Reviews

The things this show gets right it does amazingly well, but the things it drops the ball on it fails big time. The Punisher suffers from the same problem as Luke Cage and Iron Fist in that it takes a plot that should be resolved in a couple of episodes and stretches it out over a full season. Not a good idea.

Bernthal is absolutely amazing in this, and his supporting cast is likewise excellent. It's just really hard to rate this higher when the story feels so dragged out.

So I'll make this really brief to avoid spoilers:

1st Season is a 10. 2nd Season is an 8. 3rd Season is a 5.

The first season of Jessica Jones is an absolute must watch, you should stick around for season 2, and there are parts of season 3 that made me want to nail my hand to my desk. Bad pacing and lazy writing, I would love to see an edit of those episodes where all the Horvath scenes were cut out.

Anyway, this is a unique show that crackles with potential that was not lived up to in the later seasons.

I'm not going to spend too much time on this review as the show is just not really worth the effort. Iron Fist suffers from the same problem as Luck Cage, a three-episode arc that is stretched over a full season. The writing is bland, the acting is passable but uninspired, and it's just not a memorable experience.

Again, I'd say more but I kind of feel like that's enough.

The whole vampire apocalypse atmosphere is pretty decent. This show reminds me of a mix between The Walking Dead and The Strain, albeit with a smaller budget. I've watched most of the former and tiny bits of the latter, and while Van Helsing seems heavily influenced by similar shows, it does manage to stand on its own.

I really wanted to rate Van Helsing higher but there are a few too many cringey moments in it, mostly related to the vampires. More often than not they come across as comically over the top, with a very few notable exceptions. There are a lot of bad animal noises and weird gesticulations, snarling and growling, it just doesn't work for me. Some of this IS explained by the story, but the saner vampires are just really boring. There is very little to make them memorable, again with a few notable exceptions. Dimitri, for example, is a wasted character; no gravitas, no charisma, not convincing at all.

There are so many cliches it's almost like the show runners had a checklist.

That being said, Van Helsing DOES have redeeming features. While the vampires are incredibly campy, the survivors are much more earnest and well-acted. Overton, Scarfe and Heyerdahl in particular are outstanding. There are others but I don't want to risk spoilers buy singling them out. Suffice to say that I felt their performances more than make up for the bad vampire acting choices.

The writing is also surprisingly decent, especially the pacing. Where The Walking Dead spent an entire season on that stupid farm, that kind of situation in Van Helsing would be resolved in one or two episodes. The show runners may make the vampires dumb and campy, but they keep the plot moving at a good pace and I never felt bored or annoyed with the characters like I did in The Walking Dead. There are definitely characters that I dislike but the show still treats them well, and I felt like they were all well developed.

So in the end I would definitely recommend this show if you're into this kind of thing. It does a few things very well and the rest is passable.

It's the end of the world and all you have to protect you is Eric Balfour's impressively massive chin.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

This is a movie where the actors earn some credit for doing the best they can with a horrible script, but most of them are pretty crappy anyway. Granted this is an alien invasion movie so I guess we're not supposed to have high expectations when comes to the quality of the writing, but how low should our expectations be?

I don't really have much else to say, and the effort I've put into this review is of markedly higher quality that the effort the which was put into writing Skyline.

This documentary is a great look at the effects of working in the porn industry , but you do need to take some of what is said with a certain amount of salt.

Shelley Lubben, for example, is clearly unhinged and almost everything that she says in this (and in interviews in other places) is at best a distortion of the truth. She was severely mentally ill and worked as a prostitute for several years before working in porn, but somehow the porn industry ruined her life. Yeah...

Anyway, it's a great look at the industry, and one thing that really stuck with me is that it's difficult to tell in some cases whether or not the person was damaged by the industry or if they were already carrying scars from earlier events in their lives.

The movie begins strong and was legitimately creepy, but once the weirdness kicks in it starts to fall apart.

The biggest problem with The Bye Bye Man (besides the absurd title) are the uneven performances from Douglas Smith and Cressida Bonas. While Smith is somewhat reliable in this role but he delves into hammy waters often enough that it becomes hard to take him seriously. Bonas, on the other hand, is almost never believable and her delivery is almost universally terrible. It makes me wonder how a director can watch a performance as bad as hers and consider it to be acceptable.

