NoWo's Reviews
She still got some, but her California is showing
I used to like Shlesinger. Then again, she used to be balanced in her views.
I was probably put off by her investing the first 5 minutes of her routine to berate men for "not realizing women are persons too before having a daughter of their own".
Well, I use routine quite liberally, as it was more preaching than funny.
Also, yeah, maybe. I know for a fact many women can be mothers and grandmothers to males without extending compassion to men, so there's that.
Don't know, maybe it's just me being thin-skinned.
Most of the audience's laughs are at the expense of men. Maybe because most jokes are too.
She has a part about pregnancy shrinking parts of women's brain, and making them unfunny. Even stating she can't afford that, being a comic with two kids.
Yep, agreed.
I was on the fence until she launched into the "real men are like this" tirade.
To echo Palahniuk, not sure one more woman trying to tell me what to do is the solution.
So yeah, she's gone pretty lefty with age. Not full retard, but definitely men=stupid women=victims, and political.
She even states it's the hill she's willing to die on.
Well, it's a free country.
Also, what with the trousers? She used to be hot. Now she's nice-looking for a forty-something.
And, before the cries of 'misogyny' and 'patriarchal male gaze': I remember McDonald, or even Carlin, being somewhat dashing young bucks, but they stopped playing to that at some point.
Created: 03-14-2025
Mesowokeithic
The movie itself is not bad, but the mid-10s pre-wokeism is grating.
Every male character is emasculated to an extent, and acceptable only if he conforms to a female behaviour, or is outright homosexual.
Every male character is both a victim and a champion, and grows up into the leader she knows she can be.
At least it's not overtly preaching. It's last decade. They still understood "show, don't tell"; I guess not all talent had quit at the time.
Created: 03-02-2025
There's only so much an actor can do
Kick-Ass buffed up nice. Taylor-Johnson is undeniably charismatic. Also, he will get the female audience approval.
The rest of the movie is mediocre at best. Crowe is fat and bored. Hechinger doesn't find his pace. Movie is meandering and 45 minutes too long.
Major offender is DeBose, providing the obligatory black girlboss magic.
Where Taylor-Johnson worked himself into current year's beefcake, she is aggressively mid. Because, why bother, diversity hire.
Wokeness is rather subdued, probably left on the floor in the final cut. All the baddies are white men, the local branch of the Society of Magical Negroes is all female, and London is 60% black.
The latter being realistic. So many Somali, London doesn't even feel like Pakistan anymore.
Created: 03-01-2025
The sleeper should have awakened by now
Lynch brought many personal additions that were quite fantastic, possibly because he was close enough in age to Herbert.
Villeneuve, not so much. He does get a little bit more freaky, with his hairless, B&W Harkonnen aesthetics. Not unpleasant, but short of a success. His overall take is off the mark, as I see it.
He tried to flesh out the Fremen, and I say, why not?
The forced diversity of colour still makes sense only to the leftist, so racist, mind. The Fremen are a brutally homogeneous people, which is one of their main strength. So yeah, multikulti motto of diversity being strength in full action. To be fair, Lynch's Fremen were very white, but probably due to logistics and budget. And well, Berbers and Kabyls, so there's that.
Also, Bardem is the whitest actor, and the natural leader, so yeah, usual lefty racism confirmed. Bardem in one heck of a Stilgar, I have to admit.
On the other hand, a character is only as intelligent as its writers, which is a severe limitation here. Hand-to-hand may look bad-arse, but shields can't be used in the desert, because worms. Meaning it should be a rifleman's battlefield.
Also, shield + laser equals big boom. Patrol ornis use shields, and the Fremen's objective is utter destruction. Why risk your men when one or two fire teams can wreak total havoc on the enemy's harvesters by detonating the scouts?
Since combat is melee, women participate, as in all zeroes of historical examples, and are at least as good as men, because intersectionality of missing dick and heightened melanin.
Zendaya is the main offender; flying arm-lock takedowns may look cool, but how she crosses the distance every time without getting eviscerated is as mysterious as her continued employment in Hollywood.
Speaking of which, she should contractualize not appearing in scene with other females, as all and any other actress has more presence than her. Including incidental, two-lines characters.
And then there's the split between Northern and Southern Fremen (South being for the religious extremists), which makes no sense either (thus the reason for not existing in the books), and feels like modern politics injection. How can it even be stable, with the South being both safe and an overwhelming majority, one would wonder.
