The Leverton Review

 This is a complicated show, full of laugh-out loud moments and emotionally charged moments.  The sentence I just wrote is a cliché, but this series is not. It has surreal moments of comedy, which for me have the feeling that they were inspired by real events. Because when you are trying to make something up, you have to be realistic, but real life is bizarre. The cast does an amazing job, and Danny Glover's comedic timing is superb. I like that in later series the focus was on other characters.  While this is some of the best television I have ever watched, I don't think I will finish it. That's because I really wish the characters would have good endings, but this is not the kind of show that would do that.

The worst Marvel movie I have ever seen, and I have seen most of them. It's worse than the Eternals, it's worse than She-Hulk.  The Eternals was a boring movie and I didn't expect anything from it, and I didn't get anything from it-it was a nothing of a movie. But in Ant-Man, they built this character, he was fun and charismatic, and the movie itself was fun with scenes that had a lot of humour like the toy train scene.  In this, the producers are hoping that the charisma of their very talented cast will make up for the lack of writing, character development, and humour.   It's a frustrating movie because Marvel have proved that they can make entertaining films. I hope with the cut back in the rate of production of new films, the quality will return. 

 Another book which did not meet my expectations.  I was expecting more of a book which would simply show the proofs of evolution.  This is not that book.  It is a much deeper distillation of some of the more high-level aspects of evolution. While some of this is interesting, the generation of the author is clearly on display at some points-he says evolution can not account for ethics in human beings, but that these were developed because of religious traditions.  This ignores the fact that other animals display altruism, and ignores the theory that we essentially domesticated ourselves. This may be good for more of an expert reader, but if you want to have a more general understanding of the topic, pick a different book.

 I think the Toy Story 3 is kind of a perfect ending for the entire franchise, but I did like this one better.  One slight criticism of Toy Story 4 is it's a little bit too long, and it kind of drags a little bit, but I'll tell you what I really did like.  So the film starts with a flashback and in the flashback it's raining, and it's really hard to tell that this is all animated rain. It looks really, really good.  Toy Story 1 was the introduction of computer animated film, but it looked terrifying. Toy Story 2, was a little bit better and by Toy Story 3 the animation didn't look uncanny anymore, it looked completely natural.  I think if this rate of progress continues, in five or ten years they'll be able to make a movie that looks like a real movie just using computer animation. The problem with the Toy Story franchise is the more movies you have, the stranger the world. In this movie you fully get to understand the terror of having sentient, practically immo...

So in the first and second Toy Story there is this idea that the thing that truly terrifies the character of Woody the most is how his relationship with Andy the boy who owns him is going to continue after Andy grows up. In this film we actually see what happens when Andy grows up, and he moves away to college and his toys are destined for different places. There's a really horrifying scene where the toys are being played with by younger children.  The difference in the animation, between this installment and the first two films, is just night and day. It's the first movie in this franchise where I didn't really think about the animation whatsoever. It's a good conclusion to this franchise, and I'm not sure why they made more films.

 DP stands for deserter Pursuit.  It's hard to describe what's so good about this K-drama. I think it's so good because it avoids the clichés of other K-dramas. The topic is quite serious and while there are characters who do funny things inside the episodes, it's not a comedy, it's a drama, but it's also not one of those romantic dramas. It's a drama based on a real situation that happens to people in the South Korean military, so it doesn't have any of that kind of phoniness.  The first season was a glorious six episodes long and each episode was 45 minutes long, so you could watch that in a day and evening.  In the drama, there is this team of military police, and they try to catch deserters from the South Korean army.  I really like the acting of all the actors in the series, but I'm particularly like the main actor because he has this sort of very calm rational demeanor throughout the whole series until we get to a point where it's the first...

