Listening (2015)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Film is decent. Strong points are interesting concept, good pacing, and strong acting. Weak points include pretty bad dialogue and some key unbelievable plot points, weird choices in aesthetic. The movie is worth it, but its not perfect. Constantly struck by how weird everything looks in the like yellow-green tint. Added nothing to the movie. The dialogue is also pretty unimpressive. Not a memorable or striking exchange in the movie because of the awkward word choice. However this is all made passable by the strong concept and moral questions that are brought into the scope of the film. It touches on the concept of sacrifice and freedom as we brave a new age where technology entangles with the human brain. A lot to take away as any good scifi should.

I didn't think it was possible. Until I saw this film...I'd foolishly thought that I figured out a way to vet the fake reviews from IMDb. If you see a suspiciously high rating on an unknown film with unknown actors on a meagre budget, then the first thing I'd do is see the number of reviewers. If it was 300 or less, chances are that the reviews were artificially inflated by the actors' families, cast, crew, etc.... Well lo and behold......this may not have had a 9 rating, but high enough to pique my interest, and had more than 1,000 reviews. So I figured it was one of those "diamond in the rough" indie films which somehow slipped underneath my radar. How wrong I was! You know how sometimes you can just tell a film is going to be horrible after just watching the first few minutes of it? Well this was no exception. Wooden acting, stilted dialogue, meandering plot... "but," I said to myself "the IMDb rating is decent, so I have to give it a try!". Famous last words. Watching more of this drivel did nothing more but to increase my irritation and headache.... honestly, what was the purpose of those color-filters anyhow...I felt that whilst watching some scenes, I was taking a colour-blindness test. It's the whole cinematographic affectation bit where the filmmakers randomly add filters in order to add a veneer of sophistication over what amounts to (at the end of the day) footage that is no grander than that taken by your nan during a holiday in Barcelona! Full disclosure: I couldn't force myself to watch all of this film... once they started on the whole derivative x-files "the government is now chasing us" part of the plot, I had to give up. Perhaps I may have had more stamina if the acting was on par and the story a bit more interesting and cogent. But alas... t'was not to be. So back to my original point...No way in Hades did this film legitimately get a 5.6 review out of almost 2,000 alleged voters. Just look at the evidence: there are only a handful of actual reviews on this post (and if you strip away the obvious shill reviews, I think there are only three or four genuine ones).So I guess that this is what it's come to now.....some ingenious computer whizzes now have the ability to create inflated scores which are derived from supposedly 2000 voters when it's quite clear that not that many people have probably even seen the film! That really irks me........as I hate nothing more than people who waste my time. That is why, despite me being a member here for many years, this is probably my first or second review that I've posted. This is how strongly I feel about it, and just want to warn others who are looking for a genuine review!

The movie is written and directed by the same guy. That usually means that if it's going to be bad, it's going to be really bad. Good news: it's not bad. But it's not that great either.The story follows two students researching brain communication. Of course the bad guys are interested in this and they are already in trouble as they have been using stolen lab equipment from their university. More than that, there are marital problems as well. This could have been a good idea if not for the paint-by-numbers story, which is obviously written by somebody who went to writing class, but didn't have the time to develop their own style.The good part about the film is that the actors play well, the direction is reasonable - although I don't know why every damn frame has to have lens flares (another reason to hate J.J., probably) and the story is captivating. The only major problem is the lackluster script. Everything gets revealed way too soon and in the moments where tension was needed, story gets resolved by impossible means.Bottom line: nothing in this film is great, but it had something, a potential that somehow failed to get realized. Good start, interesting second act, confusing third and a really really bad ending.

An excellent script well performed.-- When you look at a street in almost any city in the western world today, you see cameras pointing towards the street to automatically and silently film people going about their regular business.The way to protect yourself from this kind of information gathering is by hiding your face ALWAYS, when you are outside. Which would most likely garner you a more intense surveillance - possibly wiretapping and your house bugged and your friends bugged and you mail read and electronic activities monitored, all the way up to physical intervention, incarceration, "evidence planted", defamation - possibly elimination, if the watchers cant make you.If you go on the net, there is no mechanism designed to cover your tracks and actions, which cannot be cracked - leaving your thought patterns, your needs, your funding, connections, friends, family etc wide open to blatant scrutiny or simple data gathering. Forget about VPN or Tor or what ever. One slip, and your IP is toast and not just your secrets are out, but everything your have ever shared digitally with anyone over the net.Why is that? Because ever since 9/11 USA and all other countries (in order to be able to send and receive plane passengers from all over) have treated their citizens and citizens of most other nations as suspects - potential threats to cities, infrastructure, businesses, economic structures and institutions and their national citizens too, if not for humanitarian reasons then from an attempt to prevent widespread fear and out-of-control actions taken by more than gun-ready-and-willing men and women.What if that lack of control over citizens could go away within a short while? What if USA, always seeking to be the bigger, the stronger, the wisest brother in the world, found a way to do that? What if the war on people was really patricide/matricide from blind greed, last rat gets the bigger loot?! = = = = = = = = = = = = = SPOILER = = = = = = = = = = = = = This movie explores well know themes of surveillance and mind control in order to show that mainstream people only used to guns in the media don't realize surveillance and monitoring and pooling private information is really a weapon against a nation's citizens, not a protection from foreigners.As an intellectual exercise this is kinda easy to both realize and sort of accept, but when you actually understand the implications of controlling powers being able to predict your actions and opinions and choices, it loses its intellectual shine as it verges towards actual loss of freedom - of mobility, speech, purchasing power, schooling, teaching, voting, housing, participating, giving aid and assistance etc.Population control is becoming an increasingly difficult task, as shown by the recent Sicario (2015), where whole major cities can be besieged by criminal and violent "examples" and all "loyalty" goes to those, who can instill fear, rather than to those who protect.While "Listening" may skip a bit on the realistic side, when it comes to calculating the consequences of thinking, feeling people falling pray to fascistic measures without relevant opposition - thus over-playing both spread and danger of a technological mind-control scheme - the script still manages to represent the eager greed with which possible control of people's patterns and actions is to be measured. (It IS lucky that everything living by electricity will die from lack of electricity or from magnetism. Making an EMP placed here and there hunky dory, if ever they tried anything similar in reality).But don't take the movie as a literal statement. Take it as a pointer to the magician's other hand: What is everyone upholding power doing in their free time, that they do not want out in the open? What are they doing during working hours, that they don't want to share? See this film as an argument for full disclosure - as long as it is out of VOLITION. In an atmosphere of distrust, meaning: "You go first..."