All User Reviews

I love this movie... and guitars

I had to give this one a tick of woke. It's actually a half-tick rounded up. Willie argues that Eugene would be "just one more white boy ripping off our music." Willie also gets called "mud-duck" by a white pimp in a small southern town. That's about it for the woke report.

The movie itself is based on the legend of Robert Johnson's deal with the devil at the crossroads. Willie is a harmonica player that spent his life in prison over a self-defense killing of a band member. Eugene is a privileged classical guitar prodigy who is obsessed with Robert Johnson. He believes Johnson had a song that never got recorded and Willie may be the last chance to find it. Eugene breaks Willie out of the hospital, and they go on the road. Eugene is looking for a lost song. Willie is looking for a way to back out of his deal with the devil.

The strength of this movie is the music. There's kind of a Devil Went Down to Georgia story at the end. It's a guitar contest between Eugene and the Devil's guitarist (Steve Vai). If you don't watch the movie, at least find the ending on YouTube. The contest is called "Cutting Heads."

Ralph Macchio learned to play guitar for this part. He didn't do the actual playing, but he developed enough skill that you wouldn't know it. Ry Cooder played most of the actual soundtrack. Vai, of course, played for real. It was awesome!

Another Norwegian monster movie. The acting is pretty bad and the FX look cheap. For some reason there is a lot of blurry out of focus background scenes that are distracting. The title Kraken shows up for about 30 seconds of bad CG screen time, the rest is all cheap looking tentacles and the first 45 minutes is pretty much all setup with nothing happening. The ending is hilariously bad and the whole movie is an environmentalist monster revenge movie on evil humans destroying the ecosystem and messing with nature. There is far too much DEI casting here for a Norwegian movie where the country is 94 percent white. The opening scenes has a white male and black male, the 3 teenagers' includes a black male and the lead is a mixed Iranian Norwegian female. Speaking of this is another movie all about the females, every group is focused on female leads with background male characters, the scrawny female police officer, the mixed Iranian smart scientist, the teenagers focus on the female of the group. The only one that has a male lead is the evil corporation harming the environment.

A lot of DEI overrepresentation in casting. Leads assistant is gay. As far as I can remember there were very few white males anywhere to be seen
here. At 2hrs and 7 minutes this an overly long slow moving bloated film that should of been cut significantly. Far too much time is spent trying to convince the audience this character is a famous pop superstar. Too many musical dance scenes with terrible songs and a lot of time spent on her going about her day. There is very little horror and a lot of angsty drama. How many times can you use the jump scare it's in her head and not real tactic before the scenes lose any possible affect they may of had. The lead who is pretty much on screen the entire time just isn't good enough an actor to carry the movie and despite what they want you to believe has all the likability and charisma of burnt toast. The FX are decent and there are a couple of creepy scenes but it seems like the
director is more interested in making some weird statement about celebrity and fame than an actual horror movie. The best scene in the entire movie is the opening 10 or so minutes. Where's the rest of that movie, that was far better than the entire rest of the film.

Ah shit! Here we go again...

Let's just agree from the start that the Scary Movie franchise was never high-brow cinema. It's not some super-developed, heavy narrative shit that inspires you to think deep thoughts. It's simple, dumb jokes that are already in everyone's heads, and the creators just put them on screen as parodies.
Making this stuff (comedy) isn't easy, but if you've got the budget for it, you should at least put in the time so your comedy actually lands and makes people laugh.

Anyway, in this case the movie tries to act like it's super politically incorrect, but most of it really isn't. It only has a few traces of that. The sketches poking fun at DEI casting and woke stuff have already been done to death in other movies and even on SNL.

I saw some comments from well-known anti-woke YouTubers saying the movie was trying to be an anti-woke comedy, making fun of that whole thing, but ended up doing exactly what it was trying to mock. In my case, I didn't really feel that. It does have a couple of genuinely funny moments. The problem is those are like 10% of the movie. The other 90% is just mediocre to straight-up boring. Some parts are so bad I honestly thought they were written by AI.

I think this franchise is dead. The Wayans brothers clearly have the talent to make good humor when they actually try, but this is just an easy cash grab. They’re milking a classic parody that should’ve never gone past three movies, and by keeping it going, they turned into exactly what they used to make fun of...

P.S.: ⚠SPOILER ALERT⚠
Ah! One of the biggest reasons I’m giving this movie such that “woke score” is because it starts with a fake little movie-within-a-movie where Teyana Taylor plays this super uninhibited, super powerful black woman that nothing can destroy. It could’ve been funny if they had gone completely the opposite way, but it’s clear they wanted to push her as this cliché, hypocritical icon of representation. That completely sets the opposite tone for the whole thing.

A different take, apparently

I agree with the points that most reviews on here make. I just consider it to be more incidental than agenda.

I've read all of Mick Herron's Slow Horse series. I really like the books. This show follows them rather closely.

The main character, Jackson Lamb, played by Oldman, is actually pure genius. He's rude, offensive, and not hygienic at all, but he always figures things out before anyone else and manipulates the outcome.

The mixed-race couple is just that. I don't see an agenda in it. If you consider that woke, so be it. If the story portrayed them as having to endure intolerance over it, I would call it woke.

I don't remember any LGBT...+++ being represented, much less any agenda.

