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544,465 | 562,732 | 120,696 | 5 | Is it really THAT bad ? | Well , yes . The curious thing about Hard Rain is that it's so well presented but at the same time it's so superficial and false . I have to admit that I was impressed with the stormy , rainy atmosphere , but at the same time I was struck by how obvious is always was that the whole thing was a setup . I guess part of it may be because some of the flood scenes were filmed on a part of Universal Studios that you go right through when you take the tram tour , and other parts were clearly filmed in that big water tank with the false background that's right near the Psycho house ( at least it was when I last went on that tour , which was regrettably sometime in the early 1990s ) , but I can't blame the fakeness in its entirety just on the fact that some of the sets are personally familiar to anyone who has been on the tram tour at Universal Studios in Hollywood . There is an interesting paradox about Hard Rain , in that it is peppered with capable and even great actors ( as in the case of Morgan Freeman ) , but it still comes off as contrived and unreal . Christian Slater is not the most beloved actor in the world , but I have an immutable liking for him , probably just because he was part of the brilliant Robin Hood : Prince of Thieves . Minnie Driver has delivered some excellent performances in some excellent movies , although none that really struck my interest . Morgan Freeman is undoubtedly one of the greatest actors working today , which is why it's strange that even his enormous presence wasn't able to generate more interest in this movie . And Randy Quaid , while one of my personal favorite comedic actors ( mostly due to his absolute hilarity is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ) , was badly miscast from the beginning . What you have in Hard Rain is a flooded town due to excessive rain and an old and weak dam that periodically has to release more and more water to avoid overflowing , each time flooding the town more and more . The movie starts off with the town being evacuated ( which is shown in a total of two or three cars led down a flooded street ) and a couple of armored car drivers picking up all of the money from the town bank . It's interesting to consider what made director Mikael Salomon feel it necessary to present this routine pickup as a robbery ( even going so far as to have the bank manager nervously throwing stacks of money into a bag and saying he's going as fast as he can ) and then turn right around and show that it's a perfectly normal event . What you have here in the first few minutes of the movie is a scene that builds false suspense and then cops out , much like the rest of the movie . We're already being set up for disaster , and it has nothing to do with a flood . ( spoilers ) The movie is the presentation of a flooded and therefore deserted town and a subsequent robbery attempt , with all of the logical inconsistencies that that might imply . The struggle between the good guys and the bad guys goes on for way too long , for one thing . It's just too much to ask us to believe that no one is coming to help just because the guy up on the dam is not calling for help and Charlie turned out to be in on it from the beginning . It's like the movie takes place in its own little world , completely cut off from the rest of the world because the story finds that necessary . Sort of like the RoboCop movies , to some extent . On the other hand , there is an undeniable element of entertainment that comes along with the movie , despite its almost complete lack of any true possession of realism . It's a movie that is fun to watch but becomes bad the more you think about it , and I can tell this mostly because as I write this review , my opinion of the film steadily grows lower and lower . It's really sad that the movie had so many good actors in it but still fell flat . There are , of course , a few stock characters , such as the bad guy's idiot sidekick and the nervous old man and his wife ( an interaction between whom comes off as one of the most amusing scenes in the film ) , and this may be the root of the film's downfall . Even the good actors and the great actor in the film were all playing one-dimensional characters . Morgan Freeman was the typical aging thief who only wanted to steal enough money to escape all of this nonsense , Randy Quaid delivers a terribly unfitting performance as the frustrated sheriff who goes bad after losing reelection , Christian Slater is the lone hero who tries to save the day , and Minnie Driver is the obligatory love interest . Nothing very exciting here , not even when Jim , Morgan Freeman's character , winds up on Tom's ( Christian Slater ) side near the end is there enough interest generated in the plot to make up for its routine presentation , the manufactured sets , and the tedious dialogue . I worked at a video store in Fresno , California when this movie was released , and I remember that it was enormously popular during the first few weeks that it was released , just like Sphere . It was clearly one of the more highly anticipated films of 1998 , which was probably why it was so popular when it was released on video , but this also reflects the quality of the film . It is an entertaining film to some extent , but also like Sphere , is goes steadily downhill after a relatively interesting introduction , and the more you think about the movie itself , the less impressive it becomes . |
544,383 | 562,732 | 89,730 | 5 | Mainstream ? | Strangely enough , I read a review of one IMDb user who asserted that Once Bitten is one of Jim Carrey's best performances since going mainstream . I'm curious as to what this user means by that statement , because Once Bitten was YEARS before Carrey went mainstream . Is this person saying that Carrey's performance here is better than his performances years later , when he did , in fact , get into mainstream films ? If so , I beg to differ . And if not , I still beg to differ . The first thing that struck me about Once Bitten is that it is a teen sex comedy , which is not something that I ever associated with Jim Carrey ( not the least reason for which is because most of his better know movies are not only above such childish comedy but were made long after his teenage years were over ) . Even in Once Bitten he was about 23 years old , but the movie focuses on his inability to communicate very effectively with women , much less pull off any successful sexual encounters . Enter a vampire , surprisingly sexy for her 400 years , who must feed on three virgins or cease to exist . All desperate high school guy in the 80s should have been so lucky . The premise is ridiculous , comparable to those bad movies that feature things like strippers that turn into aliens , or other monsters that feed on humans by taking on the form of sexy naked women in order to seduce men . Where the movie goes right is in the two main characters , Lauren Hutton as the vampiress trying to feed on Mark Kendall , to whom Jim Carrey brings a surprisingly effective level of insecurity and awkward appeal . Carrey obviously remembers similar developmental difficulties in his own youth . Mark's two friends , the obligatory sex-starved geeks who bounce crude humor off of each other , are negligible , put into the movie for no other reason than for some vampire snacks and to have someone for Mark to complain to about his nervousness about sex , while they confidently give him all kinds of advice , momentarily forgetting that they share in at least his same level of cluelessness on the subject . While earlier , and dumber , sex comedies like Porky's made no attempt to be more than they are , dumb sex comedies , Once Bitten successfully tries to present a sort of lesson about the dangers of promiscuity , while at the same time failing ultimately because it tries to be too much than its material allows . Rather than seeking the old jugular , this vampiress prefers to drink from a more southerly location , providing a pretty ham-handed allegory of sexually transmitted diseases . Carrey has been prowling dingy bars in search of an easy first time ( in response to his lack of success with an un-promiscuous girlfriend ) , and ends up placing in grave danger the very parts that he is trying to get some much needed attention . There is a sad story behind the writing of the screenplay . David Hines , a college student desperately avoiding real life , took endless art classes to postpone graduation , and ultimately dropped out when it seemed that his screenplay for Once Bitten , at the time titled Nightlife , seemed to be taking off . The movie was put into production , produced , released , and then six months later sat on the shelves at Sam Goody , where Hines worked as a lowly entry level employee , constantly teased by his coworkers over the spectacular failure of his movie . I really can't say that I found it to be THAT bad , but again , this could be just because I'm a huge fan of Jim Carrey . Maybe the movie was just overshadowed by Fright Night ( also not great but better than Once Bitten ) , released the same year , and The Lost Boys ( vastly superior to both ) , released two years later . Either way , Once Bitten is hardly an underrated gem . The film itself is pretty dismal , but it remains interesting even if for no other reason than because you can so clearly see the budding elements of what would later become Jim Carrey trademarks . Not just his over-the-top comedy performances , but also even slight hints at his more dramatic roles , like when he goes to the Halloween party and is exasperated that he keeps having to explain that he's not dressed as a vampire , he's not even wearing a costume . It's a cheesy teen sex comedy , but Carrey makes it interesting , at least some parts . It's just too bad that he had to develop more of a career before people cared . |
544,914 | 562,732 | 72,271 | 5 | I guess it's just not my thing anymore . | You know , I remember being hugely impressed with this movie when I last saw it when I was in high school . I watched it again recently to get a look at the older movies before watching what I have heard is a " stupid , stupid remake , " and was amazed that I ever enjoyed this movie . I respect it in that it is incredibly effective , especially as horror movies go , but the last time I had seen it was at a time when I was also impressed but absolute garbage like the Faces of Death movies ? movies that there is no reason for anyone to watch . Ever . The movies is based on a true story , as they say ( how loosely based is still a matter of debate ) , which adds an element of intrigue to the story , but it is simply an unappealing and sick movie that it's difficult to enjoy , even for horror fans . I am a huge horror fan , but when I see a blonde girl screaming in terror literally nonstop , it gets a little hard to take . It's cool to see a teenager scream and then get slashed by a masked killer , but to watch a teenager screaming endlessly as this sick and twisted family forces her to participate in their disgusting family rituals is not amusing in the least . What is this , an exploration of the depths of human depravity ? The movie gets high marks because it certainly is well made and effective , I just can't help being put off by it . It's not fun to watch , even as a gory horror film , which I think counts against it in the end . There is a way to make a movie like this without being too over the top and gratuitous but still remaining faithful to whatever it was that really took place that summer in Texas . Glamorizing the violence and shoving the audience's faces into the sick things that this family was into is not the way . Texas Chainsaw comes off as a hugely effective movie that's really weakly made . They allowed to sheer disgustingness of this family tell the story , rather than use the endless opportunities afforded by the medium to create a fascinating story , and a whole series of stupid sequels did not help much . Ah well ? |
544,907 | 562,732 | 478,087 | 5 | How to ruin a fascinating true story . | Ah , Las Vegas , the city of lights . The place that probably offers more false promises than anywhere else in the world , Hollywood included . I've never been much of a gambler myself , usually when I go there I plan a given amount of money to gamble with and , once it's gone ( because I understand in advance that I'm gonna lose it ) then I stop and go back to my buddies and concentrate on getting nicely drunk . But cards are even less my thing . My friends back in Venice Beach had almost nightly poker tournaments that I couldn't get myself interested in to save my life , so my experience in gambling real money on card games is almost nonexistent . Nevertheless , I have an endless fascination with Vegas , and the true story of those people from MIT who raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars by counting cards at the blackjack tables should have been a great movie . Unfortunately , 21 is not it . The movie deals with the true story of those MIT students , but the movie is so heavily fictionalized that it's nearly impossible to tell what really happened under what ultimately turns out to be a twisted mass of Hollywood clichés . Jim Sturgess plays Ben Campbell , a college student graduating from MIT and about to fulfill his lifelong dream of attending Harvard Medical School . The only problem is that he doesn't have any money and Harvard Med will run him $300 , 000 . Since he lives in a world that contains one single scholarship opportunity and not a hint of student loans ( seriously , with an academic history like Ben's , there are about a million ways to get the money he needs ) , he sees his chances of going to Harvard Med slipping away . Soon he meets a professor , Micky Rosa ( Kevin Spacey ) who introduces him to a carefully designed card-counting scheme involving himself and a few of his most gifted students . They all head to Vegas and try to beat the system , while security chief Cole Williams ( Laurence Fishburne ) lurks in the darkened security office surrounded by TV screens watching out for people like them . I wanted to see a movie about the real story , something almost documentary-like that tells not only how they beat the Vegas system but also how they got caught and what happened afterwards , but 21 plays more like a completely fictional story . It's like a cheap version of Ocean's 11 except the only laws being broken are when Williams drags various characters into the casino basement to , ah , knock some sense out of them . I have no idea how card counting works , I'm just not a math guy . The movie doesn't concern itself with helping us understand it either , beyond some quickly edited sequences showing the main characters devising an intricate counting and communication scheme that will allow them to work together in the casinos without anyone realizing that they are a team . The problem is that the card counting itself requires a tremendous intellect , but the characters are phenomenally stupid . Are we supposed to believe that the same people who perfected this counting scheme would come up with signals so stupidly obvious as linking your arms behind your back when the deck's hot ? It was bad enough that they all constantly glance nervously at each other whenever they're in the same room , but that arm-linking thing was amazing . Every single time ! ! Didn't they ever think it would be a good idea to change things up a little bit ? It would require a stupendous quantity of incompetence on the part of the security administration to miss THAT . Even worse is the fact that in order to remind us that they're humans , the characters have to make drastic mistakes , but drastic gambling mistakes done well will give you something like the poker scene at the end of Casino Royale . Here , they get dunk and blow their cover or make gambling errors that can only be described as purely moronic , and the screenplay is more concerned with cheesy relationships between the characters that only distract from what the story is really about . Pearl Harbor had the same problem . We want to see a story about a major historical event , not some idiotic romance between Josh Hartnett and whoever that girl was . Even worse , nothing is told about what happened after they were caught . They won't go to jail because counting cards isn't illegal ( and shouldn't be ) , but the movies ties everything up with so much obviously fabricated nonsense that it's nearly impossible to walk out of the theater without feeling cheated . And in a movie about card-counting and taking Vegas for hundreds of thousands of dollars , it's the casinos who should feel cheated , not the audience . |
544,342 | 562,732 | 357,413 | 5 | I agree with Vince Vaughn . | I finally got around to watching Anchorman last night , one of the most popular and , as it turns out , overrated comedies released in 2004 . I was just on vacation for 6 weeks and while I was away I watched lots of classic comedies , from Buster Keaton , the Three Stooges , and a few Shirley Temple shorts , and it seems that contemporary comedies have not learned anything from their ancestors . Buster Keaton remains untarnished in my mind , but the Three Stooges and Shirley Temple have both starred in films that are distantly below their talent level , but which continue to receive praise simply because they are early Three Stooges or Shirley Temple films . As is also the case with some of their films ( such as The Brideless Groom for the Three Stooges and Shirley Temple's awful War Babies , among a few others ) , Anchorman's creative growth seems to have stopped when Will Farrell signed on . Much stock is put into him in the lead role , and none into the content of the movie . There are times when the movie is very funny , but these times are to say the least outweighed by the stupidity in it , which is odd because the character whose role is stupidity is the funniest character in the film ( " Mmmm ! I just burned my tongue ! " ) . Far more amusing than Will Farrell , from whom I have come to expect better than this . I have to say that I long for a comedy without poop jokes . Christina Applegate is wildly miscast as the new Anchorwoman , an oxymoron is anyone at the news team has ever seen one , Veronica Corningstone , a respectable woman except that she occasionally transforms into stupid comedy fodder . We are introduced to a highly professional , well-dressed , intellectual newswoman with goals to become network anchor . Veronica summarily rejects the pitiful , frat-boy come-ons of the all male news team , which is amazing because who could resist something as charming as " I wanna be on you . " Where the movie starts to really go wrong is that her character has no consistency whatsoever . Half the time she is pure professionalism , inspiring her colleagues to refer to her as such things as an " ice queen . " The other half the time she is a breathless , steamy temptress , unable to resist the hairy Ron Burgundy , playing on Christina Applegate's iconography rather than what we have come to know about Veronica Corningstone . Burgundy's colleagues are more interesting than he is , although the tremendous Will Farrell thankfully does give his character some weight , despite an almost paralyzing amount of stupidity festering in the script . Particularly amusing is Brick Tamland , who sometimes forgets his name but knows that someday someone will discover that he has an IQ of 48 . The movie clearly doesn't have a lot to say about the intelligence of news teams , but when it operates as a satire it is amusing . When it turns news teams into street gangs and has them fight each other in alleyways using medieval torture devices as instruments , it's not . You don't need to show people having their arms torn off to have a funny movie , even if it's only to pay homage with the line , " It's getting to be ri-goddam-DICulous ! " The movie makes some interesting points about women entering into the news workforce and the torturous times that the all-male newsteams suffered as a result . That's what the movie satirizes , as you know , and when it sticks to that it's pretty funny . There are probably five or six times during the movie that I laughed out loud and had to rewind a couple of times because it was so funny , but more than half of the movie was so dumb that I was sitting stone-faced for 15-20 minutes at a time . When it comes to comedy movies , I prefer to leave the stone-face-making to Buster Keaton . Vince Vaughn plays a very small part in the film , which is sad because if he had a bigger part ( and a different one , as it were ) the movie could have been a lot better . It is not uncommon for him to carry an entire film , like he did in Old School , Clay Pigeons , Psycho , Made , Swingers , Dodgeball , The Cell , Return to Paradise , etc . He nearly steals this movie and he wasn't even credited , for crying out loud . He is at one point so overcome with rage at being second place in ratings to a team that includes a man who taunts him with such gems as " Where'd you get YOUR suit , the toilet store ? " that he slams his fist against the hood of his van like a rebellious 12-year-old . It's disappointing that his role doesn't really go uphill from there , but his exit from the film is truly telling . His exit from the movie plays out like this : he's talking into the TV camera on location for a news story ( the birth of a panda which , in this movie's plane of existence , has captivated the world ) . When he finishes his line , he throws his microphone to the ground and stalks off with a disgusted look on his face . I don't know why , but I got the feeling that he became Vince Vaughn again . His expression was a moment of clarity realized on the set of this movie , not as his character . I don't know why , but I got the feeling that Vince Vaughn decided he had had enough of this movie and was getting the hell out of there . I tended to agree . |
544,651 | 562,732 | 146,838 | 5 | A good effort , but Any Given Sunday just doesn't work | A good effort , but Any Given Sunday just doesn't work . The film is basically a behind-the-scenes look at professional football . You see the bickering and fighting that goes on among the higher powers up in the box office as well as the conflicts between the players themselves . I think that it was a good portrayal of how instant fame can really go to a person's head and cause them to act in ways that they normally wouldn't , but the football element of the film was awful . It was entirely too polished , football just doesn't look like that . This is what you get when you mix the Hollywood formula with the sport of football . Much of the film was so blown out of proportion and exaggerated that it made it ridiculous . For example , you have the party at one of the players ' ridiculously huge house , particularly the fact that Willie Beamen's ( Jamie Foxx ) truck was cut in half with a blowtorch by another player who he happened to have offended . This is just crap . And how about the play near the end of the film where one of the players got hit so hard in a play that his eyeball popped out of his head ? Yes , POPPED OUT OF HIS HEAD . See how funny that sounds ? It's even funnier to see it acted out on screen by a bunch of people who were amazingly able to keep straight faces . Simple logic reveals that a person's head would explode before their eyeball , along with a good length of the optical nerve , would pop out of their head like that . Thank God for Al Pacino , he saved this movie single-handedly , as the aging coach who began to feel like he was slightly out of his league , coaching a team that would not come together , even for someone who DIDN'T feel too old . Cameron Diaz and especially Dennis Quaid , perfectly cast in the role of the aging quarterback , also added pretty good performances to this otherwise failure of a sports film , but I don't think that Any Given Sunday had much of a chance to begin with . It is clearly a vehicle for nearly everyone involved , a genre film slapped together for the sole purpose of making money , regardless of how much garbage has to be thrown in . > |
544,298 | 562,732 | 104,684 | 5 | Evidently , legendary action director John Woo wasn't always as legendary as he is known to be today in the U . S . | Hard Boiled is one of Woo's earlier hardcore action films , and it definitely has no shortage of action . While there can be no question about Woo's skill at staging fast paced action scenes , that very element was probably the main thing that brought Hard Boiled down . Aside from the fact that the acting was terrible , even from the great Chow Yun-Fat , the film was awkwardly dubbed into English , so you DVD owners out there may want to just leave the subtitles on . With a traditional action film story ( an effort to stop a gun smuggling operation and hunt down a close one's murderer , grossly outnumbered , of course ) , Hard Boiled is not an entirely uninteresting film ? because the same old story is made to work again by the quality direction , almost single-handedly . The problem here is the gunfights . While they are , in fact , relatively well done , due to John Woo's careful hand at direction , there is just so much mind-numbing machine gun fire and so many nameless people being blown away that , pretty soon , a really terrible thing for the film begins to happen , you just stop caring . Watch this film is you are a big John Woo or Chow Yun-Fat fan , or if you are into mindless action films , but be advised , it pretty hard to be moved by a film that kills dozens and dozens of people ? nearly constantly ? within seconds of introducing them . |
544,886 | 562,732 | 435,705 | 5 | Average Cage thriller . | Next is not so much about seeing the future as it is about the paradoxes involved with seeing it . There are so many paradoxes involved in time travel and looking ahead in time that it is amazing that a movie hasn't come along earlier that deals exclusively with them . Unfortunately , the movie has not been as successful as it should have been ( really , do you know even a single person who's not interested in the idea of time travel or looking into the future ? ) , but that's probably mostly because people either love Nicholas Cage or hate him . He's a fine actor , but not exactly box office gold . Cage plays Cris Johnson , a . k . a . Frank Cadillac , a small time Las Vegas magic show performer who pads his shows with his real life ability to see 2 minutes into the future . One night he is cashing out in a casino ( he also pads his income with this ability in the gambling rooms , being careful to keep his winnings small enough to remain unnoticed ) and " sees " that the guy in front of him is about to rob the place and kill two people , so he calls attention to his secret ability by stopping the robbery and then accidentally explaining to the authorities that the guy was about to kill two people . Julianne Moore heads up the FBI's attempt to recruit Johnson's services to help stop the Russians from detonating a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles . The Russians detonating a nuclear bomb in LA ? In 2007 ? If that sounds like a cookie-cutter action / thriller plot , it's because it is . There is a hazy explanation given for why Johnson can see a few minutes into the future , but it's not really important . More importantly , his lack of interest in helping stop the impending catastrophe comes from a deep aversion to attention that he developed as a child due to massive government and medical testing . The stifling love story is introduced in the form of Jessica Biel , who plays the part of an arrogant hottie who casually slaps down Johnson's polite greetings in a local café . Intrigued , as we are , that for some reason he can see further into her future than anyone else's , he is determined to meet her , so he looks into his own future to try out a few different ways to introduce himself to her , until he finds one that works . Soon her jerk boyfriend walks in and gives him a golden opportunity for some heavily scripted heroism . We never learn why he can see further into her future than anywhere else , and it becomes clear that this is purely a plot device used to put the two together . Not exactly a good sign , given how badly messed up their romance is . There's a scene in a hotel room where he woos her with some sweet words and then blows it completely with a stupid magic trick . Nice work , moron ! The movie ends with a special-effects laden action sequence which is both highly contrived and unimpressively , ah , animated . Like so much of the rest of the film , Johnson finds himself in situations that allow him to perform astonishing feats , even for a man who can see two minutes into the future . Given that everything is so convenient for him for the whole movie , there's never any real tension and never any sense that he has really accomplished much . Nicholas Cage has done worse than this , but he's also done a lot better ? |
544,642 | 562,732 | 184,894 | 5 | This isn't the east , Chon , it's the west . You should know , you've done this before ! | Jackie Chan returns to do yet another east meets west routine , virtually identical to that in Rush Hour , just in a different time period . As far as its story , Shanghai Noon is completely unoriginal , but the laughs are surprisingly abundant , thanks in large part to the crooked-nosed Owen Wilson . Chan and Wilson make an amusing comic duo , and one of the film's strong points is the fact that it takes a tired story and delivers it in an interesting and entertaining way . However , there was also an overabundance of the manipulation of reality that was difficult to overlook . ( possible spoilers ahead ! ! ) For example , Chon Wang's almost immediate acceptance into the Indian tribe , and then the daughter's seemingly effortless divorce of Chan and elopement with Roy O'Bannon . Don't Indians frown on divorce ? I also liked how Roy's newfound Indian love suddenly spoke fluent English at the end of the movie . The character's names removed any possibility of taking this film at all seriously ( particularly Chon Wang and Princess Pei Pei ) , and the exaggerated kung fu fighting on Chan's part trapped this film indefinitely in the category of " Another Jackie Chan Film . " However , it was good for a few laughs , and it is always fun to watch Chan beat up a bunch of villains who ridiculously outnumber him , but I get the feeling that this film may be forgotten even faster than Wild Wild West . |
544,606 | 562,732 | 280,486 | 5 | The latest Chris Rock action comedy that apparently doesn't realize that it's a comedy . | Chris Rock stars as a CIA agent and a street hustler , twin brothers separated at birth . When the more successful brother , Kevin ( ironically the one who got his act together and made a life for himself , yet also the one who got himself killed ) is shot escaping a touchy sting operation in which he and his team try to buy a stolen nuclear weapon with cyber money that doesn't exist in real life , the CIA are faced with abandoning a 2 year project and risking themselves because their new enemies are going to want to know what happened to their deal or seeking out Kevin's twin brother Jake , who makes a living whipping the crap out of unsuspecting chess players in Central Park and selling scalped tickets to just about any event you can imagine . At this point in the film , it's clear that the premise is a remarkably strong one for an action comedy - the irony of having a street hustler suddenly thrown into a top secret CIA operation . And when you throw in Chris Rock as the hustler and Anthony Hopkins as his new mentor , it seems that you simply can't go wrong . Unfortunately , the movie seems to lose track of the fact that it is a comedy , and in more ways that just forgetting to throw in some good one-liners . Bad Company was made and scheduled to be released before September 11th , but was then delayed for obvious reasons ( similar to the obvious reasons that delayed the release of the much more incendiary Collateral Damage , given its subject matter ) . Because the movie was written before the attacks , the writers can't have been expected to have known what bad taste it was to center the plot on a stolen nuclear device that was meant to level a major city on the eat coast . I don't hold that against it because of the attacks , but only because it is such a tired premise . When are we going to see some good action movies that are about something other than one guy who has to save a whole city from terrorists with big bombs ? There are points in the movie where it seems that the writers stopped and said , ' Oh wait , this is supposed to be a comedy , ' and threw in a few completely unamusing jokes here and there , mostly in the form of totally inappropriate one-liners from Rock that almost invariably fall completely flat . He and Hopkins do , however , have a bit of chemistry onscreen , but it is mostly wasted . This is a flashy Bruckheimer production , obviously , but it is one of the least interesting action films that Bruckheimer has turned out in years . Granted , most of his productions are cheesy crap , but this one even manages to be boring despite itself . I watched Bad Company right after watching Men in Black II , and so was already prepared for disappointment , but I found myself trying to figure out why exactly the movie is called Bad Company . Surely it can't be because the CIA is forced to employ someone literally off the street , because he turns out to be remarkably bright and much more capable than they had anticipated . Then at the end of the movie , just as the bad guy is about to get killed , he says something about how we Americans think we're so great but we just sit here while people all over the world suffer and die , and we just watch it on our televisions and grab another burger . This is , of course , disturbingly true , and it is not a small part of the reason that four airplane were hijacked in late 2001 . It's something that Americans love to ignore so that we can pretend we're victims . The victims on September 11th were the people in the buildings and the people in the planes and al of their families , the country itself was not . Does ' Bad Company , ' then , refer to the company that the rest of the world is in , being in the company of America ? It seems that the message that this film leaves resonating in your mind at the end is about what a selfish and greedy country America is , and how capable we are to ignore the suffering of the rest of the world as long as we have our fancy cars and our money and our heart disease instead of starvation . In this case , I guess Bad Company's not such a bad movie after all . It certainly gives a pretty potent wake up call at the end , but one that will probably be largely ignored along with the rest of the film . Ah well . |
544,613 | 562,732 | 78,437 | 5 | Good clean cannibal fun ! | Last Cannibal World claims to be a true story about a stone-age cannibal tribe living on the Malaysian island of Mindanao who captures a ' modern ' man named Robert Haper , who crash lands on the island . It seems that there is an oil mining crew camping out in the jungle while they search for drilling sites , and when a team flies in to check on them , the plane is damaged during landing and the drill team turns up missing . The pilot is sure he can fix the plane ( " If I can find the wheel it shouldn't be too hard to put it back again ! " ) , but won't fly until the following day , since it was getting dark . Before long , of course , the group ends up separated and being pursued by cannibals through the jungle , and then the movie becomes a strange mix of gruesome horror and a twisted look at the animal side of humans . Of course , cannibalism is not politically correct , so the cannibal tribe is presented as more like animals than humans , with the grunting and the throwing food at each other and the spontaneous copulation . These are evolutionary drop-outs if ever there were any , but the movie doesn't know where to stop in presenting their backwardness . Even the simplest animals have some instincts , particularly about things like eating and self-preservation , but not these people . One of the women tries to eat Harper's wristwatch , I suppose not possessing the basic abilities to distinguish between food items and non-food items , and for a tribe that has been living presumably for centuries or more in an alligator infested jungle , they sure spend a lot of time swimming and getting eaten or almost eaten by alligators . A woman gives birth by the riverside and , after detaching the umbilical cord with her teeth ( and after an extreme close-up to make sure we know the baby is a girl ? I didn't need that ? ) , she goes for a nice little swim and gets immediately eaten along with her new baby . Smart . Gore fans should be happy , there is sufficient disturbing gore in the movie , although most of the effects ( such as the decomposed head in the beginning ) are pretty weak , as is the editing . But there is lots of grotesque feeding scenes which include lots of filthy savages stuffing flesh in their mouths with lots of nasty sucking sounds and twitching meat . Nice ! Some of the movie doesn't make much sense , like the way they tie up one of the natives and put carnivorous ants on his arms , which slowly eat him while he screams his head off . It's one of the more disturbing scenes in the movie with all that screaming , but why would they do that ? I thought it must be a sacrifice , but what kind of tribe sacrifices their own people rather than animals ? And who is he being sacrificed to ? The Ant God ? Even if he was being punished , for a cannibal tribe to feed a man to ants seems like a waste of food , doesn't it ? Harper spends a good part of the movie trapped in a cage , although I missed the reason for that too . They couldn't have been fattening him up to eat him because that would also be a huge waste of food . Maybe they were saving him for a special occasion . At any rate , they put in this bizarre looking bird with him , and it's strange that when Harper kills it , its squawking instantly stops and gives the scene a genuine finality of death that is more realistic than anything else in the movie . At least until it starts squawking again . There are two directions that the movie could go once a " sympathetic " jungle woman begins helping Harper ? it could have Harper try to lift the woman out of the barbaric world in which she lives , or he could descend into barbarism himself . The most interesting thing that the movie does is that it goes in both directions , and actually does it pretty well . It's a pretty sharp indictment of Harper ( especially if this really is a true story ) , given that , even after saving her from being sexually assaulted by another native , he rapes her himself . And he didn't just force himself on her , her beat her and then raped her . Are we still supposed to accept him as a protagonist ? After this , it may be a little strange to see that she basically becomes his loving cave-wife , bringing him food and cleaning and caring for him , until you remember that these are savages and I guess this is just how women expect to be treated . And Harper is happy , of course , given that he has found himself a beautiful island wife , and with obviously man-made breasts , no less . There is a weak attempt at symbolism during Harper's brief descent to his most primal instincts , and then soon he meets up with another man from the plane , who laments that no matter how much mud he smears into a badly infected wound on his knee , it never gets better . He must not have been paying much attention in his Wilderness Survival class . All in all I guess the movie is as satisfying as a cannibal movie can be . At least you know what to expect , though . I think any movie with the word " cannibal " in the title is going to be pretty much like this . It's bad but it's a fun and disgusting kind of bad , the thing you can watch with your buddies over a few beers and have a few good laughs ! |
544,343 | 562,732 | 286,244 | 5 | I'll grant that it's a work of art , but certainly not for everyone . | When I looked up this movie on the IMDb the first thing I saw was a review by someone praising Triplets of Belleville as a work of art , which it undoubtedly is . On the other hand , the same review called it captivating , which it's not . At all . I recently returned from being on vacation for 6 weeks , during which time I watched countless movies and yet was itching to get home to where I had movie passes at Hollywood and Blockbuster . During my entire vacation my girlfriend was constantly trying to get me to watch Triplets of Belleville , and I was wildly uninterested just because I'm not a huge fan of animated movies , for the most part , and just the look of the animation made it look not very interesting to me . Not a very good reason for not being interested in a movie , by judging it by its cover , but it turns out that I was right . I think Triplets is an interesting accomplishment in that it tries something different ( or at least far less commonplace ) by telling its entire story without a single line of dialogue other than what is occasionally sung in songs . The story concerns a grandmother who's son has been kidnapped during the Tour de France , along with a couple of other cyclists who did not make it through the race , and she and her dog Bruno set off for America to rescue him . The film garnered a couple of Academy Award nominations , such as Best Animated Feature ( a futile nomination , as it was nominated alongside Finding Nemo , and we all know that artistry is no match for popularity in the Oscars ) and Best Song for the routine that the Triplets perform in the film , which is one of the few elements that I found to be pretty charming . I guess I shouldn't say that , because the movie does have a lot of charm , but it's shrouded in what is often obscure artistry that I found a bit confusing and not very entertaining , which is even more odd since I'm something of an amateur marathon cyclist myself . I understand if you think I'm shallow , I certainly thought that people who called the animated short film Bunny ( included on the Ice Age DVD ) shallow or confusing astounded me to no end , but when I was watching Triplets I was reminded of those odd cartoons that come on TV late at night . Triplets of Belleville would have been a perfect show to show on adult swim , which we can thank for such hilarious cartoons as Aquateen Hungerforce and Family Guy , but as a full length feature film I found it to be stretched a bit thin . |
544,798 | 562,732 | 95,956 | 5 | This Film Is Dedicated to the Gallant People of Afghanistan - ' Rambo III ' Review . . . | In preparing to watch the latest installment of the Rambo series , I've gone back and re - watched all of the original three films , which I hadn't seen in probably 15 years . Unfortunately , they are so uniformly bad that it has taken me now over a year to get through the three of them . I finished watching part III today and , like the two films before it , it was a notably underwhelming cinematic experience . By this point in the series , the Rambo formula is worked out in every detail . Rambo just wants to be left alone but then gets sucked into some brutally violent situation which , again , he has to take care of all on his own . He doesn't really play well with others , you see . Just as we found him languishing in a prison labor camp at the beginning of the second movie , Rambo is now living the dubious life of a monk in Thailand who takes breaks from the monastery to head into Bangkok and make some extra money in the stick-fighting competitions , which he promptly turns over to the monks to help build the monastery . He likes the feeling of belonging that he gets from living among the monks and doesn't want to be a soldier anymore . Needless to say , when the guys with the stripes on their shoulders approach and ask for his help , he's uninterested until a mission goes forward in Afghanistan and results in the good guy from the second movie getting taken prisoner , the first American ever taken prisoner in Afghanistan . And here , just like the last movie , is where everything starts to fall apart . The first American ever captured in Afghanistan is not an enviable position , to be sure , so it's easy to understand why Rambo would make such a sudden change of heart . What is unfortunately missing is the entire rest of the American military . I'm curious about how the real members of the United States military responded to the movie , which portrays them as either helpless or completely absent . It may be , perhaps , that the mission is thought to be a lost cause or not worth the risk , so sending Rambo in must , of course , be done " unofficially . " If Rambo is caught , he is told prior to embarking on the mission , the military will deny all knowledge of his existence , which prompts Rambo to sneer and say he's used to such treatment , and then do that thing where he ties his headband on all dramatically . At any rate , it's no surprise when Rambo insists that he has to do everything on his own . If you saw the level of sheer camp that the second movie reached then you know something of what to expect here , although it should be said that Rambo III is certainly better than First Blood Part II , which is undeniably the worst film of the already unimpressive series . It is definitely interesting , however , to watch the way the Afghani people are portrayed in the movie . Rambo enters Afghanistan alone and has to make his way to where the prisoner is being kept with only a single in-country contact , who tells him all about the cultural realities on the ground for the Afghani people . Alexander the Great tried and failed to conquer the Afghans , then the British , then the Americans , and they all failed . He explains to Rambo and ancient battle prayer written by a long-since defeated enemy - " May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra , the teeth of the tiger , and the vengeance of the Afghan . " The relationship between America and Afghanistan has changed drastically over the years , and not in a good way . In fact , given that we're at war in Afghanistan right now , this movie appears strangely prophetic . If George W . Bush had re-watched Rambo III somewhere around early 2003 , it would not be a stretch to think that the situation in the middle east might be drastically different right now . " Every day your war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed , poorly equipped freedom fighters . The fact is you underestimated your competition . If you'd studied your history you would know that these people have never given up to anyone . They'd rather die than be slaves to an invading army . You can't defeat a people like that ! " Believe it or not , this is not a scathing criticism of America's current war in Afghanistan , it's a scathing criticism by the American prisoner of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the movie . It is one of the movie's strangest qualities that it pitts the Americans and the Afghans as allies against the cartoonishly villainous Soviets , who come in the form of wild-eyed lunatics at the controls of attack helicopters that buzz small villages laying waste unprovoked to whole populations of peaceful civilians . They are not just an invading force , they are airborne murderers that bombs women and children and disguise bombs as toys to trick unsuspecting children . With such enemies , it is understandable when one character ominously says , " God would have mercy , Rambo won't . . . " as Rambo sets off on his preposterous one-man mission of vengeance against the invading Soviets . It's interesting that the movie makes so much of how the Afghans have never given in to any invading force in their long history , and yet now they need Rambo to come in and save them from the Russians , but no matter . The movie was made to give the world another dose of outlandish Rambo-style retribution directed at the evil forces that be , and that's what it delivers . It's just too bad that Rambo-style retribution is generally so head-smackingly dumb . |
