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510,766 | 453,068 | 118,636 | 6 | not bad , but might have had more potential , somehow | Apt Pupil is a film I might possibly consider watching again , if I didn't have much to do during the day and had absolutely nothing else to watch ( including TV ) . It's one of those transitional films for a director - in this case Bryan Singer - where from one film that's a success to another there's a bridge in the middle that kind of floats and fizzles before getting a closer look . But it's possible too , as I remember it , that part of my problem initially with the film wasn't as much with Singer's work as a director as it was with ( some of ) the writing . Stephen King's story has a lot of potential , and its idea could have different directions in the scope of the tragedy and aftermath-style horror that comes with a Nazi survivor in everyday America . There could even be a Hitchcok element to it as well , with a man who has evil stored somewhere inside and now in a very average , American town ( and , indeed , what evil thoughts might lie in such average-town inhabitants ) And some of that potential is tapped , primarily in the very tense , underplayed exchanges between Brad Renfro and ( of course ) Ian McKellan . In fact , I would most likely watch the film again more than any other reason for McKellan , who is good as usual ( if not great ) , and tries his best to elevate the complexities of such a character like Kurt Dussander for the audience . But , again , the problem goes back to the writing , as in the third act the film goes completely off into more of a horror movie mode leaving some of the more serious and interesting questions left to muck around in the scenes where Dussander goes off the deep end . And , some of the horror brought to the film ( and I would guesstimate most of it is from King's original story ) is sub-par itself . King has written some great stories dealing with the horrors of humanity in the ' real ' world , but Apt Pupil isn't one of them . With all of the effort put in by Renfro as the wayward , typically curious ( and in this case un-hinged ) teen , McKellan as the understanding and interesting but later truly monstrous figure , and Singer's competent direction , it's a shame then that the material itself wasn't totally taken into account . Worth a viewing once , at least for King die-hards who may find some extra enjoyment from seeing at least one unforgettable scene ( where McKellan puts back on the uniform and gets into the ' mood ' of the old-times ) , but it's far from being one of the better Nazi war criminal movies . |
511,047 | 453,068 | 462,499 | 6 | a case of " you get what you pay for " at the movies . . . . | In this case , you pay for Stallone drawing LOTS of blood , you got it . Lots of it , with many semi-creatively designed ways of their countless means to an end ( blown up , shot , stabbed , ripped out by the throat , shot many times , cluster-bombed , even an arrow for good measure ) . If you like that in your movies , Rambo ( which , I might add , means ' violence ' in Japanese ) is the movie of the week , or month or so . This isn't to say Sylvester Stallone doesn't make his baby into what he calls as anti-war . Perhaps by the sheer ferocious attempt at this stuff , where it's not even black and white in perspective but just black , then there's almost a fascination with that aspect of it , of things just being in a terrain that may mean to be earnest in messages ( helping on another is good , not so much change , one supposes ) , but comes off as something else completely . The enemy has no personality aside from carnal killings and lust - more-so the killings - which is apt for the only dimension coming from a flashback-dream for Rambo with clips from the past movies . Rambo does , however with these comments about the violence , work as a narrow genre entertainment . Stallone works well at this stuff if he can fit the part . With him , as with many action stars , works when less is more . Ironically , he has a lot more to work with in terms of scope than , say , the first Rambo film ( I haven't seen the other sequels yet ) . While Stallone stumbles from the form path of " save the people , that's your mission " trajectory of the plot with the flashback , there's almost a cartoonish quality when he stays on track . There's a lunacy to a character like Rambo , even as he acts as a superhero for anyone within fifty yards of his reach or running length . To explain the premise is beyond the point , except that this time Rambo is a rogue / renegade in the jungle who catches snakes , is recruited by a church group from Colorado to go into Burma , and then has to rescue them by any means necessary . These means are like a common 80s action film on steroids , which might be the saving grace for the actual script . Unexpectedly heart-pounding , the action goes on and on in a big section of the picture , but there is also a sort of late-night take-over of a Burmese prison camp , and a chilling scene involving some Burmese pirates along the river . The actual theatrics of Rambo seem to hit the kind of ground that made Apocalypto look as trashy as it really was . Rambo is smart as jungle-scented bricks , but at least it's got some attitude , from a dude in his 60s like Stallone no less . |
