{"id":226,"date":"2021-01-12T03:03:38","date_gmt":"2021-01-12T03:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/?p=226"},"modified":"2021-01-12T03:03:38","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T03:03:38","slug":"searching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/?p=226","title":{"rendered":"Searching"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

               Alright, this has to stop. Following the Unfriended<\/em> movies, this is the third movie that I\u2019ve seen that takes place entirely via a computer screen. This gimmick needs to be killed with fire. I initially thought that maybe, just maybe this would change my mind about this kind of film. It\u2019s in a different genre than Unfriended<\/em>, has a credible actor and has been receiving some positive buzz. Well, none of that matters because this is an awful, borderline unwatchable way to make a movie. My friend, who has never seen the Unfriended<\/em> movies, came with me and was genuinely interested in seeing this. Afterward, he turned to me and said \u201cDude, that wasn\u2019t even a fucking movie!\u201d Amen, my friend. A-fucking-men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

               John Cho (best known as Harold of Harold & Kumar<\/em>) plays a father whose daughter goes missing and he investigates her disappearance. Since this takes place on a computer, he investigates by reading her text conversations and looking through her social media accounts. Ever spent two hours watching someone looking though a teenaged girl\u2019s social media? It\u2019s riveting. And that\u2019s basically the entire plot. Fucking riveting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

               I can\u2019t even describe how mind-numbing it is to watch a story unfold this way. It\u2019s two hours of watching text conversations and Google searches and video clips of teenagers discussing inane bullshit that only modern kids could consider interesting enough to document on video. Oh, and this shit isn\u2019t edited. You know how you will change your mind about texts, delete things and rephrase things before actually sending the message? Well, we get to see that in real-time because fuck editing, we need to capture the true excitement of texting on the big screen. For fuck\u2019s sake, even when the characters get into a car, we watch their travels as moving dots on a Google Maps screen. Did I mention that I watched this in a Dolby Cinema theater? You know, the one where they charge you extra for bullshit upgrades to the sound and picture? It\u2019s when I\u2019m sitting in a premium theater with a $21 ticket and watching a fucking Google Maps screen that I begin to question why I do this to myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

               How about characters, writing and cinematography? Fuck all of that. There really aren\u2019t any characters here because the format doesn\u2019t really allow it. Do you really get to know people from their texts? Hell no. The actors also don\u2019t get much of a chance to give performances, since frowning in front of a camera isn\u2019t really much acting direction. I like John Cho, but this really isn\u2019t worth his time. Harold and Kumar Search for Their Missing Children<\/em> would be a far more entertaining film, largely because it would actually be a film. As I said in my review of Unfriended 2<\/em> (or Dark Web<\/em> or whatever the fuck that was called), \u201cfilming\u201d a movie this way doesn\u2019t allow for much because there is a static camera angle. Really, this is just a way for non-filmmakers to make movies. And that pisses me off. This is also a mystery whose resolution revolves around absurd coincidences and people doing asinine things, so it doesn\u2019t even work as a product of its genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

               I don\u2019t have much to say about this because it isn\u2019t really a movie as I understand the word. This is lazy, talentless bullshit that wraps a crappy mystery inside an awful filmmaking technique (and I cringed as I even wrote the word \u201ctechnique,\u201d and that indicates far too much credibility). I have wondered if these exist to attract more millennials to the theater by simulating the experience of staring at a phone. That sounds ridiculous, but I can\u2019t think of an actual creative reason why a director or writer would do this. And that depresses me more than paying $21 to watch a goddamn Google Maps screen in a theater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Image By: https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/b\/b8\/Searching.png<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

               Alright, this has to stop. Following the Unfriended movies, this is the third movie that I\u2019ve seen that takes place entirely via a computer screen. This gimmick needs to be killed with fire. I initially thought that maybe, just maybe this would change my mind about this kind of film. It\u2019s in a different […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":545,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-13","category-thriller"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thefilmdoctor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/image-32.png?fit=260%2C385&ssl=1","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":823,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefilmdoctor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}