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nehpetstephen

Joined Sep 2000
Welcome to the new profile
Our updates are still in development. While the previous version of the profile is no longer accessible, we're actively working on improvements, and some of the missing features will be returning soon! Stay tuned for their return. In the meantime, the Ratings Analysis is still available on our iOS and Android apps, found on the profile page. To view your Rating Distribution(s) by Year and Genre, please refer to our new Help guide.

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Ratings5.5K

nehpetstephen's rating
Strange Illusion
6.15
Strange Illusion
Les Quatre Fantastiques
7.44
Les Quatre Fantastiques
Companion
6.94
Companion
Death of a Unicorn
5.92
Death of a Unicorn
Mountainhead
5.43
Mountainhead
Superman II
6.86
Superman II
Eddington
7.19
Eddington
Haider
8.08
Haider
Hamlet
7.04
Hamlet
Hamlet
5
Hamlet
Hamlet
8.04
Hamlet
Superman
7.57
Superman
Django porte sa croix
6.43
Django porte sa croix
Hamlet
8.510
Hamlet
The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew
6.62
The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew
Hamlet
7.88
Hamlet
Hamlet liikemaailmassa
6.88
Hamlet liikemaailmassa
Minecraft, le film
5.63
Minecraft, le film
The Legend of Gator Face
4.85
The Legend of Gator Face
Hamlet
5.92
Hamlet
Hamlet in the Golden Vale
6.61
Hamlet in the Golden Vale
Les salauds dorment en paix
8.06
Les salauds dorment en paix
Mickey 17
6.83
Mickey 17
28 ans plus tard
7.08
28 ans plus tard
Cet été-là
7.45
Cet été-là

Lists3

  • Justice Smith in I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
    2024
    • 77 titles
    • Public
    • Modified Apr 09, 2025
  • Brooklynn Prince in The Turning (2020)
    Cinemascore F
    • 22 titles
    • Public
    • Modified Sep 02, 2024
  • Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902)
    MyMovies: 1001 Movies Before Death
    • 995 titles
    • Public
    • Modified Aug 10, 2011

Reviews108

nehpetstephen's rating
Strange Illusion

Strange Illusion

6.1
5
  • Jul 30, 2025
  • Cheesy yet captivating

    This movie is quite the oddity. On the one hand, the production values are nearly nonexistent, the dialogue is unnatural, the structure of the plot is amateurish, and the whole thing is founded on an immensely silly premise. On the other hand, it's... somehow... transfixing?

    Jimmy Lydon plays Paul Cartwright, a teenage college kid who was born 102 years ago. He is--very, very loosely--a version of Hamlet, sad over the recent death of his powerful father and suspicious of his mother's new lover, who may indeed be his father's murderer if only he can get to the bottom of it. Unlike most performances of "the melancholy Dane," however, Cartwright is perpetually upbeat--cheerful, active, scheming, perhaps even flirtatious. He seems to be giving off a sexually charged charm in his interactions with literally everyone, be that his girlfriend, his best friend, his mom (especially his mom!), his elderly butler, or the random middle-aged bachelor nicknamed "Doc" with whom he has sleepovers. Lydon's performance could be called objectively awful since there's no reason why his telling his butler that he's going to take a shower should be played by the both of them as though it's a sexual innuendo, yet it's also rather mesmerizing to watch a detective move with such confidence and good humor through his dangerous investigation.

    Most of the performances are intriguing in this way. George H. Reed plays the butler Benjamin as a mere racial stereotype in his first scene but later becomes quite convincing as the man who's seen everything but won't say anything. Warren William as the mother's paramour, Brett Curtis, does an excellent job of straddling the is-he-isn't-he line between perfectly sympathetic man falling in love and thoroughly sociopathic man pretending to fall in love, and Sally Eilers as the mother-slash-fiancee is equally convincing as someone who wants to honor her son's grief while also overcoming her own widowed loneliness.