509,671 | 453,068 | 466,839 | 6 | pretty slight , but has enough wit to carry it along | Amy Heckerling's latest romantic comedy , I Could Never Be Your Woman , got , to use a proverbial word , shafted . It was meant for theatrical release and went straight to DVD due to some bad deals done with one of the producers . It's a shame despite the fact that Heckerling's comedy was far from being top-shelf work . It certainly stands a good chance at ranking well enough alongside ( and probably better than ) many of the tripe conventional market-stuffers that are out in cineplexes . Her film posits that a middle-aged TV writer ( Michelle Pfieffer ) has some angst and insecurities in dating one of the new stars of her TV show ( Paud Rudd ) , and it's not a bad premise . This is also thrown in a quasi plot thread involving her daughter ( Atonement's Saoirse Ronan , couldn't tell it was the same girl she's that good ) as she tries to navigate her first possible boyfriend . A lot of this isn't delivered with all of the best execution - certainly it's hard to figure on what exactly makes the Tracy Ullman bits funny as they're slipped in with some awkward soft-focus and at ill-timing - and there's something kind of fishy about putting such an actress like Michelle Pfieffer , who is still incredibly beautiful for any age , in the role of an insecure woman who can't see herself with such a younger man after such a long break from being with a man . At the same time , there is a good deal that does work to Heckerling's advantage , such as the bond between the mother and daughter in the story that doesn't ring as being sappy or trite like in other rom-coms or flicks with mother-daughter talks and such . And almost in spite of the bright lighting , Paul Rudd lays on the same charm and wit carried over from the Judd Apatow comedies ( if , of course , nowhere near as funny in the sensibility of crudeness ) . And who can't love Jon Lovitz or Fred Willard ? So with I Could Never Be Your Woman , it's good for a rental , but that's not really the point with the release issue . It's the kind of movie , as with Heckerling's others , that play for laughs with a big audience , and are perfect for a certain niche of female viewers and die-hard rom-com afficionados . It's light and slight and not too terrible , if not much memorable either . |
508,727 | 453,068 | 382,625 | 6 | maybe the best that could be done from the book - a contrived-to-hell ( no pun intended ) blockbuster with some merit | What can I say that has already be said about Dan Brown's international smash book about the deepest " secret " in Christianity ? Having read only part of it ( as it is , arguably of course , an airplane book with a hugely elevated status over controversy and popularity ) , I can say that the movie , directed by Ron Howard and with a cast of French , American and British all-stars , does what it means to do . It brings some food-for-thought , with enough exposition for three typical Hollywood movies . And , at times , Howard and company ( i . e . screenwriter Akiva Goldsman ) shave off a couple of parts in Brown's writing that aren't necessary while keeping the thoughtful ( as well as , dare I say , silly ) nature of the writing . As it is , the Da Vinci Code DOES have a plot that is structured well enough - a symbol specialist , Robert Langdon ( Tom Hanks in a role that basically calls for the basics of his talents , no more no less ) , is drawn into a case of murders , a conspiracy involving secret , ultra-dangerous sects of the Catholic church ( with a creepy villain in Paul Bettany's character ) , and a search for an item as old as Christianity itself . The film traces parts of Europe for the hunt , and along the way there is information compulsively expounded upon about the secrets behind the murders , the symbols , the clues , and how the entire history of the Jesus Christ is possibly - dare the filmmaker / authors say - corrupted and a lie . So it is here that the controversy has been brought through . But the controversy is no more understandable than it was for films like Dogma and The Last Temptation of Christ ; religious groups are BOUND to get sensitive by material that faces against their sternly stringent views . That it's transferred into a murder mystery / thriller that has more twists than the International House of Pretzel puts it up for everyone to contemplate . What helps make the film watchable even as the story goes through more contrivances and surprises than I'd care to count ( with the core being a suspension of disbelief of both plot turns and the exposition bits ) is the cast assembled . The bulk of the players - Ian McKellan , Alfred Molina , Audrey Tatou , and Jean Reno - are the best that could have been cast , and all that are asked of them are to say the dialog with enough conviction and believability to not be totally dull or just , well , wrong . While the direction by Howard and his crew is not the most imaginative , he is able to serve all of the " so-called " facts and ideas to use without making it into the overly pretentious . While I wouldn't think of this at all of being a great film or with the ambition even to BE one , it at least tries to have the skills of the common Hollywood thriller while serving up more facts than the same thriller wouldn't think to touch . To put it another way - this is basically Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with half of the adventure , and more than half of the historical and religious implications amplified . As Ebert said , is " preposterously entertaining " , and to take it as 100 % serious is missing what is aimed for , even if not entirely successful . |
