Reviews

Plot: J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is the famed early 20th century physicist who is hired to lead America's effort to built the first nuclear fission bomb - the Manhattan Project. Along the way he cheats on his b*tchy wife (Emily Blunt) with a Communist (Florence Pugh) who eventually commits suicide, chats a bit with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), and ultimately loses his government security clearance due to having Communist friends and relatives, and because a petty politician (Robert Downey Junior) doesn't like him and so kinda has him framed.

Review: While there is much to like in this movie, especially the race to build the atomic bomb, it is

• far too long
• headache inducing with its endless jumping around in time and pointless shifting from color to black & white to color again
• very boring with its subplot of the jealous politician and the matter of whether or not Oppenheimer would lose his security clearance, something that frankly we're not even given a reason to care about.

Mixed but ultimately thumbs down.

A few months ago i watched the SNW episode "Those Old Scientists" which featured the two characters Ensigns Boimler and Mariner from this show, and i found them pretty annoying. Well, with nothing else to do (it'll be a while til SNW season three begins) i finally decided to see the pilot of this show.

It was worse than i feared. The Tawny Newsome character (Mariner) is unbearable, treating everyone around her (including the captain) disrespectfully, yet i guess we're supposed to like her since she talks more than anyone else. Meanwhile Jack Quaid (Boimler) is pathetic and is humiliated throughout, and the other ensigns have the emotional range of twelve year olds.

The episode is also kinda gross, with a shipwide alien virus causing heads to explode and cannibalism, plus a spider bug that spews goop out of its butt and sucks on Boimler while he's naked.

Yes that's the pilot, and enough for me. Guess i'll cancel Paramount Plus for a while.

Plot: Two young men, Jules and Jim, are European friends in the early 20th century. They seem to be artists? We never see them working though they live very comfortable lives. One day they meet Catherine, who might be an English teacher but again someone who has fancy clothes and a nice apartment and who seemingly never works.

Anyway, the three of them become friends/lovers for a couple decades until Catherine randomly decides to kill Jim and herself. The end.

Review: I guess this film was extraordinary for its time? Like Godard's Breathless, it was a deliberate attempt to break the rules of film making, in this case with an unconventional plot, occasional voiceover narration, freeze frames.. It is indeed worth seeing once for this reason.

The story itself is pretty dark, with two young men quite taken with this woman who (to us viewers) is obviously a sociopath, until finally one of them is dead and the other is left alone with a child. In a way it's a horror film, though I've never heard anyone else say so.

Plot: Michel Piccoli is a playwright, who takes a job re-writing a movie script for the money. His employer is Jack Palance, a silly vain millionaire who thinks he's a god.

Almost immediately after Piccoli arrives, Palance starts hitting on his wife (Brigitte Bardot), but Piccoli is indifferent, apparently interested only in his work.

This attitude upsets Bardot, and unfortunately the middle third of the film is the two of them bickering in his apartment, which consists mostly of Bardot randomly insulting Piccoli while he pathetically takes the abuse and wonders aloud what the problem is.

Ultimately Piccoli decides that the film project is beneath him and withdraws. Meanwhile, Bardot has decided to leave him and run off with Palance, though the two quickly die in a car crash.

Along the way Piccoli talks about the Odyssey with Fritz Lang and makes small talk with Palance's assistant Giorgia Moll.

Response: Le Mépris is a lovely film to look at and the music is great (though overused - a problem in many Godard films). But despite my summary above, there isn't much of a plot, and the Bardot character is for the most part unbearable so just hit *mute* when she's on screen and skip the whole middle of the film.

(Another audio problem: In several indoor scenes, there is enough echo to suggest that the microphone is in a different room. Personally i prefer the "dub the voices on later" technique of Godard's earlier films, which makes a much fresher sound.)

I haven't seen an episode of Lower Decks, and i certainly don't want to start now. The two LD characters are unbelievably immature and annoying. Any Starfleet officer would know enough not to blurt out information about the future but these two idiots do it repeatedly. The captain should have *immediately* confined them to quarters so as to minimize their influence on the timeline, but he tolerated way too much.

