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Reviews
Hagane no renkinjutsushi (2017)
No amount of alchemy can polish this turd
After watching this film, I needed a place to process my experience and read similar reviews from others. Yeah, it's that bad.
This movie was an extremely tedious snooze-fest from start to finish, and over two hours of my life that I'm never going to get back. There was precious little action in this film, and even when it happened it felt stilted and wasn't particularly interesting to watch. Also, how many times can you plausibly have a character get attacked while everyone else just stands around watching? Whatever, I don't even care enough about this movie to litigate the merits of whatever narrative choices it thought it was making.
The dialogue was hackneyed and melodramatic, the characters were underdeveloped and completely uninteresting, and it was at least an hour longer than it needed to be. I have a sense that the villains were supposed to be cool, but they were just as bland as everyone else.
I've come to learn that this cinematic monstrosity is based on an anime film of the same name, which may or may not be good. I honestly don't want to have anything to do with this franchise after watching this; I refuse to give a second more of my time to anything that is even remotely associated with this movie. I would gladly trade an arm and a leg to turn back the clock and make the choice not to watch it.
The Leftovers (2014)
Top Notch Show Marred by Awful Music Choices
I thoroughly enjoyed watching all three seasons of this show. It is brilliantly written and consistently unpredictable in the best possible way--you can never truly anticipate where it's going to take you next. The show itself leaves very little explained until the end, which enhances the mystery that is built up through the course of the longer story arc. If you're okay living in the midst of uncertainty (much like the characters in the show), this is a really fun show to follow.
That being said, this show deserves an award for the worst music in the history of any television show. The opening theme in season 1 is rock solid and the theme from season two is fitting as well (although the bluegrass twang of Iris DeMent gets a little grating after hearing it for the fourth of fifth time). All the other music choices in this show are horrible. They are often wildly inappropriate or out of place given the mood of a particular scene, and are often obnoxious to listen to. It's almost as though the show had little or no budget to license good music and had to settle for cut rate, bargain basement music instead. The songs they picked for various episodes are as horrible as the departures and subsequent civil breakdown that the universe of the show posits. Maybe that's the point? I don't know but it's a real bummer to listen to 90% of the music.
The awful music choices come to a head in season 3, which strictly speaking does not even has its own theme. Instead, they reuse the theme from season 2 in one episode, and for the rest its a different (and horrible) song for every episode. The music chosen for this show makes no sense and is easily the worst thing about the Leftovers, which is otherwise entertaining.
Scandal (2012)
Had to stop watching it for my own sanity
This show was way better in the first two or so seasons. Back then, a lot of the episodes focused on the main characters using their skills to mop up different political scandals around town. There was a larger story arc that was okay too, but it was never all that interesting.
The show goes way downhill as it grinds on, however. Once Olivia Pope gets into a ridiculous love triangle with two dudes, the whole show devolves into her making pouty faces and yelling a lot, or sitting around on her couch making pouty faces while she drinks wine and eats chocolate, etc. That's pretty much every episode. All the characters talk with the same annoying diction and frequently make ridiculous and hyperbolic speeches about "the republic" and other nonsense. The writing is painfully predictable. I gave up somewhere in the fourth season. Or maybe the fifth. I don't remember; I do my best to pretend this show never happened.