543,758 | 562,732 | 910,905 | 5 | In The Valley of Elah Part 2 ? | Remember that movie In The Valley of Elah ? It was the movie that Tommy Lee Jones starred in before this one . Yeah , this is exactly the same movie . I've been a huge fan of Jones ever since he first came to my attention in Under Siege , but come on man , time to branch out a little bit , you know ? On the other hand , In The Valley of Elah , which is just as disappointing as In the Electric Mist ( but doesn't have nearly as bizarre a title ) , was released the same year that Jones appeared in No Country For Old Men , so I guess the man deserves some credit . But I'm still getting over The Missing and The Hunted . Yawn ! This time , Jones plays Dave Robicheaux , an alcoholic who is a regular at the bars , where he orders drinks that he never drinks . He's a detective in the deep south , and one day he spots an Italian sports car speeding through the sleepy streets of their town . When he pulls it over , he finds it's being driven by Elrod Sykes ( Peter Saarsgard ) , a local boy who has become a movie star but is now drag racing through his town drunk out of his mind . Dave sidesteps the expected bribes and goes to run him in like he should , but changes his mind when Sykes tells him he knows where a dead body is . Before you go thinking about Stand By Me , the most famous " I know where there's a dead body " movie ever made , this one goes in a completely different direction . The body is the result of a decades-old hate crime , where a bunch of racists had chained a black man and then shot him while he ran through the swamps for his life . Dave , a 17-year-old boy at the time , actually witnessed the crime from across the swamp but never figured out who the killers were . Now , the location of the body has been revealed and it has become his life's mission to bring the killers to justice . Complicating the movie more than necessary is a simultaneous investigation that Dave is running about the murder of a blonde prostitute and , worst of all , some truly bizarre run-ins with the Civil War generals out in the woods . There is suggestion that it is just a local group of dedicated fanatics in the middle of a Civil War re-enactment , but at times it seems more like an LSD flashback than anything else . Ultimately the movie is nothing but a tedious wait to see some racist dirtbags get what they deserve for a vicious hate crime that happened decades earlier . There is a brief approach of the difficult subject of forgiving someone for a past crime when they have made genuine change , although the change portrayed in the movie is not genuine so the idea is dropped pretty quick . There is always a feeling that the movie is about to take off but it just never does , and when the end credits start to roll there's a distinct feeling that you may have just wasted a bunch of time . I should mention that the movie is based on a book called " In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead , " which I haven't read , and I understand that some fans of the book are pretty impressed with the film adaptation , so there may be something more to be said about the movie than I give it credit for here . But as an unprepared moviegoer , there definitely seems to be something missing here . None of the performances are disappointing and the location where the movie was shot is undeniably beautiful , but it just seemed to me that nothing materialized along the way ? |
543,834 | 562,732 | 250,310 | 5 | Just about as corky as you would expect . | Corky Romano is obviously a vehicle for the absurd comedic talents of Chris Kattan , but it's good to see that he is able to slow down and be serious when the content of the story calls for at least a tiny bit of seriousness . It's odd that a movie like this , that is clearly made to be goofy and stupid , still manages to be not nearly as bad as something like Mickey Blue Eyes , which similarly dealt with someone trying desperately but in vain to fit in with a Hollywood-style Italian crime family . As is to be expected in a comedy like this , the characters are skewed just enough to make them weird and goofy , like the one brother who is manly and violent but latently homosexual , or the other one who has become a full-grown man without his own father ever realizing that he never learned to read . Evidently there is a huge case against the father of the family , although he is only guilty of the lesser crimes like money laundering and whatnot , not the murder that he is being charged with . In order to destroy the evidence that they have against him , they need someone to get a job on the inside , get into the evidence room , and destroy the evidence against him . Since they can't have someone do it that the feds would recognize ( and also since , obviously , they can't trust someone outside the family ) , they have to have their somewhat estranged brother Corky , the black sheep of the family , do the job . Or maybe ' the yellow canary ' would be a more apt description of him . Or maybe something pink . A pink canary in a whole family of black sheep . Corky accepts the task out of respect for his father , despite the fact that he has not been a very big part of Corky's life , but he grows cautious when he finds out how serious the charges are . Corky's antics while he is working for the FBI are some of the least convincing things that I've ever seen in a movie , it's almost insulting that we're asked to believe that someone who behaves like he does would acquire so many fans within the Bureau almost immediately . There are a couple guys who work with Corky who are so enamored with him and look up to him so much because of his accidental successes that they are more like cheerleaders than FBI agents . Some of the slapstick scenes are miserable failures , but at least it's easy to see why they were expected to work . There's a scene where Corky has a tug of war with a dog that's trying to get a package of cocaine away from him . It ends up exploding and getting all over both of them , and the ensuing madness is expected to be funny , but it's the worst kind of comedy - it's funny until you stop for a second to think about what you're laughing at . Charlie Chaplin did this exact same scene with spectacular success in Modern Times in 1936 , so it's almost sad to see it redone so badly here . Matthew Glave pops into view again after giving a spectacular performance of a spectacular jerk in The Wedding Singer to play another spectacular jerk in Corky Romano as the rival FBI agent who is sure that there is something up with this new guy that doesn't quite fit . He is constantly thwarted in his efforts to expose Corky and then immediately begins to act like a high school kid not getting what he wants ( ' Aww come on ! ! ' ) . I would say that this is just another goofy SNL movie except that there have certainly been some good SNL movies . Corky Romano is , however , nothing more than you would expect from the previews . It is a series of scenes involving the overacting of Chris Kattan , which just leaves you hungry for less . |
544,735 | 562,732 | 113,540 | 5 | Kids has a healthy message , but the method of delivery is extremely uncomfortable . | The inner city is one of the worst places in the country to spend your formative years , and the makers of Kids add a bit of crime and self-destructive behavior to that in order to show some of the dangers of this type of lifestyle . Yes , the film has strong messages about drugs , AIDS , violence , and crime , among others , but it is so negatively overdone that the positive side of the film is almost cancelled out . There is so much that you have to look past before you can derive anything good from this movie that it is almost not worth watching . The acting , however , was strikingly convincing , but probably because not much actual acting is called for for a movie like this . I realize that violence is a part of life , especially in downtown New York City , but the violence as well as the excessive partying scenes and the gruesome sex was drawn out much more than necessary , and this took a lot away from the film . It's almost as though the movie resorts to this kind of thing to keep the audiences attention , when in fact it did the opposite . While not a completely worthless film , Kids just has so few redeeming values that it is hardly worth the time to watch it . I've always thought that the closer films are to reality , the better they are , but the thing that really ruined Kids was that it focused so hard on the drugs and the sex and the violent elements of reality , while virtually ignoring every other part of these kids ' lives . A message like that does not need to be so hard to swallow in order to be effective . |
544,487 | 562,732 | 113,497 | 5 | Little Man Tate disappears in jungle for 26 years , comes back as Robin Williams ? . | It's interesting to transport yourself back to late 1995 when Jumanji was released into theaters . The movie-going public was still waiting eagerly for another stupendous family adventure to follow Jurassic Park , which blew away audiences of all ages despite some grisly scenes . The badly disappointing Congo had been released earlier in the year but younger audiences were recently charmed by the animated adventures of Pocahontas , while more mature audiences were considering the implications of Outbreak and reminiscing with the brilliant re-creation of the 1960s in Apollo 13 . Teenage audiences ( which included myself ) were mostly still running around the high schools quoting Clueless or ranting and raving about the ( now primitive ) technological wonders of The Net , although in my own circle of friends we were more interested in the techno - criminals in Hackers , the pure , unfiltered awesomeness of Seven and that amazing blonde who got naked in Species . Oh , and I was ditching school on an almost daily basis with one of the owners of this very website and sneaking over to Fashion Island and watching Ace Ventura over and over . Sadly , Jumanji was a definite step backwards in almost all adventure movie departments . The special effects more than anything else are a conspicuous regression , but the biggest problem is that the effects sequences themselves are so disjointed from the rest of the movie . It all starts with a quick sequence taking place in 1869 where two kids bury a magical board game called Jumanji in a wooden chest in the woods . This is about the extent of our knowledge of the game , by the way . There is a whole other movie that takes place before this one begins , without which Jumanji is left with a gaping plot hole . But no matter , the important thing is that this is a board game is so hellacious and fearsome that the kids fear for the soul of anyone who happens to dig it up in the future . No word on why they didn't just burn it . Cut to 1969 , where a young boy named Alan Parrish happens upon the chest at the site where his father is overseeing the construction of his shoe factory . He takes it home and plays a game with his friend Sarah . The game pieces snap into position without being touched and move themselves once the dice are rolled , but even more amazing are the physical manifestations of dangerous safari creatures and other mayhem conjured up by the game . After Alan and Sarah have each taken a turn ( Alan's even accidentally ) , Alas has been sucked off into Jumanji , wherever that is , and Sarah has taken off down the street , pursued by a squeaking mass of bats . Then we jump ahead again , this time 26 years into the future to the modern day ( 1995 ) . The house has been empty for years and a new family move in . The two kids , Judy ( a young Kirsten Dunst ) and Peter find the game and begin to play , opening the door to Jumanji and bringing back things like lions and monkeys and Alan Parrish , now a grown , hairy man without the benefit of any human contact for the vast majority of his life . It turns out that the only way to stop the black magic of the game is to get to the end and say " Jumanji . " And since Alan and Sarah were in the middle of an unfinished game for all of those years , they are now in the middle of a four-person game with Judy and Peter and they must all take their respective turns until someone makes it to the end . Sarah , of course , has suffered a life of diminished credibility ever since she claimed that Alan disappeared into a board game when she was a child . So much for the truth setting you free ! The movie is structured as a series of special effects sequences involving whatever dangerous manifestation results from each person's turn rolling the dice . They all scramble frantically in the face of new dangers every ten or fifteen minutes or so , then the dangers disappear neatly for the next person to take their turn , and so on until the end of the movie . It's not exactly the most imaginative structuring going on here , but I will admit that the ending has a little twist that , while it includes one of the cheapest happy Hollywood copout moves in movies ( they also pulled the same thing in Click ) , I would be lying if I said it wasn't at least a little heartwarming . Unfortunately , a lot of the movie is geared toward kids around 10 years old , the same age as the kids in the movie , but it also contains some imagery and some situations that kids that age would find much too frightening or intense . There is a scene involving giant spiders that admittedly look like nothing other than big plastic spider-puppets but that is still just as creepy as anything in Arachnophobia . So beware if you have a fear of creepy crawlies ! I would be lying if I said the movie wasn't at all fun or entertaining . The story is told in an unconventional way , but it's also true that it's an unconventional story , which at least makes it a little more interesting . But in retrospect it's a little hard to get over how perfectly everything is arranged as a setup for the ending . The relationships between Alan and Sarah and between the two of them and the other two kids who , needless to say , are orphans , will seem a little too perfect for some people . The characters are not uninteresting and the performances are satisfactory , but unfortunately they all take second billing to an ambitious special effects team that doesn't seem to know when their half-baked digital creations are helping to drive the movie along and when they're just swallowing everything else up . |
544,166 | 562,732 | 107,254 | 5 | I think I liked it better when Jason was just plain old Jason . | Sure , the whole Evil Can't Be Killed thing has been a dead horse for decades , but turning the Friday the 13th series in this completely different direction took something away from the movie for me . Sure , it gave the story a lot more possibilities and opened up nearly endless different routes that it could have taken , but it is barely a Friday the 13th film , and while the vast majority of them have been disastrously bad , I still get this weird feeling of loss to see that this one has been changed so much . It's the Hellraiser Inferno of the Friday the 13th series . That being said , it follows that the story structure is by far the best part of the movie . The performances are pathetic throughout , and strangely enough , there are some stomach-turningly convincing murder scenes , yet at the same time there are some scenes where the make-up is nothing short of laughable . Consider when Jason takes the body of the TV producer or whoever that guy was . Once he's in that body , the guy's make-up is exactly the same as the terrible make-up in 70s and 80s zombie movies . It reminded me of the hilarious blue-face make-up that they used in the original Dawn of the Dead . Classic horror or not ( I say not ) , the make-up was ludicrous . It's odd that the movie starts off so differently , with Jason being killed in the first few minutes of the film , and it continues to go down a different path but doesn't really do anything different as a slasher movie . I guess it's interesting to see what the true evil was behind Jason's relentlessness and imperviousness to damage , but on the other hand it isn't really necessary to the movie or the series . Evil Never Dies . It's a cliché but it's enough , really , in this case . We don't need some deep existential meaning imposed on the Jason Voorhees monster , he's a movie monster and not really anything more . It comes off as a little goofy to impose some supernatural definition onto his character , although I like that the film at least tries to acknowledge the fact that Jason turned into an unstoppable killer with really no explanation other than the fact that he just kept getting back up . Indeed , much of the movie revolves around making fun of typical horror movie stereotypes , even stereotypes specific to the Friday the 13th movies , such as the old go up to the lake , have some premarital sex , and get slaughtered . I rather enjoy it when movies have the nerve to poke fun at themselves like that , it's almost like seeing old characters return , like Nancy did in the Nightmare on Elm Street series . And seeing old characters , as Stephen King notes in Bag of Bones , can be like seeing family again . So it was nice to see that the movie was grounded in reality enough to note that it is preceded by a lot of the same movie over and over again . In just about every Friday the 13th movie up to this point , a lot of kids go up to the lake to make out , Jason shows up and gets all stabby and then eventually gets dubiously killed . In this installment that's also exactly what happens , except here it's not Jason doing the killing . Well , it kind of is . But really it isn't . In fact , was it ever ? |
544,271 | 562,732 | 4,736 | 5 | Chaplin tries directing . | In Chaplin's first film as director , he doesn't come flying out of the gates , instantly showing that he will go on to be a great filmmaker . 20 Minutes of Love is not much different from the films that he made in the months before or after , although it is interesting to see one of the first of his mostly improvised films made in a park with some couples and a police officer and little else . Like so many of his other comedies this one turns into little more than a lot of kicking and punching and throwing the entire cast into a lake , but given the amount of short films almost identical to this one that Chaplin cranked out , it is clear that the audiences at the time were having a blast . The plot itself is even more difficult to follow than they usually are in Chaplin's early work . It involves Charlie wandering around a park and making ridiculously overt passes at women who are sitting on park benches with their boyfriends or husbands , and then there is a stolen watch thrown into the mix and a subsequent conflict involving who owns it and who stole it . Probably the best moment in the film is when Charlie gives the watch away to a pretty girl and then is so proud that he is just beside himself . Pretty amusing , and a lot of the Tramp's characterization also comes through even in this very early film . It should be noted that you should not expect to find tiny , forgotten gems of masterpiece comedy by looking at Chaplin's early work , because film was an emerging medium and Chaplin himself was an inexperienced filmmaker from any perspective , but unfortunately 20 Minutes of Love , even though it is Chaplin's first film as director and therefore a film-making landmark , is also clearly the work of someone who had little experience in film-making and was still not sure where his career as a filmmaker would take him . |
543,994 | 562,732 | 120,184 | 5 | A strangely disappointing adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel that comes off to a smashing good start but very quickly approaches a precipitous downhill . | Sphere is a science fiction film that starts off with a tremendously fascinating story and ignores all of the possibilities that it entails . Four people ( you know the drill ? a psychologist ( Dustin Hoffman ) , a mathematician ( Samuel L . Jackson ) , a biochemist ( Sharon Stone ) and an astrophysicist ( Liev Schreiber ) ) are flown out to the middle of the ocean on a top-secret missions ( even they don't know where they're going ) . We would be just as confused as they were about the details of their mission if we had never seen the previews , but even though we already know what they're going to find out there , it's just as interesting to learn about the details of this ship that has been found on the bottom of the ocean , and that appears to have been sitting there for 300 years ( well , okay , 288 ) . The story keeps getting better and better as we learn that there is a hum coming from the ship , indicating that there is still something running inside it , and then even more fascinating revelations once we are taken inside the ship . There can be no doubt that Sphere contains some truly interesting and entertaining elements , and that things like the acting are just as superb as we would expect from such a spectacular cast , but as the movie progresses , we begin to realize how little the film is going to reveal . I can't say that I wasn't completely enraptured for at the least the first hour of the film , but there were just as many bitterly disappointing things about it as there were good things . Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L . Jackson , in particular , delivered absolutely brilliant performances in this film , delivering some of the best entertainment in the entire film by themselves . There is a mildly interesting but completely unconvincing ex-romantic tension between Sharon Stone's character , Dr . Beth Halperin , and Dustin Hoffman's character , Dr . Norman Goodman , that is there for little other reason than to complicate the lives of the characters as they try to solve the mystery of this undersea ship . ( spoilers ) It's really too bad that the movie completely falls on its face in the second half , because the first half of the film is excellent and undeniably entertaining . There's nothing like a bit of time travel and the suggestion of extraterrestrial life to keep you entertained , and it is definitely a great scene when we find out that the ship is a human ship . This is one of the many things in the film that really makes you think . The thing that makes a great film is that it inspires thought . This is probably the one thing that all of the great films have in common with each other . There are surely a lot of things about Sphere that really make you think , which is another reason that the first half of the film is so good . We see that it's a human ship , which opens a whole new area of possibilities for the film . Harry ( Samuel L . Jackson ) speculates on the fact that the last entry in the ship's log is an entry into an ' Unknown entry event , ' indicating that they will never reach the surface to reveal what they've found . There is also a possibly over-extensive excursion into the realm of the psychological element in the film , as the characters are all made to face their fears , some of which are not just your average fears , such as Harry's strange fear of finishing 20 , 000 Leagues Under The Sea . The special effects are definitely nothing to brag about , but there are some interesting scenes that take place in the deep ocean , such as the death of Teeny Fletcher ( hey , she's black , she had it coming , right ? ) in the midst of a mass of strange sea creatures , as well as the scene with the thousands of squid eggs . Weird looking things , I've wondered since I saw the film what kind of props they used for that scene . The conversation with ' Jerry ' is unfittingly childish , but there is definitely a significant element of tension introduced when Jerry gets mad , as well as the scene where Norman contemplated the implications of Jerry's expression of emotions , indicating his ability to get mad . There are undeniably a lot of interesting things about Sphere , and it surely has the power to entertain , but it goes off the track later in the film , maybe because it tried to answer too many of its questions . There are some unanswerable things in the film , and the movie deals with them by having the characters have a weakly-written discussion about their fears and questions , and their ultimate decision to ' forget ' what they know using the power that they seem to have gained from the sphere . While this answers the question of how it could have been an unknown entry event when they all made it to the surface , it's probably the weakest ending that the film could possibly have had . As a strange twist on the science fiction genre , Sphere succeeds , although only in the first half . Like Hollow Man , Sphere could have and should have been a much better film . The unfortunate fact about the film is that it contains a lot of very interesting and very entertaining things that are surely worth watching , but the disappointing ending almost makes them not even worth seeing . |
543,819 | 562,732 | 80,487 | 5 | Get drunk first . | There are several classic comedies that , at the time of this writing , I've never seen , like Animal House , Groundhog Day , and , until yesterday , Caddyshack . Maybe I just expected more , but I found Caddyshack to be pretty disappointing . The only funny people in the movie are Chevy Chase and Rodney Dangerfield , and the latter only sporadically . Rodney Dangerfield has this style of comedy that is brilliant in stand-up , but in a film it is not very conducive to repeat viewings . His style is too spontaneous to be funny more than once or twice , but was still funnier in this movie by leaps and bounds than Bill Murray , who turned in an astonishingly unamusing performance . A lot of times I find myself unable to sufficiently appreciate these goofball comedies , because when they reach the level of cult classic that this movie has , I really expect them to be side-splittingly hilarious , which Caddyshack simply is not . On the other hand , I think my sense of humor has matured beyond the ability to fully appreciate the crude humor for which 80s comedies are often so well known , so maybe I'm wrong ( note : I'm not wrong ) . Structurally , the movie is very well made . When it ultimately gets around to the real conflict in the movie rather than concentrating on the stupid clash between the drunken teen caddies and the snooty rich folk that populate the curiously named Bushwood Country Club , there is some genuine tension created . Bill Murray plays a groundskeeper caricature ( replacing groundskeeper Willie , who showed up in the beginning of the movie and then promptly and inexplicably disappeared completely ) who is assigned by the club's owner to get rid of the gophers that have somehow made it onto the golf course and proceeded to tear huge ruts into the putting greens . Murray's role for the rest of the movie is to plot huge military vengeance against the offending gopher , who really only wants to listen to good music and get his groove on . I'm not sure whose talent is more wasted , Murray's or the gopher's . I've found recently that watching any documentaries provided with the DVDs almost invariably makes me appreciate the movie more . I liked this movie much more after I watched the cast and crew talking about their experiences in making it , much as my appreciation was lifted by similar documentaries for movies like Willard and Texas Chainsaw III , which had nowhere to go but up anyway . What I can't get over , though , is how funny Caddyshack is not . It's not that the comedy flew below my radar , so to speak , but that there is really not much effort put into making it funny . If the making-of documentary is to be believed ( although I have a feeling that this was said as a joke ) , the screenplay was originally intended to be a drama , but not much of what was in the script ever made it into the final film . If that's true , my theory is that it was the dancing mechanical gopher that turned it from a drama into a comedy . Whatever the case , Caddyshack turned out to be one of the most famous comedies ever made , although in my opinion , not even close to one of the best . |
544,486 | 562,732 | 449,487 | 5 | Uninspired emotional drama gets totally lost in the second half ? | I have heard that Passengers received little marketing effort because the studio didn't want it to overshadow Anne Hathaway's other 2008 film , the highly depressing Rachel Getting Married . I can only imagine that they would do this because they didn't want her outstanding performance in that film to be juxtaposed with her performance in this one , where she is wildly , horrifically miscast . She is definitely a talented actress , but like it or not , she is just not an adult actress yet , and to cast her in a role as a grief counselor with , ladies and gentlemen , two Master's degrees and a freaking Ph . D is an action of such vacuous logic that I can only imagine it was a blind stab at catapulting her into a mature role that she simply isn't ready for yet . And it doesn't help matters that the first half of the movie is an emotional drama laden with every post-traumatic movie cliché imaginable , and the second half is almost entirely incomprehensible . It's one of those things where after the movie ends you can tell what they were trying to do , but you find yourself trying to figure out how they went so wrong rather than trying to piece together a complex storyline . Anne Hathaway plays Claire Summers , a grief counselor assigned to the task of single - handedly providing group therapy to an entire plane full of crash survivors . I'm immediately lost as soon as the therapy sessions begin , because Claire begins right off the bat by interrogating the survivors about the crash as though they are suspects in a crime . Do grief counselors really force trauma victims to relive their traumatic events in such detail ? Even when they so clearly don't want to ? Seems a little counter-productive to me . At any rate , she soon meets Eric , one of the crash survivors who is " feeling a little too good . " She walks into his hospital room where she finds him naked as the day he was born with an ear to ear grin , and he continues this behavior for much of the rest of the movie , charming his way into Claire's personal life through his clear and deep love of life that seems to be unique to people who have recently been reminded how fragile it all is . The movie begins with a subplot that suggests that the airline is trying to cover up the accident , which Claire begins to believe was the result of shoddy maintenance ( which , if revealed to the public , could easily put the airline out of business ) , by blaming it on the pilot . Shady characters show up in the bushes watching Claire's therapy sessions , and she is confronted by ominous businessmen who warn her not to get too involved with the stories she's hearing from her patients , who seem to remember a mid-flight explosion , which doesn't really go along with the sleepy-pilot story that the airline was pushing . The relationship between Claire and Eric is the most important thing in the movie . It evolves from a therapist / patient relationship ( although Eric continuously insists that he's not a patient ) to a romantic one until the third act of the film , which is a bizarre attempt at a Sixth Sense-style twist that totally cancels out everything that we have seen so far . Don't be surprised if you spend most of the last 30 minutes of the movie trying to figure out what you saw in the first hour that you can actually believe . It's a noble effort to throw a little mystery into the mix , but the new direction that the story takes at the end doesn't really fit too well with what we've seen so far . The movie simply jolts us out of the story and asks us to go along with it . Unfortunately , despite some good performances , Claire and Eric have absolutely no chemistry . He seems like a guy in his mid-thirties hooking up with a high school girl , and their love scene might be the most thoroughly stale and generic one that I've seen in a movie in years . He moves in for a kiss , she relents , and then we cut to a close-up of her pillow as her head moves on screen , slowly laying down and looking into Eric's loving eyes . YAWN . There is also the matter of Eric's painting . He has always wanted to paint but has always been afraid to ( ? ? ) , but thankfully the crash has made him brave enough to pick up a brush . I'm all for adding a little dimension to characters , but I just can't get behind scenes like the one where he is showing Claire his newfound love of painting , and then experiences a flood of emotion which he deals with by frantically flinging that brush across the canvas with all his might until he finally dissolves into a tearful breakdown . I'm going to go ahead and suggest that no one in film history has ever made a scene like this work . If you've seen one , please let me know , I would love to see a reason why people keep filming them . Fans of the film will have a blast trying to reconstruct the events of the ending , but personally I just never was able to generate enough interest in the movie to invest the effort into deciphering the twists and turns , who's alive , who's dead , and why people know what they know and who they know at different times throughout the movie . It does have a lot to say about death , but unfortunately it doesn't say anything new or interesting and it even proves to be a huge amount of to discover the tired message . If the movie is going to be so disappointing , they could at least have made it mildly exciting , like Turbulence ? |
544,905 | 562,732 | 406,661 | 5 | Jack already kicked a bunch of asses ! | It was with some trepidation that I watched Clementine the other day , because I had heard nothing but a relentless stream of terrible things about it . I was surprised to see that it's a Korean film in every way , given Seagal's background in Japanese martial arts and the fact that he speaks fluent Japanese . But make no mistake , Clementine is not a Seagal movie , it's an action comedy that's heavy on the comedy ( and cheap drama , for some reason ) and light on the action . The only problem is that the comedy is spotty at best and Seagal's presence on the cover box serves only to make us wonder where he is for the whole movie . The story is about Kim , a fallen Korean Taekwon-do champion who leaves his country when a bad referee call costs him the championship title . He moves to Los Angeles and becomes a cop and never goes back to Korea , although he must live in Korea tow because he and he speaks nothing but Korean , as do his colleagues and his daughter . Having lost his fighting career , he decides to concentrate on a career in law enforcement and taking care of his daughter . A fight promoter is trying to get him back in the ring but Kim doesn't want to get back into fighting . Kim's daughter is impossibly cute and takes after her father . When Kim gets called in to talk to the principal because his daughter beat up some kid that was teasing her , Kim scowls at the kid and says , " Well you got what you deserved , didn't you ! " Unfortunately , there is a stupid sub-plot involving the girl's mother that serves to do nothing but make a light - hearted , half-witted comedy pretty thoroughly depressing . The little girl who plays Kin's daughter has some great scenes , but it seems like she was just screaming and crying for about the last 30 minutes or so of the film . Oh and remember that huge black guy in Underworld ? The one that did that weird thing where he's trying to make his voice so deep that it just calls attention to his crappy acting ? That guy is in this movie , and he's still doing that stupid thing with his voice . Maybe someone forgot to tell him that he's not in a vampire movie anymore . But it's pretty much in tune with the rest of the awful acting in the movie , although Dong-jung Lee , who plays the main character , does have some pretty funny moments , especially in the first half of the film , which is the best part of the movie and I would argue that it's even pretty entertaining and fun . It's revealing about the rest of the movie that the formidable talent of Seagal himself is completely wasted . He has nothing to do in the entire movie except do what he does worst in all his other movies ? show up at the end and make some goofy speech and then wander off screen in slow motion . Yawn . But this is not a Seagal movie , it's a Korean martial arts comedy where he makes a brief appearance at the end , in one of the film's only English scenes . If they had kept up the almost family comedy sitcom story of the first half of the movie it could have been fun , light-hearted fare , but trying to give us this dramatic social situation involving the little girl and her missing mother and the whole thing with Seagal just turned it into a muddled mess . |
544,835 | 562,732 | 117,894 | 5 | A faithful adaptation of the novel , but I guess some stuff just doesn't translate to film very well . | Stephen King has obviously had more success in having his books made into movies than any other author . Sure , a lot of his movies are pretty much bottom of the barrel drivel , such as many of his earlier horror films ( such as Creepshow and Night Shift and It , to some extent ) , but there is a distinct brand of horror films that come from his books that are not only better than average , but that stand as classic horror films and probably always will ( such as The Shining and Carrie ) . It should also be noted that Stephen King has not only come out with horror stories , but that he has come out with some of the best dramas out there . Note , for example , that The Shawshank Redemption is at # 2 on the IMDb's Top 250 , and has been for as long as I can remember , and he has also provided the stories for such great dramas as Stand By Me , Hearts In Atlantis , Dolores Claiborne , The Green Mile , and Strawberry Spring ( MAN I can't wait until that movie comes out ? ) . Clearly , Stephen King has earned enough respect to have filmmakers be faithful to his material when adapting one of his stories into a film , but while that is the case with Thinner , I just don't think the material translates very well . It's not exactly one of King's best books ever , but Thinner is an entertaining and fast paced novel . It's one of those ones where something new is always happening and it's really hard to put down , which is why it seemed so strange to me that while I was watching the movie I seemed to be just waiting for it to end . I had already read the book , so I wasn't exactly hanging on the edge of my seat to see what happened next , but there's something thin ( no pun intended ) about the delivery of the movie that took away from the excitement of the story as a whole . This is not a typical horror film , in that it doesn't really rely on shocks to get you to jump out of your seat , it relies more on just horrifying stuff , like Billy Halleck's torturous weight loss and the old gypsy man's nose and that KISS at the end of the movie my GOD . Unfortunately , the film version of Thinner just doesn't capture the fascinating quality of the book . My theory is that this is the kind of thing that is much better imagined than seen . You just can't show something like this and have it be convincing enough to be a really great film . Granted , the special effects are impressive , to say the least , but there are many instances in the film where it's just all too obvious that they are just that ? special effects . Robert John Burke's performance was less than spectacular at some points , even once or twice bordering on becoming clownish ( ' I'm being ? erased ! ' ) , but I haven't seen many of his performances before ( except for his performance in the ridiculous RoboCop 3 ) , so I don't even have much to compare it to . Joe Mantegna is completely out of place in this film and pretty much the rest of the cast is on auto-pilot . The film is worth watching just to see Kari Wuhrer lift her skirt up in one of the most breathless but unrevealing scenes I've ever seen ( rivaling even the tremendous sensuality despite the nearly total lack of nudity in The Hairdresser's Husband ) , and Stephen King fans are sure to enjoy it , but this is not a King film for a wide audience . |
543,908 | 562,732 | 94,701 | 5 | Why is it that in horror movies , anytime someone finds blood dripping onto them from somewhere above their head , they always turn and look up without moving an inch to any side to get out of the way ? | There is a blood dripping scene in Bad Dreams ( one of the oldest tricks in the horror movie book but one which does not seem to ever diminish with each succeeding horror film , even up to today ) that turns out to be probably the , um , chunkiest one that I've ever seen . Effective , I suppose , on a morbid level , since it avoids being nothing but a typical revelation of a brutally murdered body , but tiring in the way that it is executed ( the scene , not the body , and no pun intended , of course ) . For some reason this reminds me of the scene in Joe Dirt where David Spade finds himself with a missile shaped septic tank strapped to his back , which ends up spewing its gooey contents onto his astonished head , and instead of attempting to prevent the sludge from bathing him from head to foot , he stands motionless , going ' Wah ! Wah ! Wah ! ' and subjecting himself to the onslaught of the pasty substance . This is something that is easily avoided in real life ( even if you DO somehow manage to wind up with a septic tank on your back ) , and the fact that Dirt makes not even the slightest attempt to avoid it reveals the scene as a weak effort to get a cheap laugh . Any blood-dripping scene in a horror film , similarly , is an equally weak effort to get a scare . In this case , a gross out scare , a brand which is inherently weak in itself . The blood-dripping scene in Bad Dreams strikes me , for the main reason , because the rest of the movie is not much of a horror film except for the occasional appearance of the cult leader from the beginning of the film turning up as a horribly burned corpse , haunting poor Cynthia , the lone survivor ( as usual ) of the tragic event at the beginning of the film . The movie starts off with one of those goofball cult meetings , where everyone decides to commit mass suicide in order to become one with each other , or some other such nonsense . It starts off by making a comment about the destructive power of stupid people in large groups , but then turns into this weird horror / thriller for the rest of the movie . There are a few effective scenes in the film , such as , ironically , the scene where Ralph , one of Cynthia's new roommates at the mental institution , tells her that whenever it gets to be too much for him , he just makes a little hole and it all goes away . He lifts up his shirt and reveals a map of scars traveling up his belly and chest , which is a huge turn from the horny teenage goofball that he had been portraying up to that point in the film ( probably something that helped in getting him the role of Dave in the Ski School films of the early and mid 1990s , the films that he is probably best known for ) . But for the most part this is a pretty weak film . Bad Dreams fails as a horror film because not a single new idea can be found in the movie , which renders its horror content completely predictable and almost entirely without effect , and it fails as a thriller ( although not as much as it fails as a horror film ) , because it crosses the thin line between horror and thriller , inserting too much gore and supernatural antagonism where it doesn't belong , and thereby coming off as campy at best . It is , however , more entertaining than other bad movies I've found in the horror section lately , such as Neon Maniacs , which has cemented itself as one of the worst horror films I've ever seen , and not even bad in that good way , like They Live or Texas Chainsaw or some of the Friday the 13th or Nightmare of Elm Street sequels . The tagline for Bad Dreams ( the one on the top of the cover box , not the goofy ' It's A Scream ! ' at the bottom ) is a little interesting , in the way that it creates interest in the movie since you just have a natural urge to find out why someone would wish they were dead upon waking up ( although this is also a pretty weak way create interest in a movie , especially a horror movie ) , but it also has nothing to do with the movie itself . Anytime a movie has a tagline that turns out to be a figure of speech , it tends to have the effect of leaving a bad aftertaste . The entirety of the suspense in the film , in fact , is derived from the fact that Cynthia does NOT wish she were dead upon awakening . The cult leader coming after her is the one that wishes she were dead , so if she really wished she was dead so badly all she had to do was give in and let him take her . This is , of course , not the case , and so we have a movie . But the strange thing about it is that , despite having almost no strengths at all , it makes me wonder if maybe horror films are SUPPOSED to be bad , at least to be memorable . This one wasn't all that terrible , but makes little to no impression . The acting is weak from everyone involved ( even from the beautiful Jennifer Rubin , who strikes me as an actor who should have had a more visible career than she has had so far ) , and the directing is little more than pointing and shooting , but the movie is almost immediately forgettable . Maybe in swaying on the line between horror and thriller , Bad Dreams made the unfortunate mistake of landing right in that limbo zone between a truly great horror film and a truly awful one ? the zone of oblivion . |