I didn't hate this episode as passionately as some others have (or as much as the musical episode to follow - goodness i hope season three starts better than the way season two ended!) but i'm hoping it's the last SNW/LD crossover.

For me, by far the best part of this show had been the brewing romance between Spock and Nurse Chapel, and now they've thrown it away.

If actress Jess Bush wanted to leave the show, why not have her leave in a way consistent with her character? Check out how she speaks of their relationship in "Charades" - she LOVES Spock. But here she treats him like dog s--t for no reason at all, Spock concludes that he's "the ex", and that's that. It's as if the episode was written by someone who hadn't even watched the show.

Now even if she decides to turn down the offer to study on Vulcan (or whatever it was, not like they spent any time on it) and stay on the Enterprise, things could never be the same, unless the writers decide to pretend that Subspace Rhapsody never happened, which is no way to write fiction.

(They also decide to make Kirk pretty sleazy, having him hit on La'an before finally saying, "oh yeah, i've a pregnant woman on another planet.." You know, James T. Kirk, the hero of the original show?)

This is the first episode of Strange New Worlds that i didn't like at all. Endless flashbacks to the horrors of war - noise, blood, suffering and death.. Not my idea of entertainment, just sad. And the lesson? "War changes people." Well yes, i have no trouble believing that, but it's not something that i needed to learn.

And parts of the episode didn't really make much sense. For instance, if the Enterprise is merely transporting the ambassador, why is it necessary for everyone to like him? Or to pretend to? It's stupid and unrealistic.

Goodness, i won't sit through another episode like that.

Plot: Some time in a stark, black and white future, a secret agent visits a city ruled by a super computer, with the intention to destroy it and kill its leader. Along the way, he helps the leader's daughter free her mind and discover love.

Review: I'm a fan of Godard's 1960s/early '70s films but goodness this one is hard to watch. The most blatant problems are

• Eddie Constantine is ugly. His face is scarred or lumpy or something. Why him as the leading man? In addition
• his character, secret agent Lemmy Caution, is rude to everyone. Are we supposed to like him?

• the voice of the super computer ("Alpha 60") is most unpleasant. According to Wikipedia, it was "a man with a mechanical voice box replacing his cancer-damaged larynx." Ugh. Godard could have just put a microphone in a paper cup and gotten a neat little sound effect.

• the women in the movie are all simple-minded (like the Anna Karina character) or robot prostitutes. Why not one intelligent female?

• although it's a "science fiction" film, there are no special effects. The super computer that rules the galaxy, for example, is shown to be just a fan spinning behind a few heating coils. And all the external shots of this futuristic city on the other side of the galaxy are obviously just Paris at night.

• the music, as in almost all Godard films, is repetitive and intrusive. He really had no ear for that, I'm afraid.

In addition, there are too many plot problems to mention. For example, why does Professor von Braun offer Lemmy a chance to not only join Alphaville but to also rule a galaxy, when it's obvious Lemmy is hostile and only there to destroy everything?

I'm convinced that the people who are praising some of these Orville episodes are Disney employees who haven't even watched them. The season finale "Future Unknown" is barely even a story. Basically the robot - who has no emotions - decides to marry the human doctor, and she accepts. Kinda dumb if you think about it. And the only subplot was Kelly giving a ship tour to a human from an episode in Season One, which has no consequence.

There is no science, no drama, no conflict, and no one learns anything. I shake my head wondering why this episode was made.

Briefly: The special effects are great, the acting is perfectly fine, but the writing is . . poop! Prometheus is yet another American big budget film/tv series that calls itself "science fiction" but which contains no appreciation of actual science. Even the premise - that humans were created by a species living on another planet, while all other life on Earth evolved separately - makes no sense from the perspective of biological evolution. And why would Shaw and Holloway interpret the pictures in the caves as invitations (from the creators of humanity, no less) instead of the obvious: An astronomical event occurred that was visible in different parts of the world? And how would they know exactly where to travel based on a picture of six stars when our galaxy contains about 400 billion? And why would the DNA of the discovered "engineer" match that of a human when judging by their appearance they're obviously a different species? And so on. And as others have pointed out, the characters - supposedly brilliant scientists - act like idiots. The deaths of Millburn and Fifield, for instance.. Even children would have been more cautious.

