jonschaper

People at a party read different stories from a book, that we see portrayed on the screen. The problem is that all the stories would, in reality, have been rejected by amateur publishers, and gotten poor grades as a junior high writing assignment.

For example: Woman opens cookbook, we see her preparing her food. She cuts up a human (off screen) for meat, then for some bizarre reason serves an obviously overooked head to her excited guests instead of the meaty dinner we saw her preparing. People working at a site talk about a local legend of a killer scarecrow. The scarecrow shows up for the last 10 seconds and kills them offscreen. And, no, I'm not leaving anything out. That's all you can find in way of plot. It's a movie where there are uniquely no spoilers because there is no plot to spoil.

All the stories lack any suspense, character, motivation, anything. They're just plot points someone might use with the intention of later fleshing out, but plot points with zero creativity behind them. Just mere cliche. And, for those who care, there's not even any gore to make up for the lack of actual story.

I am a fan of short horror fiction, so I see zero blame for running time when it comes to the complete lack of storytelling. In fact, given how threadbare the "plots" are, each "story" runs far much longer than it should, with no redeeming qualities like good acting, visuals or dialogue.

I've watched the first 3 episodes and don't think I'll bother with the rest.

Performances: The show has some really great performances -- even some of the casting people feared would be little more than stunt casting has worked thus far with Vivienne Acheampong doing a strong job as Lucien. But Sturridge as Morpheus is dull. Not a good thing for a title character. You don't really notice until the second episode when instead of being a silent prisoner (something he did well) moves on to him having to carry his scenes. He lacks any of the gravitas his character should have. He just seems like a calm, softly spoken person, and nothing more. It works when Morpheus is supposed to be calm and softly spoken, but there's more to his charcter than that. And Cain and Abel? Boy, did they get that wrong. At least they're incidental characters thus far.

Script: The first half of the first episode showed great promise. Opening exposition aside, even the changes made largely served the story (although I didn't agree with all changes like having the Corinthian playing the role of Exposition Device). But it goes downhill after the elder Burgess' end, with the show quickly skipping over about 80 years of the younger Burgess' life. No flashes of the decline of his father's cult from the 60s to 70s to 80s, etc. And then, worst of all, they do not really show what his fate is when that is an important demonstration of Morpheus' power and wrath. Burgess might as well just be another victim of the sleeping sickness. Which leads to:

ZERO foreshadowing given about what happens with any of the victims of sleeping sickness. Although they give a couple minutes screen time to a super wealthy 1920s black British family, they come off as your typical throwaway, anonymous characters from the earthquake scene in a disaster film. Which is symptomatic of two problems: The show doesn't like to use subtle foreshadowing when they can instead sledgehammer things in constantly with disrailing exposition. And it seems to throw out the original source's focus on how all these cosmic events affect people on a personal level.

The strength of Sandman was how it showed how things affected the normal humans caught up in events. But here, instead of focusing upon how posessing Morpheus' sand affecgted Rachel, they chew up screen time with a cheesy story of Joanna Constantine performing an exorcism played for laughs. And Joanna herself is haunted by an extremly watered-down version of John Constantine's Newcastle experience that leaves you wondering why she feels any guilt, not that she seems to be much of a troubled soul in the first place. So Rachel is reduced to an incidental character whose sole role seems to be as a token ticking diversity boxes for a couple seconds.

And the pacing is horrible after the first episode. As I hinted at, story and character give way to endless (no pun intended) exposition. Do they want to send people off to dreamland by inducing sleep themselves?

If anything gets me to stick to the series it would be my curiosity to see what they do with "24 Hours" from issue 6, but even if I wasn't already underwhelmed by the show I'd worry about how well that story translates. With all the choice available these days (much of it away from Netflix) I'm not sure I'd bother investing more time.

There is a lot of dross to navigate through with reviews these days. On the one hand you have people who hate any film that dare cast any women or minorities, and on the other hand you have idiots who think casting a black woman as a white male Norwegian king is a somehow a prequisite to making a film or TV.

In the case of Turning Red, many of the negative reviews are coloured by the former form of idiocy, like one person claiming the film takes place in a "woke fantasy" where "most" of the population wears turbans. Actually I found it to be a pretty damn accurate depiction of the wonderfully diverse population around Toronto's Chinatown and Kensington Market area, and the person who claimed that two people with head coverings represented "almost the entire population" was being hysterical. The main inaccuracy I found was the idea that a wealthy kid from what appears to be the Rosedale area would be going to a public school in the area the film centres around, just because they wanted a wealthy student as part of the plot -- not that a super wealthy kid was needed.

So getting to the substance: It was thankfully nowhere near the metaphor for menstruation than I was led to believe, nor the kids as smug as some positive reviews led me to believe. But one critique that was spot on is that the film seems to be geared primarily to young girls, so it wasn't the sort of enjoyable experience for the whole family I'd expect from Pixar. If anything I found it dull, my young daughters found the boy band (and the characters' obsession with them) annoying, it didn't hold their attention that well, and it seems those who would most identify with it's coming of age theme would be those with a mother, like the one in the film, who is emotionally abusive and cold.

Not a horrible film, but one I couldn't really actively recommend for any audience.