Reviews

I had every reason to believe that Netflix's One Piece adaptation would be a collossal piece of garbage. They have done nothing but give me reason after reason with their awful takes on Cowboy Bebop, and the Witcher to not trust them to do an adaptation properly, and just when I was completely done with them they go and pull off One Piece.

It makes no sense, but this is the wild and crazy world we live in.

Now granted, One Piece is actually impossible to adapt COMPLETELY to the live screen; anyone even casually familiar with the source material will understand that. But goddamn this show does as good of a job as can be reasonably expected to bring the world and characters to life.

The casting is great. These might be relatively newcomer actors, but they give the kinds of performances that make it look like they have been waiting their entire lives to bring these characters to life. Iñaki Godoy in particular gets a standing ovation from me for how close he nailed Luffy.

We get actual sets and make up and not just an overabundance of CGI which is a nice thing to see. The sets look great and thematic if not as grand as some of the locations in the manga, and the make up looks terrific even if, actually especially when it makes the villains look goofy and silly.

The writing and directing does an admirable job of not only adjusting the pace to make it fit in live action, which any One Piece fan could tell you was going to be a challenge, but also not shying away from the original style of the manga. There's a side by side comparison of one of the fights in the series, I wont say which one to keep this review spoiler free, that shows just how closely the choreography was being tailored to fit the action in the anime. I do still have some nitpicks about certain adjustments that don't seem to be neccessary but they're not major gripes as much as minor nitpicks.

All of my praise being said, this show still might not click for everyone. The subject matter is goofy and kind of cheesy at times, but hey it wouldn't be One Piece if it wasn't. It has a relatively familiar plot with predictable story themes even for people who have never experienced a Japanese shounen before. Those of us raised by the medium wouldn't have it any other way but for a live action audience looking for something new, the setting and premise of the show will feel new but the story beats and themes won't.

I have to give Netflix my genuine appreciation for this one. They did this one right. I'm quick to tell them when they screw things up, (just read my Witcher review) so it's only fair I praise them when they get it right.

You can pretty much tell from the trailer what you're going to get with this film. You got the legendary story of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, and the story plays up his struggles with segregation in the 40s and the challenges he had to overcome while a second story of. Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey played by Harrison Ford talks directly to the audience about how important of an event this is and why Baseball is the best game on the planet yadda yadda.

It's all well and good for what it's trying to do and for the most part it remains pretty historically accurate.

But it's really not that entertaining of a movie, especially if you're already familiar with the story. The emotional beats are really familiar, the acting and dialogue seems overly dramatized, and the performances while good, are done by actors who never seem to truly embody their roles so much that the audience forgets who they are. Harrison Ford is great, but he never stops being Harrison Ford throughout the movie. Alan Tudyk tries his best to sell the despicable Phillies manager yelling slurs as best he can, but never stops being Alan Tudyk, which makes me take the scene far less seriously.

Chadwick Boseman (RIP) is basically still Chadwick Boseman.

Also for a movie that loves to idolize the game of baseball like all baseball movies try to do, there really isn't a lot of baseball in it. The baseball scenes are all incredibly short, without a lot of moving parts in any given scene. You don't ever get the tension of an actual ball game, and the actors on screen don't really look like they spent a lot of time with coaches either because they don't look the part of ball players at all on screen. I suppose this is supposed to make Boseman look better as Jackie in comparison to the players he's against but it makes the whole game end up looking cheap and very "for the movies."

Your enjoyment of this movie is going to really come down to what you're expecting to get out of it. If you're looking for another movie dramatically depicting the cruelty of early 20th century segregation then this movie fits the bill, even if it doesn't really go out of its way to show anything particularly new or enlightening compared to other movies on the topic, but if you're looking for a feel good Baseball movie that happens to also address the breaking of the color barrier well this movie doesn't really do much to satisfy you since the Baseball parts of the movie aren't really that good.

In the end I got exactly what I expected out of this movie, but my expectations weren't really that high considering what I saw in the trailer. There's probably a good reason this movie never got a lot of buzz or chatter after the marketing campaign for it was over. It just isn't very memorable, even if the story it's depicting on screen is one that will never be forgotten.

I'm no expert on horror. In fact it's easily my least favorite genre, so I don't really know what I'm doing when I rate or review a horror movie.

But. I can safely say with humility that this movie has had a lasting impact on me as the scariest movie I've ever seen. Something about the mockumentary style it uses, the way it never shows you what you should be afraid of, the acting performances in it, the haunting sound effects they use.