544,259 | 562,732 | 247,745 | 5 | Failed movie titles : Highway Patrol Academy . | Wow , someone must really have had a bad runin with the police or with the Highway Patrol , since they're both made to look completely ridiculous in this movie . I can't say that the movie is entirely without laughs , because there were several scenes during which I was laughing so hard that I just about fell off the couch ( ' Hey , I got an idea ! Let's pop some Viagra and issue tickets with raging mega-huge boners ! ' ) . I guess the movie is about what law enforcement would look like if the police force and the Highway Patrol were run as though they were fraternities instead of government run entities . The police and the Highway Patrol are rival fraternities fighting each other over state funding , since one of them is about to be shut down and so they better make some heroic drug bust or something right before the budget hearings in order to stay in business . This plotline sort of falls to the side for the majority of the film in favor of freaky antics and games played by the cops as they pull people over and try to see how many times they can get away with saying Meow without being caught . This is the type of humor that might have done well had it been more prevalent , and the most extensive , seen in the film . The problem with Super Troopers is that it just goes too far at many points . It's perfectly believable to have a lot of guys on the police force who screw around in the locker room , playing practical jokes on each other and trying to do some goofy routines like the Meow routine while on the job , but the film also has them busting a teen party and then getting smashed with the kids themselves and forcing the kids to do humiliating fraternity hazing rituals , something absolutely certain to land them in court , as well as to immediately cost them their jobs , the importance of which drives the entire plot . If the movie had been something of a behind the scenes of law enforcement comedy that let us see an entirely different side of the police force than the stolid one that we usually see peering at us disappointedly through our driver's side windows , it could have been a smashing success . But instead it decides to display full frontal nudity of fat men covered in powdered sugar , a toothless redneck having sex with a bear in the woods , two cops trying to go undercover in a semi truck that they don't know how to drive , and a lot of other idiot cops doing a lot of idiot things . Given the fact that the movie is all about two law enforcement agencies trying to save their jobs by actually solving a crime ( notably something entirely out of the ordinary for them ) , the least the movie could have done is provide us with at least a single person on either team that we would actually want to see driving a patrol car and wearing a policemen's uniform . The movie is the product of a goofball comedy troupe who call themselves Broken Lizard , but who don't realize that if you want your audience to root for your characters to keep their jobs as police officers , it might be beneficial to keep in mind that police officers have power over the general public . Personally , I'm not too thrilled about the possibility of being pulled over by someone who is going to demand my license and registration and then call me a chickenfker . |
543,808 | 562,732 | 391,198 | 5 | Effective Japanese horror dulled by unnecessary remake and unnecessary CGI . | In perusing all the negative comments about The Grudge spread out among the IMDb , I'm amazed at how many people , even professional critics , have gotten the basic premise completely wrong . The curse that the movie is centered around is not created when someone dies in a horrible way , it's created when someone dies " in the grip of anger . " The terrible rage that has consumed someone at the time of their death is what creates the curse , and then that rage consumes anyone that it comes into contact with , at which point it also renews itself . Not that it matters , however , for the most part , people have been tending to be right about the rest of the movie . It's a remake of a Japanese film of the same name , which was released barely a year before this one and was directed by the same guy and is , by the way , leaps and bounds better than this one . You know all this stuff . The infamous opening scene of the American version is certainly surprising and promises an interesting movie , but then the movie veers off in a completely different direction and for most of the time it seems like that first scene is completely unrelated . Ultimately , it is little more than your standard haunted house story , which is probably the oldest and weakest story in the horror book . If you make a movie about a haunted house these days , there better be something truly interesting about it , otherwise it is guaranteed to sink unnoticed into obscurity . Sarah Michelle Gellar , a veteran of bad American horror movies , enters the mix adding her unique brand of weak horror acting . She's a college student finally granted her long - standing wish to travel abroad , but unfortunately she gets placed in this house helping to care for an old woman suffering from dementia , which basically means she spends most of the time staring into empty spaces at ghostly things that no one else seems to realize are really there . Gradually , we come to realize that she's not just losing her mind , she's being driven insane by ghostly forces that simply won't leave her alone . Enter another couple , Jennifer and Matthew , who are also living in Japan temporarily , as the husband has business there . Clea DuVall , the most talented actor in the entire movie , plays Jennifer , and the becomes immediately unhappy with the whole situation . She is having major problems adjusting to life in Japan , unable to communicate , unable to read any of the packages on the food at the supermarket , etc . Basically many of the same troubles I had when I moved here to China two years ago . As is to be expected , weird things start happening . You get the idea . I have heard people defend the movie by saying that there is nothing to complain about , the ghosts act perfectly naturally by lashing out at anyone who comes near because of course they're angry about how they died and want to take it out on someone ! Yeah , I can understand that , but a movie about that and nothing else ? And not only one , but TWO movies ? Is it too much to ask for more than exactly the same kind of story that he been being told for hundreds of years ? Since I am an American living in an Asian culture myself , I had hoped that they would take the opportunity to use the combination of American actors in a Japanese film to give us some kind of cultural analysis , maybe even something that would compare the Japanese and American horror styles . The opportunities were endless , but they were all ignored in favor of simply Americanizing a Japanese horror film . And having seen more than my share of both styles of horror , I can tell you that Americanizing Japanese horror is not the way to make it better ! |
543,861 | 562,732 | 67,116 | 5 | Are you now , or have you ever been in any way connected to the French ? ? ? | Wait , lemme check something really quick . Ah yes , here we go , FIVE Academy Awards . WOW . Now , I'm no expert on movies ( note : I am an expert on movies ) but I really can't see what it is about this movie that is deserving of that many Oscars . Never do I get more angry responses to my reviews than when I write a scathing review of a hugely popular movie ( I've gotten lots of ridiculous mail from fans of the staggeringly idiotic Scary Movie series , for example ) , but I can't see the appeal of The French Connection . Feel free to e-mail me and tell me how dumb I am , but I will never relent to the suggestion that this turgid crime film ever deserved more recognition that Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange . Granted , Kubrick's work is not very widely palatable and the Academy Awards have long since been a ceremony aimed at rewarding popularity rather than artistic quality ( this curious little factoid was proven in spectacular fashion in 1997 ) , but I find it hard to believe that even at the time , when sex and violence were probably not nearly as accepted as they are today , The French Connection could have come in above A Clockwork Orange . In the movie's defense , It is finely crafted and original , setting up what was to become a hugely copied setup of crime movies featuring a detective who is so dedicated to his assignments and determined to catch the bad guy that he / she has to go outside the agency and solve the crime alone , since some rules have to be broken . Gene Hackman's character is famously the one that is ' Bad news , but a good cop . ' I think that the movie's biggest problem today is that it is famous for having the greatest car chase ever put on film . In watching for the greatest car chase ever put on film , I was amazed when the credits started . Sure , the scene where Doyle ( Hackman ) was chasing the bad guy in the subway train was expertly crafted if short and unspectacular , and not the greatest car chase ever put on film b any stretch of the imagination . Maybe it was the greatest car chase put on film in 1971 . Anything beyond that is going a little too far . The editing of the car chase is excellent ( note the shot where the large truck / van pulls out in front of Doyle's car , and how smooth the match cut is on the action to a different angle . VERY good ) , the chase itself is not . The story is simple enough , Doyle is a detective frantically trying to topple a drug ring importing drugs from France , and the movie follows this plot in a simple and relatively realistic fashion , which I think is the film's greatest strength . As far as the technical way that it is put together , this is far superior to the action movies of today as far as the amount of thought put into its script and production , but as far as action it just doesn't compare . On the other hand , there's nothing worse than an action movie plagued by relentless stupidity ( see Bad Boys II ) , but on the same token , an action film cannot be said to be one of the greatest ever made ( or have the greatest parts , such as the car chases ) simply because it is smartly made . Maybe The French Connection really did have the greatest car chase ever filmed at the time it was made . That statement is certainly not true as of today and the movie was certainly not the best picture of 1971 , but I think as long as you don't go into it expecting a smashing great action film that lives up to the hype , there is a lot in The French Connection that could greatly benefit the moronic action movies cranked out regularly today . |
543,879 | 562,732 | 146,316 | 5 | The biggest disappointment of the summer . | I don't play video games , so I don't know anything about the Tomb Raider game or anything like that , so it played no role in the formation of my opinion about the movie . I had very high expectations for the film , because I know how popular Tomb Raider ( and , probably even more , Lara Croft ) is , and because I know that a tremendous amount of preparation went into the making of the film . And besides that , Angelina Jolie stars as Lara Croft , and she pulls off the physical aspect of that role ( face it , Lara Croft's body is even more well known than the game itself ) with stunning closeness . There is a mediocre story in the film involving Croft's search for an artifact that carries with it tremendous power , including the ability to control time , if I remember correctly . Fueling Croft's efforts to achieve the artifact is her determination to live up to the legacy of her late father , played with a little tongue in cheek by her real life father , John Voigt . The story of Tomb Raider was not too impressive to begin with , and Angelina can barely pull off the fake accent ( I shudder every time I anticipate Original Sin ) , but this is not what ultimately brings the movie down . Normally I try not to pick movies apart , but there was so much unnecessary stuff thrown in here that it makes you wonder what people were doing for all of the years that this movie was in production . It seems weird that no one noticed how weird it is to have Lara's father looking at the movie camera and talking , as though to her , while she reads a letter that her wrote her before he died . And also , whose idiot idea was it to have her do things like punch a guy in the head with the back tire of a motorcycle while she speeds by on the front wheel ? ! What a joke . On the other hand , every scene in which Lara handles guns is incredibly well done . I think that , for the most part , this is because Angelina just looks good pointing two guns and firing them that fast . The beginning action scene was pretty impressive for this reason . The action in the film was mostly pretty good , but there were several instances where it went over the top , as in the above-mentioned motorcycle scene . This is the same problem that we saw in Mission : Impossible II , which could otherwise have been a good action movie , as Tomb Raider could also have been . I don't know enough about the game to comment on how well it was translated to the screen , but I do know from pictures of Lara Croft that Angelina did an excellent job in the role . There can be no mistake that the movie is directed at a younger audience ( which makes you wonder about that brief half-nude scene ) , which probably accounts for most of the goofy action sequences , so be advised of a certain inherent immaturity before you watch it . It's an entertaining enough movie , but be warned . |
543,812 | 562,732 | 259,324 | 5 | Mugging Victim Unsurprised by Attacker's Flaming Skull . | Johnny Blaze began a career as a stunt motorcyclist while still in his teens , taking after his father , Barton Blaze , who has become a legendary stunt cyclist . In one of those bizarre quirks of irony that life tends to display , his father achieves fame by cheating death , only to be diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a short time to live . Johnny makes a deal with Mephistopheles , selling his soul to the devil in exchange for the return of his father's health . Sadly , the devil tends to be a bit of a sneaky bastard , so Barton's health returns wonderfully , and hours later he's killed in a motorcycle stunt . Ouch . So now Johnny has no soul , but he doesn't quit cycling . In fact , being an instrument of Satan has a wonderful effect on his career , since Johnny is literally unable to be killed . He performs the most spectacular stunts imaginable and with a level of calm that suggests insanity . He's almost bored as he's leaping over things that other stuntmen wouldn't even imagine trying . Unfortunately , because of his pact with the devil , he also has to transform into the Ghost Rider , the devil's bounty hunter . Sounds like it could be an interesting life , although I can't imagine how many new shirts he has to buy after they get all singed by his flaming head . Besides , he gets to ride through the night on this cool flaming chrome chopper finding evil souls and bringing them back to hell . I wouldn't mind that so much . Hear that , Mephistopheles ? There is one scene where a mugging victim is being attacked , and the Ghost Rider approaches , stops the mugging and dispatches some flaming justice . It's a satisfying scene , but then later there is a television news crew interviewing the victim , who doesn't appear to be firing on all cylinders . When asked for a description of the man who stopped the attack , she says , " he was all thin and bony and had a rad chopper with flames and stuff . " Anything else ? " Oh , and his face was a skull and it was on fire . It was an edge look but he totally pulled it off . " There you have sort of the tone of the whole movie . It's about a guy who sells his soul to Satan and becomes a tool of the devil by night , but it's certainly not afraid to laugh at itself , which is important in a movie like this . Besides , when the girl was given that interesting description , the look on the cameraman's face was classic . There is also a totally ineffective love story between Johnny and Roxanne ( played by Eva Mendez , who seems far too beautiful and sophisticated to fall in love with a stuntman like Johnny ) . Johnny flees his life after his father's death , leaving Roxanne for years without a word from him , but when a strange twist of fate brings them back together he is faced with the challenge of winning back his true love while also doing something about this pesky devil's slave thing . You see , he does that foolish thing that people in half-witted movies like this tend to do - he tries to tell her the truth . He explains earnestly that he sold his soul and now has to work for the devil at night , and he's somehow surprised when she doesn't believe him . I love how he lets her get angry and storm away from him without ever thinking to just show her . I'll tell you this right now , if I'm ever in a position where I have to convince someone that I can fly or travel through time or turn my head into a flaming skull or anything else like that , you better believe I'm not going to do much talking beyond " Okay , watch this . . . " Enter Blackheart , the devil's son , who is embarking on an ambitious plan to possess a thousand souls and thus release hell on earth . I would have thought it would take more souls than that , but no matter . Johnny is offered the opportunity to anull his contract with the devil if he can defeat Blackheart and send his soul back to hell . All this taking and sending of souls gets so tiresome for me , and it may be one of the movie's biggest weaknesses . Buying and selling a soul tends to be something that most people have little experience with , so they offer this explanation : " The host can gain control of the possessing spirit through concentration on and manipulation of the fire element that exists within man . " Hence the flaming head , I suppose . I'm reminded of that classic scene in O Brother , Where Art Thou ? where they pick up that kid Tommy on the side of the road with the guitar . He explains casually that he sold his soul to the devil to learn to play the guitar real good , and Delmar asks incredulously , " For that you sold your everlasting soul ? " Surprised , Tommy replies , " Well , I wasn't usin ' it . . . " I have a feeling that a substantial portion of Ghost Rider's target audience feels somewhat similar about their souls , which may be part of the reason that the movie has gotten such terrible reviews . Yeah , it's goofy , but it's not that bad . Most of the confrontations between Johnny and Blackheart and his gang are fantastically stupid ( " My name is Legion , for we are maaaaaaaaanyyy ! ! ! ! " ) , but the movie is fun in its own way . Columbia Pictures , at least , certainly wasn't too disappointed with it , because they have now officially green-lit a sequel . For some reason this makes me think of the relevance of one of the more interesting lines in the movie : " Raise no more devils than you can lay down . " |
543,967 | 562,732 | 163,651 | 5 | Can't Hardly Wait To Get Laid . | ( spoilers ) American Pie is yet another goofy teenage comedy full of trashy sex jokes and idiot kids trying to get together with beautiful girls , and in the end , it works for everyone except that weird red-headed guy . I'm so sick and tired of movies like this , and if Sean William Scott had not been in this movie , there would not have been a single funny part in it . American Pie is an exploitative film that takes advantage of the vast amounts of immaturity readily found in modern audiences . I'll admit that I laughed at the movie , but it's the kind of laugh that lasts for seconds , and as soon as it's over , it's never funny again . You actually feel cheated because after you watch the movie you can look back and you realize how dumb the jokes really are . Except , of course , for the scene at the very end when Steve Stifler walks into the basement of his house after the party ( ' Mom ? Shibrick ? ! ' ) . THAT will NEVER stop being funny . I don't want to give the impression that I feel that this movie was pounded out in five minutes with no thought and then thrown into production just to make money , because I realize that on some levels , maybe one or two , it is quality comedy . But on all other levels , make no mistake , this is fast-food cinema . It may be fun to watch , but there's no nutritional value . |
544,867 | 562,732 | 133,152 | 5 | Planet of the Oops ! | I'm not entirely familiar with all of the other Planet of the Apes films , but I don't think there could be anything in any of them that would change my mind about the 2001 version . We start off with an electrical storm in space that results in some serious time travel , just like we saw in Lost In Space , which results in our hero winding up thousands of years in the future and on an unknown planet . Seconds after surviving the crash landing of his pod on this mysterious planet , Leo Davidson ( Mark Walhberg ) finds himself surrounded by fleeing HUMANS . The first thing I thought was that there are humans and apes on an unknown planet in an unknown galaxy roughly 5000 years in the future , but later we learn ( also as seen in Lost In Space ) that Leo's ship also passed through that time warp and landed in the same place , leaving the humans to go into submission to the out-of-control apes that were on the ship for experimentation , and the apes themselves were left to evolve and take control , ultimately turning into the hard-nosed apes that ruled the planet when Leo crash landed . That was a mouthful . Pretty creative though , once we are eventually informed as to what the hell is going on . So Leo is stuck on this planet where the roles are basically reversed and exaggerated between humans and apes , and now it is entirely up to Leo to save this planet's version of the human race from the oppression of the apes . Tim Roth delivers a horribly annoying performance as General Thade , the militant leader of the apes who is so filled with hatred for the humans ( for reasons never made entirely clear ) that he operates just like a machine . He's always grunting and growling and always has his head tilted downward like he's expecting physical confrontation at all times , and his constant guttural tone of voice makes him almost amusing after a while . One of the biggest problems with this movie is that the apes are so well made up , but they also have tremendous intelligence , as is made evident by their strikingly human eyes , and yet they switch back and forth from normal speech to the same screeching and screaming that you hear from the monkeys at the zoo . There is a scene where General Thade is told that the humans crossed the river using the apes ' own horses , and he jumps all around the place , screeching and jumping and breaking things , and then he's back on the ground talking like a warrior . It's so hard to take this stuff seriously . Helena Bonham Carter is excellent as Ari , the weirdly attractive ape who is disgruntled with the way that the humans are treated by the apes , and who turns against her own kind to help the humans escape . There is a childish scene at the end of the film where Leo kisses Ari that is sure to get a laugh from any audience , while the stunningly but almost weirdly beautiful Estella Warren provides the human love interest . It's a good thing that they had a human woman in this movie to take romantic interest in Leo , because without her we only have Ari , who is 100 % ape but who acts exactly like a human woman while interacting with Leo . For the first half of the film , I was a little nervous about the possibility of a little bestiality happening somewhere in there . So we know that Ari is helping the humans because she is disillusioned with her violent species , but they are also accompanied by another ape - Attar , I think ( hey , half the fun was trying to figure out who was underneath all that make-up , right ? ) - and we never know why he agrees to go along , knowing that he will face severe punishment upon returning , which is one of the movies more simplistic but peeving oversights . It is , however , the ending of the film that ruins it beyond all hope for being saved . At the beginning of the film , when Leo took off in the pod toward the electrical storm , he was going after the pod of his chimp , with whom all communication had been lost . He gets swept away in the same electrical storm as the chimp got caught in , and winds up on the planet described above . At the end of the film , the chimp comes through right in the middle of the climactic battle between the humans and the apes , and the apes bow down to him as their god . This was actually a pretty clever scene , because he was , in fact , one of the first apes of their civilization , and then Leo trades places with him , leaving him with Ari ( and with an obviously broken leg , which we're left to assume turned out okay ) and taking the ship back to his own time . And General Thade , I guess , was just left sulking under that console on the ship forever , doomed to live the rest of his life as a loose end in a sub-par sci fi movie . It was bad enough that everything on the ship still worked after thousands of years , now they have to leave stuff everywhere unexplained . So we get back to Earth , Leo survives the entrance through the atmosphere and then miraculously survives another violent crash landing without a scratch , and he finds the Lincoln Monument is an ape ( when I saw Lincoln from behind , I jokingly said to myself that it would be an ape . I was disappointed and amused to find that I was right ) . This could , of course , mean only one thing . Seeing how there was barely an explanation for the English speaking humans and apes on the planet on which most of the film took place , and there was literally none at all given for the apes replacing the humans on Earth , we can only assume that they ran out of money or they are just setting up for a sequel . My money is on the latter . Stay tuned for part 9 ( or so ) . |
544,893 | 562,732 | 285,175 | 5 | Boring and trivial but not entirely inaccurate . | I've lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and I know the area of the Pacific Palisades as well as the exact area in East LA where the 16th Street Gang supposedly lives , and it's not surprising to me the way these kids in this movie act . Their desperation to be accepted by hardcore criminals is wildly exaggerated , of course , but I went to a pretty rich high school and I knew tons of rich kids who drove to school in brand new Landcruisers and BMWs and pretended to have such a hard life . That act is lampooned by this movie . Anne Hathaway removes herself from a string of goofy teenybopper films and starts taking her clothes off in this one , and if I'm not mistaken it doesn't seem to have gotten her much of the attention that she thought it would . Havoc kind of came and went and was barely noticed , maybe because it's so easy to write it off as just a stupid teenage thriller . It certainly has stupid elements , but there is a lot of truth to the story that is being told , it's just unfortunate that almost all of the performances and goofy teenage caricatures were so hard to watch . Anne Hathaway plays an out of control hussy who does things like strip down and pull her breasts out for a hand-wringing high school friend who just wants to film an interview of her . He says she's sad and nervously withdraws . Does that stuff really happen ? Whatever the case , the movie loses it's way at some point and , by the time the climax of the film comes around , the point where you're supposed to be all moved and upset and affected , you're so sick and tired of the characters and the movie has made itself so fake that you just don't care . Don't take this the wrong way , but the kids in this movie got exactly what they deserved . |
543,804 | 562,732 | 88,993 | 5 | Music soothes even the savage zombie . | The third and final installment in George Romero's Living Dead trilogy is surprising in that it comes so close to being a dismal , depressing close to one of the most famous horror film series ' ever made . True , the movie sucks pretty badly and pretty consistently except for the last 20 minutes or so , but that last 20 minutes come on pretty strong to save the rest of the movie . Strife among characters has been a major element in the series since the beginning , but in Day of the Dead the characters are so antagonistic toward each other that the movie almost becomes unwatchable . We have gone from an uncomfortable group fighting a small but quickly growing hoard of zombies in Night of the Living Dead to a group of people who mostly get along except for a herd of bikers with an inexplicable urge to kill them in Dawn of the Dead to this , a bunch of military guys and some scientists in an underground bunker , so suspicious and angry at each other that there are fingers on triggers pointed at other living people throughout the majority of the movie . And here I was thinking that something that threatens the entire human race might tend to bring the remaining survivors together , regardless of their differences . If Independence Day taught me a single thing , I thought that was it . I could see , for example , Michael Moore and Dick Cheney desperately fighting for each other's survival if they were , like the people in Day of the Dead , outnumbered by walking cannibalistic zombies 400 , 000 to 1 . Not this movie . Interestingly , the movie starts out really well and ends really well , kind of like a really good song often does . The opening of the movie is a brief but fascinating tour of the streets of a city taken over by the dead . Here was something a little strange that happened while I was watching it ? during this opening sequence , I was reminded of the description of the deserted Jerusalem's Lot in the beginning of Stephen King's novel ? Salem's Lot , which I am currently re-reading because it was mentioned at the end of Wolves of the Calla , the fifth installment in Stephen King's Dark Tower series . The ghost town of ? Salem's Lot is described as though it were suddenly deserted , even with a transaction rung up in a local store and $50 cash in the register , untouched . The town in Day of the Dead is overrun with garbage and rotting carcasses of cars , alligators for some reason roam free , and cash blows down the street like leaves . Later in the movie , a copy of ? Salem's Lot actually makes a cameo appearance . Weird ! Anyway , the new things that happen in Day of the Dead ( these things take their sweet time in emerging from the endless human bickering , by the way ) deal mostly with the psychology of the zombies . For that reason , the vast majority of the movie is clinical and dull . The setting is an underground bunker , and we are forced to sit through scene after scene of a scientist conducting numerous tests on a captive zombie , which could be a pretty interesting character study ( how often do you actually get this close to a gory horror movie villain ? ) , except that the military guys are just down the hallway sulking and threatening to kill the hard-working doctor if he doesn't come up with some results and fast . I could see the captain getting mad at the scientist for suggesting an evolutionary link between humans and reptiles , but what else did he want the guy to do , sit around and mope with him and his buddies ? The smartest thing this captain Rhodes ever does in the movie is call the doctor ' Frankenstein , ' although Rhodes probably doesn't even know he's right that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the doctor , not the monster . We find out eventually that the scientists big plan is to find some way to control the zombies , although the obvious obstacle is that this plan would require close and fairly extensive contact and treatment of millions of zombies to put them all under control . Not exactly a plan that lies within their power , but the doctor correctly concludes that the only way to win against the zombies is to make them behave . There are also some clever scenes that ponder about the role of God in this whole spectacle . One character speculates that God has risen the undead as a way to punish the human race for our sins , hinting to the audience that we better straighten out and live holy lives . What a message to get from a horror movie ! But then , a couple minutes later , the assertion is made that the only way to make the zombies behave is to trick them into thinking there's some reward coming to them for good behavior , the way the rest of humanity has been tricked . So much for the God message ? They exercise control over the zombies ( one zombie , anyway ) mostly through the use of classical conditioning , positive reinforcement , and attempts at model behavior ( ' How are we going to set an example for them if we behave barbarically ourselves ? ' ) , which results in a clever role for one of the zombies and the unexpected result that one of them becomes a protagonist . The caves at the end mark the beginning of the best portion of the movie . They're very effective atmospherically , despite the goofy , bright red haunted-house-ride lighting . The gore is largely absent from most of the middle of the movie , since this is the portion that's so preoccupied with the humans arguing with each other , but the gore at the beginning and at the end has improved massively from the last two movies . Some scenes were a little too realistic . Given recent events in the Middle East , I seem to have lost what little appetite I may ever have had for beheading scenes , and one such scene in the movie takes place while a man is screaming , his scream becoming more and more high-pitched as his vocal cords are stretched and severed . I'm only 25 and I think I'm too old for this . There is an interesting scene in which one of the characters is bitten on the arm by a zombie and they try to save him by cutting his arm off , supposedly before the zombie poison can get to the rest of his body and take him over . That was clever , I hadn't seen that in any of the other movies . This character , incidentally , is the one who ultimately goes on to make an ' escape attempt , ' which probably was the single event that saved the movie from the Oblivion of the Ridiculous , a realm populated by countless thousands of horror films . I won't go into details , but his attempt to escape is the moment that the movie starts getting good . Sadly , since there are only about 15 minutes left in the movie by this point , it doesn't have time to move in the right direction for very long . Ah well ? |
544,591 | 562,732 | 259,153 | 5 | Did you read the book ? | And yes , Mr . Baxley , I'm talking to you . You of all people should have read the book . You did , after all , direct the movie . Before I go on , I should tell you that I actually found Craig Baxley's film rendering of Stephen King's novel to be very entertaining , even though it took place almost a century after the book took place , dealing with almost nothing from the novel . But that's okay , they made a prequel for that . This movie is about a professor who just about stakes her career , and definitely her reputation , on her ability to find actual paranormal phenomena going on at the legendary Rose Red , a big bad haunted house . Rose Red is certainly a bad house . We get enough of the history of the mansion to know that it's a bad house . It seems to actually be alive and in control of its own body , altering its construction and adding entire new wings at will . You might say it's Sarah Winchester and the Winchester Mystery House combined . The story was , obviously , based on the San Jose mansion and almost filmed there . The idea was scrapped for whatever reason , and filmed in Tacoma instead , not that it matters , I suppose , since whatever mansion they used would probably have been augmented tremendously with visual effects anyway . The story concerns the above-mentioned professor bringing together an entire team of what you might call high profile paranormal phenomena experts , some more willing to attend than others , in the hopes that with such a collection of extra-perceptual abilities she might increase her chances of conjuring up genuine paranormal activity in the mansion and thus resuscitate her reputation and perhaps even generate national recognition . As is to be expected , a rival professor has sent along a spy to bring down her plans . So far so good , I guess . This is the premise for what could be a good haunted house movie , but the two most pressing problems are that a haunted house movie has a long haul ahead of it in order to achieve something innovative , and the other problem is that this is not what the book is about upon which the miniseries is based . I suppose that little detail can be overlooked , since the miniseries focuses on the future as a haunted house of the mansion in King's novel , but the movie really has to justify that leap , and this one really doesn'tThe made-for-TV effects are painfully obvious , mostly all of the visual effects and even the very filming itself having that flat and somehow too smooth quality that I can never figure out how but always reveals how cheap it is . And maybe I'm wrong , maybe it's not even cheap , just made for a different medium , but my problem is that it is not nearly as convincing as effects made for the movies . As far as the characters , it's strange that the one who I think is the most widely disliked is probably the only interesting one among the lot of them . Emery Waterman , played by Matt Ross , is the slightly overweight loser stereotype of the group , constantly mumbling and grumbling and complaining and with an overbearing mother and speaking in an almost painfully irritating voice , but at least his character has depth . Not many of the others do . Stephen King himself turns up once , as he does in just about all of the movies based on his work ( my personal favorite is his hilarious cameo in Maximum Overdrive ) , here , as always , playing the tiny part of a character that comes on screen just long enough to get treated badly and then shunned . King's humility is enviable and virtually nonexistent in Hollywood these days . Rose Red , another of Stephen King's lengthy made-for-tv movies , sure to be enjoyed by devoted Stephen King fans , although it's strange that I am a devoted King fan myself and was a little disappointed . I think , however , that I was mainly disappointed because the movie strayed so far from what the book was about , but in retrospect I kind of can appreciate the extra level that that adds to the content of the story . Besides sort of removing from the book and showing the haunted mansion far in the future from the time during which the book takes place , it also creates the possibility of a prequel . It's like they made Rose Red and Rose Red II ( The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer ) in reverse order . I guess you could say that's pretty clever , I guess , bur unfortunately it's among the more clever things about either film . I expected more from Stephen King , who has of late evolved from the cheesy horror films that were adapted from his books ( such as abysmal films like Graveyard Shift and Creepshow ) to intelligent and often amazingly high-quality films like The Shawshank Redemption and Hearts In Atlantis . Rose Red falls just a bit above one of his latest flops , Dreamcatcher . Hopefully his next miniseries , Desperation , will be better . I certainly have high hopes for The Talisman and especially Bag of Bones . |
544,020 | 562,732 | 204,946 | 5 | This is a cheerleading movie for cheerleading people . | I was sitting in the theater trying to watch The Art of War , and it was at least 20 minutes late in starting ( for the second time ) , so I decided to go watch the only other movie starting within 45 minutes , Bring It On . I had just finished watching The Replacements when I went to see this film , so I was already sick and tired of cheerleaders when I walked into the theater . As with Coyote Ugly , I knew exactly how this movie would end from the very beginning . I'm not saying that it was a bad movie , it was entertaining enough even though it is not exactly my favorite as far as subject matter , but it is the type of movie that you watch if you have to kill some time . Average acting , an un-exciting plot , and boring and sometimes pretentious dialogue interfere with what could otherwise have been your basic " sports " movie . Instead you get a somewhat disappointing , basic " sports " movie . A champion cheerleading squad finds out that their previous captain had been stealing routines from an unknown inner city squad , and now they are desperate to come up with something soon before the impending championship begins once more . That's all fine and good , but what do they do ? They try to cheat again by hiring a choreographer to teach them a winning routine . Unfortunately , what they get is some sort of cheer Nazi who goes around teaching the same routine to cheer squads all over California . Of course , there is the inevitable rivalry between the two cheer squads which eventually transforms into some kind of awkward friendship , and everyone lives happily ever after . Yawn . Bring It On is just a movie about cheerleaders . If you are a cheerleader or if you just love cheerleaders and can't get enough of their high pitched , annoying antics , watch this movie . You'll probably enjoy it . However , if you are not a hard-core cheerleader fan , you would probably be best advised to ignore this routine movie . |
544,572 | 562,732 | 261,392 | 5 | The Return of the Jay and Silent Bob Do America . | The only consistently amusing characters from Kevin Smith's films ( films which are not , by any stretch of the imagination , immune to coming out as total garbage ) return to the big screen to inspire great big laughs because the film is able to laugh at itself , which is very important with comedies like this . The plot bears striking resemblance to the hilarious Beavis & Butt-Head Do America , but this doesn't take away from the film as a whole or make it seem redundant or even unoriginal because the plot is actually a very small part of the film . It is no secret that Jay and Silent Bob are the reason that we keep getting treated to more films from Kevin Smith ( you think he would have gotten any corporate sponsors after that mess Chasing Amy if it weren't for them ? ) , so it's nice that they finally decided to dedicate an entire film to them . The movie as a whole is composed of a series of dirty jokes and a goofball plot that is squashed into obscurity under the hilarious presence of Jay and his famous silent sidekick . Sadly , this is virtually the only thing that the film has going for it . On the nother hand , it's unfortunately ironic that the very thing that made this movie interesting is also the most disappointing part of it - the casting . Obviously , Jay and Silent Bob could never be played by anyone else , but the casting director seems to have gone a little bit overboard with more than a couple of the cameos . I loved seeing James Van der Beek and that idiot Jason Biggs , I thought they both played great roles in this movie ( probably because they were making fun of themselves during most of their screen time ) . These are some of the most recognizable of the recent proliferation of actors who can't act and who have made it into Hollywood by some mysterious manipulation of reality . Van der Beek I can't explain , but I imagine Biggs was found because he was hired to play a part in what could not have been thought to be more than a goofy b-movie comedy , American Pie , and it turned out to be a huge hit , so the producers erroneously thought that he was suddenly a huge star . Whoops . Then you have a great cameo from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck . Yeah , these guys proved themselves with Good Will Hunting , which was so good that Affleck can even be forgiven for the ridiculous Armageddon . The best part of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back , the way that it pokes fun at Hollywood , comes especially into play into this cameo , as we are treated to a scene from the sequel to Good Will Hunting ( ' Applesauce ! ' ) . Carrie Fisher plays an unenviable role as the nun who picks Jay and Silent Bob when an unfortunate turn of events leaves them stuck as hitchhikers . Seann William Scott , the real comedic source that made movies like American Pie and Road Trip at least slightly amusing , is completely wasted in a role that makes no sense to have him in . He plays a hopeless geek who happens to be traveling with a bunch of hotties ( as Roger Ebert would say , no prizes for guessing why he took the role ) , and there is no reason for him to be in this role other than to put him in the preview and make people think that he will actually do something funny in it , and we are totally disappointed . He is literally thrown out of a moving van and out of the movie before anything even happens . However , it is poor Mark Hamill who is really to be felt sorry for after watching this movie . It is clear from the minute you hear the title that there is going to be some serious Star Wars bashing going on here , but the best spoofs are the ones that make fun of films themselves , not the deflated state of the old stars ( if you want to see a brilliant Star Wars spoof , watch Spaceballs ) . Poor Mark Hamill was one of the main stars of the most successful science fiction series of all time , and a couple decades later he's stuck playing a character called ' Cock-knocker ' in a goofball comedy with virtually no redeeming values . They even had to put up a huge title card to make sure that people notice that the poor guy underneath all that ridiculous make-up is the fallen sci fi hero . Kevin Smith has NOT earned enough respect to justify smacking Star Wars like that . Jay and Silent Bob is not a movie that is going to be remembered as a great comedy . It's a huge success because the characters have become so famous with junior high school and high school kids all over the world , but there is no content in the film . It fits snugly among movies like the Scary Movies and American Pie and Road Trip and Dude , Where's My Car ? With some effort , some amusement and possibly an occasional nervous laugh can be derived from these slopfests ( okay , not the Scary Movies , but the rest had their moments ) , so luckily Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is one of the better films in this ludicrous category ( thanks in no small part to the wonderful contribution from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon ) , but the film is likely to be reduced to bottom shelf oblivion faster than you can say , ' For God's sake , Kevin , no more ! ' |
544,559 | 562,732 | 304,711 | 5 | And you will know my name is the Sin-Eater when I lay my vengeance upon you ! | I never really liked movies about religion , especially these creepy thrillers . Stigmata was bad , Bless the Child was worse , Lost Souls doesn't have much promise ( although I'm sure I'll see it eventually ) , Time Changer was a preachy disaster , End of Days was like Terminator in reverse , etc . Luckily , The Order is more in the vein of something like Boondock Saints , a hugely violent film with strong religious undertones that had a lot of similar meanings as this movie did . But Boondock Saints was one of the good ones . The big question , however , comes up when you wonder how far can they go in creating religious justification for revenge . Boondock Saints , at least , had the right state of mind . That movie was geared more to the revenge idea , with less emphasis on the religious justification , than this one . The possibility ( indeed , probability ) was left open that the brothers were a couple of ultra-violent defenders of the Bible and God's word , but the extension of the Word to bloody killing was made by them , not God or the Bible . The Order takes that one step farther . I won't say that the movie tries to make the Bible justify killing in order to bring to sinners what would really come to them anyway in the afterlife , if that's your belief . But what's important to realize here is that the Sin Eater , as is dealt with heavily in the second half of this movie , is a spiritual creature . Sin Eating is a power , evidently passed on from one generation of Sin Eater to the next , while the two brothers in Boondock Saints are just two guys with vicious dedication to their beliefs . Heath Ledger , unfortunately , strikes me more as a hugely popular American actor placed into the movie maybe for name recognition than as an actor who fits the part of the character . He doesn't for a even a second , for example , come across as an experienced priest with a traumatic past , but Ledger is not able to bring this across in his performance . He's a member of an unfortunate breed of young actor that knows he's popular and so doesn't think he has to work for it anymore . You may remember too many of the actors in this movie from previous work by the director ( as well as one too much from one of Paul Verhoeven's massively successful gritty actions films which need not be name , since this particular actor has had the name of that movie permanently branded across his forehead , so you can just read it there ) , but I really don't think that that is where the majority of the problem with this movie comes from . The Order had a great preview . It's one of maybe 2-4 movies in my life that I've watched because of the preview I saw at the video store . But it seems that the religious thriller is a subgenre even more plagued with failure and repetition than horror , a genre which I've come to study more and more lately . The Order makes some interesting points and it has its moments , but as a whole it comes across as just another attempt to make a thriller out of some sort of divine justification for brutal punishment . |