    But ultimately the screenplay does the film a great disservice. Rather than hewing closely to Paul's perspective as he investigates his would-be stepfather's genuine self, the filmmakers decide to give us Brett Curtis's perspective as well, completely ruining any sense of mystery or ambiguity. This happens very early on--much earlier than Claudius's prayerful confession in Hamlet, even--and it gives the viewer too many cards to play with, serving only to undermine the suspense. If they had held the reveal a little longer, I imagine this film would've been much stronger.

    Of course, it could have never been a masterpiece; there's simply too much silliness and easy coincidence in the serial killer plot and the prophetic dream premise for it to be too meaningful. But for a production that could have--and should have--been much worse, it somehow does manage to be a memorable and entrancing little movie.
    Mountainhead

    Mountainhead

    5.4
    3
  • Jul 22, 2025
  • Why are they all so boring and stupid?

    Writer-director Jesse Armstrong has a long, impressive history of satirical comedies about powerful people unleashing verbal diarrhea in quest of their own selfish, petty objectives: Succession, Veep, In the Loop. Mountainhead is clearly a new entry in the same series, but it seems like it was made by a lesser imitator. Whatever makes his other work so enjoyable and brilliant is conspicuously absent here.

    I've been trying to figure out what the key difference is, and maybe it's that the characters here are all too flat and stupid. I can't simply say that there's no enjoyment to be had from watching four awful, greedy people snipe at each other because the characters on Succession were all uniformly awful and I loved watching them. What seems to be a distinction in Mountainhead is that Armstrong has given us one foil character (played by Ramy Youssef) who is very clearly meant to represent decency and conscience and humanity, but that makes it all seem rather simplistic and easy in a way that the other works weren't. Some point to Cousin Greg on Succession as the surrogate character because his starting point was the most relatable, but we never got the sense that we were required to give our full sympathies to Greg because he likewise had lots of flaws and did plenty of horrible things. Our sympathies were more dispersed and more critical in Succession; sometimes you felt sad for Tom for being cheated on, sometimes you rooted for Shiv for trying to hold onto a political principle, sometimes for Roman because of his past trauma, and sometimes for Logan simply because of his sheer charisma. Each character had enough recognizable humanity, specificity, and individual talent to make them interesting despite them all being ultimately despicable.

    But in Mountainhead, it's all far too simple. You'd have to be a sociopath to root for anyone other than the character played by Youssef, and--especially when compared to the other characters--there's not even anything particularly terrible about him. He's the lone voice of reason and that reason is essentially undiluted, and that makes him and the movie terribly boring.

    His purity makes the extreme awfulness of the other characters seem unreal and out of place as a result. Armstrong gives us one simple weakness about each of the characters in an attempt to generate some empathy for them: Steve Carrell has terminal cancer, Jason Schwartzman is insecure because he never became nearly as successful as his friends, and Cory Michael Smith is growing estranged from his wife and baby. But except maybe in the case of Schwartzman, these "sympathy cards" seem like they were simply drawn out of a hat. They're very stereotypical and broad, and they're not nearly enough to counterbalance the immense, comic-book-villain-level evil of the characters.

    But I think what really makes the movie awful is how incredibly boring the characters all are. With the exception (again) of Youssef, they're all quite stupid. They spend the whole movie tossing off zingers, but unlike in Armstrong's other works, extremely few of them are actually funny. And as a result, the whole chemistry is spoiled. It becomes difficult to believe that the characters (each played by actors of widely divergent ages) even know each other, let alone would want to spend a weekend alone together. So why should we want to spend time with them? Armstrong's obvious contempt for them--to the extent that he doesn't even allow them to say anything witty--makes it difficult to justify paying any attention to them.

    I think people who enjoyed the movie would probably counterargue that the issues being explored in the film (artificial intelligence, technocracy, disinformation) are so important that they should be presented in black-and-white terms, but I disagree. The movie's treatment of these topics is both incredibly reductive and absurdist; it doesn't really have anything to say about these topics other than that they're important. (There's no magical filter that's going to make it obvious to detect fake news if only the billionaires would give us access to it, as this film suggests.) The election night episode in the final season of Succession carried far more meaningful political insight despite being channeled through a bunch of ambiguous characters.

