Tag: Amazon Prime

Fallout (2024)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime Video
Length: Eight 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Yet another adaptation playing it safe with their big budget
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: acting, sometimes looks good, some good scenes
What I don’t like about it: formulaic, padded, poorly written, often looks bad

Review:
Ella Purnell plays a guileless sheltered liberal who explores the wasteland, chasing a series of macguffins and running into Walton Goggins as a hardened cowboy zombie. It’s entertaining enough but twice as edgy and half as satirical as it should be, full of stock dialogue and stretched-out scenes of violence. The animation and soundtrack are both inconsistent, often falling flat.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, gore, brief obligatory sex scene in the pilot

Deadloch (2023)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime Video
Length: Eight 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Australian comedy-murder mystery
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: fuuny, good characters, sustains interest
What I don’t like about it: a little long, tone doesn’t always mesh, underwhelming payoff

Review:
In this example and parody of dark murder mysteries, a Tasmanian cop finds that the town’s misogynistic men are being murdered and has to partner with a brash out-of-town detective to find out whodunnit. The comedy and mystery elements blend surprisingly well though not perfectly, especially at first.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence

Cinderella (2021)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime Video
Length: 1hr 50m
Synopsis: Fairy tale musical
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: dynamic, beautiful, funny, the talent, costumes, choreography, it’s very gay
What I don’t like about it: some weak jukebox numbers, overplays its strengths

Review:
Camila Cabello showcases her enviable talents in the lead role of this non-Disney fairy tale adaptation; colourful, hyperactive fluff with a charming level of effort. The voiceover narration (Billy Porter as the Fabulous Godmother) introduces us to Ella – for ‘Cinderella’ is an unwanted nickname = who lives in the cellar of her wicked stepmother (Idina Menzel) and spoiled stepsisters. Ella makes dresses and wants to sell them but is informed that women are not allowed to conduct business in this particular fantasy kingdom.

The setting is also introduced during the first number, a reworking of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, as a land where everyone follows tradition without question and also sing and dance a lot, providing a plausible and very silly reason for all the choreographed pop hits. There are lots of them; also appearing are the songs Somebody to Love, Material Girl and a mash-up of Whatta Man with Seven Nation Army. I was in a go-with-it mood but this film is probably torture if you don’t like musicals. Far and away the best number is the villain song, Dream Girl, a bitter and wistful reflection on the traditional place of women in society written and performed by Menzel.

Currently holding a 4.3/10 on IMDb, I will die on the hill that this is a good movie and everyone involved deserves to be proud of their efforts. Kay Cannon’s writing and directing is funny and dynamic, even if the reliance on gags, numbers and hyperactive editing gets a little tiring. The costumes and choreography are delightful and visually stimulating. There are also great turns from Pierce Brosnan (whose infamous singing ability is lampooned) and Minnie Driver as the King and Queen, and a particular comic highlight in their daughter, the ambitious liberal Princess Gwen who is ignored in favour of primogeniture. If – and only if – you like spectacle, camp and fluff, you’ll find this an enjoyable diversion.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): James Corden

Paper Girls (2022)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime Video
Length: Eight 45-minute episodes
Synopsis: Newspaper-delivering tweens go on a time-travel misadventure
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: young actors, interpersonal scenes
What I don’t like about it: boring plot, goes nowhere and already cancelled

Review:
Four girls with paper routes in 1988 are sent to the future. The good parts of the show come from them meeting older versions of themselves and people they care about, learning how their lives turn out and usually being disappointed. These get rarer as the series goes on and it’s mostly just a boring and perfunctory sci-fi plot about wormholes, parallel universes and a “Time War”.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence

Get Duked! (2020)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime Video
Length: 87 minutes
Synopsis: Four teens find a horror comedy when they take the Duke of Edinburgh Award
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: funny, politics, acting, editing
What I don’t like about it: the title (renamed from Boyz in the Wood) and the music

Review:
A group of teens undertake the orienteering challenge the Duke of Edinburgh Award in the Scottish Highlands. One of them, Ian, is here because the award looks good on a university application. The other three – Dean, Duncan and DJ Beatroot – have been ‘volunteered’ due to their part in a prank gone wrong. While Ian tries to bring the team together and the other three goof off, they are being stalked by a hunter who takes them for prey.

