Reviews
Confess, Fletch (2022)
Meh
Sadly, and surprisingly, mediocre film. All sorts of plot gaps, weak character development, thin plotting, etc. Seems like the folks in charge couldn't decide if they were aiming for a comedy, a thriller, or a mystery and instead ended up with none of the above.
The plotline is so muddled it's hard to know who was responsible for what.
My wife and I "enjoyed" it, because who doesn't like Jon Hamm, but we couldn't recommend it to anyone else. And even Hamm is largely wasted in this role, with his ironic/humorous sense of self completely lost in the mix. It could have been a wonderful movie, a tentpole for a franchise, but instead was just a waste. They end with a set-up for a sequel and we can only hope it's better.
Ted Lasso (2020)
I'm not one to gush...
... but I LOVE this show! At the start you think it's going to be a combination of Major League and a "fish out of water" embarrassment comedy, and then it turns into so much more. Ted Lasso has a lot of laughs, to be sure, including a few cheap and cheesy ones - most involving Nathan, which is a little disappointing - but it's also a subtle commentary on the human condition, including the power of positive thinking, confronting the painful effects of age and loss, what "success" really means, and the desire to be close to others.
The show is subtle because it doesn't take any one plot line to an extreme: Ted's positive attitude makes the team better, but they don't accomplish a Major League type turnaround; Jamie is on the road to rehabilitation, but his plot line is dropped - or more likely deferred - midstream; Rebecca's moral redemption remains a work in progress, etc.
The casting is spot on, with Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, Jeremy Swift, Brett Goldstein and Juno Temple completely inhabiting their roles. Most of all, Hannah Waddingham is a complete revelation. I'd noticed her work in the past - at 5'11" she's hard to miss - but in TL she shines like a supernova, dominating every scene she appears in with a face that expresses paragraphs in every glance.
Ted Lasso can't and won't cure the dire state of our present day world, but it definitely will inspire bit of hope and put a smile on your face. Highly recommended.
Avenue 5 (2020)
How could so much talent...
Produce such a stinking mess? And get it on a supposedly premium channel like HBO?
I've enjoyed Iannucci's previous work, particularly Veep, think Hugh Laurie should be designated a World Treasure, and am a fan of both satire and British Humour in general, so tried to give Avenue 5 a chance (my fiance bailed after the pilot). But after four episodes have decided it's just an ill-considered rando waste of time and talent.
It could have been better, maybe even decent, with a little more thought. Examples: Josh Gad's character is a particularly disappointing/loathsome distraction, as is his assistant Iris, and the show would be improved if they were on earth trying to manage the disaster ineptly rather than trying to score cheap laughs on the ship. They could have kept Joe alive (but mortally wounded) for a few episodes and had an interesting dynamic between him and Laurie as the torch passes. And how could Zach Woods' talent be so wasted?
Two stars, but only because of Hugh Laurie, who I would watch reading the phone book and think it lovely.
Einstein and Eddington (2008)
Bad science, bad history, bad story
What a disappointment! I didn't expect this to be a documentary, but this film just gets one thing wrong after another, and generally for no good reason, all while wasting much of it's limited run time on useless, if not insulting, subplots. The number of errors would take hours to compile, but here are just a few that jumped out (in no particular order)
* Chlorine gas is yellow-green, it doesn't look like smoke. A simple Google search by the effects guy would have gotten it right.
* On a related note, at Second Ypres the German chlorine gas attack was committed against French Colonial troops, not the British, so that whole plot point was nonsense.
* There is no way Arthur Eddington would not have known who Albert Einstein was, as during Einstein's "miraculous year" of 1905 he had written four of the most important papers in physics ever published, including a resolution of the photoelectric effect for which he would win the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein had been a comet streaking across the physics world, and rather than being unknown in 1914, he was considered "over the hill" because he had withdrawn to spend 6-8 years trying to reconcile relativity with gravity.
* There is no evidence Max Planck ever helped Einstein on the General Theory.
* There is, as far as I know, no proof that Eddington was a homosexual. Not that I care personally, but losing 10-15 minutes of run time that could have been used to improve the story seems quite the waste.
* Small thing, but as a former theoretical physicist you don't lie on a rug, or lie in bed, and scrawl equations on a sheet of paper. You sit at a desk and work in an orderly way (I was never much of one for notebooks, and in that was a disorganized outlier).
* There is no way any scientist would assemble all of his peers to witness him finding out if an experiment was true or false. These things are so delicate you need to understand the answer before sharing it. (I can accept the dramatic license here, but after so many other errors...)
In short, this was the science history equivalent of a Lifetime or Hallmark movie. Really disappointing because the actual story is so compelling. For anyone interested in a good take on the subject I strongly recommend the book, The Hunt for Vulcan by Thomas Levenson, which traces the history of both this story AND the 50 year search by astronomers to resolve the anomalies in Mercury's orbit by finding a "hidden" planet even closer to the sun.