Reviews

So let's get this out of the way: it's not a high-quality movie. So don't watch it if you're interested in skillful filmmaking. Acting not great, writing not great, etc.

What it *is* is the only available cinematic retelling of the Nutty Putty Cave tragedy. So if you're interested in that sort of thing, you probably want to watch it. It helped me get the human element in this instead of just being horrified by online diagrams of a guy stuck forever upside down in a hole.

I consider myself a mini-expert on the event after having read everything I can find on it. There are inaccuracies in this movie, important details they left out on purpose, lots of romanticizing (probably for the sake of the surviving family), a ton of sappy dream sequence filler as an artistic liberty, an inordinate focus on John's courtship with his wife, and they don't even show his death from a third-person POV and the closing off of the cave. They totally gloss over the death part and don't even show the aftermath.

In the end this feels like a B movie commissioned by his friends as a gift to his surviving family, so they can memorialize him in a touching light. And I get that, and it's very sweet.

But if you're a Nutty Putty armchair scholar, you probably wanted something with more substance and less fluff.

This is easily the lamest, least funny, least inspired episode of SNL I have ever seen in all my years of watching SNL. Tremendo paquetazo. That's an hour of my life I can never get back. The show needs new writers or a better coke dealer or something.

The Steve Martin and Martin Short episode this season was excellent, one for the ages. But generally this season has been weak because of the sea change happening with the cast and crew. I want to be sympathetic to that. (But can't they hire some guest writers or something?) But even by this season's standards, this episode was so wack it makes me angry.

Cobra Kai has some very funny moments, but too much cringe in between (when it's taking itself seriously) to even be watchable. It is the worst damn show I've seen in a long time. The writing is complete nonsense. They're writing it set in the modern day using tropes that died in the 80s-90s and would never happen today: an entire school dance bullying a shy, nice girl because she's overweight and eating at the snack table; a whole school cafeteria bullying a boy because he has a scar on his lip; four bullies beating a kid unconscious in a school bathroom and no one calling the cops to charge them with aggravated assault and battery, just "you'll learn karate now so you can beat them up worse"; a GenX-er who apparently has never heard of the internet... Are all the writers 85 years old??? Also the acting and dialogue are effing terrible.

This show seemed to me like an inferior ripoff of Breaking Bad at first, then showed some promise of originality toward the middle, then ended up right back where it started: feeling like a cheap third-world knockoff of Breaking Bad, with uninspired writing, characterization, and storyline wrap-ups. By the way, for those who call this "the Breaking Bad of money laundering": Breaking Bad was already the Breaking Bad of money laundering.

I really wanted to like this, as I am a huge fan of Moynihan's work on SNL (please come back!!), and some of my other favorite sketch comedians voice characters on this show. Unfortunately I'm not sure where the jokes are supposed to be. Everything falls flat or just doesn't even try. Marathoned this with a group of friends who are also SNL-heads and into stoner humor, and I think two of us chuckled once each.

I thought it was going to be a cheesy resurrection of a beloved old show from my youth that should be allowed to rest in peace, much like Fuller House. Instead they actually have good, witty, funny, modern writing, with no obnoxious laugh track (thank god!!! The gags and jokes stand on their own merit!). The style is like Arrested Development or 30 Rock.

The storylines and characters are topical and relevant, heavy on politically-charged themes. They skew markedly liberal so if you don't like that then don't bother with this show because you will hate it. But it's also got plenty of broad gags delivered in a clever way, so it's balanced. The acting is good, and the important characters are nuanced and well-written (quite better than the original series, actually).

Deserves a much higher rating but apparently it's very polarizing. Guess you either love it or hate it, and there's no way to know until you've watched a couple of episodes.

The gags weren't quite as outrageous as in the first film (which I consider a 10), and it was a bit slower-paced, and it felt more scripted, and once you're familiar with the Borat process it loses some of its novelty. That being said, this movie is a solid comedy with plenty of chuckles and some great laugh-out-loud moments. If nothing else, it's worth it just to watch a certain politician/lawyer be put in a very compromising situation toward the end of the movie. I recommend it.

The cinematography and choreography were beautiful, just lovely. The main actresses were wonderful. But the story itself was a waste of time; boring and long-winded with a cheesy, ridiculous ending that made no sense. The movie was too long and didn't give any payoff for all the time I spent watching it. The one thing I gained from this movie is having the "Pinga" song stuck in my head forever.

Months later, I'm still trying to forget I ever wasted 9 years on this show. Weakest ending ever, which made zero sense if you were keeping up with the show. I trusted Benioff and Weiss to write a decent ending but I guess I was dead wrong. There comes a time when you have to take the blame for being robbed. But 9 years, though????? HBO, I need my money back, please.

This is a neatly wrapped comedy that delivers enjoyment to every gender, age and orientation. BUT. As a heterosexual woman, and after the 10th time watching this, I finally realized that they are fanservicing *me*. Think about it: a man with a perfect body and a perfect soul, a lily-white-pure, tall, shapely, and ridiculously handsome, unspoiled, highly intelligent, exceedingly kind and thoughtful, very very wealthy young man, who happens to be an expert in martial arts and ballroom dancing and many languages... falls madly in love with you, a regular cute-ish girl from Pasadena who can't keep a job and always falls for the wrong guy.

I mean, come on now.

Well, at least they did it a lot better than Twilight. LOL

Now, don't get me wrong, this movie is a classic for a reason. It's highly entertaining, and Macaulay Culkin does as good an acting job as any child actor can be expected to, especially when he's carrying the whole film.

HOWEVER: The treatment of Kevin by his family has not aged well. At the beginning of the film, his parents stand idly by while his uncle, brother and cousins verbally abuse him, angrily calling him a "little jerk" and a "disease" for doing nothing that was even that bad. This will not sit well with modern audiences, who will rightly say that if someone called their child that, they would bi*chslap them and kick them out of their house. The issue was not even addressed in the movie, the parents did nothing to defend him, and thus verbal abuse of small children was normalized, given that it's such a popular movie. I would otherwise give it ten stars, but this really stuck in my craw.

This finale feels like the writers were sick of writing and just wanted to get the season over and done with.

Sloppy, lazy writing. Too many plot holes to count. Felt rushed, boring and incredibly anticlimactic. An important death was completely brushed off. Tons of things didn't even try to make sense. And what was up with that gratuitous, corny and inappropriate Stevie Nicks music video? Then the final scene was cheesy, appropriate to top off a total disaster of a finale.

I am so disappointed. If this had had a worthy final episode, Coven would have been my favorite season of American Horror Story by far. But it was terrible. Shame on the writers. I want that hour of my life back, and I want a rewrite, a proper ending to this otherwise exceptional story.