This is particularly jarring when compared to the performances of Lucien Laviscount and Jenna Kanell. Kanell's part is comparatively smaller than Bonas's, but the quality of her acting is so markedly better that one cannot help bu think their roles should have been switched. Laviscount seems to be a reliably effective actor, conveying genuine emotions where Smith is more hit or miss. The discrepancy between the male actors is not quite as pronounced,, however.

The movie also should have been a bit longer. They characters seem to jump to conclusions not based on their experience within the film, but rather because the plot demands it. Better writing would have helped as well.

In the end we have a mediocre horror film that occasionally shows what could have been if only a few small changes had been made.

I made the title just to save the time of anyone who looked at the score and was like "are there naked people in this?" Well, there's your answer.

Don't get me wrong, that doesn't affect the score; I've watched porn videos that were better written, so that wouldn't really have done them any good here, but I kind of feel that movies like this usually have naked people in it, so I guess they subverted expectations? Yay? I don't know kids; the Kaptain is off his meds at the moment so maybe take this review with more than the usual dosage of salt.

Anyway, this movie is wacky as heck. I watched it in English and for some reason it felt like a nutty anime, really goofy vibes coupled with badly dubbed audio. This produced some unintentional humor, so it is maybe worth a look for that.

So I want to add that Manon Azem is my new waifu. I am totally smitten with her, that curly hair and those green eyes...MMM. I will move to France, learn French, do whatever it takes to win her heart. YOU CAN'T STOP OUR LOVE!

Sorry, off my meds. ANYWAY!

All the actors are decent enough in this, the script is just so bananas that you really can't take it seriously, which is really why this is worth a 4. It's a great movie to watch with very low expectations. There were some genuine laughs to be had, and today was a weird, unmedicated kind of day for me, and I really needed this.

There is one creepy guy who is the leader of the baddies who for some reason reminded me of a demented John Malkovich, and I couldn't stop laughing at him. I think this was intentional. I couldn't think of a way to make this sentence fit with the other stuff I wrote about the actors so it gets its own paragraph thing.

I have no idea how to end this so I'm just going to stop.

This is a filler episode. It has about 5 minutes of new material, the rest is clips from earlier episodes. I genuinely don't understand why show runners think this kind of thing is ok, it's a total waste of time, if I'm ever president the first thing I'm going to do is outlaw this kind of episode with an executive order.

Seriously, you can skip this episode and not miss anything at all.

The movie is not the worst horror film I've ever seen, but it's still pretty bad. The story had potential but is hampered by horrible acting. There isn't much to say about this movie and the only reason I'm bothering to write anything at all is because most of other the reviews for it are fake.

If you click on the name of the user who wrote the 7, 8, 9 and 10 star reviews you will see that almost all of them have been users for less than 6 months, and many have given high ratings to the same 10 or so films.

The opening credits are probably the best thing about this, to be honest. They hint at a story that is more interesting that what is actually delivered. There are some interesting moment scattered throughout and a couple of times it was pretty creepy, but these moments were ruined by inconsistent performances. Speaking of which...

Kate Rose Reynolds, whose character is introduced as being a "dark Wiccan" *CRINGE*, is actually a decent actress. She plays a creepy part pretty well, and I would watch another movie with her in it just to see how she does.

Aurora Heimbach and Sandra Mae Frank play twins, and both are bland enough to be interchangeable, except that Sandra Mae Frank is deaf. I DO like the way that they worked sign language into the film, and the moments where we viewed a situation from Frank's perspective were effective. Otherwise they both deliver decent performances; I don't hold this movie against them, but I'm not in a hurry to see anything else they might do.

The male actors...whoooo boy. They need to not be actors. They need to go on a walking tour of the continental US, along with the writers and directors, apologizing for, well, being themselves. Especially Craig Fogel and Derek Long. Those two are just the worst.

Anyway, I wouldn't have gone into all of this were it not for the fake reviews someone either made alt accounts for (or paid someone else for). Balance in all things.

The idea of tackling misguided nostalgia is a great one, but the execution of this episode is TERRIBLE. The duo's humor can be hit or miss, and this episode is a great example of how big they can miss.

