Boy Makes Girl
Another relationship movie in drag as sci-fi... Tubi must be lining these up on purpose. In this case, an autistic coder with severe social problems builds a girlfriend, teaches her to be real, then fails to keep her.
The Pod Generation
A relationship movie in sci-fi drag. In a future world where corporations and artificial technology have intruded into every facet of life, women have babies gestate in artificial "pods" owned by a greasy company. In this scenario, a woman decides to have a baby, the couple goes through couple tensions, and in a climactic moment: the baby is born!
Well made but I didn't find it compelling.
28 Weeks Later
This technically well-made sequel to the astoundingly good "28 Days Later" is technically well made, but adding fairly respectable stars like Rose Byrne and Idriss Elba, and even the production assistance of the original movie's creative team Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, isn't sufficient to make up for the fact that it has very big shoes to fill, and for the most part, abdicates completely, attempting to substitute punchy direction and action sequences for punchy direction and a well-written, well-told story.
So, not bad, but it's kind of like seeing your favorite team come back from winning the World Series to play, you know, alright.
Inmate Zero
Surprisingly solid zombie action thriller about a zombie outbreak in a prison. With this clichéd title and that plot synopsis I expected total crap, but, surprise, it's a well-made, atmospheric, tense, fairly tightly made—if not particularly inventive—little splatterfest, more like "28 Days Later" in tone and production than "Return of The Living Dead". Completely lacks 28DL's epic scope and grand storytelling, but definitely feels like they took some cinematography lessons from Danny Boyle and learned well. Watchable if you're in the mood for this sort of thing. Might be a good date movie, if perhaps a little violent and explicitly gory for some.
Warning: panned badly on IMDB, 4.3 stars. I'm not sure why. It's not great by a long shot but it deserves better than that.
Bad Education (TV series)
Faintly entertaining British series about an immature teacher leading a classroom full of misfits. Starts slow, gets a little better as it goes along.
Gehenna: Where Death Lives
People trapped in a subterranean Japanese WWII bunker in the Philippines become embroiled in supernatural drama as corpse-like people and the spirits of deceased loved ones start to appear. As mediocre as it gets, and with a twist that you can see coming from 20 minutes into the movie.
Devil’s Pass
Starts off like "The Blair Witch Project" meets the Dyatlov Pass Incident, before taking a hard sci-fi turn in the last act, after it's too late. Not terrible, but, meh. Also briefly mentions the Philadelphia Experiment, which, eh, not as creative is the writer probably thought it was, two cool conspiracy theories somehow add up to less than just one. Directed by Renny Harlin, known for such B fare as "Nightmare On Elm Street 4: Dream Warriors", "Die Hard 2: Die Harder", and "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane", but who's been at this long enough that he ought to aim higher. Actually probably on the better end of "found footage" stuff in that it's not total crap, but, dunno. Wouldn't go out of my way to see it, for sure.
Man Vs
Unremarkable but reasonably entertaining younger cousin to "Predator" benefits from that little touch of Canadian production quality, which, as usual, means it's ever-so-slightly better than it should have been.
Mostly a one man show, as a host of a survival show gets dropped off for 5 days in the northern Ontario wilderness to survive on his own, filming it for his show, as it becomes apparent he's not alone.
Not a great movie by any stretch, and slightly predictable, but benefits a little bit from what it's not: it's not an annoying first-person shooter, they didn't show the monster too early or for too long. Both good decisions that too many filmmakers wouldn't have made that keep it a little more watchable than it would have been otherwise.
Saturday Night Fever
A better movie than you might think considering the best known thing about it is the genre-defining disco soundtrack. John Travolta as a Brooklyn teenager in the '70s who loves going to the disco. More of a character-driven, slice-of-life movie than it gets credit for being. Most strangely, for example, the dancing, featured heavily in the first two acts, doesn't go on to be the film's emotional center, and, refreshingly for the modern viewer, it doesn't end with him winning a big dance contest.
I'm not saying I'd go out of my way to see it, but a lot of critics liked it, and I get that. It's two hours long, and it passes quickly, it's a pretty tight piece of filmmaking.
It probably helps that it's been long enough that we're all thoroughly calloused to how bad disco sucks.
The IT Crowd (TV series)
Reasonably humorous Britcom about geeks in a corporate IT department. First season kind of slow but eventually it gets a little funnier. Ok if you need some occasionally entertaining background noise.
After Yang
Visually gorgeous but perhaps the slowest, talkiest, least engaging nominal sci-fi I've ever seen. Something about a family whose child's AI companion breaks, so a lot of people talk and talk and talk about a lot of things.
Death Becomes Her
Faintly-better-than-it-should be comedy about two viciously competitive women who ingest an immortality potion, allowing them to do greater and greater damage to each other. Primarily saved by nice film-noir type production and good casting: Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis, all playing against type, please a cameo role from an effectively creepy Isabella Rossellini.
Van Dyke And Company (TV series)
Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner, Mary Tyler Moore, Gabe Kaplan, and a bunch of other people who should have known better in a stereotypically cringeworthy, unfunny '70s variety show. I lasted one episode.
Dog Day Afternoon
A fictionalization of a real-life 1972 bank robbery and hostage situation in Brooklyn that goes awry almost from the moment it begins. Masterful direction from Sidney Lumet and stellar acting performances from a young Al Pacino from back in the days before he became a ham and an ice-cold John Cazale, as well as a talented supporting cast of colorful characters, ensured this film's place in movie history. Not a picture with a big message, no deep meaning, not a lot of emotional punch, just a goddamn great yarn, incredibly well made. One of my favorites.