Whatever the sum of its parts it is, it stuck with me, and it might just be that it worked on my particular set of fears, but whatever the case may be, when I think of movies that scared me this is at the top of the list. So that means I have to give it high marks right?

I understand that the way this movie presents itself as authentic rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but to be honest I can't dock points for that. It's a movie, you're an adult, you're supposed to be able to make educated opinions about what is real and what isn't. If you really need a filmmaker to hold your hand that way then you're stifling their ability to be creative.

So with that rant out of the way all I can say is, that for a genre that I'm not normally a fan of this is a high scoring movie for me, because of the lasting impact it has had on me. I'll never watch this movie again. So if you want the same kind of experience I've had, give this movie a go.

I'm starting to really wonder at this point, why studios are even bothering to adapt popular series that are loved across the world. It really doesn't make sense to me. You'd think the studio would want to adapt something because they want to bring in the already built audience that is attached to the other mediums, you'd think they'd want the word of mouth advertising that fans of that medium can bring with them to grow an audience. You'd think that adapting a story that is already written, proofread and tested with audiences would be easier than coming up with something brand new on your own. You'd think all of these things right? This is why studios choose to adapt fantasy novels right?

So then why, would Netflix allow people like the ones in charge of the Witcher, to do to this show what they have been allowed to do?

This series had the potential to be Netflix's answer to Game of Thrones (a series that was faithfully adapted up until the show went past the published material just by the way) it's a dark and gritty fantasy series that tackles serious moral questions with real adult relationships and loads of political intrigue. It is widely considered by lovers of fantasy as one of the finest dark fantasy stories available right now.

It was this love of the series that brought in Cavill, who championed the series as its face and title character. His passion for the series was evident from the very beginning with the way he portrays Geralt on screen. When the series first introduces you to him, fans delight in how much he looks and sounds the part of the iconic stoic Witcher from the books and the first episode which faithfully resembles chapters from The Last Wish gets fans excited to see what is next for the character in the series.

Unfortunately, that first episode is the peak of what this show has to offer. It's all downhill from there. It has a fantastic first episode that while the obvious directing problems (more on that later) did show themselves the primary story of Renfri and Stregabor in the first episode was so well done that it could be ignored. The budget seemed like it would be enough to allow the show to do the series justice, and then later in the series it just wasn't. There's a very steep drop off in production value from the first episode onward which impacts very important events like the Battle of Sodden Hill later on. The costume design feels very low budget, the cast other than Cavill is a bunch of actors making their first speaking roll credit anywhere. The budget became a noticeable problem the further into Season 1 that you went. But you know what? There was enough positive in the first season that you could look past its flaws and hope for improvement in Season 2, that if the show could pick up steam it might be able to truly go somewhere.

Then season 2 happened, and fans hopes of anything positive coming out of this series was completely massacred like the henchmen of Blaviken. Inexplicably the show starts to just go on WILD tangeants that have no bearing whatsoever to the source material. Completely ruining and wasting important character relationships with one another, killing off characters that are known to be alive much later, COMPLETELY rewriting one of the core story arcs of one of the main characters (Ciri) in a totally stupid and ridiculous way only for it to go absolutely nowhere.

What was a mediocre but painfully budget adaptation turns into something that barely resembles anything to do with the Witcher at all in just one season. What the hell happened here? Suddenly you're not able to look past the glaring problems with direction, pacing and time management that were present in the first season because now the series has wasted the good faith the audience had in cheering for its success. You can't ignore the jerking around of various timelines and plot threads in disjointed fashion as though the series was trying to rush towards the big events of the later books and completely skipping over the quieter scenes of Geralt just being a Witcher (that everyone wanted to see) because it crash lands into a field of pure show original garbage that no one asked for. How did we end up here? How did Cavill who is supposed to be as big of a Witcher fan as the rest of us let any of this happen?

Ladies and gentlemen we come now to where we are today. To where Henry Cavill has walked away from the series, and none of us can blame him, because as it turns out, Cavill was as frustrated with how quickly this show fell apart as much as we are. His refusal to continue to take part in what is such an obvious bait and switch from lackluster and dishonest showrunners is a validation in the fanbase's love of him as a spokesman of the series.

The show is scheduled to continue with Cavill as Geralt through Season 3, but this particular fan wasn't planning on watching Season 3 with or without Henry Cavill anyway because that's how horrifically bad Season 2 was. With Cavill now leaving the show for good at the end of the season, I can safely say without any hyperbole that the last reason for anyone to care anything about this show is gone for good.

