Reviews

I liked this film, primarily because I LOVED the Phoenix character and Serra Naiman's portrayal of her. I also liked the quirkiness of the production. I honestly didn't like almost anything else about this film; I was somewhere between a little bored and painfully bored whenever Naiman wasn't onscreen.

The 2011 film's minute details of course couldn't and didn't perfectly match those of the great COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 (for example, the virus' parameters such as incubation period and virulence, and the functionality of both USA supply chains and the USA government's response), but more important I think to a viewer is the comforting sense of relating to it more than to life in our actual Before Times. For example, the way the camera focused exactly on the kind of objects of infection vectors that we are all NOW trained to. Difficult, though, were (I'll be un-spoilingly vague now) final scenes of a resolution when we as yet have no resolution in sight now May 2020.

Excellent, and very important film every American needs to see. Startlingly eye opening, clearly demonstrates the impossible challenges of the unmanaged globalization of a race-to-the-bottom. At once fascinating and full of laugh-out-loud black humor.

A deep, and deeply moving and important film with and about profound wisdom.

I'm a huge fan of Kevin Smith, but I liked this one significantly less than everything else he's done.

Mostly a series of short scenes. 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back' was nearly infinitely better.

But as a fan I wouldn't have missed it. For me particularly I cherished seeing the 'Chasing Amy' characters again, as I think that film was Smith's greatest masterpiece.

Smith's daughter Harley Quinn was another bright spot.

The fatherhood themes are about where Smith is in life, and he says that's because that he writes from where he is. But I bet he could still write from where he used to be if he wanted to, and I think he should at least try.

The strength her character embodied was deeply inspiring, and deeply moving.

Congratulations Ms. Kazan for writing (and your superb acting in) such a brilliant, wonderful, deeply touching film. It's impossible even to create a person that's perfect for you, unless you can be a person that can make someone happy.

Superb acting, particularly by Elle Fanning.

The way the alien culture was portrayed was generally rather silly, but that's a feature not a bug, as it was also very smart, creative, and artfully avant-garde.

If "artfully avant-garde" puts you off, you might not want to watch it. If you like "artfully avant-garde", you'll likely enjoy it!

It's like Naomi Watts was stolen from a good film and exiled into this one. Some good acting, and some interesting things occur, but they're hidden deep beneath direction which calls for everything to be so tediously slow, childishly stupid and silly, and pointless it's so unbearable I don't know which is more idiotic, the film or me for subjecting myself to it. So bad I laughed AT it.

The last part of the film is very confusing; perhaps there is some explanation, but I could not care less.

I see this film has good ratings, so I expect the reviewers aren't human; maybe they're vegetables or aliens or rocks. Or maybe they're so brain-dead they like it only because they think they're supposed to from what little of it their brains can think they understand.

Not the worst movie ever only thanks to Lynch's "Lost Highway" which is 100% pure incoherent vomit. A very low IQ must be required to like Lynch's work.

No one should let Lynch ever make another movie.

Heartbreaking. Deeply moving and beautiful film about a great tragedy. Many of the 18 hours made me want to cry.

I've watched every minute of every film Ken Burns ever made. I couldn't be a bigger fan. I know not everyone is, but I don't understand how. (Too emotional? Emotions are the greatest truths. And that's never more the case than in this film "The Vietnam War".) (Too liberal? No, objective, moderate.)

It's common for Burns's works to contain important tangential sub-themes. (A primary sub-theme of "Baseball" was race in America.)

"The Vietnam War" only had minor tangential sub-themes. It's story is so important that it didn't need major ones. Burns's "The Civil War" (about the only more-divisive war in American history) told the story of a nation growing up, coming together. "The Vietnam War" tells the story of America becoming it's modern, highly polarized, ungovernable/chaotic present. As such this film could not be more current, relevant, and important.

I think the only great thing about Boyhood was technical: the characters actually truly aged. So the audience was free of the customary burden of suspension of disbelief which accompanies the usual makeup or cast-changes that provide "aging" in other films. As pleasurable as this was...

Aside from that, I also liked the film and it's cast and their acting, but I think none of those things remotely deserved a best picture award. I'd love to see real aging in a film that did.

I imagine for many it was that film. And I imagine for a few, the pleasure of being free of the burden of suspension of disbelief intoxicates their assessment of the film.

I'll note that I'm a big fan of the director, and frankly I think it's far from his best film. The ones I like more, "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly", I *also* loved most for something technical(!); their rotoscope animation made them seethe and quiver with an inner energy: in them I loved feeling a view into reality usually reserved for the duration of a psychedelic trip. (But compared to "Boyhood") that technical accomplishment, for me, went far further in elevating those films.

An excellent series with important messages (including: an imagined potential for systems to liberate us, ended up controlling us). It's Wikipedia page is informative.

Curtis brilliantly and laudably identifies grave problems. But humanity was so foolish to end up with those problems, the series left me wanting. Nothing I'll say impacts his sound theses, but it's Curtis' only series that moves me to other than praise.

A primary theme of Curtis' filmography is the tragicomic consequences of ideologies imposed by elites; I love his films so I expect and embrace foolish targets. And identifying problems brings no responsibility to also solve them, particularly when identification is such an impressive contribution. But the fools gallery Curtis necessarily targets while developing the series' theses are so transparent and sterile that I believe more view through them, to depth and substance beyond, was called for. I'm so astonished that their beliefs attracted attention let alone gained currency, and the richly deserving targets are so much more delusional pushovers than in Curtis' other films, that I wanted more. (And I'm more mystified than before by how information processing enchants the analytically-challenged.) Curtis shows both the Internet and systems models fail to deliver things--that it was foolish for anyone to ever imagine they could.