The girl boss is present. The main one is the "Second Desk" of MI5. She's a politically conniving backstabber who gets put in her place by Lamb on a regular basis. He always gets the upper hand, in both the novels and the show.

Casting: I looked up the first season on IMDB. The top 12 cast consists of 9 men and 3 women. There is one Asian, one Black an 10 white. I don't see any DEI in that.

The main characters consist of 3 white males portrayed as competent. The most incompetent, bumbling idiot in the show is the Asian. The black lady is portrayed as competent. I don't see any agenda in that.

The fist season is about some punks wanting to behead a Muslim on camera. I can see that as being woke agenda. Some of the following storylines have Islamic terrorists attacking. It's kind of across the board on that issue.

The wokeness may be there, but I don't think it comes with an agenda.

Mild wokeness or none at all

I rated is as mildly woke. But, it may not be woke at all, depending on your taste.
It doesn't contain much woke politics. However, it's obvious there's a lot of DEI casting. Also, all the male White characters are somewhat bad or grey. While most of the non-White characters are good

Less than halfway through the first episode. Enough.

The protagonist was at a bar, talking to a tender who would set off anyone's gaydar. The next scene was them waking up together. If you can get through that, maybe there's a good show to be watched. I, myself, cannot.

This is nothing more than Disney anti-America propaganda trash aimed at teens. I only suffered through half of the first episode and couldn't
take any more. This is woke Gen Z nonsense and NOT national treasure. Casting a bunch of Gen Z DEI minority hires and a script that appears to have been written by A.I. using social media as a template this is an embarrassment. The dialog and acting is awful, the soundtrack is tiktok clips of modern pop rap slop. White people are bad or stupid. Pro illegal immigration and rampant feminism everywhere. The dialogue is loaded full of woke social justice comments and anti American sentiment. The lead character is an illegal immigrant trying to get a job with the FBI while using DACA. This is as bad as it gets and no surprise from Disney.

Surprisingly good indie movie. Some great performances and good writing. More of a dramedy than comedy so if your expecting a laugh fest you may be disappointed. The humor is there and it has some funny moments but that's not really the focus. Also some great cinematography of Japan. I think a general knowledge of Japanese culture may make this a bit more enjoyable but definitely not a requirement. The only thing woke is one scene at the beginning. He pretends to marry a young Japanese woman than tells her parents they are moving to Canada so she can get away from her parents and be with her lesbian lover without having to tell them. There is also a lesbian kiss in this scene. It's one short scene and has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It feels like a throwaway virtue signal given there is nothing at all in the rest of the movie. Overall great movie and highly recommended if you like lite comedy with your drama. However be aware a large part of this (at least half if not more) is in Japanese with subtitles. If you don't enjoy subtitled movies you may not like this.

I almost didn't watch this due to the trailers looking pretty bad and I expected the worst. The first half hour or so was surprisingly better
than expected. The comedy was more subtle and seemed like it was going in the right direction. However as it kept going I started to wonder
when the horror would kick in. An hour into it and there is very little snake screen time and all the opportunities for horror elements are played strictly for laughs and comedy. Where the original is a horror monster movie with comedic elements this is a comedy all the way. The final 30 minutes when horror should of taken over completely for a big finale they went the complete opposite direction into full over the top slapstick silly comedy. The original cost 45 million in 1997 versus the same budget for this one. With inflation the original would of cost 91 million today so this had half the budget that one did and it shows. The fx look bad, everything from the snake to the obvious green screen shots are very poorly done. It's not an overly woke movie but the 4 main characters consist of 3 white men and a token black female. There is also the typical badass female character thrown in. Toward the end there is an obvious scene of the 3 white male's cowering in fear getting saved by
the black female character. There is also a very weird awkward unfunny scene where a male character attempts to pee on another male character but he has anxiety and can only pee sitting down. It goes on way too long and is completely random and out of place. It's in the middle of what should be an action sequence and screeches everything to a halt for a long man peeing on another man joke.

Not at all what I was expecting. The first 40 minutes or so had a decent if improbable start but than it sort of stopped and went off into
corny rom-com territory. Another true story movie that is basically all fake and made up. The basic character of Gary and his fake hit man is true but pretty much everything else is b.s. including the love story that is central to the entire movie as well as the 'surprise' ending. The acting is ok and there are some humorous scenes but I just didn't find it all that funny. It also seemed to be a bit long at 2hrs for the story it was telling. I finished it and it isn't terrible just could of been better. The only woke is the usual DEI overrepresentation and the love interest just had to be Spanish so we can get that mixed race box checked. I feel like this is another 2.5 star movie but I think it's decent enough to bump up to 3 stars.

1 of the skits has 2 annoying unlikabe feminist type characters call 8 year old boys misogynsts for no reason othwise nothing really woke.
This franchise is an anthology series of found footage horror shorts. I've watched one of them before but can't remember which one. The acting
is pretty bad in almost every segment, none of them are scary, it's just tons of screaming and gore. The FX range from mediocre to bad the stories are pretty boring and these suffer the same problems all found footage type movie do. I suppose if you enjoy the franchise or don't mind found footage it's sort of ok but frankly I was bored by the second segment and started skipping ahead to others to find any that were a little better. They all sort of feel like a bunch of film students with an iPhone shooting home movies with minimal budget.