And there's just too much more wrong to take the trouble to mention. If you like expensive special effects and have no knowledge of science, logic or common sense, you might love this movie. Otherwise, spare yourself.

AFTER SEASON ONE

In the 1970s I was a kid and I vaguely remember tuning in to one episode of Space:1999, but finding it much too serious, adult, and boring, like a soap opera. Now that I'm grown up and just finished watching the first season, I confess I'm not sure who the intended audience for this show was.

On the one hand, the themes are indeed adult - the origin of life, death, war, human evolution, the ultimate fate of the universe.. On the other hand, for a show that advertizes itself as "science fiction", the science is indescribably bad. It would take a whole book to list all the absurdities, so I'll just describe the premise:

In the pilot episode, a nuclear blast pushes the Earth's moon out of its orbit while it's occupied by about 300 people in "Moon Base Alpha". The moon then flies about the galaxy, bringing the Earth people into contact with other planets, civilizations, and mysterious space anomalies. On at least three occasions it is implied or explicitly stated that they're no longer even in our galaxy.

Yet at no point does anyone ask, "wait, where exactly are we? How fast are we going?" The star nearest to our own sun is Proxima Centauri which is about 4.3 light years away. So even if the moon were traveling at the fantastic speed of 18,600 miles per second, it would still take 43 years to get there - assuming of course they were headed in exactly that direction (and why would they be?). Most stars are much further away than that. And a quick calculation shows that to accelerate the moon to that 0.1c speed would require about 5.5x10^23 Hiroshima bombs - far more massive than the moon itself. And of course, every time they encounter a new planet (once a week or so) the moon conveniently slows down to a nice orbital speed so they can get in their little spaceships and visit it a few times. Then it speeds up again to move on to the next planet.

And that's just THE PREMISE. Every episode contains more absurdities. A fog that changes people into Cro-Magnons, for instance - including a change of clothes! - then back to modern humans when it reappears. Or a "black sun" that transports the moon to (according to the resident scientist Barry Morse) "the other side of the universe" - where they find a small spacecraft that they deliberately left behind. How did it get there? No effort is ever made to explain any of this - just a smile, shrug of the shoulders and a "gosh, that was something, wasn't it." Very frustrating.

WATCHING SEASON TWO

Well this is certainly different. Half the cast has been replaced, the set is completely different, even the uniforms have changed. This strange Maya character changes into other animals (or people, or a plant, or a rock..) several times in every episode, sometimes just for fun. And speaking of fun, there's now light-hearted romance between the four main characters (Landau, Bain, Maya and "Tony" - whose sudden appearance on the show is never explained) which occasionally reminds me of The Love Boat. For instance, Maya turning into the Barbara Bain character so the two of them can take turns kissing Martin Landau. I'm not making this up. Was Aaron Spelling a writer?

The stories themselves are more action/explosion packed, without any of the efforts at profound pseudo-science/philosophy which appeared in the first season. And the aliens/monsters look incredibly cheap. So basically it's now a 1970's Saturday morning kid's show, and I can imagine it airing sometime between Land Of The Lost and Far Out Space Nuts.

FINISHED

Okay, I just watched the last episode, "The Dorcons" which had plot elements similar to the 1992 movie FreeJack and 2017's Get Out - not so bad. A couple more remarks about the second season: There are several pairs of consecutive episodes which were evidently shot simultaneously, so that each one contains only part of the cast. Pretty lame. Also a few of the plots were basically rip offs of Star Trek episodes, perhaps the worst being "The Rules Of Luton" with Star Trek's "Arena".

And that's it. I watched this series out of curiosity and 1970's nostalgia. A few episodes - perhaps 4 or 5 out of the 48 - ("War Games", "Death's Other Dominion", "Mission of the Darians", "The Last Sunset" . . all from Season One) were worth watching, but for the most part it was a painful experience.