544,239 | 562,732 | 339,291 | 5 | A Series of Unfortunate Bits of Celluloid Edited Together Into A Movie . | Whenever I see a really bad movie , I tend to think about what kinds of things led to such an awful script being put into production . Take some obscure horror movies , like Nightmare Weekend or Graveyard Shift , for example . These movies are so unbelievably bad that it is almost inconceivable to me that someone ever read them and thought , " Yeah , let's put this into production ! " A Series of Unfortunate Events is not , of course , on the same astounding level of badness as those movies , but its size compared with its quality makes it look like the title refers to the events that took place during pre-production rather than within the story . Before I go on , I should point out that what is probably the first of many Lemony Snicket films is not a complete loss , but it markets itself on one of the brilliant marketing techniques employed by the books , which advise the reader against reading them . The movie starts out by repeatedly referring to itself as dark and dreary and depressing and unhappy , and if you want a cutesy , feel-good movie , " there is probably plenty of seating left in theater 2 . " Incidentally , I was IN theater 2 when I saw the movie , but no matter . The movie is about three children in their hectic search for proper parental care after their parents died in a fire in their home . What follows is a story about three preadolescent adults struggling to find their way in a world populated by fully grown children , but the biggest problem with the movie is the same as the reason that I wanted to see it in the first place ? Jim Carrey . Carrey is a massively talented actor , but seems to have misjudged this movie , or at least his target audience . I read an interview with him in Time magazine or Newsweek , where he was asked why children would want to see a movie as dark and unhappy as this one markets itself as . Carrey , a father himself , promptly answered , " Easy , the leeches ! " This is , of course , a classic Jim Carrey answer , but if there was a single person in the movie that children in the audience would like , it would be Meryl Streep's character , and she gets EATEN by the leeches . Jim Carrey's character , sadly , is neither likable , even as a villain , nor amusing . The film spends way too much time introducing us to characters that we are not meant to care about , and way too little time on the fantasy element . It comes off as a series of contrived scenes in a dirty house sporadically interspersed with establishing shots of strange places , such as the ridiculous house in which Streep lives . Odd that her character is presented as so paranoid that she doesn't want any of the doorknobs in her house to be touched , lest they should explode and send shards of glass into her eyes , yet she doesn't seem to mind that she lives in a rickety wooden house tenuously supported by tremendously tall and spindly wooden supports at the edge of a huge , jagged cliff . Personally , I'd be more worried about the fact that my house rocked back and forth regularly on its fibrous supports than about the possibility of spontaneous electrocution . Not that it matters , Meryl Streep , despite playing a throwaway character , is given extensive screen time during which I imagine we are not meant to come to any logical conclusions about her other than that she is terrified of the world around her and has recently lost her husband to the very leeches that inevitably threaten the lives of the children looking for good parental custody . The Harry Potter element of the movie , so called because it so clearly wants to replicate it , is very well done , except that it is so small that it's difficult to believe . Most of the film takes place in imaginative settings , but all we really see are small sets , often little more than one room , and not enough of the grand establishing shots which were so effective in creating the whole new worlds in the Harry Potter films . Lemony Snicket lives in the shadow of the Harry Potter films , which themselves live in the gigantic shadow of the Lord of the Rings films . Each successive series is smaller and more childish than the last , but the most quality is lost between Potter and Snicket . Indeed , much of the first half of the film is flat out boring . Jim Carrey doesn't seem to be sure if his character is supposed to be funny or threatening , and ultimately he comes off as being neither . He is simply a greedy old humbug who changes disguises that any rational person would recognize ( luckily the only rational people in the movie are the three preadolescent adults ) , in his efforts to obtain legal custody of them and hence the massive inheritance that comes along with them . It's a simple , straightforward and barely interesting premise that is ultimately made into a simple , straightforward and barely interesting fantasy film . I recently read an interview with Peter Jackson about his upcoming King Kong remake where he said that it would , of course , be pointless to spend the rest of his life trying to top his Lord of the Rings trilogy . Certainly understandable , and also understandable that he thinks it wisest to just have fun with such things as a remake of King Kong , one of his all time favorite films . So even though the Lord of the Rings films are not necessarily what fantasy adventure films are shooting to beat , since their own director all but admits that this is impossible , I still tend to think that we have come to expect more than this . Those involved could certainly have done better . |
544,780 | 562,732 | 165,929 | 5 | This is yet another hardcore action kung-fu B-movie , but it does have a few redeeming values . | First of all , there is absolutely nothing to be said for the acting in this film . No one delivered a notable performance at all , so don't expect anything in that department . Jet Li provides some amazing martial arts scenes that are just a lot of fun to watch , but unfortunately most of them were distorted beyond recognition with special effects and obviously faked stunts . There are scenes where he obviously defies gravity , and things like that are just insulting . I can see that Jet Li is a phenomenal martial artist , I don't need all this stuff to make him look even better than he is . That's where Jackie Chan has Jet Li beaten ( the ONLY place where Jackie Chan has Jet Li beaten ) . Chan does his own stunts , and even though they are manipulated by the editing , everything seen on screen is real , it was done right in front of the camera just as it appears in the film . However , despite the computer generated excesses , the x-ray shots during some of the more intense fight scenes were interesting enough , except for the final scene , which was ridiculously unrealistic . Also , I don't like being expected to believe that Jet Li , as good of a fighter as he is , could defeat four prison guards while hanging upside down by one leg with his hands shackled together . That's just too much . But despite his mediocre acting , there is something that about him that just makes him interesting to watch . Ironically enough , I particularly liked the street football game he was lured into , where he ended up adding an element of martial arts to the game . True , this scene was thrown in for no reason whatsoever ( in true Big Momma's House form ) , and his moves were obviously faked , but it was just fun to watch . Romeo Must Die takes a tired theme about powerful gangs turning against each other and molds a tired martial arts movie out of it . There's nothing new here except the somewhat interesting but also questionable use of x-ray photography in some of the fight scenes , and yes , someone even manages to say " Guns don't kill people , people kill people . " Thanks for the pearls of wisdom there , Silk . I guess that was their pathetic attempt to justify the excessive violence portrayed in the film . What a joke . The film is watchable , but beware of severe acting and directing mediocrity . |
544,303 | 562,732 | 163,983 | 5 | This is a deeply flawed supernatural thriller that has an even shallower version of good vs . evil than Star Wars . | There's a reason that this movie received such bad reviews , and I think that that reason has something to do with the fact that the movie sucked . Granted , there were a few genuine thrills in the film , but as a whole , this disappointing film parallels the insufficiency of other failed supernatural thrillers , like the recent End of Days . Angela Bettis gives a creepy and unattractive performance as Jenna , the drug addicted mother of Cody , the blessed child . The scene when Jenna runs out on Cody early in the film , leaving her with Maggie ( Kim Basinger ) is so badly presented that it gives the illusion that she committed suicide instead of just ran off . The little girl who played Cody as a three year old girl was absolutely adorable , but you have to wonder why such a cute little girl has a terrifying gargoyle just outside her bedroom window . No wonder she's so messed up . While the religious cult trying to utilize Cody's powers for evil is the same old garbage , impressive performances and an interesting subplot save this film from obscurity . Kim Basinger is excellent as Maggie , Cody's aunt and guardian since her ninth day of life , and Jimmy Smits plays the part of the most interesting character in the film ? a former seminary student who decided to join the FBI as another way to fight Satan . Well , he gets his chance with the creepy Eric Stark , leader of a group of Satanists who want to utilize Cody's powers for their own purposes . ( spoilers ) There's nothing new here , and the relationship between Maggie and Cherry ( another good performance from Christina Ricci ) is ridiculously unlikely from the beginning , but at least they were both well acted . Also , one of the film's few real thrills involved Cherry , after having been beaten to death in the subway but a bunch of satanic nuts . I don't care what anyone says , the part where Cherry's head rolls off is a great scare ! There was another good scare that took place in front of the satanic church , but for the most part , the film was a jumbled mess of clichés . Besides that , it seemed like every five minutes , something stupid would happen . The scene where Maggie bursts into Cody's bedroom after hearing her scream from the other room is taken directly from The Exorcist , especially the part where she bursts through the door with a horrified expression on her face . This is blatant plagiarism , but at least it was followed by a sequence in which dreams and reality are effectively confused with each other , and this scene also makes an amusing comment about slow computers . There is a candlelight scene that is fairly effective , but that is ruined by the old Crying Statue trick , and Cody's dumb line , ' She's sad , so sad . She's crying for us . ' The return of Cody's mother when Cody is six years old is just weak scriptwriting , and the whole thing with the gargoyles , while impressive as far as the special effects , may have been a little bit excessive . But the worst things were the continuity errors and logical errors . For example , in the scene before Maggie crashes her car and drops it off of the bridge after being saved by some random hero , she wakes up out of a drugged sleep and she's sitting in a moving car heading the wrong way on a busy road . Clearly the bad guys didn't put her in the car and give it a good push , and it's obvious that SHE didn't drive herself there , so what the hell happened ? Was the car remote controlled ? And how about the scene where Maggie follows Cody as she is led into the dentists office , and when she gets upstairs , the dentist is just finishing ? That is truly some lightning speed dental work . Then you have Maggie and Cody being chased into the subway by one of the creepy Satanists , and as she bangs on the subway door , breaking the glass in frustration , her true form , that of some sort of gargoyle , shows momentarily . If she is some type of demon capable of changing forms , why can't she get onto a freakin ' subway car ? I've complained too much already , I'm not even gonna get started on the mystery of the disappearing police backup . Bless The Child is a run of the mill supernatural thriller with the ever-present religious undertones ( or overtones , in this case ) . The only really interesting thing about the film is the investigation of the murdered children by the FBI , but we already know who the killers are . As a whole , the film is a mess , and the clichés are everywhere . Even the ending , when some Satanist runs up with a knife to kill Cody ( or kill SOMEONE , at least ) , only to stop abruptly in shock when Cody turns around and looks at him . Yawn . And what better way to end a heavily clichéd film than with one more cliché ? ' Are you alright ? ' ' It's alright ? now . ' Even Stigmata was better than this . |
544,138 | 562,732 | 99,994 | 5 | What about part II ? | At the end of Texas Chainsaw II , there was something of a variation on the ending of the original film . The girl who spends most of her time trying to escape the family of crazed maniacs with her life ends up holding the chainsaw herself , swinging it around like a lunatic exactly like Leatherface did at the end of the original film , which led me to believe that it would suggest a general direction that the movies would take in any further sequels . Instead , Texas Chainsaw III , one of the more controversial entries in the series , seems to be unaware of its predecessors . I hesitate to condemn the entire film just because it is seriously lacking in the quality department , if only because I watched the ' Making Of ' featurettes on the DVD and found that the cast and crew actually went through some serious trouble getting the thing made , and the cause of a lot of the drops in quality was some things that they had to cut or change in order to get an R rather than X rating . You would think that all they have to do is cut out excessive blood or guts or nudity to tame the rating a bit , but they had to completely change scenes in order for the blasted MPAA to allow them to release it . Wes Craven went through similar troubles in some of his earlier films , like Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes , and when you learn what they deal with it's not so hard to figure out why the MPAA is not popular with horror filmmakers . ( spoilers ) One thing that had to be changed , for example , was the ending . This is why you see a character show up grinning at the end of the film , despite the fact that we watched him get his head chainsawed in half earlier in the movie . Before you yank the DVD out of your DVD player and try to stick it in the wall , take a few minutes to watch the making of documentary , which essentially is 30 minutes of the cast and crew trying to explain why the movie was so bad . One verbose reviewer who calls himself Duke De Mondo writes a hilarious review in which he asserts that the Texas Chainsaw sequels all seem to pay homage to the original film as though it were some kind of urban legend , constantly reshuffling everything except Leatherface , the only character who is expected to be in any Texas Chainsaw movie . Hence , in part III , Leatherface is the only returning character , and as the director explains on the accompanying documentary , everyone else is some sort of surrogate family brought together my similar deviations from sanity . Still a pretty weak explanation for the little blonde girl , I should think . Speaking of which , it should be mentioned that at one point in the film , two people get chainsawed to death minutes apart , and it is not until I saw that little girl standing at the top of the stairs that I was even slightly apprehensive . What is it about little kids that makes them so scary ? It's the worst when they are dressed in cute little outfits that just clash so strongly with their surroundings , like the little girl in this movie or , probably most famously , the twin girls in The Shining , who I still think are some of the creepiest kids ever captured on film . This girl turns out to be an aspiring member of the family , eager for her turn to put the meat hooks and sledge hammers to good use , and who decorates her room not with flowers or Barbie's or anything even remotely pink , but with human bones and skulls , presumably left over from the original Texas Chainsaw and , subsequently , The Hills Have Eyes . And this is to say nothing of her doll . You know , Jodie Foster had to undergo counseling in preparation for her role as a 12-year-old prostitute in Taxi Driver . I really wonder if there were similar concerns for this girl , whose film-making ordeal can't have been much less damaging . As far as the gore , Texas Chainsaw III is famous for being disappointing , but this is explained by the whole ratings fiasco . On the other hand , there was much talk about death scene of the girl who had already been running from the crazed family for five days or so when this movie started . Supposedly she was sawed in half from the stomach up , but this is simply not true , even in the unrated version that I watched . Yes , there is a vast quantity of blood in the scene , and yes , she does get brutally killed with the saw , but no , she does not get sawed in half and then her body peel off in two directions , having been split down the middle . It just doesn't happen . Nevertheless , I should think there is sufficient gore in the movie to satisfy all but the most depraved horror and Chainsaw fans , especially considering the sledge-hammer scene ( which is based on a real police photo of Ed Gein's basement , and is one thing that the movie deserves at least some credit for ) , the above-mentioned chainsaw scene , and the scene where one character gets his head sawed almost in half at the ear level , although , as we later find out , does not kill him . If this is not enough for you , watch Day of the Dead . And if THAT is not enough for you , watch the news . There are plenty of videos coming from al Qaeda that are truly , truly disturbing . Viggo Mortensen , although he almost didn't get the part because his audition just didn't go very well , was outstanding as Tex , who is essentially the character that Matthew McConaughey plays in Texas Chainsaw 4 , which is by leaps and bounds the worst of the series , including the 2003 remake ( which I have not seen at the time of this writing , but it is physically impossible that it was worse than that ridiculous mess ) . There is one scene where Tex nails the heroine's hands to a wooden chair , and then casually asks her how she likes Texas . Pretty disturbing , but it doesn't make you want to slap your forehead , as McConaughey does from start to finish in part 4 . Well , I'm sure she's having a blast , although the movie was filmed in California , incidentally about a 30-minute drive from where I live in Los Angeles . That's bike-riding distance for me . I was also impressed with the heroine in the movie , the obligatory girl who is the last to survive running from Leatherface ( although this movie makes a slight variation on this trend at the end of the film ) . She manages to walk the fine line between sufficiently expressing her terror and not screaming mercilessly to the point where you just want her to get killed so she'll shut the hell up , and that is not an easy line to walk . I hope I'm not being misogynistic , but there is nothing worse in a horror film than the hysterical woman who simply screams and moans and won't respond when someone is trying to help her . I hate that . I have to admit that I was disappointed that the fancy new chainsaw , inscribed with the infamous quote ' The Saw is Family ' and the most famous thing about this movie , was put to so little use . Not only is it not introduced until the majority of the killings are already done with another , much less shiny and interesting , chainsaw . And to make matters worse , not only is it underwater when it does its flesh-hacking ( I guess the ability to run underwater was another of its special features ) , but the one character that it is allowed to sink its teeth into turns up not dead at the end of the film . Disappointing , true , but I have to say that Texas Chainsaw III is one of the better TCM films . Not as good as the original , but as good as the first sequel and light years better than the third sequel . |
544,575 | 562,732 | 164,052 | 5 | Hollow Man takes an abundance of fantastic special effects and narrative possibilities and reduces it all to an expensive but cheesy horror movie . | Ever since the original Halloween was released in 1978 , there have been countless imitation films that desperately , although primarily unsuccessfully , attempt to feed off of the success of that film by copying its premise of a faceless and unstoppable killer . In the late 90s , there have been a resurgence of these films , such as the Scream movies , which started off good and then went sharply downhill with each additional sequel , Urban Legend , and I Know What You Did Last Summer ( as well as , God willing , it's only sequel , I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago ) . Hollow Man is a film that takes a fantastic premise and reduces it to yet another of these cheap imitation slasher films . Sure , the whole invisible man thing has been done before . Done to death , if you include literary examples . But let's face it , the possibility of human invisibility is one of the most fascinating premises that you can possibly tell a story about . The unfortunate thing about Hollow Man was that no one involved with the making of the movie seemed to realize that . What you have here is the development of an invisibility serum ( as well as a reversing visibility serum ) by a brilliant scientist , who successfully uses it on a gorilla in some of the best special effects scenes to date , and then uses it on himself . Well , of course he uses it on himself , what scientist could possibly resist ? And why would any scientist WANT to resist ? Well , the reason may be that , evidently , invisibility serum turns even the most intelligent scientists into raving madmen . The absolutely infinite amount of possibilities for an invisible character are completely ignored here in favor of turning him into yet another bland faceless killer . This time , we may know who it is that's trying to kill people , but what we don't know is why he completely ignores the outside world . This is the greatest scientific discovery of mankind , and this bonehead decides to use it to become a peeping tom and to spy on his girlfriend . This vast and hugely unfortunate simplification of the potential for the story of an invisible man is both bitterly disappointing and more than a little insulting . As Roger Ebert mentions in his review of Hollow Man , it seems that director Paul Verhoeven , who directed such great films as RoboCop and Total Recall , seems to think that his audience is so intellectually dim that they prefer a mindless killer to the incredibly imaginative villain ( or protagonist ) that Dr . Sebastian Caine could have become . Hollow Man is an absolutely fascinating display of brilliant special effects , which seem to map out internal anatomy just as good as any medical textbook , and is also a great deal of fun as the visible characters desperately try to make Dr . Caine visible again , but it is a dismal failure on the story level . The film starts out with a gigantic amount of intelligence , both that required for the development of an invisibility serum and that involved in the brilliant premise of the story , but winds up in the end as nothing more than yet another mindless thriller , completely lacking in thought and intrigue . |
544,742 | 562,732 | 117,011 | 5 | Well , maximum SOMETHING , anyway ? | Maximum Risk was released in 1996 , the year after Species was released and was , if I remember correctly , a huge hit . I was in high school at the time , and I know it was highly popular with my peers , who are clearly the same target audience that director Ringo Lam was shooting for with Maximum Risk . Van Damme lends his cult star power along with Natasha Henstridge ( which the IMDb claims is sometimes credited as " The Chick From Species " ) under the direction of Hong Kong action director Lam and the result is a remarkably bad , by-the-numbers revenge drama . The movie opens with a routine high speed chase that is interesting only because it takes places through tiny alleys in the south of France and ends in a wild jump into oncoming traffic by the man being chased , who is played by Van Damme and who dies before we even see the title of the movie . The last movie that I watched before this one was Universal Soldier , another movie in which Van Damme's character is killing within the first few minutes of the movie , so I was surprised to see it happen again given that this is obviously a very different movie . But if nothing else , the opening chase definitely gets your attention , if only to make you wonder what would make him so desperate to escape from the men chasing him , who turned out to be government agents . But an early death is not the only familiar thing we'll see . Van Damme also plays a double role and spends most of the movie trying to avenge his brother , You see , it seems that there is a French cop who bears an astonishing resemblance to the man killed in the chase , and after some investigation it's revealed that he is a long lost brother . The mother tearfully admits that she had to give up her other son when he was an infant because she couldn't support two children , and never told her other son Alain ( the French police officer ) that he ever had a brother . That's basically the set-up , and Alain drops everything and sets off on a personal quest to find out who his brother was and who killed him and why . This is what leads him to Alex , his dead brother's girlfriend , played by Natasha Henstridge , who surely would never have taken such a ridiculous role had she not been brand new in the movies . This is her second film , and I am at a loss to explain why she would accept such a ludicrous role other than her inexperience in film . Alex is an ex-stripper who is now a waitress for questionable characters ( " less money but more respectable " ) , who doesn't blink when Alain shows up at her work , other than to rush him out because he's not exactly welcome there . He tends to be stone silent when he approaches people who think that he is his brother , but in most cases ultimately he comes right out and tells them , and when he tells Alex , she joins him in his mission . Sadly , there is nothing interesting or original about the movie . Every character is a cliché , good guys or bad . All that's left is Alain's quest to learn about his brother's life and bring his killers to justice , which is honorable but all he can do is spout cheesy lines about how he's not going to rest until his brother's killers are brought to justice . I have said before that Van Damme gets a lot of bad press about his movies , and I think that because of that people often forget that his characters are almost always motivated by very honorable ideas and values . He delivers a good message in a way that very few other action stars do , and unfortunately in Maximum Risk the problem is that it's too obvious and there's not really anything else in the movie to entertain us along the way . James Berardinelli , for example , claims in his review that Van Damme's acting ability " can charitably be described as ' limited , ' " so clearly there can be no satisfactory emotional content in the movie . He's right that Van Damme's acting is often wooden and unconvincing , but dead wrong that he can't do it . Sadly , it wasn't until eight years later , in Wake of Death ( which Berardinelli didn't see ) that Van Damme showed without question that he can definitely convey emotions . WOW . There is the issue that there is no chemistry whatsoever between Van Damme and Henstridge , but a more pressing concern is that she was a man's lover and then , after he was killed , she honored his memory by becoming his twin brother's lover . Is it just me or does something about that just not come off right ? Sort of throws a wet towel over the already boring and routine obligatory ending . Unfortunately , Lam is not the first Hong Kong action director to enter the American market with a Van Damme disaster . John Woo , an occasionally lucky director , also came to America and brought us Hard Target , another of Van Damme's few thorough disappointments . Van Damme is a major action star with genuine talent and appeal , but sadly this movie was worth the time of effort of anyone involved ? |
544,297 | 562,732 | 55,830 | 5 | Classic horror , but badly dated . | Carnival of Souls is the kind of title for a movie that really makes you want it to be scary . It's such a good name , especially for this genre , but this version has lost most if not all of its effectiveness since its release in 1962 . The story is about a girl who manages to survive a car crash , and subsequently cuts herself off from other people , taking a job as an organ player at a church , but just as a way to make money . She begins to have creepy visions of a dead looking man who constantly shows up at strange times , and eventually seems to be following her . While the main character , Candace Hilligoss , is surprisingly attractive , the entire film is full of bad acting and even worse script writing . She meets a guy in the home where she is renting a room , and although he is overly insistent , he is always polite to her . Then when she eventually agrees to go out on a date with him , he almost immediately turns into a complete bd . Why would he go to all of that effort to persuade her to spend time with him , and then treat her like crap ? The ghostly visions that she has , in particular , have lost all of their effect . Toward the end of the film , not only does she see dozens of these zombies following her , but she also sees herself as one , which hints to the possibility that this movie might have some meaning beyond just a goofy ghost story . However , probably the main reason that this movie isn't scary is that a lot of the scenes weren't edited very well . There's a scene when Mary ( Hilligoss ) is running from dozens of the zombies , and you can clearly see a huge grin on her face , as if the zombies were a huge group of children who were trying to tickle her . While Carnival of Souls does have a few fairly creepy moments , the film as a whole is a disappointment . The black and white photography is probably one of the best elements of the film , and it does have an interesting soundtrack , but the movie almost entirely lost its impact over the years . And the obscure and confusing ending didn't help much either ? |
544,714 | 562,732 | 120,841 | 5 | Species II exists somewhere in what is apparently a barren wasteland between Mission to Mars , Alien , and Terminator 2 . | I quite often see a movie like Species II , which I fully understand is most likely to be an awful movie , and I discover that a lot of people hated it a lot more than I did . On the one hand , sometimes I feel like I am extremely harsh to movies that I can't stand ( read my reviews of Scary Movie 1 , 2 , or 3 , for example ) , but on the other hand , maybe I didn't hate Species II as much as many people because I've seen more bad movies than they have . I have a bad habit of watching movies even if I already know I'm going to hate them ( this is why I've seen Scary Movie , 2 and 3 , for example ) , so this may be why I've been a little bit numbed to idiocy in the movies . I can certainly recognize stupidity at any level when I see it in the movies , and there is plenty of it in Species II , but it takes a lot more than this movie has for me to describe it as the worst movie I've ever seen or a total waste of celluloid or some other such nonsense . It is certainly not , for example , a " grade Z exploitation flick , ripe for the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment . " In a massive lapse of cognitive function , scientists , including Dr . Baker from the 1st movie , have decided to make a clone of Sil , this time named Eve , to study her more extensively than they had the chance last time . They somehow made her more docile and controllable ( although still female ) , and she cooperates with them , suffering through the tests and tortures that she has to endure for them to demonstrate things like her remarkable ability to heal . After one such session , Dr . Baker walks Eve back to her glass holding cell , and Eve tiredly asks Dr . Baker something like , " Why do you do this to me ? " Eve spends her time reading and learning to drive by watching Dukes of Hazzard , her favorite show , when she's not being poked and prodded by people in white coats . The only thing that the scientists seem to remember about Sil from the last movie is her unstoppable sex drive , so men are not allowed anywhere inside the area where she is kept , at least until the end when Dennis Gamble ( Mykelti Williamson ) , one of the men on the mission to Mars casually walks in , walks right up to the glass and tries to flirt with her . Good thing she was unimpressed by his genetic code , otherwise they may have had a serious security breach on their hands . While scientists were busy studying Eve for some kind of weakness that they could use should another , ah , outbreak occur , other scientists are busy successfully completing the first manned mission to Mars . On the way back , there is a lapse of communication for seven minutes , I think , and the next thing you know one of the scientists has been infected with alien DNA , much like the stuff running through Eve's veins . Evidently the smart aliens ( in this series , the ones in space , off-screen , sending intelligent radio signals to earth ) have intercepted the Mars mission and sent a scout back to earth for another shot at those pesky humans . But fear not , it's not long before the slimy monster aliens take over the colonization efforts . Given the feeble plot , it's not hard to see why Species II focuses entirely on the sexual aspect of the alien species . Natasha Henstridge is not most , but ALL of the draw that this movie has , so they have to pander to who they know is in the theaters . And judging from what happens during the movie , most of the people in theaters are adolescent boys who really shouldn't be watching this movie . Okay that was a guess , but while Natasha gets topless for about three seconds , there is still extensive nudity and group sex in the movie , most of which results in bloody birth scenes stolen from the Alien movies , as he steadily compiles a growing herd of offspring . Dennis Gamble , the token black guy and comic relief , has no purpose but to constantly complain that he can never get any booty , until scientists inform him that because he's a carrier of sickle cell anemia , his blood can be used as a weapon against the alien . In the movie's defense , there is a great scene where Patrick Ross , who was infected in space , finally reaches Eve , with whom his hormones have been communicating since he got back to earth , and they have an intense love scene from opposite sides of thick glass . Interesting in that it is a shining moment of skillful acting in an otherwise dreary slog of drivel . Also , I have to admit that I was impressed with the head regeneration scene , but only in the way that I was impressed with many of the special effects in Hollow Man . It was a fascinating thing to watch , despite all the while being very obviously a special effect . If you absolutely loved the first film ( and I mean LOVED it ) , then you may enjoy this one slightly as well . But in the Species series even more than normal , if you didn't like the original you'll hate the sequel . And in some cases , hating this sequel doesn't even require a lukewarm opinion of the original . |
544,272 | 562,732 | 3,805 | 5 | Chaplin misses the mark completely ? | Chaplin famously churned out an enormous number of short comedies for Keystone during his first year in the film-making business , and while the majority of them are pretty sad comparisons to the later films that he would become famous for , Cruel , Cruel Love definitely ranks as one of the less memorable . A lot of people complain about these early comedies , no doubt because Chaplin is known as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and yet the films he made in 1914-1915 are most definitely not the greatest films of all time , but this one gives a clear look at what a lot of people are turned off by . Chaplin does not play the tramp , but some sort of bizarre jerk with a hideous mustache and what appears to be an unenviable future . Like in many of Chaplin's early comedies , this one devolves into a widespread kicking and punching match by the end of the film . This has been going on for months by this point , and I believe that Chaplin was just giving his audience what they wanted at the time , but this is the first time that I have gotten the feeling that he is just running out of ideas . I think Chaplin may have been progressing past what he would later refer to as the good old days when films could just be slapped together in a park , and so he tried to do something different , try on a slightly different characterization for a while , but unfortunately it just doesn't work . The film as a whole comes off as a bit of a disjointed mess , Chaplin makes some faces that I could have gone the rest of my life without ever having seen , and his heart is clearly not in it . Just his feet and his fists . |
544,789 | 562,732 | 23,395 | 5 | Hitchcock trying to find his way ? | Rich and Strange seems to have been made during an experimental period in Hitchcock's career , before he discovered and accepted what he was really good at . He had far superior films than this one earlier in his career , so he was no longer learning his craft , but it seems that with this film he tried to do something a little different that just didn't really pan out . A young married couple inherit a significant amount of money and embark on a journey around the world , thinking it will bring excitement and adventure back into their lives and their marriage . Instead , it introduces a myriad of problems into their lives and leads to some incredible situations . The film drags terribly , leading us pointlessly into numerous different relationships , but most importantly , it presents two characters who it is impossible to feel any sympathy for . They are immediately corrupted by their money , turning into callous , pompous pricks , unpleasant in almost every way . Consider , for example , when that poor guy working for the cruise ship tries to come in to their room to clean or offer them something , and they both scream at him to get out . He immediately retreats , terrified . Are these the people in which we are asked to invest our emotions ? No , thanks . But stay tuned , because it was not long at all before Hitch bounced back from this minor letdown . |
544,605 | 562,732 | 120,912 | 5 | A huge step down from the original . | Sequels are almost inherently inferior to their original films . The reason that a sequel is ever made is because the original film was a huge success and therefore people want to see more , but at the same time have developed high expectations from the original film , expectations which are rarely if ever completely fulfilled . In my opinion , every sequel has a right not to live up to the original that it followed , but Men In Black II abuses the privilege almost as much as Austin Powers has already done twice so far . Roger Ebert makes an interesting comment in his review of Men In Black II , stating that the original was so enormously successful because it was unexpected and we had not seen anything like it , while the second one is a rehash of the original , and now we HAVE seen something like it . The expected result is that , like the two Austin Powers sequels , what we have here is little more than an extension of the same jokes that we saw in the original film . The entire cast has come back , of course , since this is guaranteed to be a hugely popular film ( although at the same time guaranteed to be an artistic failure ) , and we also see a few more introductions to the cast of actors and artists with flailing careers like Lara Flynn Boyle and even Michael Jackson , who embarrasses himself in the film by playing the part of someone desperately trying to secure himself a position as one of the Men In Black ( ' I can be Agent M ! Pleeeeeeeeeease ? ? ? ' ) . Naturally , everything that got a laugh in the original film is milked to death here , although not entirely without effect . I thought it was really funny when K blows off Jeebs ' head ( feeding off of one of the more amusing scenes from the original during J's introduction to the aliens amongst whom he lives ) , and J asks him how he knew that Jeebs ' head would grow back if his memory had not been restored , and K replies , ' It grows back ? ' Not very creative , but certainly amusing . The movie has its strong points , I am not saying that it was a stone-faced bore , but the problem is that it completely feeds off of whatever was successful about the original film . There is virtually nothing creative presented in this film , it is much talkier and drier than the original and doesn't seem to have a personality of its own . MIB followed an alien disguised as a redneck named Edgar as he tries to get his hands on a galaxy that is small enough to fit on a cat's collar . In the second film , we not only have a charm on a bracelet that is the most sought-after item in the film , but we also catch a couple of overly brief glances at some tiny populations of life forms that are able to fit into an airport locker but are still not able to secure themselves a larger part in this film , which chooses instead to entertain us with a talking dog . How's that again ? Why is it that there were so many interesting creatures in the original film but this one gives us a quick glimpse of some fascinating creatures but then tries to distract us with the talking ( and sometimes singing ) antics of a tiny dog , which had just the right size role in the original film ? Things like this and the fact that the movie had nothing new to add to the Men In Black story bring the quality of MIIB way down , leaving it to tag along behind its predecessor like an annoying little sister . We already know there is going to be a Men In Black III ( hey , if they made a second sequel after the ridiculous Austin Powers 2 ? ) , so we can only hope that the producers and director will take a little more time in deciding how to entertain us and what kinds of life forms to focus on , because this was entirely overlooked in this sequel . Even the enormously sexy Boyle was not comfortable on her role and therefore unconvincing as an alien villain in disguise ( indeed , it was more convincing that the writers were so unconfident in their script that they felt the need to gloss it over with a sexy villain than it was that she was a threat to the MIB ) , and Mr . Smith and Mr . Jones had little to nothing to work with in their roles . There is still something left to be salvaged in the Men In Black story . Like the story for Hollow Man , there are nearly endless possibilities , but they were unfortunately largely ignored in this film . At least it's all uphill from here ? |
544,295 | 562,732 | 118,842 | 5 | Kevin Smith's worst movie ever . | ( spoilers ) Jason Lee was , by far , the funniest guy in this movie ( followed VERY closely by the small part with Silent Bob and especially Jay ) , as was the case in Mallrats and would have been the case in Clerks , had he been in that movie . Unfortunately , his comedic potential was muted and replaced by intense ( although also fairly amusing , at times ) anger . His high volume obnoxiousness in public places is just as amusing as ever , but the numbing profanity that dominates the majority of his conversations with Holden , his partner in comic book making , is not only not funny but also overly excessive . While the film as a whole is a disappointment ( despite the ending , which almost saved it ) , there were some interesting things in it . Just after Banky ( Lee ) and Holden ( Ben Affleck ) discover Alyssa's sexual orientation , there is a hilarious scene in a bar in which Banky asks Alyssa questions about lesbianism , how two girls can fck , for example . Ben Affleck plays the part of the typical male , who wants to immediately cut off contact with her because he is upset about the fact that she is a lesbian . Nevertheless , he ends up falling in love with her , and while the ensuing love triangle was interesting enough , there was just too much stuff in this movie that was horribly aggravating . And by ' horribly aggravating , ' of course , I mean three things - Joey , Lauren , and Adams . Her nasally performance as the confused Alyssa was mildly annoying at first , as she goofily grinned her way through the first part of the film . This part of the film , which contained the mildly annoying part of her performance , was topped off when she uttered the cheesiest line in the entire movie - ' I'm so in love ! ' Maybe it was just the stupid way that she said it that made it sound so ridiculous . Then , of course , we have the screaming scenes . Hearing Alyssa scream at Holden at the top of her lungs was beyond annoying - this grated on the nerves like a thousand fingers on a thousand chalkboards . And not only was it almost painful to listen to her yell like that , but it just seemed to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on . Ben Affleck spends the majority of the film pied off , and Jason Lee's comedy skills are tragically under-used because he spends the majority of the film pied off at Holden for even caring about Alyssa , who he calls a ' man hating dyke . ' Fortunately , he often can't help being funny , but Chasing Amy is barely a comedy . This is a twisted romance that is punctuated with explicit profanity and dozens of sexual innuendos , which had a lot of star power but ended up inconclusive anyway . Thank God Jay and Silent Bob showed up , because it's really not until that point in the movie that you really sit up and care about what's about to happen . To make matters worse , Alyssa is constantly spouting pseudo-philosophical nonsense about life - why she's gay , why she chose to make an exception for Holden , etc . While some of it makes sense , trying to find the right person , no matter what their sex , this kind of stuff , especially utilized to such an extent , just doesn't belong in what could have been a great comedy . One thing in Chasing Amy that was fairly interesting ( probably as a result of such a lack of interesting content ) , is its allusions to other films . At east I hope that it's alluding to other films , because if not , then there is some blatant plagiarism here . Of course , there are references to previous Kevin Smith films , both in the comic strip opening sequence as well as at the end when Jay and Silent Bob show up ( ' What took you guys so long , were you at the mall again ? ' ) , but I'm talking about at least one stolen line , and from Jaws , of all places . There is a scene where Banky and Alyssa are comparing cunnilingus scars , and besides the fact that the entire scene can be found in the exact same form in numerous films - such as Lethal Weapon III and , of course , Jaws - there is a point where Alyssa says ( of the scar that Banky had just shown her ) ' I got that beat . I got that beat . ' You remember this as the exact same line spoken by Richard Dreyfuss to Quint , as they were also comparing scars on that boat while they waited for the shark to show up . Needless to say , the quick cameo from Jay and silent Bob was the best part of this movie , and also watch for Matt Damon in an extremely small part . Despite the more well known actors , Chasing Amy doesn't even live up to the modest standards of the two Kevin Smith films that preceded it , both of which were hilarious but plagued with horrendously awful acting . If you're a huge Kevin Smith fan , you may want to watch Chasing Amy , but if not , you may want to steer clear . Either way , though , you're probably headed for bitter disappointment . |
