I just finished season 1 of Luck. Thoughts:
- It’s such a shame that this show was canceled, and for the wrong reasons.
- It was quite slow at points, but it was certainly building up. Particularly in the final episode.
- Working in the racing industry myself, I knew there would be plenty of stories and angles to choose from within that world.
- Dustin Hoffman gave a great, subtle performance.
- All of the performances were fantastic actually.
- I thought Richard Kind and his character were really good and interesting.
- It was also amusing to have Michael Gambon (Dumbledore) swearing a lot.
- I loved the use of Massive Attack, not just as the the theme song, but also as score a few times throughout the series.
- I feel so bad for David Milch. This is his third show on HBO to be canceled, and the second to end after its first season.
- Oh well, I enjoyed it while it lasted.
P365 Film #233
This film is mostly set in a restaurant, wherein the owner (Michael Gambon) and his wife (Helen Mirren) regularly dine. It’s pretty obvious early on that Gambon’s character is a huge prick. Just an absolutely unbelievable asshole. Seldom have I seen such a dick of a guy on screen. How Gambon can pull that and being Dumbledore off, I’ll never know. Anyway, Mirren’s character begins an affair with a guy at the restaurant and it goes from there. I liked it a lot. It was shot in a very simple way, but it was quite effective. It was dark, it was sexual and contained great performances all around.
P365 Film #190
Well, well, well. Here we are. After 11 years, eight of which had a movie released, we are finally at the end of the Harry Potter saga. I think I read the first book when I was about 11 or 12 and and books 2-4 shortly thereafter. The first movie came out not long after that. And I kept up with the books and movies, right up until today. So what did I think of this final film? It was good. But the word that kept coming to mind was… “underwhelming”. I’m not sure if I put too much expectation on it, or if I was remaining too faithful the book but most things fell flat for me. It started off really well. There were some really awesome moody shots and I was getting amped for the ending. But I just kept waiting and waiting and waiting for something epic and amazing and I didn’t feel it ever quite delivered. I was particularly disappointed in how it kind of glossed over some of the deaths of certain characters. I was looking forward to some emotional intensity at characters being killed, but they were very casually dealt with. It showed them dead for a second, then moved on to whatever Harry was doing. Everything moved so fast - they hardly ever dwelled on anything (though that’s been true of most of the films for me). So, yeah, most things felt disappointing to me. Harry’s final confrontation with Voldemort should’ve been the grandest moment of the series, but it was nothing too spectacular. Also, I guess it was inevitable with it being all about Harry and there being so many characters, but a lot of them really felt marginalised. Some of the pretty important or memorable characters only got one line, if that. One thing I will praise greatly was Alan Rickman. He was the best actor in the film and I really liked the flashbacks to his past. Maggie Smith was also brilliant. Anyway, I guess I wish I didn’t have the baggage of having already read the books. It’s really nowhere near as bad as I’m making it sound - it was still pretty well-made and enjoyable, but, like I said, underwhelming. I’m now pretty keen to read all the books again, to see how the stories should be experienced.