Perceptarium
100% amateur crap. Some sort of attempt at Lynchian surrealism executed with apparently no knowledge of cinematography, lighting, sound, or acting.
The Mind Snatchers (aka “The Happiness Cage”)
Christopher Walken, in his first film role, stars with Ronny Cox in this odd, talky little movie about psychological experiments in which army doctors implant chips into soldiers' pleasure centers to make them docile. Strangely, much less interesting than it sounds. Not much really happens. Overall kind of a low-budget-seeming oddity, despite the big names.
The Demon Seed
Classic sci-fi/horror about a sentient computer imprisoning a woman in her home with the goal of using her body to become human. Explores existential themes of human existence and personal autonomy in the best classic literary science fiction tradition.
It's hard for me to judge this movie objectively. I first saw this as a kid, and loved it then, and although now the visual style seems slightly cheezy and low-budget to me, and the pacing definitely isn't the punchy pacing modern viewers are used to, the better points of the storytelling and themes hold up for me as an adult. I see this as perhaps the last of the great tradition of small, personal, humanist, character-driven sci-fi and horror movies that started perhaps in the 1950s, which began to be supplanted by a new, more grandiose, almost mythic or archetype-driven storytelling style in 1968 with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and…
Mr. Robot (TV series)
What to say about this critical fave? A drug-addicted schizophrenic anarchist hacker takes on the forces of corporatism and global-scale evil in this dark cyberthriller series that never lets the intensity go below 10 for a second. Every scene is intense. Every piece of dialog. People look at each other intensely, or argue and threaten each other intensely. One woman was cast, I'm sure, primarily for her skill at sitting there looking, because it's almost all she does. The show never takes a quiet moment to gather power for the next scene, never lets up. It's just one intense climax to the next, like a Whitney Houston song.
This series reminds me of what took me so long to cotton to "Breaking Bad" for—slow pacing, intensity conveyed with lots of quiet and stillness instead of action. Which, in principle is admirable, and much harder to do well than the…
The Lonely Ones
A couple wakes up to find their house completely surrounded by blackness in which unexplained phantasmagorical visions are sometimes displayed, and spends 2/3 of the movie bickering, 1/6 in "deep" philosophizing, and 1/6 in an incomprehensible arthouse special effects mess.
10 Items Or Less (TV series)
Seeming like the forced love-child of "Superstore" and quasi-improv post-"The Office" shows like "Parks & Rec", this ensemble show set in a grocery story more closely resembles comedy than any other show I think I've ever not laughed at. The quirky and deeply flawed characters, the hammy performances, the snappy patter, the absurd setups, the ridiculous romantic pairings, it sure does look and feel like comedy. And it's even faintly entertaining. But I don't think I actually laughed once. And the lead, a young manwho inherits his deceased father's grocery store, is just insufferable, without any of the charm that has historically made so many insufferable sitcom leads tolerable.
Van Wilder
Imagine a movie described as "National Lampoon's Van Wilder, a frat-house comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Tara Reid". Now picture that same movie, except more crass than you're imagining.
Homicide: Life On The Street (TV series)
Gritty, pretty watchable cop show. The acting is good. The first seasons are better and then it never gets bad, but isn't quite as good for the last few. Still fairly watchable though.
No Filter
Views-obsessed "Influencer" gets possessed by an ancient demon or spirit or something that somehow knows how to use YouTube in this atrocious teen scream horror of the unfortunate modern "let's try to make a horror movie about social media" genre. This movie makes cheezy '90s teen scream horror look good.
Dropbear
Terribly paced, cheaply made splatstick about a bunch of American tourists in Australia who encounter a menacing pack of digitally-generated koalas with glowing eyes and an actor in a very fake-looking "mutant koala" costume.
After The Outbreak
Cheapo horror flick about a bunch of people holed up in a house during a zombie outbreak. Mostly you don't even see the zombies. So, basically, "Night Of The Living Dead", except, totally uninteresting.
Wait Wait Don’t Kill Me
What a weird movie. Bottom-of-the-barrel crapola, with the (lack of) acting and production values of a cheap porn film, and yet... something about it... if this had been a big budget it would have been kinda good. It's about a zombie outbreak in Philadelphia, and a group of survivors trapped in a basement. But it's a lot more about dialogue than zombies eating people. And it has a couple of fanciful animated sequences that totally work as comic relief and look better than anything else in the movie. It's kind of like... this would have been a good movie if they'd spent the kind of budget on actors and production staff that they did on the animation. The writing is, strangely, not really that bad, if you can imagine a skilled director directing skilled actors at it. But the movie looks and feels like a porno but with zombies instead…
Smiley Face
Anna Faris in a faintly amusing stoner comedy. Harold and Kumar somehow got away with this sort of thing, but at this point it's kind of been done, and much better than this.
Dead Last (TV series)
Faintly amusing TV series that plays like a cross between "Dead Like Me" and "Scooby Doo". A touring rock band gets an amulet that lets them see ghosts as they tour from city to city, whom they must help pass on from the earthly plane by helping them fulfill an unfulfilled ambition.
Short Poppies (TV miniseries)
Rhys Darby, whom I ordinarily like a great deal, does his best Tracey Ullman impression, starring as multiple colorful characters in this mockumentary series about a small New Zealand village. It's not terrible, but how Darby, Jemaine Clement, and Stephen Merchant got together and made something this "not that funny" is a mystery for the ages.