    In short: avoid. There are some moments here and there that make it funny, but nothing that's worth revisiting or remembering and certainly not enough to justify the entire running time.
    Catfish

    Catfish

    7.1
    10
  • Jul 5, 2025
  • Catfishes all

    My first major foray into the world wide web was on my fourteenth birthday in 1999 when my mom bought me a WebTV, a VCR-like device that used the home landline to stream a crude version of the Internet through the television. I was in eighth grade, fat, bespectacled, queer but confused, poor, unstylish, too smart for my own good, and utterly friendless. I sat at the loser table in the cafeteria. I imagine one of those tables could seat about thirty students, and all of the tables in the room were full except for ours, which sat only five other people besides myself--Roberto, also fat; Richard, also queer; Josh, also poor; Kenny, also unstylish; and Angelo, who by all means should have been cool yet sat at the table, I suppose, for reasons of self-hatred. I hated them all, and I hated myself for sitting with them. If I had been a little less fat, a little less poor, a little less gay, I figured, then I could have been cool and popular like I had been in elementary school. I could be living it up with friends, who would appreciate my humor and intelligence, rather than wallowing in our pool of bickering and self-loathing.

    On the Internet, though, I didn't have to wear oversized polo shirts from Dollar General. I didn't have to be chubby and wear dorky glasses. I could be gay without anyone lashing out at me or avoiding me like the plague. I could even have a boyfriend if I wanted to, who would judge me for my wit, my humor, and my grammar rather than my bad haircut and embarrassing laugh. Anything I wanted to change, I could change. Anything I desired to be--say, a British film critic--I could be. Anything I wished to forget was nonexistent.

    Even my age became malleable. In chatrooms few people would take me seriously as a fourteen-year-old, so to avoid the bullying I simply added a decade. I became Stephen the twenty-four-year-old, and to accommodate the increase I invented an occupation, a partner, a whole ten-year history of working and schooling and lovemaking and adventuring, all so that people wouldn't dismiss me for being a teenager. It was still the same old me making the jokes, imparting the wisdom, and chatting it up; only the vehicle was slightly modified.

    By 2000 I had met a woman named Margaret in a chatroom about movies. She lived in Queens, New York, and she ran a catering business. She was twenty-five. Her sense of humor and her personality meshed perfectly with mine, and soon I migrated from chatrooms to instant messaging. We would talk for hours on end about everything going on in our minds and our lives. Sometimes we would chat until the sun was rising. In tenth grade she was my best friend and one of my only friends, and she thought I was the same age as her. I hated lying to her, but more than that I feared the repercussions that would come from telling the truth. Would she despise me? Knowing that our friendship had been, to an extent, a charade, would that make her sad or angry? I needed a friend desperately, someone I could talk to about being gay, someone I could talk to period, and I didn't want to jeopardize that.

    But in the end my conscience won out. I get major qualms from being dishonest, and I could no longer stomach inventing details about my days at work at the furniture store when I had never had a job in my life. I disappeared completely. I stopped using the messenger. I ceased going to chatrooms. I stopped responding to her emails. And in the long run I made friends who were my own age, real people in the real world who actually knew who I was, some of them completely. I found a boyfriend, I found a real life best friend, I got an actual job and went on actual adventures. A couple years later, happy in my new life, I contacted her by email, confessing the truth, attaching photographs, and apologizing for my disappearance. Her response was short and thankful, and it was the last I ever heard from her.

    When Friendster became big, and then Myspace, and finally Facebook, I always searched for her in hope of rekindling some more honest, more fulfilling friendship. We had chatted for some untold hundreds of hours--on the Internet and over the phone--and had shared an infinite number of jokes, hopes, and fears. I thought about her often, and I thought we should still be friends. But, surprisingly, she had no profiles on any of those sites--not even blank ones.

