracted to women, but they never did anything with it, not even Weisz who had broken with the shackles of her past. In fact we are told that she never met anyone and apparently engaged in quickies with men.

Essentially the movie is because McAdams informed Weisz about her fathers death. This made the latter come over from the US and this is what McAdams wanted. You would then expect that this would result in something but this is not what happens. In fact McAdams is almost unseen in the first part of the movie and the two girls hardly respond to each other. And then suddenly about a third in they hit it off which cumulates into a long sex scene about halfway in. Then the movie see-saws as McAdams cannot make up her mind and Weisz not doing much more than trying to flee. Eventually this leads to the moment where McAdams asks her freedom from Nivola. Which then is totally undone when Nivola makes a speech in the Synagogue that comes down to: duty is important.

Weisz doesn't have any kind of character arc. She is the same as when the movie started and her trick is to flee. But fleeing has gained her nothing. She is a lonely figure who has quick sex with men whom she doesn't love and she has no family and probably dies a lonely death. She has become nothing.

McAdams has a character arc of sorts but it is only to make her end up where she started. McAdams might not have found love but she had found her role in life: that of being the mother of her child and the wife of her husband. She has become something.

What infuriates me is that the whole movie is aimed at rubbing this is by leaving no alternatives. The whole 'lesbian' affaire is there to contrast the two women and the whole story railroads them to an outcome.

But what takes the cake is near the end. Weisz drives of in a taxi, but McAdams runs after her. They kiss passionately and then nothing happens. Yeah, they wanted to make sure you go the message.

I like the Mandalorian as concept and as a character, but this episode feels weak. Overall, the camera work is amazing and they went all out on the visuals. I really enjoyed that.

But the writing leaves me baffled.

So the Mandalorian wants to bring little Yoda back to his own people.

This seems like an okay drive to get the story going.

Next he wants to find another of his kind 'for guidance'. I don't quite understand why another Mandalorian might help, but fair enough, let's go with it.

Then he hears from an informant there is a Mandalorian on Tatooine.

Okay.. so he goes there.

Turns out it isn't one, but some dude who used the armor to make himself marshal of the town.

Okay, valid enough.

Then the Mandalorian orders him to hand over the armor.

At that precise moment a huge sandworm comes into town(for some reason it also bring with it a powerful wind) and gobbles up a bantha.

What a coincidence...

Next something happens that leaves me baffled.

The marshal offers the Mandalorian a 'deal'. Help kill the sandworm in exchange for the armor.

Wait, what?

Why?

Why would the Mandalorian make a deal? He can just gun the marshal down, take his armor and leave?

At this point the writers should have add another reason for the Mandalorian to agree to this deal. Perhaps the whole town is up in arms against him. So he has to kill a lot of innocent people. Or they have the whole place rigged with explosives to make a point(the explosives come back later in play when facing the sandworm). The marshal needs the armor for x, but once x is gone he wouldn't need it.

It feels like in the first writings of the script, the armor the marshal was wearing would fend of the sand people. It feels like that wasn't going anywhere so they introduced a sandworm. So now the sand people wouldn't be the enemy but savage natives that have a common cause with the inhabitants of the town. But that doesn't make sense either as the sand people are nomadic raiders. So why would they care about a sandworm that lives in a cave at a particular place?

It would make sense if the monster had some religious significance. And it actually seems they were going for that in the images. But somehow this got lost during the telling.

It would have made more sense is there was a kind of character that spoke for the sand people. Someone that would be able to link the fate of the sand people to the fate of the sand worm. It misses that kind of character.

Still I liked the episode, but as some other people say. It lacks good characters next to the mandalorian. The only other 'person' is the marshal and he just doesn't feel like a genuine character. It seems like most of the budget went to other things then good characters.

And Voyager takes a nose dive again as the series fails to maintain its otherwise relentless mediocre course and plunges towards the atrocious in an episode that should have been named: and there be spiders..

Harry Kim gets to be made the main star which is almost worst then making Neelix the main star. Boring vs Annoying. Oh, the choice. Kim gets into danger as spiders in the shape of women lure him down to get eaten for his genes. Do I care? No. Remind me what makes Kim stand out again? He likes to play music? And? Well, he likes to play music. Anything else? No.. not really.

Anyway.. some kind of race greets Voyager with powered down weapons and lowered shields, but they are arming their weapons in secret without Voyager knowing, except for Kim. Fire away he shouts. Nice that Voyager can or cannot detect this depending on what is needed for the moment. This level of bad writing, being super inconsistent, now even occurs in one episode. The bla bla buffers can detect a virus and cannot detect it. The computer cannot detect alien DNA and can detect it five minutes later. Oh, who cares.

That alien DNA turns Kim into spider fodder in a desperate attempt to make him interesting. It fails. He is left behind on a planet on which 90 percent of the populace is women. Nubile women, so those women tell Kim. This means then that ten percent men, I assume, hasn't been devoured yet? Anyway these spi.. women tell him he is actually an alien of their kind who returns home. Except he is male.. And they will eat him. Well, they didn't tell him that. They told him: You're home Kim.. and strangely enough turning into an alien does give you spots, but does not make you interesting. From that moment on every time someone talked about these women I mentally substituted women with spiders. And i didn't even knew they were going to eat him.. It was just obvious they would.