544,841 | 562,732 | 195,714 | 5 | A relatively interesting premise , but Final Destination ultimately sinks nearly to the level of the mass of bonehead teen thrillers that have been so prevalent in the 90s . | ( spoilers ) Final Destination starts off really well , with our unlikely hero Alex in a great scene where he has a dream that the airplane that he is on with all of his high school friends ( what high school goes to Europe for a senior trip ? ! ) is going to explode upon take off . This is unquestionably the best scene in the film , both for its creativeness as well as its effectiveness . This kid falls asleep on the plane as everyone is boarding ( another common occurrence among high school kids on planes filled with their friends , I'm sure ) , and has a dream about a defective seat back table and a subsequent , and pretty impressive , explosion on the plane that kills everyone . As the plane is going up in flames and people are getting sucked out through the hole in the side of the plane and burning to death and whatnot , Alex wakes up in a cold sweat and a frantic panic . Suddenly back to reality , he climbs over people trying to get back to the seat where his dream takes place , and when he gets there , he finds the same defective seat back table that was in his dream and therefore concludes that it was a clairvoyant dream and starts yelling that the plane is going to explode . Not bad for a movie that doesn't appear to be anything more than the latest teen slasher movie . And to top it all off , the part where the plane actually does explode ( as seen from inside the airport ) , and especially the brief pause before the windows of the airport explode inward as well , is also one of the more satisfying scenes in the film . Unfortunately , it's pretty much all downhill from there . It seems that by avoiding being blown to bits on the plane , the kids who got off ( some whether they liked it or not ) seem to have ' cheated ' Death , and Death doesn't seem to be too happy about it . They are apparently being stalked by Death , as he ( or , more likely , she ) begins killing them one by one in increasingly outlandish and sometimes laughable death scenes . Is this really as original and entertaining as the explosion scene at the beginning of the film ? Probably not . In fact , not even close . A bunch of scared teenagers being killed off one by one . Can you name another movie where this has happened ? Can you really name a horror movie made in the 90s where this HASN'T happened ? On the one hand , you KNOW that nothing like these scenes would ever happen in real life . For the most part , computers that people have in their homes do not have anything in them that would explode if vodka were accidentally spilled into the monitor , and even if there was something like that inside it , it probably wouldn't explode through the screen , the strongest part of the entire thing . I also fail to feel any sympathy for someone who strangles in the bathroom because he thrashed his legs around while hanging by his neck from a cord , kicking his feet everywhere except directly underneath him . Take some knowledge , people ( as this poor guy would have said ) , if you ever find yourself in a similar situation , stand up . It'll save your life . And don't even get me started on the power line at the end of the film that whipped around like a severed worm in fast forward . This is just garbage , couldn't they think of something better than that ? Power lines do not behave like loose fire hoses on full blast when they are cut , they behave like cut cords . Probably the only death scene in the film that was really shocking and impressive ( as well as relieving , given the character ) was the one with the city bus . On the other hand , this stuff does have a sort of purpose . Sure , every death in the film was ludicrous ( even the rather grisly one dealt to Seann William Scott ) , but this gives shape to the character of Death . It's one of the film's good points that the Grim Reaper wasn't personified as a huge shape in a black cloak , stalking the kids and killing them . That would have put Final Destination in the same stagnant pool with all of these other goofy teen slashers and also would have ruined the movie beyond all hope . Instead , we get these outlandish and often ridiculously exaggerated death scenes , so it almost gives the feeling that Death is taking time out of his busy schedule to hand these people their asses personally . As Mallory Knox would say , ' There's no escapin ' here ! ' There are very few interesting things about this movie , other than such things as that you can see Tony Todd , known as virtually nothing other than the Candyman , in a small role as the freakiest mortician on the planet . Also , it's interesting to ponder what would possibly have made Alex so hated and feared for saving those people's lives , especially when he is alienated the most by the very people that he saved . Carter , in particular , develops an unfathomable hatred for Alex that swells to the exploding point . You'd think those jerks would be grateful . At any rate , the film as a whole is entertaining enough , but doesn't make much progress in attempting to elevate itself above the recent abundance of terrible teen thrillers and slasher movies and horror films . It is far above the abysmal level of such messes as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Valentine , as well as hideous spoofs like the Scary Movies , but Final Destination is definitely not meant for a more mature audience . If you decide to watch it , try to enjoy it for what it is , but keep your expectations low . |
543,729 | 562,732 | 390,384 | 6 | You almost may as well just try to invent time travel ? | There's nothing more disappointing than a film that doesn't have a thought in its head , so in one sense it's nice to see a movie come along that truly has a significant amount of intelligence behind it , but on the other hand it's also a little off-putting to rent a movie about time travel and discover that it is about as easy to follow , for me , anyway , as your average quantum physics class . Two friends seem to have stumbled over an invention that somehow disconnects objects , so to speak , in that the objects placed inside their invention become unattached to the steadily moving stream of passing time . Such is my understanding , at least . They go about the analysis and investigation of their invention on their own , making new discoveries all along the way without any outside help because they realize that this could be a massive discovery and they don't want to take the lid off of their project before they know what exactly they're dealing with , and they are understandably tired of selling cheap hardware out of their garage to hacker kids for a little extra money on the side . In the movie's defense , the fact that the characters ' communication with each other is limited to tech talk that is barely understandable is in some way acceptable , since the characters don't really understand it a lot more than we are meant to , I won't mind venturing to imagine . One problem I had with the movie was how serious they were whenever they were discussing their project . Not that I want to see them laughing and joking like excited teenagers about the potential of what they may have invented , but watching them in lengthy discussions where they talk so low that it's as if they think the room is tapped gets a little tiring . This is definitely a cleverly written film and there is quite a bit of substance here , but I think the production values and the character performances took away a bit from what the film could really have become . Undeniably fascinating , especially for someone as fascinated with time travel as I am , but I can't help leaving with the feeling that the movie was a little drier and slower than it should have been . |
544,039 | 562,732 | 264,395 | 6 | Here's a riddle for you ? | What do you get when you cross John Travolta , the great Samuel L . Jackson , and Die Hard director John McTiernan ? Well , something other than this , I thought . I have a feeling that Basic is going to be remembered more for it's confusing screenplay than anything else . One thing you'll notice is that when you read reviews of Basic , the reviewers seem to have a tendency to write a lot of filler ( kind of like what I'm doing now ) , because the structure of this movie is so confusing and complex that it's so hard to follow what's happening . Structurally , it borrows heavily from Rashomon , an infinitely superior film , in that it tells the same story from different angles , leaving us to probe for the truth . In this element , the movie is highly effective , and it highlights an important truth ? that people have a tendency to believe what they see , and the human mind is set up in such a way that people are inclined to believe what they want to be true . But the problem is that in trying to explore this curious dichotomy the movie becomes confusing and misleading and ultimately you just sit back and let it happen in front of you without feeling at all involved with the story . This is a major problem . The movie doe point out the effectiveness of Hollywood's habit of killing off the black guy first or of making the black guy the bad guy , and also comments on our overwhelming willingness to believe what we see on TV . But worst of all , the movie builds and builds and builds and builds and then ends in what I'll euphemistically call an anti-climactic ending . ( spoilers ) And therein lies the movie's greatest crime . I don't know if they just didn't want to specify one person as the bad guy or if they just couldn't think of a clever ending , but by ending the film with the revelation of it's total falsity it defeats its own purpose , which should have been to promote in the audience the desire to see all sides of a story or event before making decisions about it . This is especially important in a society like ours , because we have a disturbing tendency to jump to conclusions and then use that conclusion to support rash decisions . A military thriller like Basic could have been a great vehicle for promoting investigation and discovery rather than hasty actions based ultimately on ignorance . Unfortunately , by nothing happening at all , the ending completely negates everything we had seen up to that point , leaving the audience with the worst feeling that a movie can give , the feeling that you just wasted 95 minutes . Everyone involved has done better than this . For good military fare , I recommend A Few Good Men , Courage Under Fire , or even the slightly lesser Rules of Engagement . One way or the other , this movie is going to make you feel like you've been tricked . |
544,326 | 562,732 | 1,228,933 | 6 | Back to basics of a whole new kind . . . | My first reaction to the first few minutes of Laid to Rest was that it was a cheap , no-budget horror film typical of the direct-to-video nonsense that you so often see populating the new release wall at the video store . Well , that I remember seeing on the new release wall at the video store , anyway . It's been a couple yeas since I've lived in the states and even longer since Netflix left me with any reason to ever visit a video store , but back in 2004 or so I used to have that monthly no-limit rental service at both Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and for a brief period I tried to keep up with ALL of the new movies , which included this horizonless stream of train wrecks that seemed to come out of nowhere . And in many ways , that's what Laid to Rest is , but in some interesting other ways , it's not . Yeah it's true that the story is a prime example of mind-numbing pointlessness , but it would be a mistake to relegate the thing to the dark world of bottom shelf obscurity . Sort of . You see , there's not a scrap of originality or significance to the movie , but it is a perfect example of something bigger that is happening around us in the movie world at large . 80 years ago , movie-going audiences would have been shocked out of their chairs to see a man and a woman kiss on screen . Hell , 50 years ago they were still pretty uncomfortable with it . 10 years ago , even the most brutally violent horror movies more often than not showed the KILLER during the kill scenes , as movie blood sprayed all over them . Then Scream came along ( by the way , true story ? just this second I mis-typed " Scream " and it accidentally came out " Scarem . " Interesting . ) and we saw the hugely famous Drew Barrymore get stabbed in the chest in the opening scene . No cutaway or anything , remember that ? The movie briefly goes into slow motion and audiences the world over were shocked that we were actually looking at this knife going into this girl's chest . I'd been watching scary movies for years by that point and even I was pretty amazed . Strangely , to this day it is still a scene that makes me a little uncomfortable . Now , on the other hand , such a thing is as tame as those monster movies that had people jumping out of their chairs in the 1950s , so we get movies like Laid to Rest which , if you were to show it to some of those audiences , would probably flood the theaters with heart attack victims . There is no cutting away here , man . Not by a long shot and it's going to be a pretty good idea for you to be well aware of that before you start watching it . Such a movie could never be released in wide theatrical release , you understand , but that's the huge shift that's taking place in the movie world right now . Making movies is getting easier , nearly to the point where any jerk with a camera and a computer can get a movie made as long as he can find someone to distribute it . Of course , it's to be expected that these movies are almost uniformly awful , and Laid to Rest is a prime example . It's pretty bad , but these things are getting better and they're only going to continue to get better as people learn to make better and better movies with simpler equipment , at which point the direct-to - video market will grow and improve , and the important thing is that all of this will happen beyond the grasp of the censorship-happy MPAA . The result , of course , is that we get movies like Laid to Rest which feature nothing but the grotesque developments of pushing the violence envelope , which is really all that this movie does . Like literally . The movie has absolutely nothing to it except violence , which is why all this stuff about the MPAA came to my mind . There is no backstory to the killer in the movie whatsoever , or really any backstory to the story itself . Some big-breasted brunette wakes up in a closed casket , no idea who she is or why she's there . She manages to knock the thing over and escape , but before she gets out of the funeral home she witnesses a man wearing a chrome skull mask brutally kill another man , and then the killer comes after her . Why does he want to kill her ? Who knows ? Who cares ? Any explanation would just waste time . We understand that this is a slasher movie , and this particular slasher movie has no interest in such time-wasting things as character depth or coherent story structure . The important thing is that for the rest of the movie he relentlessly pursues her , viciously killing anyone who gets in his way with a serrated , double-edged knife . Gore hounds will be highly impressed , as the movie is astonishingly and graphically bloody . We get sustained shots of the killer sawing away at various body parts , and one scene where we the central cast pops the lids off of a succession of coffins , revealing some of the killer's past kills , which he has taken the time to save , for future reference , let's say . I won't go into any details about the state of the victims in the coffins , let's just say that they are one of many reasons that the movie is not for the faint of heart , or the squeamish , or really anyone who , for example , would feel some hesitation at taking up the opportunity to do a little dissecting work on a human cadaver . But the rest of you are going to love it ? |
544,134 | 562,732 | 734,658 | 6 | Why can't people wish right ? | This episode reminded me of that half-assed remake of Bedazzled with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley . Remember that ? He would make wishes and something would go wrong and he would make another wish , overcorrecting his mistake in the last wish in the most spectacular fashion . I seem to remember Fraser's character wishing , for example , at one point to be the most emotionally sensitive man on earth . What ? Why ? Can he not see that that wish can't possibly go right ? Anyway , it's the same problem in this episode . Arthur and Edna Castle own an antiques shop and are experiencing tremendous financial difficulties , until one day a poor woman comes in to sell them an old bottle which looks like garbage but which she claims to be a family heirloom . Out of the goodness of his heart , Arthur gives the woman a dollar , but later breaks the bottle in frustration , releasing a genie . I've always dreamed of this happening to me and I've thought countless times about what kinds of wishes I would make , which is why it's so hard to watch someone make such dumb wishes as Arthur does in the movie . First of all , in order to find out of the genie is for real or not , he wishes for a pane of glass in his counter to be fixed , and poof , it happens . He's incredulous that it worked , and I was incredulous that he would throw away one of his wishes like that . Real or not , you might as well find out by wishing for something good , right ? Anyway , the genie warns him to be careful what he wishes for , because there are always consequences . Arthur is unconcerned , and places a seemingly safe wish - for one million dollars . Sadly , it turns out that in the early 1960s , the government took what I believe was just over 94 % of prize money , so after giving away tens of thousands of dollars , Arhtur and Edna find themselves with $5 left and still the mountain of debt piled on them . Having spent two of his four wishes now and instead of wishing for something safe , like $10 million tax free or his debt to be wiped away , he makes the astonishingly foolish wish to be the leader of a country who can't be voted out of office . What are you thinking Arthur ! ? ? ! The wish is so foolish that he deserves for his wishes ultimately to be wasted , although this feeling that he deserves what he gets cancels out the show's message , which is to be careful what you wish for , and also to take note of how lucky you are . Things could always be worse . In Arthur's case , he's struggling but ultimately learns that things aren't so bad . Before he met the genie , for example , he didn't have to live with the knowledge that he had been handed an opportunity to turn his and his wife's lives around but blew it completely . Note - if you ever find yourself in a situation where a genie comes out of a bottle and offers you three wishes but warns you of the consequences , just so you know , here are exactly the words you should say : " I wish for a clearly typed note on standard notebook paper , listing the three best and safest wishes that I , ( insert your name here ) , can make . " And for those of you in the screen writing business , if you're interested in an actual challenge , feel free to make another genie show using that one ! |
544,460 | 562,732 | 734,681 | 6 | Works well enough . . . | I have noticed on the IMDb review boards that this is one of the less popular twilight zone episodes . I agree with certain aspects , it's shot on video and comes with all of the limitations that that implies , the set looks cheap and the story is hardly the most interesting thing in the world , but it was interesting enough , at least in that it seems now that Liar Liar may very well be a total rip off of this single episode . If you can watch this movie and not think about Jim Carrey then you must not have seen the movie . In the show's defense , this one paints a much clearer picture of the society into which it was released , in it's suggestion that all car salesmen and politicians are liars ( this doesn't seem to have changed much ) , but particularly in the ending of the show , which will now be lost on the majority of modern audiences unless they are more familiar with American history than , sadly , most Americans are . The show was released on the same day that Kennedy was inaugurated , giving it that strange feel that sometimes happens when imagining the normalcy that was taking place just before a national tragedy , although I have to imagine that at the time it must have felt just a bit like some political preachiness . This is one of the simpler twilight zone episodes in almost every way , but the story moves along well enough despite it's relative lack of creativity , and the performances are satisfactory . It's not the best episode , obviously , but I have to say that you should be able to tell without even seeing it that the hugely negative reviews here on our beloved IMDb are blowing the drawbacks out of proportion . . . |
544,764 | 562,732 | 734,674 | 6 | Dumbest super-genius criminals ever . . . | I think the whole " million dollars worth of gold " argument is not necessarily important . I agree that it's the dollar that loses value and not gold ( and even now the manufacturing of gold seems a little too far-fetched even for the twilight zone , although if any society would manufacture one of the world's most valuable precious metals into worthlessness , it would be America ) , but the main problem is the mean guy , the " mastermind " of the whole scheme , displays incredible brilliance in planning and pulling off the suspended animation , and then for some reason seems to wake up afterwards with the IQ of a raisin . The plan - hijack a train in the modern day , 1961 , use a special gas to put all of the passengers and crew to sleep while they help themselves to the cargo of gold bullion , hide the bullion in a cave and then put themselves into suspended animation for 100 years while they let the whole crime blow over . Surprisingly enough , I had no problem with the whole suspended animation thing . I was a little dismayed at first that they were going to ask us to believe that these guys could put themselves to sleep for 100 years in a bunch of plexiglass boxes in a cave in the middle of the desert , but the use of the air locks and the special gas made it believable enough for me . But for me , the episode just falls apart after they wake up . We'll forget about the fact that the gas is miraculously able to cake them up not only 100 years later but within seconds of each other . The problem is the behavior of the characters . Farwell is the ringleader of the group , the designer of the gas and the planner of the massive heist itself , but as soon as they wake up in the future , he immediately and stupidly ruins his own plan . First of all , I'd like to know what manufacturer was making trucks in the early 1960s that could sit for 100 years and then start right up , but failing that , I'd like to know why this guy chose to deliberately destroy it , stranding him and his last remaining cohort in the middle of the desert with tons of gold . I am of the opinion that you can't hit an able-bodied person with a car or truck ( especially a hundred year old one ) in a wide open area at close range , especially with as much warning as the guy in the show had and as many huge rock outcroppings as he had to hide behind . Farwell made a enormously blunderous attempt to kill one of his fellow criminals due to some trust issues , leaving him and the last guy , De Cruz , with no option but to carry their gold to the closest town . And sadly , that's still not the stupidest thing this guy did . Later down the road , he apparently left his canteen full of water behind during one of their rest stops . Who leaves their canteen behind while wandering through the desert ? Maybe he was just not concerned about water . De Cruz certainly isn't , as he gleefully sells drinks of water to Farwell for the price of one gold bar . He thinks he's all clever , not realizing ( despite having been carrying them for so long ) how heavy gold is . Personally , my growing load of gold would be just as worrisome to me as my diminishing supply of water . That canteen wouldn't have lasted the two of them an hour in that sun . There is a clever and interesting twist at the end , although not one that has any basis in reality , but it's okay because it doesn't need to be based in reality . In time travel stories , the future is infinitely more difficult to portray than the past , for obvious reasons , and even though the only really futuristic thing we see is a car , it's pretty impressive , even for the time period . This is a fun episode with high entertainment value and some valuable and insightful commentary about materialistic greed , but the sheer dumbness of some of the characters takes away from the episode quite a bit . Note : be sure to catch Serling's introduction of next week's story at the end of this episode , after which he does a clownish plug for a brand of cigarettes called Oasis ( notably long since out of business ) . It's interesting to consider the difference between then , when such a product advertisement would be acceptable on a family TV show , and now , when the producers and television station and whoever else would be saddled with massive fines , as well as the advertiser ( host and subject ) suffering tremendous reputation damage . But hey , with the corporate sponsors , maybe now they can afford to stop shooting the episodes on videotape ? |
544,526 | 562,732 | 175,880 | 6 | A feast for lovers of abstract art , but others may find it to be too much of a bad thing . | Magnolia had the potential to be a very good movie , and in most ways it was . It opened with a fascinating feature of seemingly impossible coincidences , and as it progressed the viewer realizes that the many separate stories within the film itself come together in amazing ways . In this way it delivered spectacularly on its already defined premise , but to the average movie-goer , there may have been too much intense and confusing emotional turmoil within the rest of the film . Virtually every single character displayed a lengthy crying scene , and while the characters personalities were very well portrayed , three hours may prove to many people to be too long to watch so much negative emotion . Keep in mind that 67 % of people surveyed ( according to Edwards Cinemas here in Fresno ) believe that the most important reason to go to the movies is " to laugh . " The ending of the movie was in my opinion the best part . I won't describe what happened in case people who haven't seen it may be reading this , but keep in mind that it is well worth sitting through the other three hours of the film . I think the first half hour and the last half hour were absolutely the best parts of this film , but the two hours in between could have benefited very much from a little editing . As it stands , I give it six stars , but hey , maybe I was too tired to give it a fair chance , it was my fifth movie of the day after all . . . |
544,242 | 562,732 | 345,616 | 6 | Not very enlightening ? | Making the Earth Stand Still is a clever title for a documentary about this movie , and I can see why they would want to give this documentary that name despite the fact that it is not at all about making the Earth Stand Still . A more accurate title would have been Making " The Day the Earth Stood Still , " or , even more accurately , Remembering The Day the Earth Stood Still . If you are looking to see what kinds of techniques went into creating the effects seen in the 1951 science fiction classic , as I was , I would advise against spending two solid hours watching this documentary , because probably less than five minutes of screen time are spent on the subject . Even more oddly , the back of the DVD case lists as a special feature a " 70-Minute ' Making the Earth Stand Still ' Documentary , " which is off the mark by a good 50 minutes . I've never seen that happen before . The odd thing here is that I loved the movie and I respect this documentary for what it is , but it's really nothing more than the director and major surviving cast and crew talking about their experiences in making the movie , as well as great details about the events leading to production , where the title came from , reactions to the public reception , etc . These are all interesting things and I respect the massive achievements that can be seen in the film , but I really wanted to see how they made the earth stand still , what cinematic tricks were used , etc . I guess I just think that The Day the Earth Stood Still deserves a better documentary to accompany it on the Studio Classics DVD , which brings me to my next point . My biggest problem with this documentary is that it is unbelievably badly made , and at some points even depressing . Billy Gray , the man who played the young boy in the movie , provides an interview in which he talks about his experience on The Day the Earth Stood Still almost as if nothing important happened in his life since then , which may or may not be true , but his interview is pretty depressing . It seemed to me that he remembered making the movie with a profound sadness , manifested in his wish that he still had some of the diamonds used in the movie . Julian Blaustein , who seems to be suffering from the physical effects of a stroke or an aneurysm ( since I've seen similar features in my grandmother , who suffered a stroke not long ago ) , is lit so incompetently that not only does he appears completely washed out because of the harsh light , but his eyes even look like they're two different colors . Such bungling ineptitude associated with such a wonderful film is disturbing indeed . What lunatic did that lighting setup ? And what lunatic shot it ? That massive overexposure with the lights could have been easily fixed by adjusting the exposure on the camera . Even the editor could have cleaned it up quite a bit . This movie and the people involved with it certainly deserve better . On an informational level the documentary is great , but as I've mentioned , it is a technical disaster ; it doesn't even end , it just eventually stops abruptly . There are a great variety of things covered that were highly entertaining , but for a documentary titled Making the Earth Stand Still , some time had to be spent on the actual physical making of the movie , which was almost completely ignored . I don't think I would complain about it quite this much if not for the title and , even worse , the fact that at the end of the documentary we are treated to 20 minutes of people talking about their collections of The Day the Earth Stood Still memorabilia . There is , of course , nothing wrong with memorabilia . I was completely fascinated with the coverage of what happened to the prop used as the time machine in the 1962 version of H . G . Wells ' The Time Machine , which featured a similar documentary on the DVD , but that documentary didn't waste as much time as this one does . It doesn't present the information that the title suggests , and it spends too much time on something that deserves much less , if any . " The Collectors " portion of this documentary should have been a separate video on the DVD , in which case it could have been as long as they wanted to make it . I appreciate the documentary as far as giving a good look inside the heads of the filmmakers and much of the cast , as well as valuable insights into what was going on in the world at the time the movie was released . There are some wonderful stories about the prop used as the spaceship as well as the iron man , which was a statue in some scenes and a hulking costume worn by a man more than 7 ½ feet tall in other scenes , and there are some wonderful stories about that . It is a good series of stories told about the making of the movie , but it is not at all a documentary on how the earth was made to stand still . |
544,870 | 562,732 | 116,514 | 6 | Not quite as good as part III , but Bloodline is still a relatively watchable installment in the hugely successful Hellraiser series . | The year is 2127 , and a descendent of the maker of the box that opens the gate to Hell is trying to figure out a way to open the box and trap the demons that come out of Hell . He has commandeered a space station ( that he himself designed ) for this task . He opens the box , lets the demons out , and is detained ( people begin to investigate his questionable behavior on the ship ) before he can capture them . Almost the entire film is told in the form of a story which he tells the people holding him , in an effort to get them to let him go so he can finish his work . Needless to say , it takes a lot of gory deaths to convince them . There is a small bit of tension created by the fact that the entire time he is telling the guards what is going on , the Cenobites are out and are on the ship . However , this is largely forgotten about for the majority of the film because so much of it takes place in 18th century France , the time when the box was created . Basically , some toymaker makes the box , opens it , demons show up , and they terrorize his family for generations . You'd think they'd be grateful because he let them out into the world of the living . Anyway , the guy in 2127 has taken upon himself the task of building a NEW box that will be sort of an antidote to the first box , one that is designed so that it can actually trap LIGHT inside . It's an interesting enough story , and it was actually fairly entertaining , but the film itself was still somewhat lacking . The acting was pretty bad ( but at least Ashley Laurence was blissfully absent again ) , and there wasn't much effort put into the directing . The movement back and forth from the distant future to the distant past was also a bit detrimental at times to the tension of the story , but luckily the film did present a few cool new cenobites ( one that was satisfactorily created out of a couple of idiot security guards ) , and Bloodline also displayed probably one of Pinhead's best performances ever . I would say that Bloodline is more of an informational movie than a good Hellraiser movie . While it is interesting to watch , it is almost more informational than entertaining . So even though the movie itself may have been disappointing , I think that it is a good addition to the series as a whole . It works better within the Hellraiser series than it does by itself . |
544,859 | 562,732 | 250,494 | 6 | Undeniably skilled filmmaking , but the movie doesn't know where it's going . | Legally Blonde is obviously one of those silly comedies in the tradition of the much better Clueless ( what with all of the air headed blondes and big lawyers ) , but the film really loses its way in the final act . Elle Woods , a cutesy sorority president at the charmingly named CULA ( real creative name , guys ) , is jilted by her boyfriend when he breaks up with her on the night that she thinks that he's going to propose to her . He arrogantly tells her that he needs to find someone more serious , basically telling her that he is more interested in finding someone that will help him further his career than he is in marrying someone who loves him . Elle goes through a period of boyfriend mourning , and then decides that she'll follow him and go to Harvard Law school ( ' What , like it's hard ? ' ) to prove to him ( and the audience ) that she really does have a brain underneath all of that fluffy pink exterior . Her acceptance is barely , but successfully , made moderately believable , and she's off to Harvard in her Porsche Boxter and with her tiny tiny dog . As is to be expected , she encounters significant difficulties at Harvard because no one there takes her seriously , because she is obviously not one of the ' intellectual ' types that are commonly seen there . It turns out that her plans to win back her boyfriend , Warner , have backfired , because he has already gotten back together with an ex-girlfriend by the time Elle gets to Harvard , and this is when we really know that Warner will not be a part of Elle's future . His new girlfriend Vivian ( played by Selma Blair , who we remember from a significantly different role in Cruel Intentions ) , treats her no differently that many of her professor's treat her , as a dumb blonde who doesn't belong at Harvard . As a Harvard Law School graduate , I can completely understand the troubles that she is going through , because it is an intensely intellectual school ( disclaimer : I never went to Harvard Law ) . Elle deals with all of her problems at Harvard by keeping in touch with her air headed bimbo buddies from back at CULA ( I never went to UCLA either , but I've been there enough times to know that this really is what a good portion of the female population looks like at that school ) , as well as by forming a heart warming friendship with Stifler's mom ( ' Bend ? and SNAP ! ' ) . The overall plot is not really something to complain about . It's the same old underdog coming out on top premise , but Reese Witherspoon fits her role perfectly and there is plenty of comic relief to keep it moving and to keep you entertained . ( spoilers ) The part where the film really goes wrong is with the trial at the end of the film . It's great to see the progress that Elle makes during the case , but the outcome completely contradicts the rest of the film . There were some hilarious cross-examinations ( ' You bitch ! ' ) on the stand , but the end is awful . We spend the entire film watching Elle struggle through law school trying to prove to everyone , including her parents , that she has the mental capacity to get through it , but in the end , it is her knowledge of the beauty salon that comes to the rescue to help her win the case . Her entire speech as she is cross-examining the murder victim's daughter consists of little to no legal jargon whatsoever . Any ditz straight out of the hair salon could have convicted that woman . It's too bad that the movie got so lost at the end , because it was otherwise a very entertaining comedy . Elle is never for a second made into a believable lawyer OR law student ( the scene where she pretends to be Paulette's attorney in order to get her dog back , in which she spouts legal mumbo jumbo that she clearly doesn't understand , certainly doesn't help either ) , and we're left with a film that amused us for an hour and a half but didn't really do anything . We can only hope that the guilty party in any trial that Elle conducts in the future makes a mistake in commiting their crime that involves some sort of cosmetic augmentation that Elle can latch on to and use to solve the case , because the one we saw at the end of the film was , as they say , dumb luck . |
543,837 | 562,732 | 120,338 | 6 | Visually , Titanic was a stunning masterpiece , but the story and the acting were mediocre and sometimes just outright bad . | At first glance , Titanic is an epic film . The scenery and cinematogrpahy are spectacular , and it is just a beautifully photographed movie . However , when you look past the superficial beauty of the film , much like Armageddon , its numerous shortcomings become clear . First of all , Titanic suffered badly from the transition from the big screen to video . This took away a lot of the hugeness of the film , and this inadvertently places more attention on the story and the acting , both of which were the biggest problems with the film . I went to see this movie to see the sinking of the Titanic , not to see some elaborately fabricated love story . Titanic is a landmark film as a result of the sinking of the ship and the fact that it inexplicably turned out to be such a huge moneymaker . There is absolutely nothing great about the acting , the story is nothing that hasn't been seen dozens of times before , and the directing is awkward , probably due to the fact that James Cameron , who is an excellent director , is so used to directing the Frankenstein-like Schwarzenegger as the Terminator . This is not to say that the directing was bad , it wasn't at all , but there is nothing special to be said about the directing because James Cameron is not really a director of this type of film . Kate Winslet was beautiful in Titanic . She delivered a wonderful performance in the film and was very convincing , as was Kathy Bates ( as always ) and even Billy Zane . I normally don't like him , but he was playing a dislikeable character , which is probably why I enjoyed his performance so much . Leonardo DiCaprio , however , delivered the worst performance of his career . If you want to see him really act , watch The Basketball Diaries or , even better , The Beach . Titanic is a beautifully made film . It suffered in the story and the acting departments , but it is an entertaining and easy to watch movie . It was not , however , the best picture of 1997 . Not even close . There were probably 20 movies that were released in 1997 that were better than Titanic , but the Oscar's wouldn't have gained as much public support had they not given the Oscar to Titanic . It was a quality film , but don't be fooled by all of the hype . |
544,125 | 562,732 | 734,543 | 6 | Fun morality play , but stops making sense near the end ? | Two small time crooks , Chester and Paula , root through their latest haul in a shabby hotel room , lamenting the worthlessness of it all , until one of them stumbles upon one of their stolen items , a seemingly ancient and valueless camera without any apparent place to open it and put film in or take it out . They soon learn that the camera takes pictures of 5 minutes in the future , and do what any small time crook would do , they go to the races . It seems strange that they could go to the horse races and take pictures of the scoreboard and bet on the winners over and over without attracting any attention , but soon they find themselves with a huge pile of cash back at the hotel room , and then everything starts going wrong . Adam Williams plays the part of Woodward , Paula's escaped con brother , possibly the dumbest character ever presented on the twilight zone . Soon a Frenchman shows up in their room and notices that the camera says , in French , that it only allows 10 pictures per owner , providing Rod Serling with a great opportunity to make one of his exploratory statements about the human psyche . Obviously , the only thing on the crooks ' mind is greed , but Serling doesn't seem to know where else to go with this message . The Frenchman gives us an antagonist to our antagonists , plotting to steal the money that they won unfairly and unsquarely . But the ending of the episode is just too goofy to take seriously , even for a twilight zone episode . After learning that the camera only takes ten pictures per owner , rather than consider the possibility of each of them taking turns being the owner ( and thus getting at least another 22 pictures out of it ) , Chester and Woodward start fighting over it and end up falling out the window to the ground below . Paula gives a weak attempt at grief until she realizes that now all of their prize money is hers to keep , and just for the hell of it , looks out the window and takes a picture of her brother and husband dead on the ground below . What the hell ? Not only does she waste one of the two pictures left , but she takes a picture of something that surely she would never want to see in the first place . But soon we realize that this is crucial to the plot , as the Frenchman immediately shows up ad calmly begins collecting the money , since he has an airtight insurance against her telling the police , as this would put her in a , ah , fantastic plight . He tells her that there are not just two bodies in the picture that the camera spit out after she snapped one out the window , and rather than going to look at it , she runs to the window with enough velocity to trip and fling herself out the window to the ground below . Come ON . I can accept Chester and Woodward falling out the window while fighting over the camera , and I can accept Paula getting over their deaths immediately , as soon as she realizes that now all the money is hers , but then the Frenchman shows up and not only doesn't notice that there are four bodies in the photo that Paula took out the window and not three , but she manages to accidentally fall out the window herself . Now , at this point , it's getting difficult enough to believe , but then the guy notices that , wait ! There aren't three bodies , there are four ! Oh no ! ! The camera then pans away and we hear the sound of the Frenchman falling out the window too . I'm guess we panned away because they had run out of ideas for how four people could accidentally fall out of the same window within a few minutes of each other . The moral of the episode is clear enough , and it is an entertaining episode , but definitely has far more ' oh please ' moments than I have come to expect from your typical twilight zone episode . |