(Because I'm not as engaged by this series' topic as I am by Curtis' other best work, on first viewing I made large errors because it's complexity exceeded the attention I paid.) In episode one (e1) I thought Curtis drew a parallel between Ayn Rand and the Internet. On second viewing I found I was wrong. Rand and the Internet share the story in e1. And Curtis draws attention to that, such as when phrasing the belief some held that "computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes in control of our own destiny" (e1@58:17).

Curtis shows the Internet couldn't do all the things some people believed it would. And he mentioned that the Internet can do some of those things, but he didn't note that those things it can do were the ones antithetical to Rand, which I think he should've given the attention he draws to Rand and the Internet in his story together, both failing fools.

Curtis notes "the Internet had played a key role…brought millions of people together" (e2@52:05) for revolutions in former Soviet states last decade. As we again saw during 2011's Arab Spring, in contrast to Rand's non-embrace of community, online social media's ability to manifest a collective consciousness can play an encouraging role in enabling a revolutionary wave.

So while Curtis is correct that machines have not liberated us from traditional political structures, they can galvanize the action necessary to start. Thereafter OF COURSE it's up to us to organize the realization of our vision (since, as Curtis points out, "the machines…offer…no ideas about what comes next" {e2@58:09}). (Incidentally, Curtis' "The Century of the Self" explained that politicians today cede power to the unconscious desires of swing voters, which also deliver no organized or coherent vision forward.) Curtis notes hippie "communes {failed because they} deliberately had no hierarchy of control or authority" (e2@20:33). I lived in a 250-person alternative community of "hippies", and it ran beautifully because like most hippies and non-hippies then and always, we weren't foolish enough to think organization wasn't necessary.

(OTOH, while hierarchy is often necessary, marriages can work without one spouse having authority over the other. Had communes remained small enough, and bonding been very strong, people's hearts could've done at least some of what was lacked by, and thus doomed, communes. That might suggest a way forward globally; particularly if Carpenter's 1991 "Pong" experiment {e1@9:21} demonstrated collective connection. Changing people could change politics; the Dalai Lama received an uncommon {anti-Randian} education, and he turned out pretty well; humanity should commit to universally high psychological health/development.) Foolish targets abound. E1's computer visionaries were naïve fools, and Ayn Rand's philosophy is the product of a nearly peerless psychological/emotional infant.

E2 brings more idiotic beliefs, such as that inherently lossy models can faithfully reflect reality, and that disturbed ecosystems "would always try to return to an original balanced state" via a purely imaginary "underlying mechanism" (e2@5:03). It's pathetic that Forrester's systems model for the planet's ecosystem "could not imagine a future where human beings, unlike machines, would behave in ways that they hadn't before" (e2@35:35).

Regarding the ecosystem model, while Curtis correctly points out it's not true, neither does it have no truth at all. There are interactions between different things in the natural world; they influence each other positively and negatively. The existence of interactions can foster a degree of stability (relative to hypotheticals with minimal interactions), albeit to an essentially dynamic reality (at all scales). The reality of interaction--for example that human actions can cause great harm--makes that part of the ecosystem model of use in understanding, and of motivational use (towards achieving optimally vital results). I think Curtis should've acknowledged these values of the ecosystem model, since they were all anyone who wasn't foolish ever thought it was really right for.

{Perhaps asserting that interactions can foster some stability needs no justification. But just in case, a simple hypothetical: a habitat containing grazing animals. Too many of which might cause dramatic population decline, for example from increased risk of epidemic or from stripping the habitat; later (after the epidemic ends or the habitat recovers) the grazers' population might soar. But add to this hypothetical a different animal that preys successfully enough upon the grazing animals to lower such risks, and both the habitat and grazing animal population could gain relative stability.} The series is so densely packed that little could've been added without requiring another part, but with another part I think it could've been substantially stronger. I can't fault Curtis, but I also can't say that all that it did prevented me from feeling more was called for.

My Akita was exactly like Hachi.

She was so bonded to me, I couldn't bear to think of what my dying would have done to her. She would go to the window ten minutes before I got home; it didn't matter that there was no pattern to my schedule, somehow she 'knew'. Once I had to go away for a few months; I heard how sad she was, so I phoned and I sent home a shirt I'd worn, so she would know I was alive.

She was the smartest dog I ever met. But she would never learn to fetch (sometimes she went to get it, but only if she wanted it, she almost never would bring it back), it seemed to me that she had too much dignity.

I did always did everything I could to make hers the best life any dog ever lived; I knew how loyal she was, and returned every bit of it to her.

That was 15 years ago. After the first few minutes of the movie "Hachi", I never stopped crying until the end. I loved the movie, the most moving one I ever saw. Beautifully made and unforgettable.

Excellent. A compelling story in the best tradition of Sci-Fi, an uplifting celebration of the human spirit.

That said, there are inherent film-making and viewing challenges when most of the screen time features characters intentionally lacking humanity in expression and makeup. But it's in the necessary service of a seminal picture, and is executed as well as it could be.

Not light minute-to-minute entertainment, but entertaining enough, and a very intelligent and important work on the alienating essence of so much technological process. I recommend seeing it if smart is as important to you as fun.