In the mean time that species that got shot at by Voyager - thanks to Kim - is contacted by Voyager to ask them: why did intend to fire on us while pretending not to so we had to fire on you, so you could totally wreck Voyager when you finally did fire at us? Cause we hate that other species! Why? Cause we do. And anyone having one of their species on board will be shot at. For no reason at all. Even if you would have superior firepower! Which Voyager never has, because the weapon systems are always the first to go offline in a battle. For no reason you attack us but because you do not like those women. Because.. well why? Maybe to leave the viewer guessing? So Voyager returns to the spider planet after having squandered the time on nothing. But this was just so they could find out that those spi.. women erected an impenetrable force-field around the whole planet to keep Kim in and Voyager out. Except that it is penetrable if you just plunge Voyager through some holes you made by modulating the shield or bi-polarize the emitters. Or inject a plasma stream into the warpcore. Oh man.. so many words that you can combine. In the meantime a spi.. women ship is then on an intercept course so Janeway can shout: Battle Stations. What does that mean anyway? Everyone is already behind the consoles they sit behind during the explosion scenes. Why shout this pointless line? Cause it sounds cool. Like shield down to whatever percent. Or establishing the cause of things after it has been revealed. We are being fired upon. Oh is that what cause the shaking of the ship and the lowering of the shield.

Anyway Kim.. finds out the spi.. are women.. or was it the other way around? He flees..Comes in one of the most silly pole fights ever and show he has nothing to his credit but playing music. The spi.. women start to prepare him but he gets saved. Oh my, wow that was exciting. They saved him.. Who? Kim? The music player? Yes, him. Say,... whenever did we see him play music?

Anyway Voyager flies off with the spidership hot on their tail when that other species makes in an appearance.. cause you know.. Script. And while earlier into the episode that spider ship knocked out those other ships with one shot, now they can't. Cause script.

At the end Kim tells about the Sirens... if you missed the reference.. we just grab your head and smash you in a full bowl of the painful obvious.

Oh and he says: there was something exciting about having a new identity.

Yeah,, maybe you make for a more interesting character being a meal for spiders.

The most curious thing about this episode is that if Belenna had been in it she would have reversed the plasma stream through the gravitational nodes and then enriched it with antimatter and injected into the teleporter stream to create a window through the electrostatic storm surrounding the moon. Then they would have teleported Tuvok and the kids out of their without issues. Pity Janeway and Kim didn't think of that one.

So now we have to deal with the story.

When rewatching old Star Trek series on Netflix you get to meet the good, the bad, the truly remarkable and the astonishing atrocious. That one episiode can have it all is possibly shown by Innocence.

First the good: Tuvok played by Tim Russ. I find him a believable Vulcan. Tuvok has crashed on some kind of moon where a group of children have been stranded too. We see him interact with these children, thus confronting him with the unruly and emotional. We learn a bit about the Vulcans and how they learn to control their emotions and become logical.

Now to continue I would have to reveal the clue of the episode, there is no other way. The clue is that the species the Voyager meets this time has a reversed aging process. Now this isn't revealed until the very end. In fact this is truly bad because the whole confrontation and what happens in the episode would not have occured if the leader of the species had told Janeway the moment tensions arose.

Now one can argue that they only became aware that the Voyager crew has a reversed aging process as compared to themselves near the end but we never see them go though these motions. In fact: it is just mentioned before at the final confrontation. Oh, they don't know we have a reversed aging process; the kid is 96 years old. Note the sentense? We have a reversed one. This assumes they accept that the norm is different from theirs. But how would a species that deliberately isolates itselfs, so we are informed, assume or know that they are abnormal?

But then we run into various problems. Does this reverse process also entail that they forget everything they learned? The kids act as kids do and show the usual neglect of experience and understanding. In fact they don't even know they come to die because they tell Tuvok that it is a monster who takes them away and the others of their kind are out to kill them. And when Tuvok goes to investigate he finds only the clothes of the kids in the cave they are too afraid to go into. Why did they go into a cave with a monster they feared? So where did the bodies go? I cannot but feel that there is none as to prevent Tuvok from discovering the bodies so he can determine they died of a natural process and not by the hand of a monster. But given the way the clothes are arranged this must have given him that clue anyway. They did not die a violent death.

What is truly bad about this series is that you see them try to make this tale work by bending everything out of shape. How truly convenient to the story that nobody was there to explain things to Tuvok. How interesting that there is apparently no guidance or buildings or anything to make the dying more convenient for the kids and tip Tuvok off? Why is it called dying anyway? How convenient that there is a storm around the moon that prevents everything from communications, teleporting to shuttle craft landing. And no Belanna tweaking the teleporter to teleport them out or in.

