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estehl
Reviews
Expats (2023)
Drip... drip... drip
I'm always up for a new Prime series. I didn't even see that Nicole Kidman was in it until it started. Promising. An amalgam of disconnected storylines that come together in a tie-in resolution is usually a nice adventure. However, in this instance it's not working. A pilot episode is supposed to lure you in, letting you become invested in the characters and their lives. Here, you're presented three storylines of expat women in Hong Kong. The intro narration promises a story about the after effects of a tragedy from the viewpoint of the unwitting perpetrators. Instead we're dropped into the lives of a family dealing with the death of a son. We're not told how he was killed, only that one surviving child is obsessed with news reports of a downed airliner, and another is drawing pictures of the dead son standing with Jesus. While the mother is obsessed with a young catering waitress and a street market.
For the disparate storyline trope to work, we need to become invested enough to stay through to the end. Nobody in this show has enough chemistry with anybody else for us to care what happens to them; especially if it's going to be drawn out over 6 or more hours. If we don't care enough after 1 hour to sit through a second, it's not a well constructed story arc.
Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. (2021)
First kiss, no spark.
Lots of cliches and forced dialog. Maybe they'll grow into it.
Nonsense Revolution (2008)
Another teen angst film
A group of twenty-somethings deal with the death of one of their friends. Now, one year later, most have moved on, but one girl, Tess, still grieves and gets visited by her dead friend, complete with angelic wings. But the kid is far from saintly. Most obviously, and persistently mentioned, that since he died with an erection (?) he still has it, and cannot relieve the situation. He urges Tess to get the gang back together for one last night of partying on his anniversary. Though the people are reluctant at first, plans fall together and all the buried anger, grief and frustration comes to the surface, during a wild night, filled with lots of repressed, and unleashed, sexual tension. The film is whimsical at times, amusing quite often, but definitely not for the average taste.