Has good jokes – especially towards the end when callbacks kick in – and a fun classist framework, a healthy disrespect for the police and tolerable lad-banter. Impressive editing and lots of beautiful highland footage makes up for its occasional weaknesses, making it less forgettable than most entries in the genre.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): drugs, dissociative VFX, scat, fur, violence (often sudden)

The Devil’s Hour (2022)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime
Length: Six 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Dark thriller
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: gave me something to shout at
What I don’t like about it: relentlessly and despicably cruel to neurodivergent children, renewed for two more seasons

Review:
The initial interest is supposed to come from the “creepy” and “weird” behaviour of a quiet kid who doesn’t express emotions in the expected way. His parents believe he has no feelings and openly refuse to love him for the first two episodes, changing their tune after he’s kidnapped. His mother takes him to psychiatrists and demands that they fix him. She repeatedly says “it’s not autism” with no further explanation, in the vain hope that it will protect the screenwriters from this deserved criticism. Like in The Babadook, I screamed all the way through at the character I was supposed to be sympathising with for the tragedy of choosing to have children and expecting them to be easy.

Aside from that, it’s a boring British crime procedural with bad supernatural horror elements and risibly hacky writing. Hated it.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, child sexual abuse

Kevin Can Fuck Himself (2021)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime Video
Length: Sixteen 45-minute episodes
Synopsis: Sitcom wife tries to kill husband
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: comes from a good place with sincere effort, Patty
What I don’t like about it: format doesn’t have legs, unlikeable characters, never a good idea to give your show an unbroadcastable title

Review:
It probably wasn’t the best idea to create a television series solely to shitpost about the quickly cancelled and forgotten 2019 sitcom Kevin Can Wait but that’s what we have here. Fuelled by a righteous hatred of Kevin James, this show follows the “long-suffering” wife character in all of his sitcoms as she breaks away from his multicamera antics and into her own single-camera crime drama as she plans to murder him. The formats never mesh and the show proves to be a bad example of both, though it does make some good points about the sitcom character type of the pushy buffoon – “He’s not incapable, he just wants you to believe he is so you’ll pay his rent and bail him out for 30 years.”, along with “The world is made for men like Kevin.”

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, drugs

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: FreeVee on Amazon Prime
Length: 115 minutes
Synopsis: Wealthy socialites take in, and are taken in by, a con artist
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: Will Smith, dialogue
What I don’t like about it: overlong, poor pacing

Review:
This talky play based on a true story stars Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing as moneyed New York socialites who take a young man into their home because he claims to be the son of Sidney Poitier and they want a story to tell their friends. Will Smith plays the young man in question with confidence and if occasional nerves show through, it’s hidden by his character’s quick-thinking lies. A perfect performance and the first of many times Smith has been robbed of an Oscar.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): sex

The Kings of Summer (2013)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Amazon Prime Video
Length: 95 minutes
Synopsis: Adolescents run off to live in the woods
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: funny, acting, themes
What I don’t like about it: not important or great, jokes misfire

Review:
A marginal coming-of-age comedy drama about three boys who build a house in the woods and then run away to live in it. They consider themselves men but they’re not as independent or grown-up as they claim. Captures a very foolish phase of adolescence quite well but makes for generally unlikeable characters.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, racism, extended scene of a rabbit being skinned

Out of the Past (1947)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: FreeVee on Amazon Prime Video
Length: 96 minutes
Synopsis: Noir thriller about a gumshoe whose past catches up with him
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: writing, twisty plot compellingly paced
What I don’t like about it: good but imperfect in all elements

Review:
A great example of overwritten, over-lit film noir, Broodin’ Bob Mitchum plays a mobbed-up private investigator gone straight, a young Kirk Douglas is the crime boss who pulls him back into the game and brings up memories of a femme fatale, Jane Greer, who may yet prove to be his undoing.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): smoking, violence