moviefan098

I give this an 8 and I don't do it lightly. I'm also not rating it highly as an indie, it's good compared to any project. This movie is absolutely haunting. The writer has a deep understand of people and displays them so realistically. I really liked the fact that it didn't have cliché characters. The "gangsters" don't do what you expect them to do. The things people did in this movie weren't over the top, it felt very real.

The cinematography and shots were fantastic in this movie. It was at times like a dream or an acid trip and it never felt out of place. The transitions between hallucinations and real life were not stark and abrupt like in other movies where someone is tripping. Shawn Christensen is going to be the director to watch out for in the future. The casting was perfect. Everybody was good. I just dislike Ron Perlman because he gets cast in this type of role in so many movies that it's starting to be a cliché, still he was great.

Christensen is also a great writer. This movie was at once deeply sad and entertaining. Casting Fatima Ptecek as Sophia was perfect. She was the pillar of light for Richie's darkness and she was just a delight to watch. There really is something special about Ptecek. She's the next Abigail Breslin.

I don't know how someone can even give this a 10. That's gotta be a very biased review. Stephen Merchant's character has absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever. When someone has bad social skills, they have to be at least sympathetic somehow. The show is not funny in the least. All it is is, Merchant doing something completely retarded and people reacting badly to it. I don't need to watch a TV show like this, I know people like him. You can't sympathize with him at all because you sympathize with the "straight man" characters too much. This worked in The Office because all the characters around Michael were main characters. All I feel while watching this show is cringe. I haven't laughed at a single joke in it yet and I watched both episodes to give it a chance. In the 90s, we got sarcasm, 2000s we got "reference comedy" like Family guy, now we're deep in the "being awkward is funny" era. It wasn't that great to being with and Hello Ladies does it extremely badly. Everyone is doing the awkward thing nowadays. Look on youtube, everybody is doing it and it's just not funny in and of itself. It's extremely lazy writing. I guess I shouldn't say it's lazy. People who write this kind of comedy simply have no skills or talent whatsoever so they can't do any better. I'm giving it a 1 to average out the 10.

In The Blacklist, James Spader reprises his role as Alan Shore. Same manner of speech and facial expressions, and same kind of quips. The pilot starts out promising. The directing and acting was a little loose but forgivable. The plot was entertaining enough. Then at the end of the episode, you realize that it's going to be an episodic and procedural show with James Spader catching a new bad guy every week. What a waste. The show could've been a crappy low budget version of homeland but it turned out to be another csi clone. The worst part about the show might be its liberal take on logic. I just can't stand watching people do things that doesn't make any sense. The musical choices were also quite bad for some reason.