544,554 | 562,732 | 120,347 | 6 | Good action , good acting , idiotic one-liners , a bonehead story , and James Bond at his most reckless . | ( spoilers ) The traditional opening sequence of Tomorrow Never Dies is excellent . Especially when compared to the horrendous opening of the awful film that followed this one , The World Is Not Enough . When we see James Bond steal the bombs from the Nuclear Arms Bazaar in Russia , overcoming every obstacle ( including an overdone gunfight ) , we expect an awesome film to follow , but to a large extent we are disappointed . I'm willing to accept the suggestion that a fighter jet could be piloted , at least temporarily , with the knees , if the pilots hands are busy trying to prevent the co-pilot from strangling him . I actually liked that scene , but for him to also be able to fly right underneath another jet ( I won't even go into the fact that the pilot of the other jet didn't seem to notice this ) and eject the co-pilot into the co-pilot seat of the other jet , thus blowing it up , is just too far . Still , the opening scene , ending with Bond victoriously asking where the recovered bombs should be delivered , leaves the audience with a smile and the hopes of a quality action film to follow . The story involves a high-powered media mogul who intends to instigate World War III in order to boost his ratings and make him ridiculously rich . Although , from the looks of his ? office , ' he already IS ridiculously rich . No , this isn't original at all , but at least the scriptwriters were courteous enough to put the quote that they stole and made a movie out of right into the dialogue ( William Randolph Hearst once said , ' You provide the pictures , I'll provide the war . ' ) . There you have the entire plot of the film . The famous quote ' Good news is no news ' is another stolen item that can be found in Tomorrow Never Dies , thinly disguised in the clichéd line , ' There's no news like bad news . ' As Bond first takes on his mission impossible , there is a good scene where he introduces himself as a banker to Mr . and Mrs . Elliott Carver ( the offending media mogul and one of Bond's own past lovers , respectively ) , but he revealed himself far too soon when he not so subtly make a comment about Carver's crimes . Sure , they have to get the movie going , but if he hadn't been so ham-handed in that scene , he might not have wound up in that sound proof room . Speaking of which , Elliott Carver , the media mogul , makes an extremely unimaginative villain for this 007 installation , and although he seems effective enough at first , he soon reduces himself to an annoying character who badly misuses his own power , leading to his own violent death in the spinning wheels of the horrendous exaggeration that was one of the tools he used to instigate his artificial war . Probably the best part of this whole movie is the unintentional comic relief . As I watched Tomorrow Never Dies , I found that I burst out laughing more often than I found myself on the edge of my seat . When Bond parks his car in the parking structure , after having stolen the decoder device , a bunch of bad guys arrive , tow truck and all , to break into the car and retrieve the decoder . It was funny enough when one of them tried the door handle , only to be given an electric shock , but when another one of them tried the other side , with the same result , I found myself in hysterics ! And then , just to make sure that Tomorrow Never Dies is not confused with an action movie that is to be taken seriously , a THIRD guy tries the door , receiving the obvious electric shock , after sledge hammers and machine guns had failed to provide entrance to the car . Which is weird , because the windows were shot out readily enough in the car chase that soon followed which was , by the way , the best action sequence in the entire movie . This is more of an action comedy than anything that Jackie Chan or Chris Tucker have ever done . The murders that James Bond commits in Tomorrow Never Dies are also fairly uncharacteristic . While they were stealing quotes to form the foundation of this film , one of the writers should have added in Arnold Schwarzenegger's line from True Lies , ' Yeah , but they were all bad . ' Bond drops a guy into the spinning gears at a Carver newspaper press , with bloody results ( and the obligatory cheesy one liner ? ' They'll print anything these days . ' ) , he shoots a guy in the face at point blank range , and he moronically endangers the lives of innocent people as he drives his car , remote controlled , of course , through the wall on the roof of a parking structure , raining large chunks of asphalt and a huge chunk of BMW down on the sidewalk below . The scenes that were more or less done right were very rare but it was good to see some miniscule bit of realism allowed into this otherwise extremely unrealistic movie . The car chase scene where Bond drives from the backseat was hideously exaggerated but it was also effective . The skydiving wasn't completely screwed up like it was in movies like Drop Zone and Moonraker , but it was still badly flawed . There needs to be a little more thought put into these movies , because even if James Bond is enough of a badass to ride a motorcycle ( BMW , of course , this IS a 2 hour commercial , after all ) like it had wings , no helicopter in the world can fly nearly inverted like the one near the end of the film did . But this is just the kind of nonsense that is commonplace in 007 movies , and after Tomorrow Never Dies , the James Bond creators manage once again to slap world audiences in the face and the wallet with another idiotic action epic , The World Is Not Enough , which comes off even worse than this installment . |
544,234 | 562,732 | 70,633 | 6 | The bad parts are pretty bad , but the good parts are creepy as hell . | This made for TV horror thriller is a lot better than it's ridiculous title would have you believe , which is really saying something since the title is actually a pretty apt description of what goes on in the movie . It starts out with a girl acting really strangely , running away something that isn't identified and then turning up dead . Her sister doesn't accept the police's quick decision to label it a suicide and close the case . Surely there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are right , but then again , they don't take supernatural explanations into account so her sister Elizabeth decides to take the investigation into her own hands . Suspicious that the girl's school that her sister attended at the time of her death may have had something to do with what happened to her , Elizabeth enrolls into the school to do some investigating of her own . I don't know how fresh the idea of that premise was in 1973 , but it works pretty well here . There are some slip-ups , like when Elizabeth meets the Head Mistress for an interview and spouts some nonsense like " Picasso was a realist painter before he was an impressionist . " Not that I don't accept that someone her age would have any knowledge about that ( it is , after all , not exactly the kind of knowledge reserved for geniuses ) , it's just that it's so out of place in this movie . I guess I should respect such an attempt at three dimensional characterization though . Horror movies are , after all , historically lacking in this area . I got Satan's School for Girls on a 10-movie collection that I bought for $15 , since I have something of a love of old , crappy horror movies ( and you can't beat that price ! ) , otherwise I would never have seen it . To be sure , this is one of those movies that is actually worth watching but has a title that is incredibly efficient in making people want to see it . Who would want to watch a movie with a title like this ? I imagine that's part of the reason that the remake with Shannon Dougherty came and went instantaneously with little to no attention . And this really is unfortunate , because the movie certainly has some tense moments . The scene where Elizabeth goes searching the basement for the room where the painting of her sister took place is wonderfully creepy . Even that painting itself is a great prop . The psychology teacher in the movie is a little too obvious . I think it's safe to say that no character should ever act as evil or nutty as this guy did . When he's not threatening girls with a huge knife he's making rats go insane in his lab . This guy can NOT be well balanced . It actually is a pretty clever technique to have designed the cavernous basement like the rat maze in his classroom , but if the person acting insane turns out to be the bad guy then the movie is too predictable , and if they turn out to be completely innocent then it becomes too clear that the movie was trying to deliberately lead you in the wrong direction , which in turn requires a Scooby-Doo ending because they need to explain why we were wrong the whole time in thinking exactly what they wanted us to think . The movie takes something of a downturn in the third act , as the cheesy acting starts to tip the scales against the creepy atmosphere , which is no longer creepy enough to justify overlooking how bad the acting is . There is a ludicrous scene where the professor can't get out of a pond because there are girls all around him poking him with sticks . If they had established earlier on that he can't swim , fine , but any warm-blooded human being , man or woman , would have simply grabbed onto the first stick that poked him or her and yanked the girl holding it right into the pond . It would not be hard to do , obviously . But there I go nitpicking . I just have a hard time with scenes like that . It's like when someone takes a person hostage , holding a gun to their head while the whole police force stands with their guns aimed , and they all drop their guns like incompetent morons . In all my years of movie watching , only twice have I seen anybody acknowledge how effective it would be to just shoot the guy ( one was RoboCop , and the other was Charlie Sheen in Navy Seals ) . You wouldn't even have to kill him , Shooting the gunman in the arm would usually not endanger the victim at all and would completely incapacitate the gunman from being able to fire . There I go nitpicking AGAIN . Stop me next time , will you ? I don't remember there being any shooting in Satan's School for Girls ( although there is a gun ) , and there is little to no gore either , the movie is almost solely driven by its atmosphere , which most of the time is not very effective but a few times is VERY effective . For 70s horror , this is definitely one of the better ones ( excluding the giants , like The Exorcist , which are , of course , in a class all their own ) . Certainly worth seeing for horror buffs . |
544,018 | 562,732 | 191,397 | 6 | Not original in the slightest sense of the word , but good acting and entertaining comedy make this weak story at least a little bit better . | The Replacements , as I am sure hundreds of people have noted already , is yet another football movie . There have been only a few football movies which were very well made and resulted in quality films ( Unnecessary Roughness was fairly well-done , and especially The Program , probably one of the best ) , but it seemed that The Replacements was an effort to either revive that genre ( which is pretty much worn out ) or to cash in on its past success . The story is loosely based on and an updated version of the 1987 pro-football strike ( I doubt that the bullet riddled Porsche was a 1987 model ) , but the majority of the film is made up of an unimaginative story about " replacement players . " Almost the entire movie was put together using scenes that were disturbingly familiar to scenes from other films . For example , the actual replacement players were introduced exactly the same way that the ' replacement astronauts ' were introduced in Armageddon . The actual football scenes require no imagination at all , and could have come from anywhere , and the cheerleaders were a tasteless element of the film in the tradition of BASEketball . Besides that , how about the ending ? ( spoilers ) The team needs " heart " in order to win the big game , coach McGinty ( Gene Hackman ) says to the television reporter . He is obviously sending out a message specifically to Shane Falco ( Keanu Reeves ) , the team's ' star ' replacement quarterback . How touching . Needless to say , Falco decides to head down to the stadium to save the day , and boot the pro quarterback who had recently re-joined the team . Falco walks into the locker room at half time , everyone cheers , they go on to win the game . Does that sound familiar at all ( " Remember when B-Bobby Boucher showed up and the M-M-Mud Dogs won the Bourbon Bowl , do ya ? " ) ? Yeah , so Falco saved the day in true Waterboy form , and the movie ends just like every other football film ever made has ended . Despite the lacking story and the many unlikely events that take place ( " Is that your ride ? " " Yeah . " BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM ! ! ! ) , The Replacements was barely saved by some surprisingly good acting . I was sick and tired of Keanu Reeves ( until I saw The Matrix , where he delivered an excellent performance ) , and I expected a disappointing turn from The Matrix to a routine football film , but he was very convincing as the disillusioned quarterback who is suddenly faced with the chance to reverse his shabby reputation . Even Brooke Langton provides a good depiction of the only original cheerleader who is suddenly surrounded by strip club airheads and has some pretty good on-screen chemistry with the monotonous Keanu . The Replacements is a fairly good football film which doesn't really do anything that hasn't been done before , but at least it wasn't as terrible as Varsity Blues . It is worth watching to see the underdogs beat the odds and come out on top ( yet again ) , but don't expect any plot twists . If you've ever seen a sports movie , you know the basic structure that they follow , and you'll know what's going to happen from the very beginning . |
544,199 | 562,732 | 110,725 | 6 | For $350 , 000 I'd do anything once ! | Of course , when I say " do " anything once , I am paraphrasing something else that Seagal says in his first scene in this movie , something that would get my review swiftly booted off the IMDb were I to put the real line up there . But it's the perfect explanation of the character that Seagal plays in On Deadly Ground , which is also his directorial debut . He stars as Forrest Taft , a man with a job that is beginning to conflict with his morals . He works for Michael Jennings , the super-greedy and morally vacuous owner of Aegis oil , an oil drilling juggernaut of a company whose scary drilling practices are drawing enormous protests from environmental groups and the group of natives living on the land where the next big oil rig is meant to open . Michael Caine is wonderfully villainous in the role of Michael Jennings , but a little too much given that the movie has a serious message . In fact , that's the one really big problem with the movie . It approaches the very real issue of environmental protection and dangerous oil drilling practices , but it comes in this over - exaggerated form with hapless Eskimo victims , mass wildlife destruction , a super-evil oil business executive and one superhero who comes along to save the world all by himself . We get that oil drilling can be dangerous and we get that environmental groups and native inhabitants will be angered by the opening of a new oil rig in a pristine location , but do we really need to have a movie made where the oil company is opening an enormous oil rig in an untouched area of nature with shoddy parts , inefficient safety standards and basically in all other ways before it can be done safely ? True , it's easy to complain about these things at first glance , but if you consider the movie to be a dramatization of real life , then it starts to make a little more sense . Jennings is forcefully insisting on an early open date to secure drilling rights to the specific area , despite the fact that in order to make that date the rig will have to be open in a condition that is not only not safe , but will pretty much guarantee an oil spill and massive environmental damage . But the movie leaves all that up to you . Most people will just find it to be another trashy Seagal movie , only this time with a preachy political agenda . It seemed such a great follow - up to the outstanding Under Siege with it's great cast ( seriously , browse on through the cast of this movie , it's absolutely incredible ) , but it's probably that overt political preachiness that really brought it down with the popular audience . John C . McGinley , as always , is outstanding in the movie . He's a villain the viciousness of which I haven't seen in any other Seagal film to date . He plays MacGruder , the man hired by Jennings to remove any " problems " preventing the timely opening of the oil rig , and there is a certain scene involving MacGruder , an old man and a pipe cutter that is one of the more uncomfortable scenes I've ever seen in a movie . Pretty scary , man , but MacGruder gets his point across , you have to give him that . There are some moments of genuine dumbness in the movie , as is to be expected . For example , about 90 % of Taft's involvement with the oil-afflicted natives is pretty hare - brained . He comes into their midst and they smoke him out on something to kind of indoctrinate him into their clan , I suppose , and he learns about their native ways and their pure , natural way of life , which much be protected from the imminent arrival of Aegis oil's rig . And then , get this , at a key moment , they unveil a SNOW-MOBILE that they keep " just for emergencies , " so that Taft can make a daring getaway . I wonder if they know what that black stuff is in the engine of that thing ? But no matter . Jennings is a bad enough dude that we can forgive the natives a few quarts of the evil oil , right ? There is also the matter of the hand-slapping game that Taft plays in the saloon with a local drunken bully ( played by the " gas man " from Dumb & Dumber ) . This guy is bullying and berating everyone in sight , and Taft sits calmly , insisting that nothing can be done , until the guy pushes around one poor native guy too many , and decides to teach the guy a lesson in the form of a children's hand game . With that little addition , of course , that whoever loses gets punched by Steven Seagal . Ouch ! After losing many times , the bully is bleeding profusely and barely able to stand up , and Taft asks , " What does it take to change the essence of man ? " Apparently not a couple decades of violent movies ! I did read , however , an interesting reading of this scene by someone who suggested that the meaning of the exchange is in the last couple of lines . The bully realizes he's a bully that needs to change and says , " I need time , " and then Taft agrees and walks away , saying " I do , too . " Supposedly meaning we all have something in ourselves that we need to change . Like a bad habit of fighting violence with violence , maybe ? Taft then proceeds to beat up nearly everyone in the bar , which includes at least one elderly man . Unfortunately , the end of the movie comes in the form of a standard environmentalist speech , which attains a level of preachiness that no one will ever be able to miss . It's not a great movie but not the worst I've seen . Seagal has done much worse ! By the way , does anyone know what kind of car Seagal drives ? I'm guessing something big . I just can't picture the guy in a Prius . |
544,771 | 562,732 | 363,276 | 6 | Average . | I wasn't really sure what to expect when I rented this movie . I tend to be pretty impressed with psychological thrillers ( I loved In Dreams , for example , which was not hugely popular ) , so I thought I would give it a shot even though it seemed to be one of those movies that pops up at the video store , the direct to video nonsense that large chain stores tend to stock one or two copies of , like they're obligated to buy at least a copy or two of every DVD that comes out each week . That was clearly not the case at Blockbuster , as I had looked up new DVDs for this week on the IMDb and was very excited about renting Whispering Corridors , but was greeted with a blank expression when I asked the girl at the counter if they had any copies in stock . I finally decided to cancel my movie pass . At any rate , I rented Session 9 at the same time , because I was going to go to my brother's house to watch a movie and he is the manager of a mental health facility here in LA so I thought it would be fun to watch something like one of these . I have seen Session 9 before and was pretty impressed , but Madhouse did not meet my expectations . It is an interesting film and there are a lot of well-done aspects , but there are also a lot of not so well-done aspects . I grow tired very quickly , for example , of horror movies that take place in hospitals or mental hospitals that are so obviously horror movie sets , as was the case in this movie . There are a lot of efforts at jump out of your seat scares , most of which are executed with sound , but I think the most impressive thing about the movie was the editing . There are several scenes where there is very fast paced and effective editing which achieves a pretty good effect in creating a creepy atmosphere . Lance Henriksen's talent is completely wasted as the hospital director who appears offended that some rookie psychologist intern would insinuate that his filthy , filthy hospital could use some renovation , and he is promptly brought upstairs to the level 5 ward or whatever they called it , which is evidently without electricity . Nice . There is a slightly interesting combination of horror and psychological thriller here , but not quite enough to overcome a pervasive sense of predictability which is ever-present throughout the film , endlessly inviting you to call out smartass remarks , kind of like that goofy movie Hidalgo did . This is not a terrible film , but as I mentioned , it's part horror and part psychological thriller , and there are better horror movie and better psychological thrillers out there , and they're not hard to find . |
544,856 | 562,732 | 83,944 | 6 | True models of law enforcement . | First Blood is the unexpectedly simplistic story of a mentally unstable Vietnam veteran who returns to America and is shunned by the people who's freedom he was fighting for , as was so famously the case with so many soldiers returning from that war , regardless of how much or how little they believed in the war itself . I have to say here that the story is simplistic because it really boils down to John Rambo fighting a One Man War for his very life but really for no reason . His plans to visit an old Vietnam friend are crushed when he learns that that friend died of cancer that he developed from Agent Orange in Vietnam , and so he immediately becomes a drifter . Evidently he had no other plans and came from nowhere , and therefore has nowhere to go . I won't go into whether or not the book went into more detail about where Rambo came from or why he has no destination whatsoever beyond visiting his friend , because I haven't read it . I have , however , seen the movie , and at this point in the trilogy , I find it rather surprising that Rambo has become something of a cultural icon because of this film and the two sequels . In First Blood , as he wanders aimlessly down the highway , he stumbles into a small town and right into the town sheriff , who politely escorts him to the town limits , saying that drifters only cause trouble but he's more than welcome to grab a bite to eat 30 miles down the road . After being dropped off , Rambo promptly walks back toward town , is promptly noticed and arrested , and ultimately ends up in an all-out battle with what has to be the most incompetent police force on earth , then with the most incompetent state police force on earth , and finally the most incompetent national guard on earth . First the town police can't even get Rambo to put his fingerprints on the paper , then he manages to punch his way completely out of the police station while unarmed , then the state police starts a massive manhunt , apparently unable to find Rambo , who is conspicuously hiding out in his enormous log cabin in the woods , in which he builds a nice fire and takes a nap , and then the national guard is afraid to pursue him in a mine shaft , so they fire a grenade into it instead , but only after the senior officer importantly says , ' Wait , lemme get outta the way first ? ' Just so you know , the type of elite military forces that would be sent on such a mission are just that . Elite forces . And by that , of course , I mean these guys don't mess round . They don't respond to orders with ' No way , I ain't going ' in there ! ' The commanding officer of such a company would never , while under fire , call out , ' Who's got the rocket launcher ? ' Nor would he say ' Give that man a cee-gar ! ' ' Bullseye ! ' or , heaven forbid , ' Come on you guys , shoot ! ' Rambo's rampage is somewhat justified by the mental scars that he suffered from his training and work in the Vietnam War , although that topic only comes up right at the beginning of the film and then in the closing scene , when he suddenly starts ranting and raving about how bad the Vietnam veterans have it back in America , spouting more dialogue all at once than he had in the entire film up to that point . If he had been able to explain any of this to the idiot police officers in the beginning of the film , he could have saved himself a lot of trouble . Sure , we wouldn't have had a movie that way , but he wouldn't have had to throw himself off the side of a sheer cliff and into a tree to avoid getting shot , either . Not a bad trade-off , I should think . The reason it seems curious to me that this movie has inspired two sequels and a cult following is that , while it's true the movies are certainly fun to watch , the logic is nonexistent , even for a cheesy action movie . Rambo allows himself to be taken into custody by men that he could snap like twigs , then doesn't react to anything , including such benign queries as ' Name ? ' until he has a razor to his throat . By the way , this is the nicest criminal justice system I've ever heard of . Not only do they assign you a court date the very morning after your arrest , they even assign half of the police force to be on hand while they give you a shave so you'll be presentable in court . Even worse , the whole movie is based on irreversible combat training that Rambo is acting on , in massive self-defense , which is what causes him to enter into a one-man war against the town police force , the state police , and the national guard . Sure , soldiers come back with post-traumatic stress syndrome as well as the remnants of dangerous training that can lead to harsh reactions to small provocations and sleepless nights , because these people have been so heavily trained for combat that some of that remains after the war . What the movie catastrophically forgets is that , along with combat training , soldiers also come out of the military with intense respect for authority figures , especially those in uniform . Not Rambo . Not only does he treat the police as well as the national guard like the subjects of a hunt , he doesn't even respect the very guy that trained him . Somewhere along the way , it seems , Rambo snapped and lost all control of his abilities , becoming a dangerous weapon , a lethal weapon , if you will , who does , in fact , need to be stopped . Unfortunately , the guys who should be the good guys are such morons that it is impossible to root for them , even if they weren't led by the sheriff , who is the only really bad guy in the movie . First Blood is fairly clever as a manhunt film , but as an informational movie about what it's like for Vietnam veterans it's pretty outlandish . Sure , there are tons of problems surrounding that war and the soldiers did return and get pretty bad treatment , but Rambo is such a two-dimensional character that it's almost a shame to see him representing them . He came from nowhere and goes nowhere at the end , all we see is him going nuts . I hope the movie hasn't actually contributed to the problems that Vietnam veterans have had to face . |
544,633 | 562,732 | 120,784 | 6 | Payback is a good action movie but that's about all . | Mel Gibson has been so heavily typecast as the good guy that even in a movie for which the tagline is ' Get ready to root for the bad guy , ' he's not the bad guy . Quite the contrary , a premise like this is little more than a way to get people to expect a heightened level of blood and violence in the movie , it gives the special effects people an excuse to do creative things with ball hammers and to make the audience find even the most brutal murders to be ' quite fun and funny , ' as one IMDb reviewer put it . For some reason , however , I wasn't entirely amused to see a guy get shot in the shoulder and then the knee , and when he fails to produce a lighter when asked for a light , he gets a pillow pressed over his face and gets shot in the forehead . Granted , this was a very bad guy and had double crossed Porter ( Mel Gibson , the GOOD guy ) in one of the worst ways imaginable , and there is nothing that you want more than to see this guy fall , but that certainly doesn't make it amusing or even cheerful . I weep for the obvious descent of mankind into barbarism if people laughed at this . Let's consider the plot here . Mel Gibson is a criminal , and a good one at that . He and his wife are involved in crime that involves high risk and massive payoffs , and when one score results in the acquisition of $130 , 000 , he and she and their partner , Val ( Gregg Henry ) begin discussing the splitting of the money . Porter calmly says that they will split it like they agreed in the first place , even though it turned out to be less than they expected , and Val and Lynn ( Porter's wife ) turn on Porter , shooting him in the back , taking all the money for themselves to run away together , and leaving him for dead . Five months later , Porter is recovered again and is out to get his money by whatever means necessary . The important thing here is that he is obviously so disappointed when he is forced to use violence that his shoulders droop to let us know that it's the last thing in the world that he wants , and on top of that , he wants $70 , 000 , not $130 , 000 . All he wants is his share , even after all he's been through . So how's he the bad guy again ? Under the circumstances , it's amazing how obvious it is that presenting Porter as the bad guy is a weak ploy to get more violence into the movie , and it is a terrible sign of the state of our society that people enjoyed this . Try watching a movie like Payback and then watch Michael Moore's brilliant documentary Bowling for Columbine , you won't be so eager to root for the ' bad guy ' after all . On the one hand , Payback is a quality action film with plenty of car crashes and guns and killing and death , all the necessary ingredients for an action film these days , but the premise is such a weak scheme that it drastically lowers the rest of the movie . Lucy Liu , however , can be seen in a relatively early role looking sexier than anyone should really be allowed to look in a movie . I was almost depressed when it was over , she looked so good . I do not want to give the impression that Payback was a bad film or that I completely condemn it for it's ploy to get as much violence as possible into it , I just think that it could have been a much better movie if they hadn't laid so much emphasis on its violent content . Even the obligatory action movie hottie only added to the enjoyment of it all ( I'm sure female viewers felt the same , of course ) , so it is certainly a movie that is likely to be enjoyed by action fans . The rest of you , however , may want to be a little more careful . The violence , at least at one point , is literally stomach-turning . |
544,416 | 562,732 | 158,583 | 6 | Almost immediately forgettable , Deterrence is an extremely simply made " thriller " that bores more than it thrills . | I didn't expect much from Deterrence to begin with ( it was recommended to me by someone with consistently ridiculous taste in movies - no offense to him , of course ) , but I was still disappointed . First of all , the entire movie takes place in a diner in some town in the middle of nowhere . As a film student , I realize how expensive it is to move to different locations ( or even just be ON location ) , to travel with an entire movie crew , and even that just to move a camera to a different angle could take all day and be very costly . But you need to keep in mind that in order to make a convincing " political thriller , " at least SOME of this needs to be done . I mean , there wasn't even a single SHOT that was not taken in this diner ( at least none that weren't borrowed from previous news footage ) . Besides that , the acting wasn't great . Timmothy Hutton was the only actor in the film of any consequence , and he delivered the only really good performance of anyone in the entire film . Kevin Pollack put forth a good effort as the inexperienced and overloaded new President , but he was terribly miscast . No matter how many people came before him in the order of assuming the Presidency , no one as short and bald as him would have generated much respect from the American people . I know that this is a prejudicial thing to say , but it's true . The American public does not respect a President AS MUCH if he ( or she , someday ) is not tall , good looking , full head of hair , etc . Appearance is extremely important , and Kevin Pollack doesn't have much of it . ( spoilers ) That little element bothered me , but I am more than willing to overlook it in the interest of enjoying the film . However , there are certain things that I absolutely will not overlook . The cook's suicide , for example . You have the stereotypical , uneducated black man working the grill in some hole-in-the-wall diner , yet he seems to be very intelligent . After attempting to voice his opinion to the President about dropping the bomb , he is rudely interrupted and entirely ignored . When it seems that the bomb will inevitably be dropped , he KILLS himself . What the hell is that all about ? ! Is that a subliminal message being sent out to the public ? You can't change what the government does , so if you don't like it , suicide is surely the only answer . This suicide was completely unnecessary to the story and was thrown in for no other reason than to have a couple of deaths in the film , as well as to kill the only guy who knew the codes to drop the bomb . The makers of Deterrence clearly did not blow much of their budget on writers . Even though every part of the film that did not take place in the diner was conducted over the phone , Deterrence clearly tries extremely hard to stimulate the emotions of the audience , but the simplicity of the story and the quickly thrown together script reduce the film to bottom-shelf drivel that will very soon be forgotten . President Emerson not only made the offensive decision entirely too early ( it was clear that he would drop the bomb within the first half hour of the film ) , he also ignored the advice of his personal staff for the vast majority of the film . This is boring , boring stuff . I was not even moved the tiniest bit when the bomb was dropped and Baghdad ( the civilization where civilization began ) was completely destroyed , along with everyone in it . Way too simple , not at all convincing , and routinely directed , Deterrence plays like a book being read to the audience . Everything is implied , suggested , vicariously explained , and entirely without effect . |
544,198 | 562,732 | 116,421 | 6 | Seagal bleeds his own blood for the first time ! | OK , so the IMDb plot synopsis describes Seagal's character Jack Cole as a " soft spoken , mystical , new age New York cop with a checkered past . " So basically that's Seagal playing himself again , except for the New York cop part ? He's been transferred from New York to LA to help the LAPD with the case of a serial killer who has been dubbed " the family man , " due to the fact that he has a tendency to kill whole families . Generally the killer has a very specific method , and the killings that have taken place since Cole came to LA have seemed a little different to him . And since he's Steven Seagal , of course it needs to be personal . Because like it or not , ole ' Steve's just good at revenge , man . The latest murder is Cole's ex-wife and her new husband , so he is brought almost miraculously into a personal involvement in the case ( that he came from New York to help find a serial killer and then that killer managed to kill his ex-wife is what I call a Movie Miracle ) , but luckily his partnership with LA Detective Jim Campbell is interesting an amusing enough to carry us past such small snags . Ad by the way , Campbell is played by Keenan Ivory Wayans who , you may have noticed , is one of the Wayans brothers , but don't let that deter you . He does manage to give a less impressive performance that Seagal in the movie but is leaps and bounds better than his idiot brothers tend to be . At the very least , when he's involved with train wreck movies like White Chicks and Little Man , at least he has the good sense to hide his face . If you ever see Marlon's name anywhere , however , run for the hills ! Of course , in The Glimmer Man , Detective Campbell's only role is to make the LAPD seem at first to be the hardcore precinct , and then immediately afterwards he transforms into nothing but comic relief . And not that he's bad at it . It was moderately amusing when he stumbled across " powdered deer penis " in a Chinese herb store while Taft was at the counter stumbling through some broken Chinese with the store clerks , but I've lived here in China for two years now and I've never seen anyone eat nor have heard anything about anyone eating deer penis , powdered or otherwise . On the other hand , sheep penis is a different story . I've had that myself . It was one of my Chinese friends who explained to me that " the Chinese eat everything that runs along the ground except cars , and everything that flies in the sky except airplanes . " In fact , by far my favorite late night food ( meaning around 4am after a long night of bar-hopping ) is barbecued sheep testicles and eyeballs at a location that my friends and I have lovingly dubbed " the dirty street . " I know it sounds frightening but trust me , those eyeballs are DELICIOUS . Can I just make one suggestion though ? If you ever find yourself with the opportunity to eat sparrow , make sure to eat the head first . It's a small bird , so they serve it with everything but the feathers , and you eat everything , too . Claws , bones , beak , everything . But if you save the head for last , like I did , then by the time you bite into the skull you get cold brains squirting into your mouth , and trust me , that's even a little worse than it sounds ? So anyway , while tracking the serial killer , it seems that Cole's old boss , played with satisfactory menace by Michael Cox ( who you may remember as the movie world's first Hannibal Lecter ) is attempting to enter into a shady deal with the Russians to get super-rich off the black market sales of chemical weapons . Needless to say , Cole comes off as a little nuts when he , the new guy , starts trying to convince people that there is a high-level conspiracy going on involving the Russians . Not a good way to make a first impression . There are some good action sequences ( if not exactly original ) and enough fight scenes to satisfy the Seagal fans ( who will admittedly make up most of the audience , except the film critics who warn everyone else away ) , although it's all made a little goofy by the fact that Lieutenant Cole , at one point , explains that violence is against his religion . Yeah , right . The buddy-cop angle is a clever addition to the Seagal formula and has spotty success here , but the majority of people of course are going to find it a disappointing action movie unless they're a die-hard Seagal fan . Personally , I happen to believe that movies from people like Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van-Damme speak to a certain adolescent childishness in us that should never really be completely forgotten . No , they're not Oscar winners , nor will they ever be . But if you can't find at least a little fun in some of them , you might think about lightening up a little bit ! |
543,912 | 562,732 | 120,749 | 6 | Mercury sinking ? | Okay , before you condemn Mercury Rising for being what it admittedly is , a cheesy action movie , you should at least consider that it accomplishes what it sets out to do . This movie was obviously never meant to win any Academy Awards ( otherwise they wouldn't have cast Bruce Willis , at least at that stage in his career ) , but it does have some effective action sequences . The problem that I have with the movie is not that it fails as an action movie , but that it could have been so much better . The good action sequences are padded with at least as many awful ones , and there was plenty of thought put into about 5 % of the story , while the rest is on auto-pilot . There is a great opening action scene where Arthur Jeffries ( Bruce Willis ) plays an undercover FBI agent acting as a robber in an effort to end a bank robbery safely , before the trigger-happy cops outside suddenly decide to open massive fire , completely unprovoked by anything except the passage of time . What follows is one of those endlessly satisfying scenes where the angry hero stomps out to the official in charge who's stupid decision resulted in the deaths of all those bank robbers , criminal or not , as he defies all ranking by smacking him in the face with his pistol , although I can't help wishing that he had done something even more . Unfortunately , this is one of the most satisfying scenes in the movie , which goes gradually downhill from here until the end . Miko Hughes , one of American's beloved child actors who can actually act , adds to his already extensive filmography with his portrayal of Simon Lynch , an autistic boy who loves puzzles a little too much . Autism is presented in a fairly straightforward manner , although the potential for massive intellectual processing is hugely enhanced and milked for all it's worth here . The problem with the movie is that it takes an enormously unlikely scenario related to autism and makes and entire film out of it . Simon has cracked a government super-code that was placed deep within a puzzle in a ' geek's puzzle magazine ' to test it's durability , and when he manages to decipher and call the secret phone number , all hell breaks loose . And by ' all hell , ' of course , I mean the rest of the goofy plot of the movie . The film starts off presenting an intelligent story about national security , until we realize that this is a code that they spent billions of dollars on without bothering to explain where those dollars went . This may be something that I just don't know , but what is it about a code that costs billions of dollars to make ? Is it the two guys in the little computer room who charge too much for their services ? Are the rates for Federal Hitmen getting out of control ? This is where the movie really slips , by the way . Instead of simply admitting that there is obviously a problem with the code , which can be solved by a 9-year-old boy , autistic or not , and then setting about changing the code , the FBI agents involved literally turn into murderers , sending out a hit man , black gloves and all , to murder the boy and his parents , erasing him from existence and then hoping no one ever asks any questions . The action in Mercury Rising succeeds , for the most part ( except for some awful blue-screen scenes , like the one between the trains ) , but it has enormous problems on a foundational level . Some stuff succeeds ( I rather enjoyed the scene in the wine cellar , but even this is founded on a movie with an unstable premise . I think that Roger Ebert pointed this out best at the end of his review when he says that if a billion dollar code can be cracked by an autistic boy , don't kill the boy , kill the programmers . |
544,868 | 562,732 | 95,294 | 6 | Picking up almost exactly where part I left off , Hellraiser II , although also not a great movie in any respect , continues the unlikely but strangely fascinating story started by the original Hellraiser in 19 | Hellraiser II , like the rest of the series , requires an extreme suspension of disbelief . Obviously , horror movies are not meant to portray reality , but there was not a single solitary piece of the real world presented here . Not for even one second of film time did anything resembling real life show up in the movie , and this took a lot away from the film's potential . Think about how much more effective the film would have been had Kirsty Cotton ( Ashley Laurence , in her second ridiculous performance in this series alone ) been kept in a psychiatric hospital that even remotely resembled even the most dismal hospital in the real world . I would have been much more interested had she been placed in an atmosphere of normality , beyond which she knows the hellish creatures that are the Cenobites lurk . I mean , a hospital that doesn't seem to have electricity , that has a violent ward that looks more like a medieval torture chamber , and that allows patients to roam the halls doesn't do justice to the film's personality . What this type of thing does is give the entire film a creepy mood , and takes away from the effectiveness of the parts of the film that are really meant to be scary . There just wasn't much creativity in the movie's presentation . Kirsty , a PATIENT in the hospital , wanders down the darkened hall one evening , and she comes upon the room of Tiffany who , as Kirsty's doctor explains to her after finding her ( rather than taking her back to her own room ) , is a complete mystery because she never speaks . She just sits around and solves puzzles ( like little wooden boxes ! ! Kirsty didn't seem bothered by that little detail ? ) . Also , did anybody ever figure out why the hell she touched the blood from her wall ( ' ? I am in Hell help me ? ' ) to her LIPS ? ! Maybe she really does belong in the psych ward . Hellraiser II goes more in depth into some of the things that were presented in part I . For example , the film starts off with a quick scene showing Pinhead's creation , and the film also takes the audience into the world of the Cenobites . It gives an idea of where they come from and how they are made . It is this element of the film that saves it from absolute failure . The script was awful ( ' You have got to destroy that mattress ! You have GOT to destroy that mattress ! ! ' Or how about this , my favorite , ' Kyle , when I think , I hurt . ' That's brilliant , Kirsty ) , the atmosphere was entirely overdone , and the directing was unimaginative and routine . Kirsty and Kyle , her ? doctor , ' momentarily develop a hint of a ridiculous romance , and the film was packed with careless mistakes ( like the fact that , after Julia eats enough women to get her skin back , Dr . Channard cuts her bandages off and she has MAKEUP on . I guess it must have come with the skin ? ) . Then there were trivial things like when Ashley and Tiffany ( whose real name we never learn ) , barely escape one of those Hell tunnels into a room and there are two beams of light showing on the wall , having come through the window . What's this , two suns ? At any rate , the movie itself was clumsily put together , but luckily it went into detail about the things that made the equally poor original so successful . The Cenobites , ironically enough , are given a more human side , and even the thoroughly evil Pinhead shows a bit of compassion at the end of the film ( a lot of good it does him ? ) . The best element of Hellraiser II , like part I , was the convincing makeup done on the skinless people . There were some intricate details there , and the desired gross-out reaction is pretty successfully attained . Some scenes were actually painful to watch ( remember that poor nutcase who tried to get the maggots off himself with the straight razor ? ) , which I think is a mark of at least limited success for this type of horror film . If you are a horror fan , the entire Hellraiser series is obviously mandatory viewing , but I think that other people , before you immediately dismiss the Hellraiser films as complete wastes of time , should realize that they are not meant to be mainstream films . These are made for people who are into this kind of splatter film , and as a splatter film it succeeds on many levels . It creates fascinating characters ( the Cenobites , not the numbingly boring humans ) , tells an unlikely but interesting story about their interaction with the living world , and never fails to throw in buckets and buckets of blood and gore . I'm a pretty devoted horror fan myself , but even though I regard Pinhead as the best villain ever created in film , Hellraiser II ( as well as the rest of them ) was so flawed that I cannot hail this as a great or even a really good film . It's good horror and it's fun to watch , but it probably won't go down in history as a classic horror movie . |
