Reviews

This is a repellent movie. Based on the true story of the trial of Frank Di Norcsio and his court trial, Sidney Lumet tries his hardest to generate sympathy for both Di Norscio and his mobster peers. It's irrelevant that he was found not guilty. The movie tries to create some sense of irony that he was able to successfully defend him pro se in court. At the time the trial ended, he had already served 17.5 years of a 30 year sentence. He was released after serving his full sentence in 2002 and died two years later. Good riddance.

It's baffling to me why Lumet would try to make him a sympathetic character. This was not a good man, and that's made clear throughout the movie. Yes, he adhered to the mob rule that you don't turn rat, but who cares? Does that make a good person? Was he a person of good character?

No, he wasn't, and trying to present him as anything other than a thief, extortionist, drug user and distributer, and murderer is not only disingenuous, but it's gaslighting the audience by trying to whitewash a monster into a guy who just needed a break. The hell with this movie.

Watching this movie was one of the most difficult experiences I've ever had with a film. This is without doubt the bleakest and most depressing film I've ever seen. The was no point, no message, nothing for the viewer take away.

Kaufman went out of his way to make his movie as ugly as possible, yet he didn't bother to give it any emotional payoff or resolution for the viewers at the end to justify its ugliness and nihilism.

I now have a much better understanding of what Kaufman wants to say with his films, which is that he has nothing to say while saying it in the most pretentious way. People think he's a genius because he's so "meta", but that's nothing more than a substitute for having no real ideas for stories about people. Instead, he seems only to have ideas for stories about ideas for stories about people.

Imagine you have conceived a child in 2008 and you and your spouse are awaiting the birth. You watch the child grow for 14 years, then in 2023, the kid says, OK, I'm done, and disappears into mist.

This is the disappointing outcome of the last season of Archer. There is nothing to indicate that things are wrapping up. They even introduced a new character, who contributes to the plots, but ultimately does little to change the dynamics of the central characters.

We are expected to bid farewell to a show and to characters we have watched and came to know (often with much too much information about their degenerate lives), and it ends with the left shoe dropping with no opportunity for the resolution of the other shoe.

This is bad, lazy writing. There should have been SOME resolution, where the agency was shut down, and the characters going their separate ways, possibly with a "where are the gang now", sort of wrap-up.

But there wasn't. It was dropped in our laps like uncooked scrambled eggs. It showed an disgraceful disrespect to the audience who stayed with it, through the ups and downs, despite the narcissistic personalities of the characters.

How does one respond to that? Well, one can't. The best I can do is give this episode, and the entire season, a lackluster review. It's pretty weak, but it befits a show that ended on a weak note.

This episode seems to be written for college freshmen and other know-it-alls. This is even lampshaded in the episode when the professor tells Amy that she sounds like a stoned freshman.

South Park did an episode called "Simpsons Already Did It" to point out how lazy TV shows borrow from better shows. This episode is unmistakably derived from a Rick and Morty story, where it was done better.

When the show gets into pseudo-intellectual philosophy that should be obvious to anyone, everyone acts like its an epiphany, and most likely most of the viewers did so also, which explains the great number of 10 ratings for this episode.

The bad reviews for the previous episode likely stung Netflix, so even though this episode was already in the queue, viewers may have felt like they were being rewarded with another "intelligent" episode for sticking with it. At this point, I'm only watching out of morbid curiosity. I'll never re-watch any episode from this season.

This is by far the worst episode of Futurama so far. It was incoherent, disjointed, failed to provide a reference for the framing device (the delivery to the King of Space) and had all of the characters behaving completely out of character just for the sake of a lame story. The worst part was the handwave at the end with the professor saying it was a "science spell" in the last seconds.

They are now treating their fans like idiots, who have become used to tightly-written scripts with well thought-out plots and clever dialogue, but Hulu got their mitts on it and gave us this.

Like most here, I've been a day-one fan and watched most episodes episodes multiple times because they are so well crafted, they deserve re-watching. This season? Absolute garbage. Lazily written with no regard to the fans who kept up with it for two decades.

This is a shameful way for this series to go out on. This is Matt Groening's property and still has considerable clout to make sure that this could have been the best season to go out on, but he decided to say f--- it all, I got paid, and I can't be bothered any longer.

Adam Carolla raised $1.5 million for this movie, spent a million, and it still looks like a low budget movie. The story is hackneyed and forced, the main character is extremely unlikable, the dialogue is stale and forced, and the nudity is gratuitous. This is a movie made for the fans who forked over movie to Carolla to make this sad, forgettable movie.

Everything is based on Carolla's own experiences or observations. He's clearly jealous of Jimmy Kimmel, once his closest friend who gave him his start as a headliner. Somehow Kimmel has considerable clout in Hollywood, and has always wanted to help his old friend, but Carolla is too stubborn and narcissistic to accept it or move with the times.

The best scene in the movie is with the Kimmel analog, played by Jay Mohr, mildly scolding Bruce (played by Carolla) to "do the work". Bruce rejects it by calling it being his "fluffer".

The entire movie is unpleasant and not funny, despite it being about a stand-up comedian. Carolla's talents are limited, and whining about how life is so hard for him in a 90 minute movie shows that limitation.

I remember the Valley in 1973, and I remember Licorice Pizza, a chain of record stores very popular in the 70s. The visual aspect of Anderson's re-creating the times is fairly accurate, and the deviant behavior that was normal in Los Angeles and the Valley was more or less accurate, but I fail to see why Anderson would think this was appropriate subject matter for a film.

Beginning with his choice of characters, a 15-year old boy and a 25-year old girl, it made me cringe watching those two interact. His casting of Alana Haim was questionable and not a good choice. Not particularly attractive or talented, she often looks more than her 25 years and often wears a smirk. The scene where she exposes herself to the boy was revolting.

Anderson's movies have been getting stranger and stranger and in my opinion more unrelatable to his audience. They are technically well made, but his stories and his characters' motives are nonsensical, particularly in "Phantom Thread". I think this will be the last of Anderson's movies I will watch. This one put me off so much, I don't think I want to watch his previous movies either.