    And in all that time, in nearly a decade, it never once occurred to me to ask some rather blaring questions about my friend and to stand back and think about what I had done to her. Margaret was a twenty-five year old woman who had a job and an adult life; how was she able to spend twelve hours a day goofing off with me on the Internet, chatting from seven p.m. To seven a.m. With little interruption? I didn't have any responsibilities on a July morning when school was out, but didn't she have a life to run, work to do, errands to perform, real friends to see?

    Early this year I googled her name and found an article that a friend of hers had written for a British health website. The article detailed the psychological problems that Margaret had had since her mother died when Margaret was a teenager, problems she had hinted at to me only rarely. It detailed an obsession with comfort eating that had caused Margaret to grow to over seven hundred pounds, leaving her disabled and housebound. She didn't have a job, and she didn't run errands. And of all the "real friends" that I figured adults were supposed to have, it turns out I was one of the only ones. The article detailed long hours spent on the Internet: "'It's too hard for me to get out,' she admitted. 'It's the only way I can talk to friends.'" And then, on September 25, 2003, she died at age 27 after spending an entire night hunched over her keyboard. I could never find her on Facebook because she had died before it was invented.

    I had lied to Margaret about my age and my insecurities, and she had concealed from me her disability and her own insecurities. We loved each other and needed each other, but our hatred of ourselves had kept us forever divided. It had never occurred to me, selfish as I was, that by removing myself from her life, I was removing a large part of her social life, taking away from her one of her only confidants. If I had trusted her and had faith that our friendship could have overcome my failings, then perhaps she could have trusted me. It's ridiculous for me to think that I killed her, and yet I wonder what small benefits could have come from a little honesty, compassion, and heart-to-heart.

    The Internet doesn't allow for much of that. The Internet offers wish fulfillment and easy fantasies, comfort and isolation. You can find what you want to find--even if you're a cannibalism fetishist or a Jewish antisemite--and you can be what you want to be. If you see something you don't like or that doesn't interest you, you can click away from it in an instant--or sound off endlessly with no fear of repercussion, no need for fact-checking or self-disclosure, and without having to listen to any rebuttals. The Internet, the cold screen we stare at for hours each day, the treatment for our ailments--be they stress, depression, insomnia, or anxiety--the answers to all our questions, the solutions to all our problems, the source of all our financial, occupational, and social hopes and dreams, our entertainer, our great distractor, our confidant, our guru--the Internet has promised us something that heretofore has never been possible in the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution: that we can survive and prosper without the outside world and without each other.

    This is ostensibly a review of Catfish, the controversial documentary by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, and yet I've written ten paragraphs without apparently saying anything about the film. Nevertheless, I feel I've already said almost everything I need to say about this heart-wrenching, insightful, and poignant movie. Catfish is best experienced, I think, without too much prior information about its subject. Documenting the burgeoning relationship on Facebook between the filmmaker's brother Yaniv "Niv" Schulman in New York City and Megan Faccio, a beautiful young woman in rural Michigan, Catfish slyly deconstructs our relationship with the Internet and its world of empty possibilities. Using imagery from Google Maps and web pages, closeups of cell phones and digital cameras and GPS devices, and sound from voice mails, the film unravels the conceits of the Information Age. The screens we stare at don't always offer us a glimpse of reality. The quagmire of data at our fingertips can both elucidate and obfuscate.

    By its tearful conclusion, Catfish is nothing short of a heartbreaking examination of the American Dream as it exists at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our hopes and fantasies no longer lie at the end of the seven seas, out in the wild west, or in the outer reaches of the cosmos. We have drowned our futures in the murky chaos of the digital world, where satisfaction is never tangible and rarely yields anything we can truly embrace.

    Catfish is one of the best films, if not the very best film, of 2010.

    (This review was originally written on October 19, 2010.)
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