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“In my work with the (Nuremberg Trial) defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil, and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy ... a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Ways to convey the message "they are moving me out of the country by boat": Option A: write "Boat". Maybe even "Help, boat". Option B: draw a little boat. Option C: write down the mathematical formula for Archimedes' principle, which determines if something will float or sink Besides, how on Earth would she know about any ship? Did they discuss their plan in front of her? Does she happen to understand whatever slavic language they speak? Dear screenwriters: if you're not really that smart, please stop trying so hard? You'll pull a muscle in your brain. Just give us some action or mistery, no need to be clever. Thanks.
Nobody uses this app for comments anymore and I’m cool with that. It’s 2025 and I’ve never watched this show before, though my Netflix has been used more than (insert cliche joke) and the shows been viewed a few times over. Honestly the show is pretty predictable, network TV, so I may have well as watched it. Started slow, sucked, better at this point. It’s too simple for Reddington to be Lizzy’s father too early in the show. The man who raised Lizzy was dying in the hospital, Red visits him and the man looks at him in a very peculiar manor as he awakens to find him sitting in his room. It wasn’t an “I haven’t seen you in so long” type of look, either. It seemed like he recognized “Reddington” for the most part but maybe only certain aspects of him, or his face or nose, I’m not sure. Maybe he knew “Red” long ago, but it seemed more like he knew the person that “Red” was before he had facelifts, or some sort of serious plastic surgery which must have been a way that “Reddington” evaded capture long-like that Mexican drug cartel leader was trying to do 25 years ago when he died having a 14 hour plastic surgery procedure that was changing all of his body’s feature a-la the movie Face Off so that he would evade law enforcement and enemies. Amado Carrillo Fuentes was his name. Anyway coupled with the suburban house Red bought, along with Red telling Lizzys adorning father that he apologized for “dumping Lizzy” on him the way had he did….Red was looking out the window and having flashbacks of a little girl playing in the front yard that looks about 4 years old, telling his Asian underling that he raised his family in that house, then blowing it up as they leave makes it seem pretty obvious that Red had been a part of Lizzy’s upbringing despite both her parents supposedly dying in a fire, when she got the scar on her hand. Frankly, I’m pretty sure that the man we know as Red, the former naval intelligence officer who turned criminal and disappeared for 30 years isn’t who he seems to be and I’ll take it a step further and say that I think Raymond Reddington isn’t Raymond Reddington at all. I think he’s Lizzy’s . But “Reddington” said he raised his family there and, he didn’t raise Lizzy at all, so did he/she, shim, honestly I don’t mean to offend in any way, it’s 2025 and it’s all good, I just honestly don’t know what to think of Reddington as as of the end of the first half of season 1. Maybe my thinking that Red is possibly Lizzy’s mother having had a ton of plastic surgery (they went and saw the plastic surgeon who clearly had a long term business relationship with Red to get info out of him about a criminal) is some sort of deep down phobia I don’t even know I have, or the relativity of the WOKE movement I don’t know. Am I weird for thinking this? Nobody is going to see this and respond. I think Reddington is Lizzy’s mother, there must have been siblings since Red said he raised his family in the home along with various height measurements still there that looked like various children, Lizzy’s husband is not legit even though at this point it seems like he’s in the clear after his run in, assistant director Harold Cooper is shady along with the mean old skinny principal woman whom I think is head of the CIA or something is also shady and the only boring part of the show at this point are the garbage “problems of the week” that all network TV shows seemingly . The actual Blacklist itself and the supposed most dangerous criminals on the planet is the worst part of the show. The criminals seem like bad guys out a 60 year old Batman cartoon, are not compelling at all and have gotten progressively worse and worse and with 190+ episodes to go working off this blacklist this is not a good sign. I’m hoping doesn’t turn into with 8 times as many episodes. That show has left me feeling stupid, slow and leaving lengthy comments on a dead app that has a handful of comments in the last 10 years.
This movie is OK at best. It's one of Nolan's better ones at least. But, it has some serious issues. See Krauss talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pG89gREWyI&t=1m12s It's too long - he's right. The oxygen blight is completely scientifically silly. The entire basis of the plot (that Earth will run out of oxygen in tens of years) is unbelievable. This put me off from the start. There's some "formula" that Michael Caine worked on and half-solved, but it took data from the event horizon of a black hole (which also makes no sense scientifically) to solve it. Sorry, if you approach a black hole, you don't end up behind a bookshelf in your old house in the past - I have no idea how they can claim this is a movie about science. It is FULL of religious symbolism, though, so if you're into that, you'll be right at home. Apparently humans evolve out of the 3rd dimension too ... sure. There's one thing that was definitely right - outer space is quiet - FINALLY. The cinematography is pretty good, and I liked how the dude went crazy on the barren planet, but this film would have been a lot better without the sappy happy ending. I mean, really - transporting all the way back from inside a black hole? Armageddon had a much more realistic ending than that, and it was SO STUPID! It would be great if someone fan-edited this into something scientifically accurate (dub over the lines about what's wrong with Earth replacing it with a feasible problem, have him crushed to death in the black hole, show Brand on the planet at the end all alone, FIN). I don't know how people can give this a higher rating than a 7/10. I wouldn't consider it to be a classic at all. It's at best a see-once blockbuster, just like Armageddon was.