510,906 | 453,068 | 152,015 | 6 | is pretentious always a bad thing ? maybe not , even if it keeps from being very recommendable | I kept thinking watching Pola X , the first Leos Carax film I've seen yet , what it means for a film or any work of art to be " pretentious " . The dictionary defines it as being or seeming to be " expressive of affected , unwarranted , or exaggerated importance , worth , or stature " . Carax does indeed want his film to be important , and sometimes he does go to exaggerated lengths to get his results , of the ' artsy-fartsy ' kind that one would only find in small art-houses in NYC ( in fact , this was probably a film that screened for at least a month at the Angelika in Manhattan ) . But there's an intriguing conceit that Carax has with his material as it goes along : it's almost as if he's critiquing pretension , mocking it in subtle ways as he shows his disparate and desperate character heading towards an uber tragic end . It's a story that unfolds too thickly in hopelessness , where the characters don't seem to mind it as there is hope for two of them , at one point , that things will get better until they start getting horribly worse , sometimes in the abstract . Try as I might have at the half-way point to dismiss it as rambling pseudo-poetic French dreck , there's an appeal and watchable quality to it all , and I'd almost be inclined to call it a good effort . . . Almost . The story is taken from a Herman Melville novel , though I'd wonder how much exactly was changed in the adaptation ( incest , anyone ? ) Pierre ( Depardieu , son of Gerard ) is a novelist engaged to beautiful Lucie , and lives with his mother ( Deneauve ) , but is torn away after finding one night in the woods that he has a long lost older sister who was raised elsewhere in Europe . He moves with her to Paris , and after getting rejected by a cousin ( Lucas , disappearing for a long while in the film then returning in act three , or five , or whatever ) , go to live in a big warehouse type of loft where a weird avant-garde rock band practices and records songs . Meanwhile , a new crazy book is in the works , a child that was tagging along with another woman ( I'd assume Isabelle's friend or caregiver or something ) is killed randomly , and pretty quickly Pierre goes as insane and rambling as his book . Now , granted , a lot of this is presented matter-of-factly , but there is a mood that Carax creates that makes it " affected " . There's a tint , for example , that sometimes makes characters look all blue - which works more or less in the revelation of who Isabelle is to Pierre in the woods - and scenes that aren't totally clear as to whether they are really real or imagined ( Deneuve's fate on a bike is shot and executed almost as a parody of itself ) . And Depardieu himself is like a walking pit of uncertain angst . He plays him adequately enough , but there is the creeping sense , as with the film a lot of times , that there isn't quite as much dimension as one would hope , or at least would think the filmmaker would recognize . Not that this is a total deterrent . I like when a filmmaker isn't afraid to plunge the viewer into unconventional duress and ambiguity , and for at least a few scenes Pola X does feel thriving with a sense of drama infused well by the exquisite but anxious camera-work ( the child's death is one of these , as well as the climax that gains momentum in a style comparable to Strosek , minus the chicken ) . And the actual band in the movie itself seems to be Carax commenting on what he must realize is over-reaching in other sections ; is it to be taken seriously , really , when we see the lead singer or whomever it is doing a weird body movement while the abdomen is covered in red ? There's even a trippy dream scene with characters in a river of blood that treads that pretension line : you can sense the filmmaker behind it is so happy with how it came out as mad as it is , and it's actually quite an eye-full . Carax also pulls off one of the most explicit sex scenes in film history ( full penetration , among other acts of foreplay ) , and this oddly enough does serve an emotional point - it feels eerie in the light , but strangely intimate . All of this adds up to what then ? Is Pola X worth watching ? If you're familiar already with / admire Carax's work , it's a pretty safe bet as an act of semi-experimentation . For a first-timer to his work , like myself , it's a hit or miss experience , but one I wasn't too upset at having . At the least , one can say , Carax didn't go to the lengths of the man who directed a film Carax once starred in : Godard's King Lear . |
