Reviews

Picture the worst bully you've ever seen transformed into a documentary. This is what Absurd Planet is.

Humans are without any doubt among the most bizarre species on earth. Hairy tufts on top of the head and some other random parts of the body. Fragile, weak, can't swim right, can't run fast, can't fly, can't stand cold, can't sniff well. And of course, the only species dumb enough to destroy it's own environment.

And yet, high from his delirious sense of superiority, the writer of this unbelievable series decided to ridicule whatever form of life that doesn't fit his prejudiced notions of beauty and normality. What you get is the classic and sad bully making fun of others all around.

I feel sorry for the creators of this series. They represent the exact opposite of everything we should strive for when it comes to relating to nature. And they only did it because that's exactly how they see the world and feel about it. Any person who has a respectful and humble attitude towards non human life couldn't possibly conceive this, let alone materialize it.

I also feel truly sorry for every single kid who had the misfortune of watching this sad series. These are the values that they're being taught - animals are inferior and pathetic. And they're absorbing them, while also learning that it's cool and fun to ridicule whoever is different.

Stay away from this garbage and look for uplifting, intelligent and educational creators, like David Attenborough.

What a strange documentary.

On the good side it presents quite well the problem and its causes. Industrialization brought a rise in global temperature. Temperature rising leads to warmer seas and coral reefs deaths. It's informative and didactic. I did learn many things about corals. Images are amazing and truly impressive. Specially the before/after scenes.

The problem lies in the conclusion at the end. It takes literally the last 2 minutes of the movie and actually shocked me. It goes like this: "Yes, all the corals are dying, but there's no need to worry! The world is going through changes. There's an environmentalist movement that's *inevitable* and that will fix everything! Look, these forty or so countries have committed to be powered by clean energy. And so did these fifty or so US cities. We just need to show this material to children and they'll save us all in the future!"

There's zero call to action. Zip. Nada. Basically we should just keep enjoying our awesome industrialized lives, lie back and wait for the "inevitable" solution. I've never seen so much naivete in an environmentalist documentary. It's Pollyanna at childish levels.

The movie also spends way too much time documenting it's own production, telling how hard it was to take those shots, to reach the places, to place and operate the cameras. It's in great part a documentary about it's own making.

I very rarely write reviews here in IMDb, but for this title I really felt compelled. Hope this is useful for the community.

Kiki is a remake of a comedy released only 2 years before called The Little Death, which was written and directed by Australian Josh Lawson.

I think that remakes are a delicate thing. A director must have a very powerful reason to remake a movie, and to do it "because I liked it and I wanted to do it myself" isn't a good enough reason for me. There are way too many good untold stories to be told to waste money and talent re-telling stories that were told yesterday, just for the sake of it.

The Little Death is an amazing movie. It's light, intelligent, subtle, funny, well written. It's the kind of movie that leaves a smile on your face for a long time. It also has in my opinion one of the funniest scenes on the history of the cinema - and by reading reviews and comments I noticed that this opinion is shared by many people.

Unfortunately Kiki couldn't manage to improve it at all. In fact what it did was to make it vulgar. Kiki is just full of fowl language. The smart dialogues and the innuendo present in the first movie became a stream of f-words, swearing, in-your-face jokes that simply didn't work for me. The movies aren't identical. Kiki does throw some 10-15% of new or original elements into the plot, but these are the weakest parts of the movie. They are not funny or smart, and sometimes they're plain gross.

When I consider what Kiki made with the original movie, I can only feel that The Little Death vs Kiki is like Woody Allen vs. Eddie Murphy. It's Charlie Chaplin vs Charlie Sheen. It's intelligent vs. in-your-face humour. That's what Kiki managed to put on top of Lawson's story. All the cleverness you'll find within Kiki (and I'm not saying there's none) came from Lawson's script. The original elements... they're just weak.

In Kiki the acting is inferior, the way the stories are weaved is much less interesting. The casting is way, way inferior. Lawson managed to create a magic chemistry with his casting that's nowhere to be found in Kiki. Not by a long shot.

Kiki is not a bad movie in itself. And it's very beautiful visually. But when a movie is a remake, comparing it to the original one is something that's unavoidable. And Kiki failed to improve The Little Death in any sense.

My suggestion: if you haven't seen any of them, watch The Little Death first! If you watch Kiki first, it'll ruin the novelty and the joy of watching the - much superior - original title.

Usually I don't leave reviews but since I noticed some reviewers comparing this movie to El Orfanato or El Espinazo del Diablo I decided to comment.

Comparing The Awakening to El Espinazo is like comparing Scream to The Shining. El Espinazo is poetry in form of movie disguised as horror tale. It's a piece of art that has several layers and is told with incredible sensibility despite the harshness of the setting. The Awakening is yet another silly ghost story. It has fewer than average cheap scares, which is kinda of a plus, but the story is paper thin, silly and ultimately unrewarding.

Another thing that bothered me a lot is that the personalities and the behavior of the characters are absolutely modern. In fact, one could easily set this movie in 2020 by changing only the clothes and objects and leaving all acting untouched. The acting is not bat but it is ridiculous to imagine that people like my great-grandparents would talk and behave anything like that. So expect an extremely superfluous post-first-war feeling.

If you're looking for an intelligent ghost story go for El Espinazo del Diablo. El Orfanato is also worth checking. But I definitely do not recommend The Awakening.

When I first heard about Children of Men's plot I got totally hooked. The idea of a world where humans can't have babies anymore is fascinating and could lead to great speculations/explanations. Certainly a concept for a fantastic science fiction story.

Well, that's not what it is.

This movie could be described simply as a big runaway. After a few short introductory minutes some characters get together and begin a runaway (from a few parties and groups)that will be the essence of the movie.

So there's no speculation about what's happening with humanity? The answer is no. Expect no "why"s at all. Also do not expect to have to think anytime during or after the movie.

Children of Man's story ignores so much the fertility issue that it could be easily transplanted to any other war-like/runaway context without major adaptations (besides the motive of the runaway, which by the say is no big deal at all).

The reason for the movie's background of a chaotic society is also left blank. All the poverty, contrasts, and the imminence of a civil war are left untouched. Some people use the word "dystopia" here, but this is way too much generosity for me. It would take a much more solid context to transform this empty background in a dystopia.

Don't misunderstand me, the movie is well done. I would dare describing it as the famous first minutes of Saving Private Ryan stretched to a full length movie, and that's a compliment.

However I felt totally cheated by this movie's marketing. By relying so much on the fertility mystery it induced people to believe it was a different movie than it really is.

If you're looking for a clever and complex sci-fi story, look somewhere else.

If you're looking for an action movie with lots of car chases, killing and explosions, then this movie is for you.

I didn't read Well's original novel so I really don't know which one is to blame - he or the director (who is actually his great-grandson), but the movie is crap.

I think that if there's a perfectly working travel machine, the last thing one would do after traveling hundreds of thousands of years to the future or to the past would be engage himself on a stupid and dangerous adventure to rescue someone unknown. I mean, come on! So many wonderful things to know about the future, so many gorgeous things to explore with this theme... why must the main character play Indiana Jones and go rescuing some girl in a random year? Yet another 2000's flavored ultra-action movie to be forgotten soon enough (I'm already forgetting it).