Reviews
Game of Thrones: The Bells (2019)
Episode 5: Will its Rating be Meaningless?
This should remind anyone who uses IMDB to read below the ratings before making your decision. A raft of users have rated this a single star before even watching the episode. Whatever their motivation -- and you can be sure there is one -- they've taken their shot at hammering down the rating. We'll have to see if a tidal wave of objective reviewers can emerge to provide a non-idiotic overall rating.
I consider myself an objective reviewer. I found the last two episodes of GoT pretty disappointing. Leaving a Starbucks cup on set, while kind of funny, hurt credibilty. It's just one of many recent weak points, for me. But I kept my mind open just enough to watch Episode 5, and I believe it is one of the great episodes in GoT history (and one of the great episodes in tv series history).
The concluding episodes of this show had to bring violence. But instead of a loud, unphilosophical, and brutal series of sequences (as happens in all sorts of comic-hero big films), GoT delivered a collection of principles and insights with the savagery. War is random. Don't expect your heroes to crawl through while everyone else dies (and many other principles, far more interesting than that.)
The episode also brought unbelievable visuals at all levels. Episode 5 was a work of art, a Hieronymous Bosch in motion, with narrative to match. If you've read the book "Tribal Leadership" by Dave Logan (very highly recommended), this is Level 1 existence at its most grim. Everyone's life is hell. No winners. No joy. Revenge, fear, brutality, hatred, shock, and misery. Every single character suffers.
It scores a 10 out of 10 for me. The series now has a fighting chance of closing out masterfully, at a level at -- or beyond -- its greatest moments.
The Mule (2018)
Borderline Unwatchable.
Cardboard performances. Disconnected feel throughout. Multiple scenes that don't advance the story. Long highway driving cuts. Renders like one of the lower quality episodes of Chips. Breaking Bad on training wheels, without handlebars.
Henry May Long (2008)
Truly Bad Film.
The good news for IMDb is that this movie was so very bad that it compelled me to register and make a comment. I should add here that I'm a film buff who rarely passes harsh judgment. But sometimes a movie is so poorly acted, poorly conceived, poorly edited, with a such a poor story line that it begs criticism.
I'm surprised by all the claims of how superb, brilliant, dark, and beautifully shot this movie was. I can only conclude that the cast and crew are active posters here. The acting was extremely thin. The pace of the movie was agonizing. I gave it new chances at every turn (mostly because I didn't want to feel like I was wasting a Saturday morning in NY), but with every new scene, it dragged longer, delivering characters in which I took no interest, with which I could not connect, for whom I could not empathize.
When I see negative reviews on IMDb of small independent films like this, I sometimes wonder if the poster has a personal axe to grind (something like. . he used to date the gaffer, she dumped him, and now he's going to trash everything she ever works on). But here, nope. I know no one who worked on this film. And I wish it would have been great. But the film wasn't dark (as some have mentioned) or depressing (as others have claimed). . . those suggest that I connected with the film . . . nope, Henry May Long was just too long, empty, and tedious.
That's the Tomas Take on this one.