508,736 | 453,068 | 493,430 | 6 | is it another sign of the decline of American intelligence , or another grab-bag of the most obscene gags and jokes to hit theaters , you decide | Jackass Number Two may not be as " good " as part 1 , though it may depend on how you define ' good ' . I guess it has to mean more to how much you're fulfilled entertainment-wise by the material . To say that the Jackass boys outdo themselves this time is putting it lightly . Maybe it was around the time that one of them drank horse semen , or when one put a leech on his eyeball , or when one of them blew farts directly into a another with a space helmet on , or when . . . Nevermind . The point of Jackass Number Two is , well , there is no point if you're going at it logistically . If anything by logic these guys are out of their ( bleeping ) minds . Being fodder for seeing-red-charging-bulls , here and there surrounded by a snake or two , I wonder here and there if these guys inadvertently have a death wish in them , or at least the instinct . But on the other hand , Jackass 2 is at it's best for me in showing how people can actually be live-action cartoons - sometimes very X-rated and crude , but cartoons all the same . This was evident for me too already in the first Jackass movie , but this time it's almost all-too-blatant . What are we to think of Wile E . Coyote's reputation when Johnny Knoxville straps himself to a rocket ( though this time just for the sake of doing it across a lake , not for a roadrunner ) , or in what I thought of as a Beavis & Butt-head homage rolling down a long hill inside of a tire ? But there are other things that had me laughing very hard at what they were doing . The old-man / lady get-ups were the best for me , as Spike Jonze ( yes , Spike Jonze ) and Knoxville provided caricatures that are like walking , breathing punk'd creations , with genitals and breasts all askew . Yet through all the stupidity , the insanities , and what sometimes just has me going ' huh ' ( the final musical number comes to mind ) , there is at least a good spirit of the old-time pranksters in them , even as they cheat death and get away from it laughing their heads off at each other . Little bits like riding the bicycle with the one big wheel and small little wheel ( " why did people do this " ) , or the switcheroo of Bam's father in bed , are genuinely clever , if still very stupid things to see . Now , if you're going into this movie without having seen part 1 , it may be a bit naive on your part . It helps to see the first one just to know whether or not this stuff is really for you . Because if you know it is for you , Jackass Number Two is probably the picture of the season . If not , you may end up either a ) puking in your seat , seriously , or b ) walking out within the first twenty minutes . This is the kind of picture that I , who rarely calls for censoring anything , could have been warranted a second look for an NC-17 rating . On the other hand , it'd be wrong of me to say I didn't have a good time for most of the time either , even when a gag or joke was weak . |
508,881 | 453,068 | 112,744 | 6 | the devices of the writer / director vs . the actors | Sean Penn can be a great actor , but with the Crossing Guard he displays a hit or miss attitude in the believability of his characters . It starts with a given for a gripping premise : a man torn completely psychologically from himself , Freddy ( Jack Nicholson ) finds out the man who killed his daughter in a drunk driving accident is released from prison after only six years . And , he'll go and kill him . Why he'll kill him is also a psychological pull is that he's more so vying to kill him for his ex-wife Mary ( Angelica Huston ) than he is for himself . It's as much , if not more , about pride than it is about vengeance . But through this premise , and the divide between self-destructive , drunk Freddy and the guilt-ridden , morose John Booth , Penn paints his characters sometimes into corners even when things become most intriguing . It's appropriate , I suppose , that Penn decided to dedicate the film to Charles Bukowski , as it probably alludes a lot to the moods of the characters in those books . But in putting across moods so much he almost forgets that his actors need believable circumstances to follow . One device , for example , is the whole " you got three days " angle Freddy pulls with John when he first confronts him in his trailer . There's also the sort of romance-in-limbo between John and another woman ( Robin Wright Penn ) . But what I didn't expect was that the actors almost ( I say almost because they do ) don't rise above the contrivances of the script . There's even a great scene between Nicholson and Huston in a restaurant the night the murder is supposed to take place . Scenes like this , and a tear-ridden phone call from Freddy in a red-tinted room , are powerful and connect with the overall theme of loss in the film . Yet as a director Penn doesn't pull enough with his characters and mood to make it as compelling as it can be . He also relies on some fairly arty camera moves to make it more interesting , when they aren't needed anyway . Nicholson and Morse , meanwhile , are consummate pros who get into their characters completely ( and for Nicholson especially it's almost a walk in the park , with his motivation less about the death of his daughter than it is about decay itself ) . But what is the audience to make of the mediocre decision to have Freddy get pulled over by the cops on his way to kill John , for drunk driving , and then go into a very far-fetched chase from them to catch up to John just so the irony can be placed in ? It's not that the actors don't use some devices either at their disposal . However in the case of the Crossing Guard , no matter how deeply felt Penn is to his material - leading up to a somewhat meaningful ending at the cemetery - he doesn't give it all to actors who demand more from him . I also think having seen this after seeing the Pledge , a brilliant drama with many of the same themes of redemption from another's death and loss from it all , rises so much more above similar ground in this picture . Not bad , but not great either - sort of an unfulfilled , if always watchable , middle-ground . |