I didn't catch it until my second watch through the series, but the dialogue in the episodes written by Zimmerman, like this one, is just sloppy compared to everything else from the second season onwards. A few notable examples: > _"You're the first **gringo** I've met whose family's killed more people than mine."_ — Javier [to Clare after closing the deal at the off-site lab] (0:41:11.89) In Spanish, all nouns have grammatical gender, for most of which is mutable: they take the gender of the subject. Such is the case with the word _gringo_, which is mostly used to describe Anglo-Americans (though, ironically, it was a reference to Greeks when it first came into use). Zimmerman bills himself as a "bilingual playwright who grew up speaking Spanish" and is mostly credited lately using the Spanish spelling of his first name, Martín – so I don't think it unreasonable to expect him, or hell, anyone who's taken a couple semesters of college Spanish (raising my hand) – to know to use _**gringa**_ in that moment when speaking and referring to a woman, particularly when it's the only Spanish word in an English sentence. Honestly, it's baffling that no one present on set during filming didn't raise the matter with the script supervisor or assistant director. > … > _"C: If you try, there's no guarantee I won't take off yours first."_ — Ruth [to Darlene, giving a list of reasons why Darlene shouldn't "take her head off" after learning Ruth sold her heroin without her knowledge] (0:43:07.79) Here, the syntax is so off, it barely sounds coherent in the given context. The natural way of saying this would be: "…no guarantee I won't **take yours off** first." If Ruth were flustered when she was speaking, then maybe I could accept the twisted syntax as a byproduct of anxiety, but this came five seconds after she'd handed Darlene (who badly needed cash) a gift bag full of banded bills. She was almost taunting Darlene and speaking slowly and calmly, so here again, the dialogue was just sloppy. > _Maya: "I… I have to go, right now." Mother [after a few beats]: "Okay, then go."_ —Agent Miller [to her mother who's watching her son, after getting the tip from Navarro about the gun shipment, which she's leaving to intercept] (0:48:51.51) This one's less striking, but I still think it's subpar. The cinematography throughout the whole episode is doing everything it can to highlight Maya's explicit discomfort with the entire interaction between her and Navarro, as well as her mother's growing registration that her daughter is not behaving at all normally and has not been forthcoming about why. Now she's leaving the house on a moment's notice well after sundown, and in response to being told about it her mother responds in the softest, most reassuring tone, but it comes just a second later than it would normally. This is surely not lost on Maya—one of the greatest challenges in writing authentic dialogue between a parent and their adult child is encoding the fact that the speakers have more conversational familiarity with one another than with anyone else they've known except maybe a long-term spouse. It felt jarringly truncated in this scene for Maya to just abruptly turn and leave without first either providing a brief explanation as to why she was leaving ("Something big's just fallen in my lap from work") or adding a simple "Thank you, Mom" as acknowledgment of the subtext from that short pause preceding the gracious reassurance that she could leave without worry. One of the most salient aspects of the Agent Miller character to this point has been her ability to speak with exceptional precision and read the non-verbal cues of those with whom she's speaking, and the absence of those traits here is very conspicuous and felt sharply. I'm not saying Zimmerman is a bad writer overall, only that his episodes lack a lot of the nuance that really elevated this series starting with the second season. He was on staff as a story editor for the full length of the first two seasons, even getting a couple writer/co-writer credits in that time. Then despite no longer being on staff, he returns in the third season for a single writer's credit but still had the assistance of another story editor from those earlier seasons. This is the first time we see him working without a net as the only credited script source and I can't help but think the decision to let him work alone was perhaps premature when it doesn't maintain consistency with the surrounding material. His final credit of the series as co-writer of episode 12 in this season with Paul Kolsby falls even flatter with me as some of the poorest writing since the middle of season one when this show was still trying to find its legs. This episode's still got a lot of great elements and kept me engaged, but the dialogue throughout consistently let me down, especially toward the end.
Natasha 
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MostlyHarmless