544,843 | 562,732 | 4,284 | 6 | One of Chaplin's less successful early comedies . | While it's true that not all of Chaplin's short films are as stunningly brilliant as so many of the films for which he later became famous , it is also true that there is a distinct difference in quality between the early films in which he acted as well as directed , and those in which he was directed as an actor by someone else . Mabel's Strange Predicament is one of the ones in which he only acted ; he was directed by Mabel Normand , with whom he did not have the most friendly relationship when the film was made . The first unusual thing about this film is that it is in French ? at least , the film is intertitled in French . Charlie plays the part of a drunken man at a hotel who comes across Mabel in an upstairs hallway , after having locked herself out of her room in her pajamas while chasing after a ball with which she was playing with her dog . When Charlie arrives and the two of them are embarrassed and amused , it seems that this is the strange predicament to which the title refers , but then Charlie chases her down the hall , and she ultimately winds up hiding from his drunken , amorous advances under the bed in a neighbor's room across the hall . There is a lot of confusing action in Mabel's Strange Predicament , such as the well dressed man who bears a striking resemblance to Marlon Brando ( Marlon Brando 1972 , not Marlon Brando 2001 ) who comes into the room and seems exceedingly upset about Mabel and her dog under the bed ( wasn't the dog locked in the room across the hall ? ) , as well as the film's conclusion , which consisted of a huge amount of confusion and anger and fighting in the hallway . Clearly , there is room for plenty of Chaplin's characteristic slapstick comedy with this type of film . The film starts off with him downstairs falling over various chairs and getting into brief brawls with the waiters , and there are also things like the scene where he is chasing Mabel down the hallway and accidentally winds up kissing a man after she evades him . Charlie Chaplin's and Mabel Normand's volatile relationship seems to have played a role in Charlie's character in this film , because he is little more than a drunk who gets out of hand and causes a lot of trouble . He is a mere nuisance on the restaurant level of the hotel , and at the end , his character has the grand exit of staggering off down the hallway , seemingly too drunk to even realize what is going on . In this way , this is a disappointment for Chaplin fans , but it is a curiosity piece to see what results when he works under a different , and far less talented , director . |
544,871 | 562,732 | 138,304 | 6 | Not a great film in any sense , The Astronaut's Wife is entertaining in the sense that you feel you are being led up to an excellent climax , but when it is eventually reached , it is disappointing and retrospe | SPOILERS SPOILERS Unfortunately , Charlize Theron has reached the point where she can't really play roles like the disturbed wife because she just comes off as annoying . She was good in The Devil's Advocate ( in almost exactly the same role as she played in The Astronaut's Wife ) , but that was probably just because every other element of that film was so well done . I just can't become interested in watching her do these whiny crying scenes anymore . However , Johnny Depp delivered an excellent performance as the newly disturbed husband , even though the character himself was shallow and ultimately uninteresting . Despite this mediocrity in terms of Depp's character development , his creepy performance made it fun to watch . SPOILERS My biggest problem with this movie is that it builds up and builds up and builds up and then just stops . And it was even a good story up until the last 30 minutes or so . The blackout in space , the strange behavior of the two astronauts , Depp's sudden and mysterious promotion , the whole thing with the twins , it was all coming together so well . But then , you get the same old crap that you always get with movies like these . The wife starts to suspect , husband starts to get subtly aggressive and threatening , wife inexplicably wants to do the traditional ' right thing , ' husband doesn't like it and ultimately gets killed , wife goes on to find her perfect man . Come on , whose idea was it to slap this awful ending on to what could otherwise have been a great film ? I don't mind Charlize wanting to do the thing that is traditionally accepted by society ( the backwards religious community , anyway - the only people likely to complain , had it been done differently ) , but I was just completely put off when she seemed to fall in love with these alien babies . She KNEW something was horribly wrong , yet she just HAS to have these kids . And what does she get ? Two creepy twins ( collectively of Big Daddy fame ) who resemble the kids from The Village of the Damned . This is not a good message to give to our society . Basically what they are saying here is that even if you find out that you are pregnant with the offspring of an other-worldly species intent on world domination , you should still have the baby ( or babies ) . Yes , abortion is THAT wrong . This is just ridiculous nonsense , and is one of the main points where the film really went horribly wrong . It's almost worth watching just for Johnny Depp's fascinating performance , but be advised that it is ultimately a very disappointing movie . |
544,555 | 562,732 | 143,145 | 6 | Is the 007 series suffering from the same big-budget , low-thought production system that seems to be plaguing the Lethal Weapon series ? | ( spoilers ) The Lethal Weapon series began with a succession of excellent action films , but as of late , particularly in the fourth installment , the content just went overboard and much of the quality was lost . This same thing seems to have happened with the latest installment in the James Bond film series , and although The World Is Not Enough does have its redeeming values , its blunt financial motives are all too obvious . Clearly , the ' Bond girl ' is a significant tradition in any Bond film , and the casting of stunningly beautiful Denise Richards in this role would reveal the film's commercial intentions all by itself . But on top of that , they throw in a hilarious name ( Christmas Jones ) and claim that this heartthrob is a freakin ' nuclear physicist . Watching Denise walk around in her cute little shorts and halter-top while she talks about plutonium and physics is just funny , and it takes away any possible chance of her character being taken seriously . If they expect her to play the part of a highly educated physicist , they could have at least dressed her to look less like a high school girl . The World Is Not Enough starts out with the traditional Bond opening , with the cool , collected Bond conversing with the enemy only to wind up making an elaborate escape and barely getting away with his life . Some things about this scene just come off as weird or incorrect . For example , consider the fact that while the opening scene takes place in Europe , the police officers that burst into the room are speaking Spanish . I really hope that I am just missing something and that that wasn't just randomly thrown in . The action was excellent , but in most cases it was so ridiculously exaggerated and unrealistic that it made it funnier than exciting . I realize that this IS James Bond , and this is the kind of crazy stuff that he is famous for , but it is a little upsetting that the screenwriters couldn't come up with some kind of action that is possible in real life but still creates thrills and excitement . Does that little speedboat that Bond takes off in have wheels ? It's cool to see a boat jump up on land and slide a bit while the hero jumps out and makes a heroic rescue or something , but this thing was STEERING . Bond was literally driving it around the streets , and don't get me started on the idiotic underwater scene . Also , there obviously wasn't much proofreading done on the scene where Bond and Jones jump off of the vehicle in the tunnel , while traveling at 70 MPH ! ! Surely the typical Bond film's audience is aware of what would happen to someone who hit cement while traveling that fast . And especially in a tunnel , that's probably certain death . And it was not a very brilliant idea that was devised in order to get a jumping - out - of - a - helicopter - on - skis shot ? the helicopter pilot tells them that the wind is too strong to land , and this is followed by a shot of the helicopter hovering over the mountain in an utter absence of wind other than what is created by the rotors . Bond and Elektra jump out and we get some unnecessary but beautiful scenery shots as the ski gracefully down the mountain in their cute little ski outfits . This whole scene is unnecessary and , to make it worse , it's followed by one of those breaks where the plot is explained boringly through a bit of dialogue . The narrative structure of this movie is badly flawed , with the action literally stopping periodically in order for the characters on screen to discuss with each other , in pure dialogue , what is happening in the story . This type of weak presentation is something that is more at home is cheesy action B-movies , and it's almost heartbreaking to see it in a James Bond film . There is also an awkward use of sound while one of these little duologues is taking place while Bond and Elektra King ( Sophie Marceau , one of the few reasons to watch the film ) walk through a crowd of people . There are people running all around them , and the camera is pretty far away , yet you can hear them perfectly as they speak in normal tones , and you can't hear the people running around them . The reasons for doing this are obvious , but it makes the crowd seem eerily silent . And then you have the helicopter with the circular saws attached to it . I sure hope that one of the writers was fired ( and beaten , for emphasis ) for THAT little idea . It's the other Bond tradition - the villain - that saves the movie . Robert Carlyle is wonderfully menacing as Renard , the bad guy who literally has no feelings because of a bullet that is lodged in his head and is slowly numbing all of his senses as it gradually kills him . Not only was he an excellent villain for this movie , but he also gave the best performance of anyone in the entire , film , followed closely by Judi Dench as M . While the concluding action face off between Bond and Renard is effective ( thanks , in no small part , to the quality performance from Carlyle ) and even fairly exciting , it dissolves into dumb action film cliché as Bond ( of course ) gets the girl . Granted , I wouldn't complain about that part , James Bond always gets the girl . But did we really have to have a shot where the distressed and frightened Christmas Jones happens to fall right into Bond's open arms ? That's bad form , as Hook would say . The World Is Not Enough is definitely a characteristic James Bond film , but I really wish that there was more quality involved in the formula these days , and less flying snowmobiles piloted by miracle marksmen . And if only they sold some of those x-ray glasses as collector's items ? |
543,934 | 562,732 | 70,328 | 6 | Start the unnecessarily slow moving dipping mechanism ! | Although super-slow and plodding for a 007 film , Live and Let Die is notable as Roger Moore's debut in the role of james Bond , and the first movie with anyone other than Sean Connery as the famous secret agent . It takes a good hour before anything happens resembling any kind of action sequence , even the traditional opening action scene doesn't really happen . It starts with an interesting introduction to the story , where several secret agents are killed in mysterious circumstances in various places around the world , and Bond's mission , should he choose to accept it , is to investigate the killings and determine any connection . Since they happened within 24 hours of each other , some kind of connection is pretty likely . People complain about the voodoo content in this movie , but it has a bit of a black-sheep feel relative to its counterparts , if only because it's so slow and action-less . It is one of Roger Moore's best performances in the role , although that's not saying much since he was so disappointing in most of his roles , but here he just isn't given much to do . More importantly , much of the movie feels more like a soap opera than an action spy film . Whenever I watch a Bond film I'm always curious to see what kind of elaborate action set pieces they come up with , because love them or hate them , these are some of the most inventive action movies ever , but this has to be an exception . There is a short bus chase where Bond drives a double decker bus , some nonsense involving some crocodiles that are astonishingly easy to get away from , and your basic , run-of-the - mill speedboat chase that was about as exciting as your average Marine World ski show . You get a lot of speedboats chasing each other through some tropical marsh , constantly running up over some spits of land , through people's yards and swimming pools and weddings and whatnot . Yawn . I couldn't stop thinking about Police Academy , which at least was funny . But in the movie's defense , at least it has an interesting enough story , although it passes by in the background , behind the periodic love interests , the half-hearted action and the bizarre voodoo element . And what was the deal with that guy with the painted face ? I know it sounds like I'm being really harsh on the movie , so I should say in the movie's defense that I really appreciated it's having a black villain and the first black Bond girl . It's too bad that so many of the bad guys were black , but I liked the African American presence in the movie . I have read that this cost them some southern viewers , but I have no problem with that . Anyone who wouldn't watch the movie because there are black people in it can just stick their heads back in the sand , as far as I'm concerned . I should admit that I tend to criticize Bond films a little harshly because I am less tolerant of some of the more childish elements than the target audience is supposed to be , but I still think that Live and Let Die is one of the lesser films in the series . It's a strange combination of James Bond and the Hollywood voodoo films of the 1940s , although I couldn't help thinking about bad movies from the 1980s , like Gator Bait and I Spit on Your Grave and those cannibal movies that Ruggero Deodato kept making . Next comes The Man With the Golden Gun , which was disappointing for entirely different reasons . . . . |
544,477 | 562,732 | 120,591 | 6 | If you watch Armageddon , only watch it once . If you see it more than that , you'll realize how terrible it really is . | Armageddon definitely sets the record for fooling the most people into thinking it's a good movie . When I first saw it , I was blown away . I loved every second of it ! It was exciting , it was spectacularly done , the acting was great , the dialogue was funny , I couldn't think of a single thing wrong with it . Obviously , I bought it on video . Then I watched it at home , and saw for the first time what an awful movie it is . Armageddon manipulates the emotions of the audience like no other disaster movie ever has . The romantic scenes ( like those in The Rock ) are clumsily and randomly thrown in ( this way it will appeal to women , too , and therefore make more money in the box office ) . The tough guy acting , particularly ( and CONSTANTLY ) on the part of Bruce Willis as Harry Stamper , the world's best oil driller , was terrible ! There were so many scenes in this film that were thrown in for no other reason than to get a meaningless laugh or broaden the target audience that it began to get tiring trying to figure out which ones actually had anything to do with the story itself . Besides all that , there were also horrible discrepancies in the storyline . Early in the film , Dan Truman ( Billy Bob Thornton ) describes the effects of the asteroid collision as " basically the worst parts of the Bible . " Even the name of the film , " Armageddon , " is taken straight from the Bible . Given that , you have to wonder why there are so many times when the characters ( mostly Stamper and Truman ) ask God for help , ask God for just a little more time , pray that " God be with them . " Why are they asking God for help ? ! They just finished pointing out that it was God that sent the asteroid ! Why WOULD He help ? You can see how the hypocrisy of religion even manages to wiggle its way into Hollywood films . The dialogue of the movie also took a lot away from several of the action packed scenes . The phrase " She's gonna blow ! " is uttered so many times that by the time the scene's climax is reached it has no effect anymore . The predictability of the ending is also a serious disappointment . Furthermore , the logical errors were a little disturbing . For example , there was moderate WIND on the asteroid , as well as clouds of dust and smoke floating calmly around . That's funny , I thought we were in SPACE traveling at 22 , 000 mph . As a whole , Armageddon is an edge of your seat action thriller , but there wasn't a whole lot of effort put into it beyond special effects and sheer financial purging . It's never boring , but the structural , logical , and storyline problems take away a great deal from what could have been a spectacular disaster film . |
544,051 | 562,732 | 120,603 | 6 | A valiant and occasionally successful effort , but Beloved is an adaptation of a novel that is far too complex to ever be satisfactorily translated to the screen . | Beloved is a novel that relies heavily upon it's own language and the brilliant writing style in order to have its effect on the reader . One of its strongest points ( and these are countless ) is that it is about the period of American history near the end and immediately following slavery , when Negroes were still considered sub-human . It presents the story of the tremendous suffering of a few slaves during that time ( and , indeed , during their entire lives ) , but the important thing is that the book does this with a startlingly small amount of graphic images and direct depictions of violence or cruelty . Because the movie is a visual account of the novel , it is unable to do this . Sethe is a former slave who has suffered more hardships than most human beings ( although , given the allusions to life on Sweet Home , she has not suffered even there the most ) , and the novel is about her life experiences and those of the slaves close to her . The most glaring problem here , which may have been unavoidable , is that Sethe's flashbacks could not be presented in the film in any other way than as brief , shocking images filled with violence and blood . This is not a problem because of anything to do with gratuitous violence , but because in the novel , Sethe lets out brief snapshots of her memories ( which are too painful to directly tell as stories of her earlier life ) as though she does not quite realize that she's doing it , then immediately stops herself when the pain hits her . The magnitude of her suffering is reduced to split-second sequences of brutality , which are presented as such but with no explanation or hint that they are that short because they are too painful to be any longer . Besides the trouble that arises from having huge Hollywood superstars play the slaves here ( which is a negligible fact because the performances are so powerful ) , the performance of Beloved , the title character , is entirely off the mark . Beloved embodies the epitome of Sethe's painful memories . She is Sethe's daughter ( although not the only child ) that Sethe was forced to kill to prevent them from going into slavery ( thus providing the most significant act that allows us , indeed , FORCES us , to judge her as a person ) . When she is reborn from the river , she stumbles to 124 Bluestone Road , the house in which the majority of the movie and novel take place , and back into the lives of Sethe and Denver , the daughter that barely escaped the violence of her own mother's hands . The problem with the performance is that , while it's true that Beloved was killed when she was two years old , and has not matured a day since then except physically , she does not act like a two-year-old child . The Beloved in Toni Morrison's novel has the maturity of a two-year-old and the physical , motherly needs of a two-year-old ( most evident in her urgent need to be with Sethe ) , but she does not have the demeanor of one . I am reminded of John Malkovich's performance as Lennie Small in ' Of Mice and Men . ' Lennie Small is a huge , hulking man in the novel with a miniscule intelligence . He has the intellectual capacity and maybe even some of the same values as a seven or eight-year-old ( such as ' tenning dem wabbits ' ) , but he doesn't act like one . Thandie Newton remembers in her performance that Beloved was a small child when she died , but she overuses it to the point where she drowns out much of the rest of the effect that she has on the story and those around her . Most importantly , her overdone performance distracts attention from the purpose that she is meant to serve in the story . Beloved is the supernatural element of Toni Morrison's novel , who is there not because this is a supernatural story but because she represents the magnitude of the suffering that went on during slave times . She is a spiritual manifestation that requires no explanation except for her cause of death , and Newton's outlandish performance in the role reduces that effect because her behavior is not explained . The film stays true to the magnitude of sorrow presented in the novel , but it transforms it from the slow , relentless , and immensely complicated version presented in the novel and into one of visuals and performance , which challenges successful actors to present the lives of people who have suffered more than most people alive can imagine . The film succeeds grandly in presenting the society in which Negroes were not humans but property . Sethe did not murder her children , she destroyed property that does not belong to her . But the important thing that is lost here is the shock that is delivered by the subtlety of the content . The emotion of the novel is enormously powerful , and yet it is all so subdued that even white people are almost not in it at all . They are little more than a lumbering presence that never shows its face ( except for the single scene in the book that is presented from the point of view of white people ) , but is always looming dangerously just over the horizon . Beloved is a story that is too powerful to be told directly , because if it is , it will be weakened because the danger and the suffering becomes tangible , something that you can see and then forget about . The short descriptions and bits of events in the book force the mind to circle and work them until the full impact of their true meaning is realized . |
544,470 | 562,732 | 243,155 | 6 | Not as good as some of Hugh Grant's other romantic comedies , but Bridget Jones's Diary stands out as one of the better comedies of 2001 . | First of all , yes , I realize that it sounds kind of ironic to say that Bridget Jones's Diary is not as GOOD as other Hugh Grant movies , but keep in mind that even this hideously charming English actor has come out with some genuinely entertaining and memorable films ( I am thinking , in particular , of films like Four Weddings and A Funeral and especially Notting Hill and even several of his other films that are not Mickey Blue Eyes ) . With Bridget Jones's Diary , director Sharon Maguire approaches the daunting task of attempting to convince the ( American ) public that there is a big-breasted blonde played by Renee Zellweger who has made it to her thirties without ever having had a boyfriend , and the film that results from this effort depicts the point in her life where she happens to gain two boyfriends at once . At the time that Bridget Jones's Diary was released , Hugh Grant had recently starred in Notting Hill , in which he famously uttered the words ' whoopsy-daisy , ' removing any room for respect from his character that there might once have been , although at the same time making us love him whether we liked it or not as well as realize that his character was made un-respectable for that very reason . Because of this uncomfortable but ultimately pleasing love for his character in that film , we are willing to forgive a lot of the terrible things that he does in Bridget Jones's Diary , but only when we see him change from the womanizer that he amazingly plays in this film and reverts into the same caricature character that he always plays ( see my Mickey Blue Eyes review ) that we have grown to know and love , for the most part . Colin Firth , on the other hand , has just come out of his role in Shakespeare in Love , where he played the jerk who Viola De Lesseps was forced to marry , despite our desperate wish that she would find a way to escape the arranged marriage and marry her true love , William Shakespeare . Bridget Jones's Diary plays off of both of these past performances in the formation of its story , suggesting ( erroneously ) that the roles were written for the actors and greatly enhancing the effect of its plot . I remember watching this film and being disappointed from within minutes of the film that I was going to watch a childish exercise in the traditional romantic comedy ( indeed , it's not hard during the e-mail trading within the office to assume that Bridget and her boss , played by Hugh Grant , are going to go through some weak romance trouble and then wind up happily in love at the end of the film ) . There is an interesting introduction of the other love interest in Colin Firth's character , who she hates from the moment we meet him . And , if I may interject for a moment , on a personal level , my two best and closest friendships , with Ryan Collette and Kyle Blount , started exactly the same way . When we met in high school , there were times that we were literally inches away from fistfights , and now , several years later , they're brothers to me . There is nothing that I wouldn't do for them or them for me , and it's interesting to consider whether something like this inspired the introduction we see of Firth's character into the film or whether the writers were simply trying to come up with something original . In any case , it doesn't matter , because while the film doesn't exactly generate the most respect in the way that it plods through its content ( some of the interactions between Bridget and her two men are less than convincing , which is nearly catastrophic because the success of the film depends exactly on whether the audience is convinced of that very thing ) , there is a genuine element of not knowing how the story is going to end up . We are torn between our love for some of Hugh Grant's previous characters ( as well as our expectation that the more well-known actor will end up victorious regardless ) and our hatred from Colin Firth's character in Shakespeare in Love alone ( a testament to the quality of that movie as well as to his performance within it ) in trying to decide for ourselves what is to become of Bridget Jones's love life in the future . There's a scene where this indecisiveness between the two suitors comes to a climax , when they both get into a fistfight in the snow-covered street , but the uncertainty of who she is going to end up with pursues until near the end of the film , when it becomes progressively obvious . True , this is not the best love story ever presented on film , but Bridget Jones's Diary is definitely one of the better romantic comedies of the last few years . |
543,777 | 562,732 | 120,620 | 6 | Excellent performances saved this one from total failure . | ( spoilers ) Brokedown Palace is a very effective and highly emotional film . It succeeds on many levels , but it also fails on many levels . While the film is totally unoriginal ( HEAVY emphasis on ' unoriginal ' ) , it is very well acted and directed , even if nearly every aspect of the story itself has very recently been seen in almost exactly the same way . Brokedown Palace is literally a remake of the stunningly powerful film Return To Paradise , which starred Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Pheonix , and which presented almost exactly the same story , except that the main characters were male and there were three of them instead of two . Alice and Darlene ( Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale , respectively ) take a trip to Thailand together just after high school , to celebrate their lifelong friendship that is about to be separated by college . Once there , they almost immediately encounter a charming Australian guy who wines and dines both of them , sparking intense jealousy , and coerces them to accompany him to Hong Kong . While it's not hard to believe that , in their rush to get to the airport on time , Alice did not notice the extra weight of the narcotics that Nick ( the charming Australian guy ) planted in her pack , it was kind of a big risk that he took , assuming that they would be too rushed to notice that much extra weight in their luggage . One of the main problems with the film is that Alice and Darlene were so reckless when they first got to Thailand . Sure , this establishes the fact that they just didn't know better , hence increasing the emotion caused by their later misfortune , but some of it was just too much . Like when they were at the royal hotel and ordered all kinds of drinks on some random room's tab , and Alice says , ' Oh , they don't care . ' Naiveté is one thing , but that is absolute stupidity . Never mind the fact that they are in a foreign and significantly more dangerous country - pulling some moronic stunt like that will get you in big trouble ANYwhere . Another unnecessary element was the ordeal with Darlene's father later in the film . He shows up at the prison in Thailand and soothingly convinces Darlene that everything is going to be okay , that he'll make sure everything is fixed and she gets home safely and out of that damn prison . Then when Alice comes out , he basically tells her that he never trusted her and she can rot in that prison thousands of miles away from anything she knows , for all he cares . Why is it that this guy goes immediately from being a loving and caring father to an absolute worthless bastard ? I don't care how many times she got paint on his couch or got his daughter in trouble or whatever , that is no reason to leave her in a strange prison on the other side of the planet . That guy was a total dick , and nothing ever really even came of that scene . The legal ordeal that the girls went through involving the seedy lawyer played by Bill Pullman was also very interesting , but also grossly unoriginal . Alice and Darlene suffer the exact same troubles that faced the characters in Return To Paradise , with exactly the same result . While this was an entertaining and admittedly an intensely emotional film , without the quality performances Brokedown Palace would be little more than an instructional video about what not to do when on vacation in Thailand . The ending leaves you wondering if she ever really does get out of that prison , but we'll never know , because who the hell would want to watch a sequel to a film like this ? The film left so many loose ends that it almost cancelled out all of the things that it achieved . We know that Darlene goes home , and obviously she'll try to get Alice out , but they sure didn't have much luck up to that point . We only get a vague idea of what happens to Nick , and the film ends with Alice still in the prison , saying that she knows she did the right thing and that she remains hopeful that Darlene will fight for her until she gets released , too . Optimists are sure to get a good thrill out of this , but every single event in the entire film after they get thrown into prison suggests that Alice is never going to get out of there , at least not until she's an old woman . This weak ending ( although still very emotional , due to the quality acting from Claire ) takes a lot away from a film that was not that good to begin with . I suggest that you watch Return To Paradise instead - it's more original and MUCH better . |
544,252 | 562,732 | 23,694 | 6 | Classy old thriller . | It's amazing how times have changed . When considering the change from the plodding zombies in The Dawn of the Dead into the turbo-charged , sprinting zombies in the 2004 remake , I suppose it can be expected that a zombie film made in the early 1930s might feature some zombies that stand stark still for extended periods of time . Enter the legendary Bela Lugosi , starring as the highly creepy " Murder " Legendre , who controls the zombies by interlocking his hands and opening his eyes really wide . There is a contrived love story threaded through the narrative that serves to confuse why Rob Zombie chose this film to name his band after , although for such an early film it is highly accomplished . The atmosphere is creepy , especially during the scene early in the film that shows Legendre's zombie's at work ( which contains a sound effect that had to have influenced that cringe-inducing croaking sound in The Grudge ) . The performances are often cartoonish and overdone , and an almost intolerably slow pace makes it less thrilling than it could have been , but that and a persistently eerie atmosphere adds to the effect . |
544,327 | 562,732 | 93,756 | 6 | Another great movie gangster of the 1980s ? David Spade ! ! | So what's happened so far ? A gaggle of society's goofiest citizens have taken advantage of a new policy to loosen hiring standards at the police force and actually made it through despite efforts from all directions to get them thrown out . They embark on their first assignment , which is to turn around Commandant Lassard's beloved precinct 16 , which has been dubbed the worst precinct in the city and given 30 days to turn around or suffer some major employee turnover , a fate which is relentlessly helped along by the eternally butt - kissing Captain Mauser . They display a spectacular feat of water-borne police work , saving the academy and then return in the next movie to beat the city's other police academy when it turns out that the governor decides it's not worth the money to keep them both open . Oh , and of course you all realize who is in this thing , right ? None less than Sharon Stone , David Spade in his first film , and Tony Hawk in an early stunt-skateboarding role ! You gotta see this ! This time , Commandant Lassard has come up with a scheme he calls Citizens on Patrol ( C . O . P . Get it ? Get it ? ) , in which he elaborates slightly on the plot of the original movie . You see , the police force has been stretched a little too thin and the public has developed a negative opinion of them due to the fact that they can't be everywhere at all times to stop every single crime in the city . So the natural solution , of course , is to train the public as deputy police officers and basically have briefly trained undercover cops all over the city . In fact , so close is the resemblance to the first movie that we are even treated to a couple characters who are forced to join the police academy or face jail time ? an idea suggested , of course , by Mahoney himself . This is the best part of the movie , by the way . There is a hilarious gang of skateboarding punks who are disturbing the peace left and right , headed by none other than David Spade , who is a hardened urban predator if I've ever seen one . Thug life , baby ! ! Sharon Stone also has a relatively small role in the film , although probably one of the ons that she would like to forget about , and Lieutenant Harris is back after being gone for the last two movies . All of the other relevant cast members return , with the addition of a new group of misfits , like the token fat black guy , David Spade and his idiot skateboarder friend , and Tackleberry's FATHER-in-law . Remember that guy ? Who is always gleefully punching out his son ? I can't wait until the grandparents start joining ! But don't worry , until then we have Mrs . Feldman to hold us over . Here's this sweet old lady living in a nursing home / military barracks and who has more of a love of all things camouflaged than Tackleberry himself . In fact , I was waiting the whole movie for her to tell her that she's his long lost mother , but no such luck . Something went wrong with the screen writing in there somewhere , but ultimately she turns out to be one of the most consistently funny characters in the movie . She's played with a good-natured smile by Billie Bird , who clearly enjoyed herself while making the movie . You can always tell when the actors are having a good time , and it always makes the movie better , which is good because this movie needs a lot of help ! Of course , it's not much different than the last three movies as far as being worth watching . Bud and his father are still trading punches and it's still more groan-inducing than laugh - inducing , people are still accidentally wandering into the Blue Oyster Club , which hasn't been funny for three movies by now ( Proctor inadvertently wandering in naked was the high point of this gag , but also the point where it becomes the most clear that the joke has lost its steam ) , and Jones is still doing that Bruce Lee impersonation which was funny in the first movie when I was a kid , but as an adult not so much ? But , Callahan has a great wet t-shirt scene that makes the whole movie worthwhile ! Oh , and was Mahoney's mischievous grin ever amusing ? That poor guy , man . His reputation has for some reason become so tarnished that he is seen by most of the public as even more of a washed up has-been than , umm , well no one else really comes to mind . Bill Paxton ? Nah , he's cool , I think . I never needed to forgive him for Weird Science , but Guttenburg unfortunately has a whole string of bad sequels to make up for , and Cocoon and Short Circuit are just not gonna cut it ! At any rate , super-gluing the loudspeaker to Harris ' face was funny , but why they missed out on the opportunity to have Harris screaming through it at high volume at the doctors in the hospital I just can't understand . The screenwriters are not scoring many points in this one ! But still , this is one of the better Police Academies so far . This one and part 3 are the best ones in the series that I've seen so far , despite the hilarious 1980s badness ( there's a boot - legging crime lord , for example , who operates his illegal warehouse standing around with a fistful of cash and a hula hoop around his shoulders ) , but there definitely are some fun gags . Harris macing his armpits is one is one of the more memorable gags in the whole series , along with Mauser getting his hands glued to his hair , and I have to admit that I enjoyed some of the scenes of the original recruits trying to recruit the public for the new C . O . P . program . It's not a good movie , but it's a good Police Academy movie ! |
544,655 | 562,732 | 192,731 | 6 | Yes ! Finally some quality cinema from the teen slasher genre ! You see , it seems that someone has taken their love of scary movies one step too ? HEY ! ! | ( spoilers ) In a time when teenage slasher mystery thrillers are in tremendous overabundance , the sequel to the fairly entertaining Urban Legend is fortunately not a complete failure . I watched Urban Legends : Final Cut with very low expectations , which were the result of having heard that the movie was terrible , as well as my growing belief that a quality film in this genre , especially a sequel , will probably never be created again . The magic of the movies can only go so far . However , I was surprised to find that this particular sequel did have its redeeming values , despite the fact that it has the same old Scooby Doo ending , with the killer finally revealing himself and basically saying that he would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky kids . The film starts off on the set of a cheesy movie , which seems to take place during a drunken college party on an AIRPLANE ( hence , ' cheesy ' movie ) . Luckily , this is revealed to be a movie within a movie , so it didn't really take away from the film as a whole , but Urban Legends : Final Cut definitely had its share of stupidity . The security guard , for example , who we remember from the first film , sure didn't seem to have learned anything from her past experiences . Not only do we find her dancing to Pam Grier films while HORROR movies are being made ( the perfect setting for a murder to take place ) but she also does she not believe the girl when she tells her that she saw a murder . And don't even get me started on the killer . Until the killer is revealed at the end , he is exactly the same as the now-boring killers in countless other rip-off films ? everything from I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Two Summers Ago to all of the Scream films , all of which ' borrowed ' this idea from John Carpenter's horror classic , Halloween . Seeing how Halloween was released about 23 years ago and has been ripped off in record numbers , I think that it's about time to come up with some different kind of villain . 007 movies always have these cool bad guys , but the teen thriller genre always recycles the now boring ? guy in the mask ' routine . I didn't hate Urban Legends : Final Cut because there really were a few scenes in the film that actually worked . For example , the scene when all of the students were watching the rushes and they saw the blonde girl's murder was actually pretty effective , in my opinion . Also , the scene with the bathtub full of ice worked pretty well , despite its lack of originality . But despite the unoriginal bathtub , the removed kidney was also pretty good , and this even evokes a painful reaction from the audience as the killer yanks her back in through the window by grabbing onto the freshly sewn wound through which the kidney was removed . OUCH . There was a lot of cheesy stuff in this movie , besides the tired inclusion of the mysterious killer . Much of the garbage is dumbly thrown into the dialogue in a number of wildly idiotic and clichéd lines ? ' This is my baby , baby . ' ' I won't let anything happen to you . I'll be there . ' But the story was actually pretty good , at least some of it was . The twin brother for example , keeps the audience guessing more than the killer does , because by this point , anything else will command more interest than the old who's-the-killer mystery . It turns out that he was telling the truth , but for much of the film after his introduction , it is never really certain whether the twin was really a twin , or if he was the same guy , in which case he would probably be the killer . The end of the film is punctuated by a very welcome cameo from Rebecca Gayheart , who should have played a substantial role in this film , given the way that the original film ended . This obviously wasn't done because everyone would know right away who the killer was , but there seems to be a rough transition between the two films because of this . All in all , Urban Legends : Final Cut is worth the time , but it is still not as good as the original , which was also not even that great . But don't be put off by low expectations , it's not THAT bad . |
544,675 | 562,732 | 419,887 | 6 | This country is not kind to invaders ? | First of all , the hype about The Kite Runner was wildly over-blown , and sadly , the movie is just as disappointing as the book . Most of the novel is outstanding , but it completely falls off a cliff at the end , and then closes with a happily-ever-after ending that seems just as tacked-on as the worst of the Hollywood offenders . True , the movie is remarkably faithful to the novel , but the whole story , especially because of the cartoonish confrontation at the end , gives me the feeling that it is little more than a childish revenge fantasy which is only legitimized because author Khaled Hosseini really can write . I was an English major when I was in college , and one of the things that I noticed in any creative writing class that I ever took was that , because almost every single person wrote stories starring themselves ( as Hosseini has clearly done and like , for example , Stephen King almost always does ) , many of them wrote stories about something bad that happened to them , in which they augmented the wrong committed against them and then issued a perfectly planned and executed retribution against their offender . This , ladies and gentlemen , is what you have with The Kite Runner . Now , I won't say that Hosseini was bullied as a child lived in a harsh environment and therefore wrote a heroic story about that . Indeed the setting in Afghanistan and the oppressive atmosphere is both well-presented and an important , real life issue . But when the Taliban appears and starts stoning adulterous women to death in front of packed stadiums and bad guys parade little boys around in make-up and get shot in the eye with sling-shots , then it all becomes clear what's really going on . I remember that the novel was extremely popular when it was released and I remember being at a loss to explain the fame after I read it . It is , indeed , a page-turner , but it has an unfortunately combination of amazingly realistic descriptions and situations with goofy , over-blown movie villains that gives the whole thing a feeling of being an artificial contraption drummed up by someone trying to make his way into the writing business . But hey , Hosseini has succeeded in making the artificial successful twice now , so maybe it's me who should take some advice . But I think it would be difficult for anyone to argue that Hosseini has succeeded as much in the quality of his story-telling as he has in the BUSINESS of story-telling . In that regard , this is definitely a success story ! I also feel like a lot of people are going to pick up on the arrogance of presenting America as this holy land , a paradise on earth where all you have to do is get there and everything will be okay . Of course , it is true of the little boy living under the iron fist of the Taliban , but it's that kind of thinking that has gotten America into a lot of trouble in the past . And I also love how Amir , our hero , goes to Afghanistan but doesn't know enough not to stare at a passing pickup truck full of bearded guys holding AK-47's . Smart . And by the way , can I just say one thing ? What is the deal with the Taliban ? Those people are totally insane . Oh , and the best thing about the movie is that little kid who played Hassan . He had the most important role in the movie and he was OUTSTANDING . |