509,472 | 453,068 | 91,203 | 6 | is this a good movie ? no . is it completely nonsensical fun ? hell yeah ! | I'll give it up to Russell Mulcahy , he knows how to direct . . . kind of . Somehow his camera is always moving or finding some kind of intense or superfluous or just bat-crazy motion to get something , anything , out of this insane story . Of course , there can be only one , as is a moral of Highlander that seems to be contingent on the franchise providing McCloud ( Christopher Lambert ) with new opponents who , as with zombies to a degree , need to be decapitated so that he can be the one . Watching the director's cut of Highlander , having never seen it but being well aware of the lineage and even with two of the dreaded sequels Endgame and The Source ( and yes , thankfully , they are worse than this ) , I'm struck by how it's not necessarily a really " good " movie , but it's wildly watchable . Its plot is convoluted at times into a gymnastic pretzel , its actors are either oddly wooden ( Lambert ) , Christmas Ham ( Sean Connery ) , or a total bad-ass ( Brown ) ripped off partially from Schwarzenegger in Terminator . Did I mention the action and fights ? Good heavens . But why should I go on about plot details , they'd only . . . take up about an entire treatment explaining it all , which would include explaining why McCloud is ' the one ' , or what a quickening is , or why Sean Connery plays an Egyptian with a Spanish name and flamboyant costume , or how that one woman who's the secretary is also the little girl is . . . nevermind . Suffice to say , McCloud is in 1986 , but he also looks back to the 16th century when he was first discovered to have " the devil in him " , and soon discovered that he couldn't be killed - unless his head is cut off . So , he learns from Connery ( who arrives on screen in one of the great entrances in movies , almost unironically from Mr . Bond himself ) how to sword-fight and have fun on mountains and NOT swim since he can't drown , and then it cuts ahead to 1986 again where , apparently , an old nemesis played by Clancy Brown is out for blood - his blood - and those around him will suffer as they may . Make any sense ? Somewhat surprisingly , Highlander is taken seriously by a whole lot of people . No problem , as I'm sure there are some who will just look past everything that is hokey and corny and badly choreographed for the mythology that is created . Surely it is entertaining , and sometimes ( whether or not unintentionally ) gut-bustingly hilarious , but it's hard for me to take much of this seriously , because of it being dated and badly staged and ( mostly ) acted without much room for any dimension save for hamming it up or going for one-note bad-assedness . While it's fun as anything in 80s action flicks to watch Connery fight Brown on the steps of an incredibly goofy display of a crumbling castle , not for a moment is it actually quality , imaginative storytelling . In fact , this is like some amazing relic from , um , two decades ago that those who remember liking it legitimately in the past should revisit to really know what they're seeing - which includes some of the incredible and incredibly sappy Queen songs often slapped on in place of a score . |
508,638 | 453,068 | 347,840 | 6 | works better in context with Inland Empire | I had known of David Lynch's made-for-his-website shorts called Rabbits long before his latest feature-length film came out , Inland Empire , and when I saw what he had taken from the shorts into the picture it worked a lot better than taken out of context and left by their own . The interpretations can only be so many - are the rabbits meant to be symbols of emotively-drained TV caricatures , or are they just , um , rabbits ? The shorts ended up working better in I . E . because they could go alongside with the other wild and manic scenes of surrealism , and be in a much stronger sense of ' dream-logic ' when taken as part of the completely non-linear structure of the picture . By themselves , they're much more confusing - even as a Lynch fan I admit this - and to use the word often maligned with auteurs , it's self-indulgent to a fault . It's not that seeing how the rabbits interact isn't absorbing in the sense of wanting to see what will happen next , or when the laugh-track is implemented . But what the shorts lack are clearer ties to what is being abstracted . Only Lynch knows , which is just as well . I wasn't unhappy to see the Rabbit segments on their own online , and a few times the ultra strange humor that may or may not be the point of these cinematic exercises . But I wish it could've been more on their own legs , or ears , or whatever . It's not like it's nothing , but it's not as substantial of a Lynchian ' something ' as usual with his shorts . |