The whole episode can only work if the story if things conveniently happen. Too much things. And this is why the episode truly is atrocious, despite an interesting premise and the acting.

Convinced there is something out there?

Don Meers, the director of this documentary, is at the end. But will you be? And has he reason to?

Australian Skies sees Don Meers, an Australian director, make a trip with one Damien John Nott to Glass Mountains, a hilly location about 30 kilometer above Brisbane. Make a note of that. Nott claims that he sees unexplained phenomena on a daily basis. And he is not alone, others see them as well for Nott is an UFO magnet.

Meers states that it his aim to understand what people like Nott are witnessing, to explain these objects and to see an object himself. Meers method seems to be to fill the bulk of the movie with interviews, of which the one with Nott takes the biggest slice of the cake. We hear Nott making claims in the order of seeing hundreds of unknown objects, having hundreds of witnesses, photos and movies to boot.

This claim must of necessity lead to a selection of movies in which these strange phenomena are shown. And given the claim, one would expect the best of the crop. The ultimate irrefutable footage. And what do we get? We get a small sampling of crappy pixelated clips made with cameras flipping all over the place. Here is a man with hundreds of photos(he actually claims thousands) and lots of footage, but the documentary cannot give anything that is crystal clear. Nor is all of this evidence show examined in anyway. It is just shown. An ironical smile came to me when Nott at some point told how youtube was swarming with fake movies. You mean those movies that are purposely badly made as to hide that they are fake? If your movies are not like that, why do they appear to look exactly like them?

To add some more weight to the documentary Meers goes with Nott on a field trip in the hopes to get confronted by one of those many objects that seem to dodge the heels of Nott. It results in a wake at night for reasons unexplained. Strange objects only come out at night? Are they more visible at night? The crew and certain others stand around pointing at the black sky stating how they see this or that and instead of pointing the professional camera at the indicated objects(one claim: this cannot be seen by the naked eye!) Meers does nothing but instead uses the crappy footage that the others make with their swaying handhelds. Hello?

The remaining part of the movie splits in two parts. One in which the documentary tries to examine(or rather disprove) that the strange objects are drones, the other can best be collected with one term: conspiracy theories. As to the drones, the crew come to the conclusion that it cannot possibly be drones and, in a beautiful dichotomy, concludes that if it cannot be drones then it must be UFOs. Oh by the way, it cannot be planes either, because there are hardly any planes there. Oh aren't there? So let's see what are the busiest airports in Australia? Hmmm... Brisbane is number three of all Australian airports. Would that not amount to a lot of planes?

And then it inevitably comes down to conspiracy theories. If there is something of a litmus test for claims that can be dismissed to the dustbin then it must be the claim that there is some kind of conspiracy behind it all. With great irony Nott makes the claim that it would be odd for the government to send out a soundless drone over populated areas(why not?) and then later into the documentary he has no problem claiming that the government has a helicopter hovering over his house for 45 minutes. And more of this, strange men or the government is on to us. Now any documentary maker worth his metal would at this point have asked the question. Why would they?

And there lies the central weakness of the documentary. Remember that Meers wanted to understand what happened to Nott(and others), what these objects are and be confronted with one himself. Next to the question, are there even objects(this goes without saying apparently) Meers doesn't even try to be critical. He lets Nott talk on end in the documentary, but Meers never poses one critical question. Nor does he consult others outside the circle of ufo adaptees. Meers hands the UFO people a platform and uncritically allows them free reign to spout their claims without any critical opposition. I think that this is called: playing tennis without the net.

My take is that Meers wasn't convinced by what occurred during the making of the movie, he was already convinced when he started to make it. And this makes him biased and the documentary useless. This is documentary is preaching to the choir, it is utter pointless to convince anyone with a critical mind.

What is real has always been a kind of challenging idea for people who mix their drinks with navel staring so why not make an episode out of it? So the good doctor and hangers-on get their shot and half-baked philosophy. Let's follow in the footsteps of Plato and swallow the blue or the red pill, shall we?

The story is about figuring out what is the real world and what is not. For you have to kill yourself in the fake world to keep existing in the real world. Oh and if you don't, something else or someone else will.

The initial victory goes to Amy, who makes the first right choice. But the doctor would not be the doctor if he hasn't got the final say. And so his choice is the final right one. Or is it. Writing is easy if you are not bound by anything. You can just make stuff up as you go and teleport people, creatures, and things around so they can appear when and where you need them. Again this results in utter nonsense, which is good for a laugh. Or more a tired smile.

Amy(and her hubby) gets into danger, of course, but she gets saved. Oh wait, is that a spoiler? Come off it. I don't really care what happens to her. Lucky her hubby is there. I care even less for him.

Fifteen stars go to Toby Jones as Dream Lord. Fifteen duds go to older people being evil creatures. Okay. Ten. It has some initial funniness.

Another lukewarm episode.

By the way, driving with a Volkswagen Minivan into a house is possibly the worst form of suicide. If you want to die, why not let the evil creatures you just tried to escape from do their thing? Just saying.