Nephalim
Joined Oct 2003
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Reviews20
Nephalim's rating
Ultimately, Dead Like Me is good because I sit down and enjoy the time I spend watching it. It's morbidly funny, and it entertains me, so if that's all I need, then it does the job.
The main problem with Dead Like Me, however, is that it takes the steps a show would take towards going beyond that. Because of its content, you would expect some meaningful thoughts on life, death, and whatever's in between. I mean, as a concept, it's intriguing - a young woman dies, but lives out what would have been her years as a grim reaper. And that's what Bryan Fuller does, he comes up with interesting ideas, but he has nowhere to go with them. It happened with Wonderfalls, as well. And even if you think about the Star Trek episodes he wrote, they touch on cool ideas, but never fully explore them.
Where could this show have gone? At the end of the first season, there seemed to be some sign of George letting go of her life, and the possibility of her being happy in death. But when the second season began, there was no sign of growth. The show is well acted and well written, but as a whole, it has massive plot holes, inconsistencies, and strange loose ends that look like they never had reasonable explanations behind them when they were imagined.
Gravelings, for example. With the Ray Summers story arc, we established that they are the souls of "bad" people. And then, to defeat him, he simply had to be reaped. Are we then to gather that the other gravelings are souls that have yet to be reaped, perhaps on an oversight on their would-be reaper? Are reapers actively pursuing them? If gravelings weren't around, would people still die? Where did Ray go upon being reaped, considering his reap wasn't accompanied by the usual light show. Now, these questions are inconsequential to the plot but have greater philosophical ramifications, and it's hard to make a show about life after death without begging a existentialist question every now and then. But this doesn't, and I consider that it's primary failing.
Whereas other shows or movies that deal with life and death usually conclude that there simply aren't any answers for us, Dead Like Me establishes that there ARE answers, but we won't ever know them, and then the matter is dropped. So my problem with Dead Like Me is that it's not as smart as it pretends to be. All it is is the beginnings of an idea which was never thoroughly thought through.
The main problem with Dead Like Me, however, is that it takes the steps a show would take towards going beyond that. Because of its content, you would expect some meaningful thoughts on life, death, and whatever's in between. I mean, as a concept, it's intriguing - a young woman dies, but lives out what would have been her years as a grim reaper. And that's what Bryan Fuller does, he comes up with interesting ideas, but he has nowhere to go with them. It happened with Wonderfalls, as well. And even if you think about the Star Trek episodes he wrote, they touch on cool ideas, but never fully explore them.
Where could this show have gone? At the end of the first season, there seemed to be some sign of George letting go of her life, and the possibility of her being happy in death. But when the second season began, there was no sign of growth. The show is well acted and well written, but as a whole, it has massive plot holes, inconsistencies, and strange loose ends that look like they never had reasonable explanations behind them when they were imagined.
Gravelings, for example. With the Ray Summers story arc, we established that they are the souls of "bad" people. And then, to defeat him, he simply had to be reaped. Are we then to gather that the other gravelings are souls that have yet to be reaped, perhaps on an oversight on their would-be reaper? Are reapers actively pursuing them? If gravelings weren't around, would people still die? Where did Ray go upon being reaped, considering his reap wasn't accompanied by the usual light show. Now, these questions are inconsequential to the plot but have greater philosophical ramifications, and it's hard to make a show about life after death without begging a existentialist question every now and then. But this doesn't, and I consider that it's primary failing.
Whereas other shows or movies that deal with life and death usually conclude that there simply aren't any answers for us, Dead Like Me establishes that there ARE answers, but we won't ever know them, and then the matter is dropped. So my problem with Dead Like Me is that it's not as smart as it pretends to be. All it is is the beginnings of an idea which was never thoroughly thought through.
I have no idea why anyone thinks that Joel Schumacher is a passable director. His efforts to establish himself in many genres has repeatedly failed. The only films he doesn't manage to run through the slaughterhouse are saved only because they ride on something other than direction, IE Cate Blanchett in Veronica Guerin, and the John Grisham source for A Time to Kill. The only films that he's involved in that don't completely fail as films are the ones that require the director to be a virtual nonentity.
The Phantom of the Opera is not an example of one of these movies. If you took stills of the scenes and made a storybook, then maybe it wouldn't be a waste of time. But otherwise, everything here fails miserably. Emmy Rossum's soulless performance juxtaposed against Minnie Driver's (in hands-down the worst performance of her life) ridiculous overacting render both characters completely unbelievable. Gerard Butler and Patrick Wilson, who have both done extremely well in other pictures, fall flat here, as if they think their characters are so well-known that they don't really have to actually act, and the audience will just get it from notoriety. The only redemption on the acting spectrum is Miranda Richardson as Madame Giry, who, naturally, gets the smallest amount of screen time of all the second tier characters.
The Phantom's scars look like little more than an intense sunburn - barely worth putting a mask over. That this was done because people wouldn't believe Christine's attraction to a disfigured man (so I hear) only amplifies what a shallow blunder this was.
If the film had sacrificed acting for good singing voices, then maybe I could understand, but that can't be the case, because all the leads just aren't good. I've seen high school productions of the Phantom do better.
The Phantom of the Opera is not an example of one of these movies. If you took stills of the scenes and made a storybook, then maybe it wouldn't be a waste of time. But otherwise, everything here fails miserably. Emmy Rossum's soulless performance juxtaposed against Minnie Driver's (in hands-down the worst performance of her life) ridiculous overacting render both characters completely unbelievable. Gerard Butler and Patrick Wilson, who have both done extremely well in other pictures, fall flat here, as if they think their characters are so well-known that they don't really have to actually act, and the audience will just get it from notoriety. The only redemption on the acting spectrum is Miranda Richardson as Madame Giry, who, naturally, gets the smallest amount of screen time of all the second tier characters.
The Phantom's scars look like little more than an intense sunburn - barely worth putting a mask over. That this was done because people wouldn't believe Christine's attraction to a disfigured man (so I hear) only amplifies what a shallow blunder this was.
If the film had sacrificed acting for good singing voices, then maybe I could understand, but that can't be the case, because all the leads just aren't good. I've seen high school productions of the Phantom do better.