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Reviews
Shôgun (2024)
As Close To Perfect As A Show Can Get
I could go into detail about how great this show is, but it would not do justice to it. This show is an experience. The performances are uniformly stellar. Anna Sawai, Cosmo Jarvis, and Hiroyuki Sanada deserve all the praise they have received. Tadanobu Asano is phenomenal as Kashigi Yabushige. One of my all-time favorite television characters and performances. Also, Yuka Kouri as Kiku stole every scene she was in. I wish I could name all the actors and speak of their brilliance. The entire cast deserves Emmy awards. Hats off to Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks for bringing this story to life in the way that they did. Everyone who worked on this show created their own masterpiece within a masterpiece. Having not read the book, nothing went where I expected it to. By the end of the series, I felt changed as a person. I felt grateful to be alive in this time--when this show premiered. Give this show a watch. Great art makes you feel like you are part of something great, which this show certainly did for me.
Uncharted (2022)
It does the trick
I have seen better, but I have also seen worse. If you are looking for an entertaining couple of hours, this does the job. Personally, I found it refreshing to watch an action/adventure movie that didn't involve a superhero. Ruben Fleischer doesn't make movies for critics, but he gives audiences a fun time at the theater. The actors did a solid job. Condensing what a video game can give you in ten hours into just under two hours is not easy and I think everyone made the most of it. If this gets a sequel or sequels I can see them expanding on this one and going bigger. Sure, the movie is a little bland, but if it's on television or you're looking for an upbeat action/adventure flick you haven't seen, you won't regret putting it on.
Cliffhanger (1993)
They Don't Make Them Like This Anymore
Real stunts, real sets, real locations, characters you care about and characters you want to see defeated, and action involving people grounded in the real world. Sure, the dialogue wasn't the greatest ever written and John Lithgow's British accent was hokey and unconvincing (Although, his voice makes the film even more fun to watch and his performance is still epic despite it). There's no CGI to be found in this film, which makes the stakes feel all the more real and heightened. I wish they made more action movies like this these days, when mass produced comic book movies are churned out like cheap trinkets (despite their ridiculous production budgets). It's pure entertainment. I watch it every year around November (a personal tradition) and it never gets old. The opening scene of the movie is one of the greatest opening sequences in action cinema history, and I'd argue that the ending sequence is equally as great. If you haven't seen it, give this 1993 classic a watch.
Love and Monsters (2020)
Excitingly New and Comfortably Familiar
After years of watching apocalyptic movies and shows, I started to feel numb about them. "Love and Monsters" is about a giant mutated animal and bug apocalypse caused by human error. I appreciated that it wasn't about a world that was beyond saving. There was hope and optimism in it, despite the dire circumstances. The story is relatively simple (which I appreciated): Our protagonist, Joel, travels though a monster-ocalypse, overcoming his personal barriers and meeting new friends along the way to reuniting with his girlfriend that he hasn't seen since the world went into chaos. I personally appreciated that the film was under two hours long (1 hour and 48 minutes). My brother brought this movie over to watch on Halloween 2021 and it's been one of my favorite movies since. I wish I saw it in theaters, but it had a limited release in 2020. I didn't even know it existed until a year later. The actors did an amazing job, the direction is awesome, and the special effects were fantastic, especially for a budget of roughly thirty million dollars (it looks like it cost more than that). If there was any mission to this movie, it was to entertain and make people feel good. It accomplished both for me.
Christmas with Cookie (2016)
A Fun, Low Budget Christmas Classic!!
If you are looking for a fun time, a good laugh, and about an hour well spent, then look no further than "Christmas With Cookie." This film is so incredibly low budget and it embraces this fact to the fullest extent. I found myself laughing so hard that I had to take breaks just to catch my breath. The performances are entertainingly over the top. Cookie is delightfully vile. The film is intentionally "bad", but it's made with such precision that you can tell it took real talent to craft. Sometimes films that are "intentionally bad" are just bad. This one is so bad that it's great. These guys knew what they were doing. I had a blast from start to finish. Overall, very impressive and well made. I look forward to director/writer/actor Alan Maxson's future projects.
Not Quite Human II (1989)
Great and Fun Family Entertainment
I grew up watching this film more times than I can count. The actors do an amazing job. The direction and writing is sharp. You can tell that they did everything they could with the budget they had. The practical effects are well done. This movie will make you laugh, cry, and leave you with a warm and fuzzy feeling by the end. "What is the missing piece that makes us human?" You'll leave this film with a solid answer to that question.