Herbert, not Villeneuve, has created a body of work with rabid following, which included quite a lot of effort for logical, sensical world-building. Maybe Villeneuve should learn some amount of humility, and not 'fix' the work of his betters.
All in all, Herbert was famous for his world crafting, Villeneuve can hope for infamy.
Speaking of which, no weirding modules. What Lynch was snorting at the time, science may never uncover.
Zendaya's purpose is uncovered in Part Deux: to spew blank slate, pseudo-egalitarian poppycock mixed with essentialist, hard-core racism. Quite a feat, really. And trying to bring Chani to the center of everything, which is very much neither the story nor the characters.
A lot of time is wasted on 'building' Feyd-Rautha's character. He's cartoonishly evil without the over-the-top campiness of Sting in space panties. "He can be controlled", says the BG mastermind. Yeah. Right. If _that_ is your plan B, you've already failed.
Princess Irulan's role has been puffed up, which is coherent with the books. Madsen was rather bland, but stunningly beautiful. Pugh is just bland.
Chalamet is still struggling with his character, Walken is tired, so is Skarsgard, Rampling has her Gom Jabbar stuck up her arse, and Seydoux fails at her femme fatale attempt, of all things. They're all competently going through the motions.
All in all, a better movie than the previous installment, mostly due to the easier, rising conflict narration, but less and less Dune.
Created: 02-12-2025
Irrevocably suffers in comparison
I'm late to the party, and so shan't be long.
This is a decent movie, with a consequential budget, and it shows in many places. The dragonfly-like ornis, as an exemple.
It looks too flat for my tastes (the curse of digital cinematography), and lacks Lynch's creative rage. Villeneuve is still inarguably competent.
The casting is a weak point. Paul Atreides character concept is a thoroughbred: bred for power, born to power, forged through power. This character does not start off weak, and his journey is not becoming a leader, it's accepting the price of ambition / manifest destiny.
MacLachlan exuded (the expected) arrogance; Chalamet is an emo teenage girl; his character has no emotional restraint nor self-control. The only worse casting decision would have been the ubiquitous Pascal. Or maybe not. Too old, but cries better.
Speaking of ubiquitous: Zendaya. Why? Or how? Or any number of questions. Did she sleep with the new Weinstein?
The rest of the cast ranges from totally adequate to quite good, such as Momoa and Brolin.
I would mention Ferguson, a good actress burdened with a badly rewritten role, and Duncan-Brewster, set up to fail as an obvious gender-swapped diversity hire filling in von Sydow's boots.
She's quite good, probably needed the big profile job, and quite possibly could have succeeded on talent alone. But everything has its cost, and well, obvious DIE hire.
Regarding so-called diversity, ie: skin colour, how can an insular population from an insular planet range from Bardem to Olusanmokun? I mean, a biological reason, not socialist drivel.
Yes, Arrakis is probably bigger than Africa. But there are "millions of Fremen". Millions. Small numbers. Iowa has millions of people. And no distinct countries. Inter-breeding should have averaged the population in time. Unless cultural taboo. And thus probably countries.
Also, feminist angle. Villeneuve wanted "strong female roles". Like maybe an elitist sorority conspiring to influence human evolution across millennia and the known universe?
And turned the basically single Bene Gesserit character in Part One into a parody. And had to gender-swap another character.
Also, good luck with that in the subsequent movies, as Herbert was a staunch critic of "current day" (ie : 80s - 90s) feminism.
As in, the wild offshoot of BG were called Honored Matres. As in bad Latin and mattresses. And deemed dangerous as they toyed with a basic human instinct that threatened humanity itself.
We'll see how Villeneuve spins that in 2028, with a 6 per year per thousand marriage rate.
But hey, Herbert did have good instincts.
Quick mention of the score, which I would rate a tad lower than Lanois' (of which it is sometimes very reminiscent), but it's probably nostalgia speaking.
All in all, this will be yet another worthy attempt to bring Dune to the big screen (who goes to theaters anymore, though?), but certainly not Jackson's LotR.
Created: 02-10-2025
Successful action flick, failed critique of conservatism
As action sci-fi, this works great.
As the devastating denunciation of the dangers of conservatism, which director Verhoeven intended, well, it's the usual leftist fail.