The show at its best, was a messy, low budget almost amateurish adaptation of the books that happened to have the perfect casting of its main character (and to be fair as Jaskier/Dandelion also) driving it, and at its worst it was a total misrepresentation of what the Witcher was, that was just horrible in every way.

So much for being Netflix's answer to Game of Thrones. This series has more in common with Netflix's live action anime adaptations. It's such a shame too because the Witcher really had the potential to be an amazing TV show. Maybe next time, the right people will be at the helm of it.

I won't try and argue with anyone that says this movie is bad. It has a horrific script rife with far too many moments more interested in selling action figures than making sense. Arnold puts in the most camp performance as Mr. Freeze possibly ever that almost completely ruins what should be one of the most dramatic characters in the Batman lore.

George Clooney as Bruce Wayne isn't believable, Chris O'Donnell's Robin feels old and tired at this point after his kind of fresh feeling introduction in Batman Forever, the effects seem cheap and theme parkish (probably didn't help that Six Flags was really pushing live shows based on these movies back then) and so on and so forth.

If you were looking for a serious Batman movie, this totally missed the mark.

But what if, what if we just misunderstood what this movie was trying to do? What if the campiness, cheesiness, and ridiculousness was the entire point. What if instead of expecting The Dark Knight we should have been expecting Sharknado? Does it have any appeal as an expensive B movie satire?

In my opinion, it does. This movie is a BLAST to watch from the perspective that it's to be made fun of. Arnold Schwarzenegger's one liners become almost iconic when viewed from the lense of "what would be the dumbest, corniest, thing that could happen right now in this scene." Uma Thurman's over the top cringe worthy Poison Ivy is actually hilarious when you know what this actress is actually capable of when she's given a good role to work with. Bane looking something like a theme park mascot is impossible to take seriously when you've seen later, more serious versions of the character.

In short, for 1997 when this movie came out, and for a variety of marketing reasons, people didn't get that this movie was supposed to be a joke. People still had Tim Burton's Batman movies in their head they weren't expecting to go full Adam West.

That's a definite failure of the movie, to fail to make sure the audience understood what you were trying to do. But I think, 20 years later we can finally look back on this movie as being misunderstood in its time. It's suffered I think more than enough for the crime of being a joke that no one got. I think it's time people tried for a moment to rethink what this movie was.

If you still think this movie was the worst thing ever even after I've said my piece, I'm still not going to argue with you. I'm just going to smile as I agree with you.

Andor is a very different type of show set in the Star Wars universe. It's slow, it's heavy on dialogue and subtlety, the characters are deeply layered and complex, the world building is thick and sticky, the tone is somber and tense.

It's brilliant. It compliments the main story of the Galactic Civil War so well, adding context and nuance to the conflict in a very meaningful way expanding the scope of the conflict to include the every day people on Imperial Worlds. It is filled with some of the best writing the franchise has seen in any medium. It has the best dialogue the franchise has ever heard, and many of what are soon going to become some of the best performances that the franchise has ever seen. I can't give shout outs to particular actors without spoiling things in the plot so I won't; anyone who's been watching this show though knows who they are.

The pacing of this show is very slow though and that is going to keep away a lot of people that are not big Star Wars nerds. For the more casual audience that is used to the very theme park level experience of a typical Star Wars product, this is going to feel very off brand and perhaps not to their liking. I totally understand that. This isn't for everyone.

For a fan like me that lives and breathes the world of the galaxy far far away, who grew up with the novels and the video games, this show is amazing. It makes me feel immersed in the universe in a way that I haven't been able to since I was a kid.

I am stunned at how bad this movie is. I literally can't think of a single thing to praise about it other than the cast.

The plot is laughably stupid, the visual effects are so bad they completely break any immersion you can possibly have in the movie, and unlike the first Wonder Woman movie this movie completely fails as a period piece. There is absolutely zero reason for this movie to be set in the 80's it lends absolutely nothing to the movie except for bad fashion.

But the worst part about this movie is how boring it is. It's just a boring super hero movie.

Also there was way too much Steve Trevor in this movie. Nothing against Chris Pine but I don't care about Steve Trevor and WAY too much of this movie is focused on him.

I honestly can't believe that this movie was made by the same people that made the first Wonder Woman movie. That movie wasn't totally perfect, it did have some issues but in every way that movie did succeed this movie fails. Wonder Woman deserves better than this.