They do this shtick where they comment as exaggerated, stereotypical characters from the 80s, the 50s, and the renaissance, sarcastically mocking the notion that things were better in those respective eras, but what should have been a one-off joke runs the length of the whole episode.

It is not funny at all.

The reason that the show works in general, when it does, is that they use humor to tackle difficult subjects and challenge conventional ideas. This subject of this episode is a very interesting one, but they really messed up the delivery. It was VERY hard to finish the episode.

While there are some really good performances in this, but the film tries too hard to evoke an emotional response; with its meandering story and ridiculously heavy handed sound track, it doesn't so much telegraph it's punches as it draws out instructions for how the audience should feel during every scene.

I'm really surprised that something this bad came from Peter Jackson.

Title says it all. She's really not very funny. I'd rather listen to Fran Drescher read War an Peace in her Nanny voice for 90 minutes than watch anything with Peretti in it after watching this special.

...and that was in Freezing Hot. I really, really wanted to like this special, but it was such a step in the wrong direction that I just couldn't.

A lot of what women go through is horrible and unfair, but a lot of what men go through is as well. I get that this special is from a female perspective, and I was really excited to hear about that from Iliza, but what I got was a lot of weak generalizations which fail to address that things really aren't that great for a lot of men either. Most of her special boils down to this: things are hard for women, and this is the fault of men and society (which translates to also men).

One point that I really take issue with is one that was also made by Whitney Cummings in her spectacularly unfunny special "I'm your Girlfriend" about how men don't want to date successful women, that men only want women who appear vulnerable. I get that they aren't men and that their jokes are about this issue from their perspective, but has it ever occurred to them that maybe the reason that some men aren't interested in them is that the men are tired of feeling judged too? Maybe men have self esteem issues as well?

Women are judged primarily on their appearance, while men are judged on their ability to provide. Iliza makes a joke at one point about how men like to think they are so much more observant than women, but she checked his credit score while he was complaining about his seat not facing the right way. So harsh, unrealistic standards towards women are bad, but men just have to accept them?

I think what bothers me about this is that instead of attacking institutions or ideas which make EVERYONE miserable, Iliza decided to go for cheap approval and laughs by catering to half baked, quasi feminist types. There are larger issues here that I do think she is intelligent and funny enough to tackle, but instead she did her whole hashtag shtick, made some goat noises, and then effectively gave carte blanche to any woman with an ax to grind over her current or past relationships approval for blaming everything on their partner.

Look, if the most interesting thing that you can think of to talk about during your 4th Netflix special is very generic material about dating that sounds way too similar to your old material about the same topic, then maybe it's time to take a critical look at your act and start working on some jokes that have punchlines that the audience can't see coming from the opener. Unless, of course, Iliza actually wants to be known as the umpteenth, barely funny female comic with a poorly articulated feminist bent.

Very rarely have I felt so let down by a performer. I thought Iliza was better than this, maybe I was wrong.

So I want to premise this by saying that I wasn't a huge Schumer fan when I decided to watch this. I didn't dislike her, but I've never been tempted to watch any of her specials. I tried to keep an open mind and just enjoy a silly movie, but I have to say that after watching this I really do find her very unpleasant.

I want so bad to say that this is just a fun, silly movie that you shouldn't take seriously. That you can just sit back with some popcorn and enjoy it. I can't say that, though, because the movie just isn't good. It's bad. It's not funny.

There are a couple of moments that did make me laugh, but they came from other actors with much smaller parts, not from either Hawn or Schumer; there isn't an official grading system for comedies, but when your starts aren't making the audience laugh in a comedy you have failed.

I was very reluctant to watch another special by Cummings after how terrible her other one was, but for reasons I don't fully understand I really wanted to like her.

Unfortunately, she is just NOT a good comic.

Her writing might be funny on a sitcom, but she just hasn't gotten her act down yet at all. Her delivery is mediocre, and her jokes are forced and unfunny. Look, I don't object to making fun of men for liking porn, but if you're going to do that at least do so in an honest way.

Comedy is art, and art should reflect truth; Whitney's jokes about men and porn come across as a repudiation of all men (and their perceived preferences) due to a bad experience she had with an ex-boyfriend. While that in and of itself can surely be fodder for a good joke, the material that she has created about men and porn are based not in genuine criticism but in her frustration in an inability to live up to her perceptions of male expectations. There is some humor and truth in that, but Whitney is frankly not talented enough to explore those topics in an engaging way.