  I am 100% sure I watched this film when I was a kid. It was on the Disney hour on Sunday evening. I watched it with my family and I remember most of what happens in the movie, which is kind of crazy.  The film is called the Cat from Outer Space and that basically explains all of the plot. The cat is very ably voiced by Roddy McDowell and the film is directed by Norman Tokar who did a lot of these Disney films in the '60s and '70s.  Interestingly for Mash fans, it stars Harry Morgan and McLean Stevenson. Harry Morgan played the first commander of the unit and McLean Stevenson actually replaced him on Mash.It's a mash-centric movie and it sort of feels like the answer to the question, what if Disney made a MASH sci-fi movie for kids? A bit boring in parts, but it definitely holds up and is worth a watch.

 Star Wars at the time this movie was released, of course, was really popular and Disney wanted to capitalize on the renewed interest in sci-fi. They created this gem of a movie, but unfortunately they weren't successful in attracting as much attention as Star Wars. The movie is really entertaining, although it starts out being sort of slow and monotonous but it just gets crazier and crazier. The acting is crazy, the dialogue is crazy, and what actually happens in the story is crazy.  If you're interested in sci-fi at all, you should definitely watch it. So why wasn't it as popular as Star Wars? I think just because it has a tone which is considerably darker, but that shouldn't prevent you from watching it.

This is a reality TV series from Netflix all about a company that auctions sports memorabilia. I don't know why I started to watch this, it is not really the kind of thing that I like any more. I think the problem with this whole show is not connected to the show itself, it's connected to this market. These are really rich people, and they're spending a lot of money on things like Pokémon cards from the 1990s. The show also highlights different auctions of different sports memorabilia, and these are things like game worn jerseys and game worn shoes. These are just pieces of equipment, cloth or a little piece of rubber. The only meaning that's attached to it is what we give it. I don't understand why somebody would want some shoes that a basketball player played in once, or a jersey that they wore in one half of the game. It doesn't make any sense to me. They show an auction for a jersey that was worn by Jackie Robinson for one season, so we know that he wore thi...

This is a very interesting film, not for what it's actually in the film, although there is some craziness there. For example this was released the year of the 25th Academy Awards and this won an award for the best feature length documentary, so it meant that Walt Disney won the most Awards of any individual in a single year up until that point It is interesting that most of those awards were all for different documentaries of different length, and one was for an animated short. The other interesting fact about this movie is that it made more money in Japan than Gone With the Wind did. The documentary is an exploration of life in the desert in the United States, and it focuses on different species. The craziest part is there is this hoedown music when the scorpions are mating-which really makes you pay attention as is it not necessarily something that should be done in a dark nature documentary. One question about the documentary is how realistic is it?  There are some scenes that s...

This movie was made because the UK had this policy of keeping some money from their box office from the studio and encouraged studios to reinvest it in the British film industry. This movie was not a success at all, and it's kind of hard to say why. It is the story of Queen Mary of England, king Henry's sister. The story is that Lady Mary is this very free spirited woman with a lot of personality, and she has this very nice relationship with her older brother, who is King Henry the 8th. Eventually it transpires that for reasons of politics, the king wants to marry his sister off to the king of France. The entertaining thing about the movie is the relationship between King Henry the 8th and Mary. Mary is played by this really charismatic actress, and she plays the part really well just over the top and Henry also is played as this over the top, larger than life character. The craziest part about the whole inaccuracy of the movie is there's this big thing where the love inter...

This documentary is in four parts, and it follows this huge group of apes who number about 120 individuals. The main story is the story of Jackson, who is the alpha of one of these groups. It tells the story of a bunch of wars that occur, or maybe it's just one long war that happens between the central group of chimpanzees and the Western group of chimpanzees. Like a lot of wars, there's actually personal relations involved.  Jackson started in the Western Group, and they broke off to form their own thing, and Jackson kind of betrayed them.  That's kind of a spoiler for this nature documentary, but it does have a plot and that's what a didn't like about, was the attempt to force a plot on this group of highly intelligent creatures. There has been a lot of debate over my lifetime whether you can treat animals in a human way and ascribe human motivations to them. I think with chimpanzees it's pretty clear that chimpanzees are remarkably human and in fact some biol...