543,739 | 562,732 | 431,678 | 6 | In-depth look at the history of the cell-phone . | This is an interesting addition to the DVD for Cellular , it's basically a lot of telecommunications engineers talking about the history of cell-phones from the " brick " of the 1970s to the 4 ounce video camera phones that we use today . It's like that educational video about rats that is on the Willard DVD . You haven't seen that , but it's basically a learning channel video about rats and their mating habits and whatnot . Celling Out looks like it was made for the History Channel or the Discovery Channel about the history of cell-phones . It has nothing to do with the making of the movie , but is interesting nonetheless . It also makes a pretty funny comment on the commercial success of cell-phones , as far as people making phone calls that they wouldn't otherwise have made . One guy makes especially amusing comments about the triviality of a lot of the conversations that people have with each other on cell-phones . They trace the transformation of the cell-phone from a communication device and into an entertainment center , even as a dating device . One guy even asserts that it's the cell-phone into which all other common devices will be absorbed ? TV remote , laptop computer , palm pilots , etc . Cell phones have revolutionized the way people communicate , and this short documentary goes into great detail about both the pros and cons of these advancements in technology , although it does make a complaint about them that I've never understood . Larry Cohen , co-writer of Cellular , mentions that he doesn't want to be reached at all times , he doesn't want someone keeping tabs on him all the time . This has always seemed like a trivial and even paranoid complaint . I've never seen a cell-phone that couldn't be turned off . It's too bad about the ending , because once the documentary gets into hypothesizing about the future , there are some pretty outlandish claims being made and the revelation that the people interviewed in the documentaries might be a little more obsessed with cell-phones than is quite healthy . The assertion is made that sometime in the near future cell-phones will be embedded under the skin behind the ear , which can stretch to believe , and that you will be able to make phone calls just by thinking about it , which I don't believe for a second . Maybe I'm just shortsighted , but it doesn't seem that that can happen without opening up the skull and connecting the cellular implant directly to the brain . Forget about whether or not the technology will ever be available , the question is whether people are going to want to have their skulls opened up so they don't have to dial phone numbers anymore . This is the kind of thinking that led people 40 years ago to assume that there would be flying cars by the year 2000 . Well , here we are in 2005 and people still tend to like to have their cars running along the ground , and I have a hypothesis that it will be quite some time before popular opinion will involve mass approval of brain surgery to avoid dialing . Other than that , however , this is a very informative , if not especially interesting , documentary . |
543,956 | 562,732 | 213,149 | 6 | This is just about what I expected . | Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay are back from Armageddon fame to once again present to us another tremendous disaster story interspersed with some elaborate and manipulative romance . The film mainly follows the lives of two life long friends , Rafe and Danny , as they grow up obviously meant to be fighter pilots , and the struggles with their friendship brought on by World War II . At least half of the film is made up of this drawn out love story , while the other half covers the Japanese invasion and bombing of Pearl Harbor . This is the reason the movie is so damn long , too . If they had left out this dumbass romance , or at least not drawn it out so much , we would have had a war movie of normal length that would have been much better . The editing between the love story and the actual war coverage is surprisingly awkward and abrupt , initially leaving us with the feeling that we are watching two completely separate movies that were edited together . The actual bombing of Pearl Harbor is spectacularly done , I have to admit that . The Japanese were obviously made to look much more evil than they were , because this is told from the American point of view , but the special effects and the torpedoes and the entire battle scene at Pearl Harbor was amazing . Cuba Gooding Jr . has a tiny tiny role as the black man who is not allowed to do anything more than cook during his entire time in the Navy , and who ultimately is able to man a gun during the battle and make a difference . This is a noticeable digression in the same vein as the over-simplified African American presence seen in Mel Gibson's The Patriot . It makes you think that Pearl Harbor was made by a bunch of rich white guys who , at the last minute , decided that they better put a black guy in the movie so they wouldn't get in trouble with the NAACP . Nonetheless , Cuba pulled off his overly small role very well , despite the fact that he was only given enough screen time to shoot down one Japanese plane , and that plane almost flew right into him as it crashed . As with any Bruckheimer film , especially The Rock or Armageddon , with which he also collaborated with director Michael Bay , the entire humanistic portion of the film was shallow and predictable . We get three main cardboard characters , Rafe , Danny , and Evelyn , and a relationship between the three that is entirely predictable . Nonetheless , some people may pretend not to know that , so here is the obligatory warning ? SPOILERS AHEAD . Rafe supposedly gets killed in combat ( he would never have survived a crash-landing into the water like that , but this is Bruckheimer , so we know he didn't really die ) , and of course , Danny moves in on his girl . Did anyone really think that Ben Affleck would be killed that early in the film ? So Danny goes for Evelyn with the ridiculous support of all of Rafe's friends ( this is another thing that would never have happened in real life ) , and then when everything seems to be going okay , Rafe comes back and everything gets mixed up again . Yawn . As the all-seeing audience , we know that Danny had no right to move in on his friend's girlfriend so soon after his theoretical death , so this is the point when we begin to suspect that Danny will be the one to ultimately be killed in combat , and in true Bruckheimer form , it will probably be in a heroic effort to save Rafe's life . And guess what . There are obvious references to the story structure of Titanic here as well as some scenes that are photographed and composed exactly like some of the battle scenes from Saving Private Ryan , but the film is obviously just trying to cash in on the success of those films . On a quality level , Pearl Harbor and Titanic are about the same , but neither even come close to the tremendous power of a real war film like Saving Private Ryan . I found myself several times thinking of Saving Private Ryan while I was watching Pearl Harbor , and the two movies are so different in their intentions ( Saving Private Ryan showed us the war , while Pearl Harbor tried to make us cry by showing how a few people were affected by the war ) that it almost seemed like I was watching a cartoon . This is why Pearl Harbor will never be considered a classic war film and will not be considered for an Oscar nod in any category . Bruckheimer and Bay make movies that are meant to please large audiences by entertaining them without making them think . This is why their movies are such box office hits but also such critical failures . There are always a lot of people who don't see how shallow these films are . For the most part , the action sequences are fast paced and actually pretty good , but they are NEVER realistic , which is probably one of the main reasons that a war film , made by these manipulative Hollywood bigshots , about such a closely scrutinized historical event just didn't come out right . The bombing of Pearl Harbor was obviously the best scene in the film , but was not realistic at all . It was , in fact , about as realistic as a fight scene in a Jet Li movie or a Jackie Chan movie . Fun to watch , but once you walk out of the theater and back into reality , you want to laugh . It's a shame that this scene in Pearl Harbor was padded with two and a half hours of fluff , because it could have been a significant part of a good war film . What a waste . |
544,534 | 562,732 | 239,395 | 6 | Disappointing . | The thing that really makes a good family film is when it appeals to both children and adults . For example , you have Toy Story , Toy Story 2 , Shrek , The Iron Giant , and even , surprisingly enough , lots and lots of Disney films . Unfortunately , the whole thing about technologically advanced domesticated animals who are also experts at tactical warfare is just too silly to be entertaining . It was fun to a degree , but when you see cats parachuting with night vision goggles or that damn underground subway system that the dogs somehow built , it goes too far . In one of Gallagher's stand-up comedy videos ( Stuck In The 60s , I believe ) , he is making fun of those rugs that show a picture of dogs shooting pool or cats playing poker , and he quips , ' You can't get a cat to sht in a box , you don't want him to ante in at your table . ' I wish I could see his reaction to the behavior of the cats and dogs in this movie ! I'm sure that Cats & Dogs is a fun movie for a much younger audience , but the scope of the film is so narrow that it can only really be enjoyed by kids . The movie was obviously not made by cat people , by the way , because of the fact that the cats are obviously the evil antagonists in the film , so if you have and love a cat or two in your household , it may be a good idea not to rent this one for your kids . There is some amusing dialogue and an interesting subplot involving Jeff Goldblum's attempt to come up with a serum to eliminate allergic reactions to dogs , but as a whole , Cats & Dogs just about falls flat . |
543,966 | 562,732 | 69,897 | 6 | What the hell does ' blaxploitation ' mean ? | I imagine it has something to do with the weak script and plot that Coffy has , but this movie doesn't exactly exploit African Americans any more than a sex thriller like Poison Ivy or something exploits white people . Coffy isn't really that bad of a movie if you can look past the same old revenge plot and the fact that , while she's not bustin ' some hoodlum ass , Coffy is some sort of nurse in her spare time . This woman is like the black female version of Rambo , but the film doesn't really take itself seriously enough for this to be a problem . Coffy is a tough black woman who decides to take matters into her own hands when the law proves powerless to help catch the drug dealers who turned her little sister into a drugged out vegetable . To make matter's worse , a friend of Coffy's named Carter , a police officer , gets beaten ( in a pathetic fight scene ) and suffers brain damage , further enraging Coffy . The whole movie is about drugs and violence , and Coffy pretends to be Mr . George's newest ho so that she can get close to her enemies and bring them down from the inside . Mr . George , by the way , is a hilariously stereotypical 70s pimp , with his felt hat , ridiculous glasses , and matching pastel outfit that is so tight that he sports a cameltoe . While at a party with Mr . George , Coffy contaminates his drug supply , replacing his cocaine stash with sugar . This is the party where that classic cat-fight scene takes place , with Coffy getting into a side-splitting scuffle with all the rest of Mr . George's harem , and having committed the laughable idea of booby-trapping her hair with razor blades . Okay , now we're really getting to know how much this movie takes itself seriously . And I won't even mention the monstrous lesbian girlfriend of Priscilla , the character that was introduced just before the most idiotic fight scene in the entire film . And then there was the car chase near the end of the film in which the cop drives like a Duke of Hazzard for no apparent reason . While the movie is filled with crap like this and is therefore a definitive B-movie , there were some relatively interesting things going on . For example , it was actually pretty clever the way that Coffy was able to turn the drug dealers against each other so that she didn't have to do all of the killing herself . Also , while all of the fight scenes were awful , some of the violence was surprisingly , and often disturbingly , convincing . When George is dragged to death behind the car , for example , it was obviously a dummy being dragged but the fact that hate-crimes like this have been so notoriously committed against blacks , the emotional impact made it much more effective . Maybe that's what blaxploitation is referring to . The standard revenge plot is not given much of a twist in Coffy , and the closing scene with her walking alone on a beach at sunset doesn't really fit with the rest of the movie . There is some pretty funny dialogue , though . White Zombie fans are sure to recognize her quote early in the film just before she un-heads some drug dealer with a shotgun ( ' This is the end of your rotten life you mother-FCKIN'-dope pusher ! ' ) . BLAM ! ! Yeah Coffy ! And then at the end , some guy begs for his life while in a swimming pool while Coffy points a shotgun at him , and she says , ' Sheeeit , I ain't gonna kill you . ' BLAM ! ! Yeah Coffy ! It's no secret that this is not Oscar material . It's a cheesy action film with bad acting and a recycled story , but if you keep that in mind when you watch it , it's actually enjoyable , at least on a few meager levels . Maxim magazine lists Coffy as number 7 on its list of the 50 best B-movies of all time , and there can clearly be no mistake about its status as a B-movie . Enjoy , but be aware of the movie's limitations . |
544,328 | 562,732 | 91,777 | 6 | It's a matter of the mind being mightier than the bosom . | I gotta admit , ladies and gentlemen , I don't really find this stuff amusing anymore , but for some reason the Police Academy movies are still their own brand of fun . I was just reading through some of the message boards about the movies on the IMDb about what peoples ' favorite scenes were from part 3 and from the series as a whole , and not one of the scenes mentioned was genuinely funny to me anymore . I remember when I was a kid I loved the movies unconditionally and used to drive my brother insane because I always wanted to watch them , but I can't really remember if I just found the movies fun or if I actually got some good belly laughs out of them . Regardless , the vast majority of the comedy has not dated well , but they are still an amusing romp through the hilarious clothing and comedy styles of the 80s ! This time around , Commandant Lassard finds himself in a bit of a moment of crisis as the governor decides that it is no longer financially reasonable to maintain two police academies ( the other one headed by the beloved Lieutenant Mauser from part 2 ) , and so one of them will have to be closed . Which academy will be closed depends on performances during a period of observation by an evaluation team . Needless to say , Mauser employs the help of the hilariously idiotic Proctor and the same two goon cadets , Copeland and Blanks , who have been employed by both Mauser and Harris to create problems for our cast of heroes since the first movie . In order to save Lassard's academy , and their own beloved alma mater , from being closed , all of our favorite Police Academy cast members have been brought back from Their First Assignment to become instructors at the academy and ensure that the place looks good . So there you have the setup and the basic plot , and other than that it's essentially exactly the same movie as the first two . The characters are the same , the music's the same , the good guys and bad guys are the same , just the skits are different and this time we have the addition of a few negligible characters , the token geek ( Sweetchuck ) , the token Japanese guy ( who really serves no other purpose than to grin like an imbecile and become mesmerized by Callahan's prodigious bosoms ) , and also the ridiculous additions to the force of Fackler's nutty wife and Tackleberry's nutty brother-in-law . You know , the guy who is always trading punches with his own father . Can you imagine putting a police uniform on such a man ? Only in a Police Academy movie ! There is not really anything of special note that happens during the movie , although it is a little revealing that this is arguably the funniest installment in the entire series . In keeping with the two preceding movies , we are introduced to the characters in the same way , by glimpsing them in their current lives before the needs of a new movie call them back to the Police Academy world . Hightower is dressing up as an old woman in order to catch purse snatchers in the park , Tackleberry is playing safari in the backyard with his brother-in-law , Fackler is trying to prevent his wife from joining the force ( in a scene eerily reminiscent of his first scene in the original movie ) , and Mahoney is a ? women's basketball coach ? Whatever , it doesn't matter what they're doing , their current occupations or pastimes or whatever are just little jokes as they're introduced into the movie . Unfortunately , it's hard to imagine a time when Mahoney's constant flirtations were not as purely creepy as they are now . And that mischievous grin he gets when he's about to play a trick on someone . I need a lot of beers before that's funny , although I would be lying if I said the Police Academies aren't a lot of fun after the beer count enters the double digits . Unfortunately , there is also a definite feeling that in this installment the movie has turned into even more of a series of goofy jokes . Of course , the whole series is a bunch of goofy jokes , but I think that the second sequel is the first time when the characters that we know are used to throw in some moronic sight gags in order to get a cheap laugh , like when Tackleberry pulls out his gun and shoots a payphone because the operator refuses to relinquish her quarter , or Proctor getting locked out in the hallway ass-naked by a prostitute . On the other hand , my beer count was getting up there by this point , so I found both scenes to be pretty funny . It is important to realize that director Jerry Paris developed most of his directing experience on television comedy series , which may have something to do with the , ah , conspicuous lack of subtlety in a lot of the sight gags in Police Academy 2 and 3 . It's interesting to consider the impact that his personal directing experience before coming into the Police Academy series may have shaped the series as a whole , which moved in that direction and then never managed to get away from it . Ad now it seems that Steve Guttenberg is attempting to put a Police Academy 8 in motion , in which case I can only hope that he doesn't try to reinvent the series , although I have a feeling that it would take nothing less than a total reinvention to make yet another sequel worthwhile ? |
544,699 | 562,732 | 349,683 | 6 | Disappointing . | I rented Paparazzi , which looked like the potential for it to suck was pretty high , so I got King Arthur just to have something to fall back on . Besides , I have been meaning to see it for months , since I never got around to seeing it in the theaters . As it turns out , I was completely wrong . Paparazzi was outstanding , it was King Arthur with all the suck potential . The movie bills itself as the truth behind the legend of King Arthur's knights , which should have been a warning sign to me because Hollywood is not exactly who you want to turn to for the truth behind stories and legends that are centuries old . And after watching the movie , I am reminded of a possible truth of King Arthur that I actually learned in a historical literature class at the University level , which was that there was more than likely not literally a " round table " involved . This movie disagrees . A big step that the movie makes in trying to live up to its promise of providing the reality behind the legend is that Guinevere and Lancelot are not lovers , they just flirt a lot . Lancelot is far too loyal to Arthur , whom he serves and who IS Guinevere's lover . I guess the fact that a Hollywood movie that has two sexy actors of the opposite sex not ending up together at the end of the movie is a good way to give the illusion of reality . By the way , I say illusion based on my immense doubt that the movie really has much to say about the reality behind the legend of King Arthur , not because of any deep knowledge on the subject myself . If you want an interesting story about the time of King Arthur , Mark Twain wrote an outstanding book called " A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , " and I very highly recommend it . It is incredibly well written and is a fascinating story , and probably involves more truth about the legend , even though it contains a bit of time travel . Merlin is even more different than his legend in that book than Arthur . Twain actually makes him a villain in his book , which threw me off because my previous knowledge of the legend came mostly from The Sword in the Stone , one of my all time favorite movies . I have to say that I was impressed with Keira Knightly's performance , although under certain conditions . I loved her performance , but her part was badly written . She is given cheesy lines but delivers them as well as they could have been delivered , and here's the even weirder part , I liked her better in this movie than I did in Pirates of the Caribbean , although I liked Pirates of the Caribbean much more than King Arthur . This is also one of those times that I have to disagree strongly with the critics , who compare it to " last summer's disappointment " ( London Times Online ) or " the flat out silly " ( Roger Ebert ) Troy . I liked Troy . Maybe I should acknowledge that it's possible that I don't know what I'm talking about . Nah . The climactic scenes of the movie involve lots of stabbings and swordplay and skewering and whatnot , reminding me that I'm really getting tired of these epic battle scenes . They blew me away in Braveheart , but have become so commonplace that they become tiresome to watch because I've seen it all so many times before . At the very least , they really tried to keep the digital effects to a minimum with the battle scenes , which I appreciate . And here's another odd thing , minimizing digital effects was certainly not a priority in Troy , and I liked that movie much better . I think that the small fights were so good that I was able to forgive the tedious digital battles . For a Hollywood Arthur , Clive Owen delivers a fine performance . He looks the part and he is one of the relatively few characters in the film who doesn't have an accent that is wildly out of place and time . James Bernardelli points out that the legend of King Arthur is one of the most enduring stories in all of European culture , a statement with which I whole-heartedly agree ( which is also significant because I usually have the exact opposite opinion as he does about movies ) . And given that , it is hard to believe that what is presented in this movie is what grew into that legend . |
544,400 | 562,732 | 7,145 | 6 | A drunken Charlie trying to get to bed ? | Chaplin playing drunk characters are his weakest roles , and for much of the time I was watching One A . M . I got the feeling that he went in to work and didn't have any ideas , so just decided to play a drunk guy coming home from a big night on the town . The plot is virtually nonexistent , it really does start with him coming home drunk , and his only purpose from beginning to end is to get upstairs and go to bed . He stumbles out of a taxi and , after accidentally paying the driver with a cigarette butt instead of the fifty cent fare , he climbs through a window to get into his house , stepping in the fishbowl on the way in . There is a series of mildly amusing sight gags involving things like an extremely slippery throw rug , a spinning table ( which was one of the more amusing gags , despite making no sense at all ) , a stuffed cougar ( or some other scary animal of the cat family ) , a coat rack , and a staircase with some insufficiently attached carpeting . The set that the movie is filmed on is a little strange , with two staircases on either side , both leading up to the second floor , which apparently contains just one door to the bedroom and a clock with a wildly over-sized pendulum . I'm struck by how unrealistic the set is , with those two staircases ( it seems like something Sarah Winchester would build in her house ) , but then again , that clock's pendulum swings long and fast , directly across the path of the door to the bedroom , so it's clear that the set was designed with physical comedy in mind , not architectural efficiency . Chaplin does , after all , ultimately decide to climb that coat rack , twice , rather than use either of the staircases . The best part of the movie , however , is definitely the bed , which Charlie has to deal with when he eventually does make it upstairs . The mechanics of the bed make no sense at all , as it flips around every which way and seems to have a personality of it's own . And apparently it doesn't like being slept on ! There is an interesting contraption at the end that I found a little curious . There's a thing that looks like a ladder in the bathroom , but it turns out that it's a shower that sprays water out of all of the rungs . I wonder if this was kind of a new and innovative showering idea that just never really caught on . At any rate , after losing his battle with the bed , Charlie ultimately falls asleep in the bathtub and the movie ends . It's a clever little comedy , but it's basically just physical comedy and nothing else . Even back in 1916 Chaplin was making much better films than this . |
543,841 | 562,732 | 116,136 | 6 | When you watch Dragonheart , keep in mind that it is a FANTASY movie . Evidently in fantasy movies dragons can remove 50 % of their cardiac system and donate it to a human , granting him immortal life , at least | Dragonheart didn't have much promise from the start , which is probably why it is not very well known . Or maybe it's just because it wasn't very good . Okay , it was a fairly entertaining movie , it had amazing special effects , but the entire premise was just asking too much , even for a fantasy movie . I am willing to accept the idea of dragons and dragon slayers , I'm even willing to suspend disbelief to the point where a dragon slayer might form some sort of twisted symbiotic relationship with the last of the dragons as a means of mutual gain , but a dragon giving his heart to a human ? Come on , you have to draw the line somewhere . Besides that , Sean Connery was horribly miscast as the voice of the menacing but strangely lovable Draco , the amazing CGI dragon with the interspecies adaptable heart . Sure he's from Scotland so he didn't have to fake the accent ( which Dennis Quaid didn't even try to do ) , but the problem with Sean Connery is that no other actor in the world sounds even a tiny bit like him . When I was watching the film , I didn't see the dragon talking , I saw Sean Connery standing in a windowless room somewhere talking into a microphone . That was the main thing that bothered me about the Dragon ; other than that I thought that Connery did a good job as the voice of Draco . The biggest problem with Dragonheart , in my opinion , is that the story is flawed . Like I said , even for a fantasy movie , it is just too much to ask for the audience to believe that a dragon could ( or WOULD ) donate its heart to a human to save a life . Are dragon's really that compassionate ? I doubt it . Maybe I'm just not enough into dragon magic and Dungeons & Dragons and things like that , but I was not too impressed with Dragonheart . Fans of the genre are sure to love it , though . |
543,726 | 562,732 | 24,368 | 6 | A curiosity piece but what was the deal with the romance ? | I watched The Mystery of the Wax Museum because I recently watched the House of Wax remake and so of course I had to go back and watch the original even though I didn't really like the remake , and Mystery happened to be a double feature with the original House of Wax . Having not seen the 1953 film yet , I'm impressed with the level of real tragedy that is infused into this film , which could very easily have just been a cheap exploitation horror film , like the 2005 version . For obvious reasons , the curiously named Ivan Igor , creator of the Wax Museum , reminds me very much of the Phantom of the Opera , film fans are sure to relish the clear influence of The Cabinet of Dr . Caligari on this film , and the rest of us will certainly get a kick out of watching the techniques of one of the earliest real horror films . Ivan Igor has been a struggling artist for some time , and just when it seems that his craft is about to take off into the public eye and make him famous , his partner , with whom he collaborated to rent the building in which he keeps his collection of wax figures , storms in and insists that he wants some insurance money back that he wasted on renting this place out , and before Igor can explain what happened only minutes before , he throws a match and the whole place explodes into flame , burning to the ground in minutes and hideously burning Igor . Injured to the point where he can no longer use his hands , but can only verbally direct other artists in how to do his work , Igor is never able to regain the level of quality that he was able to create himself , and thus ultimately he comes up with the idea to simply coat real corpses with wax and set them up as displays . And thus begins the premise that takes up relatively little of this film but which basically runs amok by the time the 2005 version was released . This one concentrates more on the struggles of a cute blonde reporter trying to get a good story and save her job than it does on the mystery of the wax museum , but once the two stories really start working together the movie flows really well . It's just too bad about the romance at the end of the film . What a joke . Nevertheless , still worth seeing , especially if you're interested in the House of Wax films or horror films in general . |
543,826 | 562,732 | 199,753 | 6 | The movie falls apart right about the same time that the ship does . | The problem with Red Planet is that there is too much known about it before it begins , and this is not only because of previews , but also because of common sense . About halfway through the film , for example , there is a lengthy scene of completely false tension , where the three survivors are helplessly watching their oxygen timers count slowly down to zero , knowing that they have nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait to suffocate . Obviously , we know throughout this entire scene that all they have to do is take off their helmets and start breathing , because if they die like that the movie's over . I suppose some tension might be derived from the fact that THEY don't know they can breathe the air on Mars yet , but since we're a thinking audience , a scene like this falls flat because we already know they're going to survive . I liked some of the things in the movie . It was pretty interesting when they finally arrived at the base on Mars and found that it had been completely destroyed , and the conflict was introduced very early as the ship begins to break apart as soon as they arrive into Mars ' atmosphere , forcing the team to split up for the rest of the movie , but then you realize that every bit of power failed on the ship and yet they still have gravity . Earth has become so polluted that humankind needs a new home , and nations around the world have combined their knowledge and money and space travel capabilities to launch this completely English speaking crew into space to test out the possibility of humans someday living on Mars . Algae has been launched there over a period of twenty years to try to build up an atmosphere of oxygen , but all the algae seems to have disappeared , and one of the mission's objectives is to find out why . I like that they came up with an interesting reason for the algae having disappeared , but I don't like the fact that the screenplay pretends that there can be breathable oxygen on Mars , while an entire Earthful of humans are sending up a manned spacecraft into the atmosphere and don't realize it . Missions like this are not cheap . No spacecraft , manned or not , is sent to another planet without extremely detailed knowledge of that planet's atmosphere . ( spoilers ) That was a hell of an oversight , but I liked that the movie didn't just have them meet some hugely disappointing Martians for our heroes to escape , but the villain that IS presented , while creative in a sense , is even worse . The mission included an exploration robot named AMEE , which for some reason comes with a ' Military Mode . ' I guess this is done in case they should run into any Martian terrorists during the mission . And since AMEE comes equipped with detailed knowledge of the weaknesses of human anatomy , it seems that her designers were concerned about HUMAN Martian terrorists . Not a lot of thought put into this aspect of the movie . Obviously , not a SINGLE person on the crew sent to Mars read the sticker on the back of AMEE , which clearly read , ' WARNING : SEVERE SHOCK OR JARRING OF THIS ROBOT WILL IMMEDIATELY TURN HER INTO A TERMINATRIX . ' On top of that , Red Planet contains probably the biggest loose end that I've seen left loose in a movie since Planet of the Oops in 2001 . Evidently some multi-cellular organisms have evolved on the surface of Mars ( feeding on massive fields of algae , yet another thing that the stupid humans on earth didn't notice ) , that eat just about anything digestible that they come into contact with . Two crew members are lost to them , but not before two of them ( note , the number required for breeding ) can be captured in a steel capsule to be taken back to earth and studied . Just before one crew member succumbs to the little critters , he tosses the capsule to the one member surviving ( Gallagher , played by Val Kilmer ) , insisting that he bring it back to earth with him . At this point , it's perfectly natural to expect that they would have one more uprising just before the end of the movie , or that they would stow away on the ship and create havoc on Earth , like that spider did in Arachnophobia , traveling back to America in that coffin . Instead , Gallagher takes the capsule and the creatures are gone from the story completely as though they were never even there . When the crew took off their helmets and found a breathable atmosphere that no one ever knew about until then , I thought THAT was an oversight , but this , THIS violates even the most basic rules of story writing . One of the first things that you learn about writing stories is that every scene must have a reason for being in the story . If it doesn't , take it out . The fact that the creatures play no role in the outcome of the movie renders their existence in the movie meaningless beyond just having some fancy special effects showing some creative Martian creature . There is so much that could have been done with those animals , which is why it was so disappointing to see them just disappear like that . Things like that are only excusable in movies that promise sequels , or movies that show the creatures remaining as a way to signify an amusing false sense of security , like in Little Shop of Horrors . I just don't really foresee much chance of a sequel to Red Planet . As a science fiction film , Red Planet is entertaining and fun , but there are oversights like the ones I've mentioned that just show that not much thought was put into the screenplay , and something like that alone can completely ruin an otherwise decent movie . The performances all around are more than satisfactory , there is a lot of focus on characterization and the interaction of the crew members and the problems that can arise from questions of trust and questions of faith in machinery that has never been properly tested before the mission ( since it was never sent into space until the mission ) , but there's nothing worse than being impressed by some parts of a movie and slapping your forehead about other parts . The movie provides a great Martian landscape , it contains a thrilling landing scene , in which the pod carrying all of the crew members sprouts huge air bags on all sides to provide for a relatively soft landing , only to roll right off a cliff , and there is even a question of God and religion to add to the complexity of the plot , but there are unfortunate shortcomings that really slow the movie down and prevent it from being as good as it should have been . The talent was there during the production , it just seems like both the script and the final film needed to spend a little more time in the editing room . |
544,792 | 562,732 | 22,395 | 6 | The film hangs from the script like a sack of potatoes . | In one of Hitchcock's slowest moving films , we see the tense interaction between two feuding families with different plans for the future of their community . There is a piece of land at the center of the dispute , which one family wants to use to preserve a life of family and tradition , and the opposing family wants to use to build a scenery-killing but productive factory . The film is based on a play and is not only extremely slow moving , but Hitchcock , with the exception of only a few scenes , simply points and shoots throughout the majority of the film . In the film's defense , the script is exceptional , but the problem is that the film is a technical mess , with the sound quality coming and going with such extremes that at times no audible dialogue can be heard at all . You can catch the crackling pace of the script but there are so many scenes where the film drags almost to a stop and Hitchcock does little to make up for it . The pace picks up slightly when the scandal involving the daughter in law comes in , but compared to what we have come to expect from Hitchcock , both before and after this point in his career , cause this one to fall pretty low on the relevance scale . A curiosity piece for Hitchcock fans and completists , though . |
544,810 | 562,732 | 80,761 | 6 | Classic that has lost all potency as a horror film , but should be respected because the reason that it has lost all potency is because it started so many trends that it has been endlessly duplicated and , hen | Friday the 13th is one of the most recognizable horror movie titles in movie history , but is not the same powerful film that it was in 1980 . It has been ripped off to no end , leaving it little more than a brittle skeleton of its original self , but it was also a rip off of Halloween , so I suppose in a way it has gotten what it deserves . It is a very basic horror film and has been since the day it was released , where a lot of teenagers go out to some remote location , ignore every possibly sign of danger , and start getting killed in the same order that they start getting naked . It is a curious phenomenon that so many horror films seem determined to punish promiscuity as brutally as possible . Maybe the directors are insecure about their daughters or something . Today , the film has been reduced to little more than a curiosity piece for horror movie fans , but also fills the important slot as the original film in one of the largest horror series ' of all time . Maybe even one of the best , at least considering the fact that most of its competitors are just as bad after the original film . I haven't seen Jason X yet , and have been going back to watch all of the older ones so that I can see it in the right order , but I thought it might be interesting to watch the original film and then watch Jason X right afterward , just to see how far the series has come ( or to see how far the special effects have come , at least . My expectations for Jason X are pretty abysmal ) . As far as being entertaining , I don't think that Friday the 13th has suffered too much , although it has turned into an entirely different kind of entertainment than when it was first released as a horror film . Normally when a horror film comes off as funny , it is a sign of the film's failure , but I don't consider the hilarity of the original Friday the 13th as a mark against it at all as much as a sign of the durability of the film . If it can't scare you anymore , it will entertain you in any way it can . You don't watch a film like the original Friday the 13th to get scared , you watch it to laugh at how stupid teenagers can be , you watch it to wonder if your parents really played such astronomically moronic games as strip Monopoly in the woods in the pouring rain , and more than anything else , you watch it to see a young Kevin Bacon frolic around in some tiny jean shorts . It has not withstood the test of time very well at all , but the film is most certainly a survivor . |
543,970 | 562,732 | 160,127 | 6 | Who's that guy ? That's George McFly ! | Charlie's Angels is a pretty sad attempt to cash in on the looks of three of the more attractive actresses working today ( although I am sad to say that Drew hardly fits in that category anymore ) , and the film's similarity to the traditional James Bond formula is a little hard not to notice . Cameron Diaz is an absolute bimbo in this movie , and although Drew Barrymore plays a relatively respectable character , her effectiveness isn't that great , especially given her whiny performances in such recent movies as Home Fries , Never Been Kissed , and The Wedding Singer . The biggest contribution that Drew made to this movie was getting her boyfriend to take a bit part in it . Despite the lack of creativity and the blatant sexual exploitation of Charlie's Angel's , there can be no denying the fact that it just had some good action and at least a few scenes that were really good . There was some fighting action that was really fun to watch , despite the fact that the cinematography was literally stolen from The Matrix , and let's not forget the fact that the Thin Man , with whom the angels had their first confrontation and who made surprisingly classy appearances throughout the film , was the guy who played George McFly in the great Back To The Future trilogy ( well , part I and some of part II , anyway ) . Those are some of my favorite movies ever , and I haven't seen him in many other movies , so I thought it was really cool to see him in a movie again . Charlie's Angels is an un-creative action crime film that continuously and excessively exploits the hotties that star in it , and relies almost solely on their looks as well as some flashy music to push the movie along . There can be no doubt about the fact that the music in the film was thrown in just to promote the soundtrack and make more money . There was hardly a second that went by that there wasn't another song playing , regardless of whether or not it had anything to do with what was happening on screen . There's so much trendy music packed into this movie that it almost overshadows everything else . Notice that they put that ridiculously popular Jennifer Lopez song ( the title of which I don't know or care to know and , of course , by ? ridiculously popular , ' I mean that it's ridiculous that it is popular ) over the end credits . Some of the music was good , but it was poured on so thickly that it becomes cloying and suffocating . LL Cool J definitely said it best during the opening scene of the movie , ' Walk out . ' |
544,785 | 562,732 | 184,858 | 6 | Reindeer Games attempts to run with the likes of such classics as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction , but unfortunately it falls significantly short . | Reindeer Games is a good thriller . It is fun to watch , it has a good story , it's entertaining , and even most of the acting is respectable enough . However , as a whole , the film is pretty weak . Ben Affleck is a car thief who is serving a six year sentence in prison . His cell-mate is a man named Nick Cassidy ( James Frain ) , who seems to have met a beautiful woman named Ashley ( Charlize Therun ) in some sort of prison pen pal system . Rudy and Nick are scheduled to be released on the same day , but Nick has a run-in with a convict and winds up getting killed . Upon his release , Rudy has the bright idea to pose as Nick Cassidy so that he can get , uh , better acquainted with this Ashley girl that he has been hearing about for so long . Unfortunately , her truck driver / amatuer criminal older brother has found out from his letters to her that he previously worked in a casino , and he and his gang want Nick's help ( whether he's willing to help or not ) to rob that casino . Unable to prove that he's not Nick Cassidy and unaware of the design of the inside of the casino , Rudy is then faced with the challenge of successfully robbing this place so that the gang doesn't kill him , while at the same time avoiding getting caught so that he doesn't go back to jail for the rest of his life . The story is good . The huge holes ( why would someone as beautiful as Ashley turn to a prison pen pal system to look for dates ? ! ) are covered up pretty well by the time the film ends , and luckily the acting , for the most part , makes up for the crudeness of the script . The plot is derived from Quentin Tarantino's trademark of showing the end of the story at the beginning of the film . This is always an interesting thing to see , especially in a film like this . However , probably the most disturbing thing about Reindeer Games is the extensive and inexplicable use of blue screens and deep focus photography . There were a lot of shots that showed a face or a gun or something close to the camera , and everything else in the shot , everything that is far away from the camera , is also in focus . There is nothing inherently wrong with this , but it is unnatural , and it calls attention to the fact that there is a movie camera right there . Filmmaking is one of the few professions where invisibility is a goal for success , and while this deliberate violation of that rule is not necessarily prohibited , it should only be committed with good reason . There were scenes in Reindeer Games where I couldn't figure out why deep focus photography and especially blue screens were needed . Despite all of that , however , it did give the film a very distinctive look . Despite the film's numerous shortcomings , Reindeer Games is a fairly well-made crime thriller . I've seen Gary Sinise look better in other films ( see every other film he's ever been in except Mission to Mars ) , and Charlize is not entirely convincing at times , although she did deliver a satisfactory performance , all told . And most of all , if you like plot twists , check this one out , because there are plenty . |
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