There were a few chuckles here and there, but overall I don't find her to be humorous. It seems like she is doing her career backwards; she gained fame for writing on sitcoms and then tried her hand at stand up. She either hasn't put in the work in the clubs or she hasn't learned anything from her time in them. Regardless, this special is not very good and there is literally no reason to watch it.

So this special was a HUGE step back from her previous one, Freezing Hot, and is actually not quite as good as War Paint. There are still some funny parts in it, and it is still very clear that Iliza is a talented comic, but the hamfisted feminist/femal empowerment portions just don't work here. I'm not against the message per se, but she takes some liberties with reality in order to make a point, and that dilutes her message.

She goes on for quite a bit about how women are insecure about their weight and all but blames men for this, erroneously claiming that the super thin female beauty standard embodied by heroin chic in the fashion community is the result of male preferences. This has never been true; while men do find models attractive, every man I have ever know (myself included) prefers women of a much healthier weight. Men like curves, and almost always have.

I don't say this to diminish anyone's experience with negative comments from former partners, or even random jerks on the internet, but if you are going to try to affect a positive change in society it helps to be more precise, and the perpetuation of of a mentality which seeks to blame others for your own perceived shortcomings and insecurities is not empowering. Women are, in my experience, far more critical of each other than men are of women. This is somewhat touched on in the special, but doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should given how pervasive it is.

This special marks a change in Iliza's tone. It is clear that she is trying to raise awareness in addition to entertaining an audience, and she is still a very funny person; it is equally clear that this is an issue that is important to her, but she needs to tighten up her message a bit if she wants it to have the impact she feels that it deserves.

In this special Iliza's act was really well put together and very funny. Unlike her special War Paint there seemed to be fewer long, unfunny bits, and some of the more repetitive parts from that special were toned down (the weird goat/sheep noises).

So far this has been her peak, and it deserves to be watched.

This was the first time I had seen anything from Iliza, and overall it shows that she DOES have talent, but her act clearly needed work. It's aged reasonably well, but there are some longer bits that just aren't funny (the pharmacy witch) and seem to drag on.

It's worth watching, but there are better specials out there.

I've never been interested in wrestling, but I love Marc Maron and took a chance on this. I am sooooo glad I did.

This show is about so much more than just the wrestling, and covers a lot of important issues. I don't want to say too much because of potential spoilers, but let me just say that I have thoroughly enjoyed this show. The main characters are very well fleshed out and come across as real people, and the character development throughout the two seasons has been phenomenal. I've been watching it slowly because I want to savor it; great TV like this doesn't come along every day.

There should be some kind of award for best casting, and whoever cast this show should get that award. The performances are almost universally perfect, and I've found myself engaged by all of the various story lines, but to me the real stand out star here is Alison Brie. I liked her before I saw her in this show, but her performance here has cemented her position as my current favorite actress. She conveys a warmth and vitality of spirit that I have to believe are genuinely a part of her. From now on I'll watch anything with her in. She is also almost casually hilarious .

Marc Maron does a great job in a part that seems almost written specifically for him. Betty Gilpin does a phenomenal job portraying her character's growth and struggles, and like pretty much everyone else on the show is very sympathetic.

In the end I fell in love with a show about wrestling when I don't even like wrestling. That should tell you something.

You should really check this episode out. Beth has found her voice and uses it with precision and grace. Her act felt MUCH more refined than any of the previous episodes, and I would actually travel to another town and pay to see her show.

I really hope we hear a lot more from Beth in the years to come. She is amazingly talented, and the only real criticism I have of this episode is that I wish it were longer.

The first ten to fifteen minutes were almost hackish; she actually said, non-ironically, that "females be shopping". It was a real cringe fest until she got to some material that was more original, and the it was pretty good.

I feel like she really could do really well, but she has got to ditch the blander bits if she wants to hold the audience's attention.

Start was a bit slow but picked up fast. I laughed WAY more than in the first two episodes, and I think Deon really does have the potential to do great things. I hope he sticks with it, and I would definitely pay to see him live.

On the other hand his set was obviously still being refined and he has a way to go before it reaches its full potential.

Her delivery is pretty shaky and her material just isn't that funny. It's not worth watching.