Peter Pan takes all the worst aspects of the early Disney films and combines them into one muddled mess. It is no exaggeration to say that it is my least favorite Disney film, and I am trying to watch all the Disney films. So what's so bad about it? The most glaring thing is the overt and obtuse racist depictions of the so-called 'injuns'. They are depicted as monosyllabic, literally red, aggressive, and stupid. You might say, well what's the problem? They're in Neverland- they're not real people - it's racist, and it is just a part of the general racist attitude towards Native Americans that exist in our culture. It's even worse than in Dumbo because in Dumbo the racist characters, for the most part, are animals, so they could kind of get away with it, and while Song of the South is structurally racist, at least they had real African-Americans depicting characters. Here you have animators who made choices in an animation studio, which made a choice to d...

 A Korean singer and a comedian examine the adult entertainment industry in Japan. I don't think humor translates either across cultures or across time, so some of the jokes in this didn't really land. The good thing about the documentary was that it did explore a lot of these areas of Japanese culture that might be a little bit fascinating to people from the outside, and they do it in a very Korean way.  They go to a sex shop, and it was just like a typical sex shop, I'd say it was much bigger and more like a sex grocery store, so that was a little bit crazy. Then they interviewed three adult actresses about their jobs, and they made a very interesting point which is in the west we have a tendency to make a connection between violence and pornography where people make the erroneous claim that pornography increases violence against women or pornography itself is an act of violence against women, but they made the claim, and probably it's also equally untrue, but they ma...

Surprisingly enjoyable. It takes the story of Robin Hood and his fight against King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and it's weird to say, gives it a fresh perspective because the movie is really old. I liked that there were a couple of interesting special effects. I like also that the evil characters are definitely evil but they have motivations and their motivations are pretty clear. The the actor who is playing Robin Hood, Richard Todd had a lot of charisma. 

 How did I feel about it? Well, I did fall asleep. Why? It just doesn't hold your attention as a movie and I think that's for two reasons. The first reason is that there's not really any plot to Alice in Wonderland-it just happens. Strange things happen to Alice, she falls asleep, she wakes up and that's it. The movie seemed to be pretty much more or less what happens in the book. It's really disjointed, and I don't really know how you can make a good movie out of that book.  If you go into this story with the idea that it's a normal plot with a beginning middle and end, it's not going to work because it's not a normal story, so that was the first problem with it. The second problem with it is more of a Disney problem than a material problem. The one thing that kind of separates this movie from other Disney movies that went before it is the palate of the colors. It is a lot brighter, there's a lot of bright blue, a lot of bright colors.  In this ...

 The documentary is about the 14th Amendment, and the 14th Amendment is the one the documentary claims that it's actually the most important amendment that Americans don't really think about. It is more concentrated on the first and the Second Amendment, but it's the one that guarantees equal protections under the law for everyone who is living every person who's living in the United States and every person born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. It talks about how this whole process came to be, they talk about  before the Civil War. Or things that led up to that. It focuses a great deal on Frederick Douglass, and then it talks about the Reconstruction. And then it talks about Jim Crow laws. Most of the series is focused on the struggle for recognition of African Americans, but then it does do one episode about women's rights, one episode about LGBTQ rights and then one episode about immigrant rights. I have really conflicted feelings about this...

  I really do think this is a brilliant sitcom, but honestly it's not my favorite sitcom in the entire world and there are parts that I was absolutely disgusted by it, but I think it's brilliant and here are the reasons I find it brilliant.  I think it's really, really hard to make a good sitcom nowadays and the in my opinion the only person who has some kind of inkling as to where the format can go is Michael Schurr, because of sitcoms like the American version of the Office, Parks and Rec, the Good Place and Brooklyn 99. All of those have unique selling points, and it's not just the traditional sitcom. The traditional sitcom is about a family and or about a group of friends and   every half hour they have some kind of adventure, there's punchlines and maybe there's a learning moment and then the sitcom is finished.  The fundamental problem with all sitcoms apart from the ones that I mentioned is that people on sitcoms are horrible people.  If you take the...