Seth Macfarlane of Family Guy fame has created a new Star Trek show, although it's not called Star Trek. It's much more like TNG than any other Trek series, and so it's WAY better than ST:Discovery, for instance, which is "dark" and so misses the whole point of Star Trek in my opinion.

The show isn't bad but, having seen every TNG and most Voyager episodes, well, I notice that a LOT of Orville plots are just lifted from those shows, although the "sci-fi" component is sometimes even weaker. Recently, for instance, they did a Best Of Both Worlds two-part episode in which the entire galaxy is threatened by a bunch of robots (not called the Borg), and the plot turns on one of the robots (Isaac) changing his mind and deciding to fight for the humans instead. The problem is, there was never really any explanation of why he did this. I was disappointed.

Also the show could use more humor, that's one of its charms, but there's not enough of it.

P.s. And could we please get back Halston Sage as Alara Kitan? She was really cute and her replacement . . isn't.

Edit: After having just watched the first episode of Season 3, I'm afraid to say that it's only going downhill. As others here have pointed out : the Orville began funny but then it started taking itself too seriously, which doesn't work at all. Seth MacFarlane, for all his talent, doesn't really have an appreciation for science fiction, and the more "heavy" the writing tries to be, the more it feels both preachy and - on an emotional level - like it was written for teenagers, like those Twilight movies.

I won't even try to describe the plot of The Hotel New Hampshire because so many things happen, and without any particular kind of moral arc. Basically it's about a family who own a hotel, then another hotel, then another hotel. Along the way there's gang rape, incest, suicide, terrorism, prostitution, an exploding airplane, blindness and killing the family dog because he farts.

The odd thing is, watching the trailer, you'd get the impression that this is a comedy. Indeed the characters themselves don't seem particularly moved by half these events, while I found the suicide of the daughter Lilly (played by then 13 year old actress Jennifer Dundas) who kills herself jumping out the window of a New York City skyscraper, especially sad.

Although the strangest part of the film was probably the Rob Lowe / Jodie Foster incest scene, in which they (siblings) basically have sex all day long, and neither of them seem a bit disturbed about it either during the orgy or at any point later in the film.

Perhaps this is a "dark comedy"?

Plot: Will Smith texts while driving, and so gets in a car crash that kills seven people, including his fiancée. To amend for this, he decides to improve the lives of seven strangers who have serious problems like, say, blindness. He does this by killing himself and leaving his body parts to these people. That's basically the story, though it's told out of chronological order so we only really understand what's going on at the movie's end.

Opinion: Many reviews here have called this film immoral, for not condemning and maybe even endorsing suicide. Personally I didn't find that offensive. The character sacrifices his life to make the lives of others better. This is not a bad thing, and indeed many men go to war with this idea in mind. What I did find hard to bear, however, was the overall tone of the film. It was very slow, sad, and with lots and lots of unnecessary background music. It seemed to be trying too hard to be "dramatic", with lots of yelling and crying and such. Actually gave me a headache. Were I the editor, I would have removed all the background music and cut the film length in half. This whole story can easily be told in an hour, or even less time.

Overall rating: thumbs down

The first half of The Birds is a dull, soap-opera-y story involving Rod Taylor, his soon-to-be-girlfriend Tippi Hedren, his cold mother Jessica Tandy, sister Veronica Cartwright and ex-girlfriend Suzanne Pleshette. It might as well have been lifted from another film since it has nothing to do with the birds.

In fact, the birds don't begin their attacks until about fifty minutes into the movie. When they do there are some genuinely scary moments, although of course the special effects look rather dated today, even the fake blood doesn't quite look like the correct shade of red. We're never told why the birds behave this way, which makes the film pretty intellectually unsatisfying. They just start killing people for apparently no reason.

Finally, after witnessing much death and destruction, Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren leave town, but the birds are still hanging around en masse, ready to attack more people. I half expected a title card reading, "End of Part One", but no — that was the whole movie.

This film is called a classic by the critics. But most of the time I was bored, waiting for something to happen, and even when the bird attacks came, I couldn't help asking myself, "so when do we find out why they're doing this?"