Mostly because Verhoeven is quite ignorant of European history. To his defense, he had been a European for barely 6 decades at the time of shooting.
Of course, as intended, I don't agree with the overly fascistic rhetoric and the obvious Nazi imagery.
And then I remember, Mussolini had been a top-dog Italian Socialist before he went off and founded his own party, and the Waffen-SS were literally the armed branch of the National Health bureaucracy of Germany's National Sozialismus.
So, prescriptive collectivism is the opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Socialism bad? Not quite what Verhoeven intended to say, but what he ended up saying anyway. Pretty much like Showgirls denounced female exploitation by means of round-the-clock naked smokeshows...
Created: 01-06-2025
Pleasant curio
This short-lived series was an attempt to bring the Vampire The Masquerade RPG to the telly, so a different, yet highly syncretic take on the vampire mythos.
This one is not teenage girl heart-throb, angsty disco sucker, and no effete Cruise & Pitt. Although all three could be Clan Toreador.
The main focus here is the Prince of San Francisco, who is basically an arbiter between the clans, as no older, more powerful kindred wants the hassle of the charge, and his efforts to uphold the Masquerade (tm), ie: the continuous effort of vampires to hide in plain sight, as an aware and united mankind could very possibly be an existential threat.
On the plus side, the script is honestly decent, if somewhat lazy in its use of clan tropes, but still pleasant enough.
On the minus side, it is cheaply made. Very cheaply. Clan Toreador is fittingly alluring, Clan Ventrue dignified, and so on, because it's rather easy to find good-looking actors.
The Nosferatu are appalling. They personify the horror of the beast within, the uncontrollable, raging animal instinct. They're ... bald.
Same goes for visual effects. They're bad, even for the 90s. Shape-shifting is awful. Any werewolf movie did it better. Heck, even the abysmal Manimal series did it better 15 years prior.
And yeah, everyone can shape-shift into a wolf for some reason. I mean, who wouldn't want to turn into a 60-pounds canine who can't speak, use a gun or operate door handles?
Also, the script plays fast and loose with the rules, but hey, telly is not TTRPG, so one has to adapt.
All in all, it's short and rather nice, and quite possibly very accessible to a non-player.
Created: 12-14-2024
Curtis is not enough
Curtis does it for me. But not for this movie.
She used to be a smoke show, back in analog times. Also, a scream queen. She didn't have the wherewithal to carry a (real) movie as the leading role.
Also, 80s script. Incoherent, and incredibly contrived, from the get-go.
Silver tries, maybe a tad too hard, but his character is just a mess of dubious writing. Brown is solid, but his character should have found the villain immediately. As in, just exclaimed "I know his name", cue electric guitar.
I got so bored that I actually started doing some light work before the halfway point.
Created: 12-08-2024
Cotton candy, goes down easy
Not Carpenter's best movie, but he knows his stuff, and it shows in this hybrid, half-vampire, half-cowboy movie.
Purportedly a horror movie, it doesn't take itself seriously, and it's a good thing. Nobody in there looks like an elite anything, Woods in his early fifties looks a tad fragile, Baldwin is somewhat well, stout, the squad tactics suck (pun intended), and everybody's been ran over by the Good Idea Fairy.
On the other hand, everything is decided by the rule of cool. Woods looks terminally cool, as he's wont to, Baldwin does a serviceable jaded cowboy and Lee an adorable zombie floozy, winch fishing is impractical as hell, but looks highly fun, and so on.
The result is stupidly rewatchable, hence the high grade.
Created: 12-08-2024
Awkward and badly paced
This could have worked as a 40-minutes episode in something like Kindred (although Near Dark actually predates Vampire the Masquerade by a few years).
As a full feature film, it's stretched too thin, and mid-thirties Bigelow still hasn't come into her own yet.
The movie has some clumsy charm to it; Pasdar and Wright are very pretty, and with Henriksen, Paxton and Goldstein, it feel a bit like an Aliens reunion. Except they are the aliens this time.
The Lost Boys did the romance part better, and Carpenter's Vampires had the inhuman, ruthless killer down to pat. And both added humour.
Near Dark isn't bad. It just doesn't compare favourably.
Fun fact: the movie never uses the V-word.
Fun 80s fact: sense of time was different back then. "Do you miss the days?" asked to the guy who's been 'dead' for 72 hours...
Created: 12-07-2024