510,018 | 453,068 | 303,658 | 6 | it's like one big loaf of cyber-teen cheesy-bread ; Miike had to know this was a goof | Talk about a project for hire - this is one of those under-seen movies that is understandably kept nowhere in your local blockbuster , and only discovered on Netflix or Amazon by the fans of director Takashi Miike who might want to look for something even more ' different ' than his high-voltage yakuza pictures and surreal nightmares . In a sense Andromedia is still a surreal nightmare , only this time filled with so much corny vibes that you'd have to be the biggest air-head 13 year old girl not to see the humor in it . I'm sure Miike had to see it too , otherwise he probably wouldn't of touched it with a 20 foot pole . It's the kind of work that's too weird to be popular , ever , in America , and I wonder looking at the response here on IMDb if there's even much awareness for it in Japan . It tells a love story with images like the cherry orchard ( on a beach ) meant to accentuate the power of the main teen couple ( Mai and Yu played by typical but dippy Hiroko Shimabukuro and Kenji Harada respectfully ) . Mai , by the way , is not really Mai , but Ai , her previous self's memory packed into a computer simulation form of herself after her sudden death . It's not just Yu who wants her , but there's also some nefarious villains who want her via the technology for no really big reasons ( no world domination , at least I don't think so ) other than just having it cause it's there . One of these guys is very strangely played by Christopher Doyle , a DP for directors like Van Sant and Wong Kar Wai , who happens to have a haircut like a muskrat long dead and made into a wig . He has his goons chase after Yu , and his friends as well , just after that laptop with poor Mai ( err , Ai ) , leading up to a climax that doesn't really make much sense except to have really over-the-top CGI effects . Actually , much of the film doesn't make too much sense , but if you don't get that by the thirty minute marker , just throw out the movie . I didn't know going into it that it was also , in part , meant to be a partial commercial for two pop-music groups ( though the very oddly placed and uproariously funny music video in the middle of the movie marks as something of a crazy marvel in Miike's cannon ) . Of course , it will never mark as a must-see even for most Miike fans , and I'm sure some who come across it will just keep scratching their heads once it's over . Though after seeing several other films from the massively prolific director , I'm kind of glad to see that there is such a fluffy side to his savage satire , and how in-between the sickeningly cutesy love moments ( like when Mai and Yu have a real ' connection ' , where a carnival lights up and the nearly wretched music cues up ) there's still some bits that remind one of the heedlessly inventive and demented wild-man of Japanese cinema . The only thing funnier , sometimes unintentionally sometimes not , than seeing Yu and his boy-band friends jumping off the cliffs to relative safety , or the brain-tumored gangster Takanaka getting enveloped in the horrendous tubes of the internet center , or the very late 90s mix of Backstreet Boys-styled music and CGI , is that this was originally based on a book ! It's poof , slight , and it almost marks a form of campy , sci-fi pop-art . |
509,523 | 453,068 | 60,984 | 6 | interesting as a repetition work , though far from Lynch's best short film | Probably the best , or most engrossed , I found myself in David Lynch's first short film effort - animated of course - was that in his use of repetition there were more chances to spot things not seen the previous time . This is really in some ways rather disgusting in its own abstracted art-school sense , but it grew on me the more times I saw these ' six figures ' going through their digestive problems . There's a mix of colors used in an animated style that I haven't seen much since I was younger ( it was done here and there on these kids videos I watched , the lower rent ones , heh ) . The alarm sound that blares , what Lynch himself described as the ' sound ' attributed to the moving painting he tried to recreate , is my least favorite part of the short . I almost wished Lynch had gone the Brakhage route , leaving just the images to speak for themselves . What I did really find interesting though on a purely film-student level however was how I liked it the more times it repeated itself , trying to get the viewer to see into what is being done with the ink marks and various blotches of ideas in forms of smoke and vomit . Nothing too outrageous or speaking of the future genius he'd show , but it would've been something I'd given high marks for if I was judging whatever contest he originally submitted this to forty years ago - it definitely carries that appeal . |
508,289 | 453,068 | 355,702 | 6 | passable enough for a easy-going afternoon , but less than outstanding entertainment | Maybe I'm a little jaded from Lords of Dogtown following the documentary Dogtown & Z-Boys , and maybe my interest in the film is compounded by the fact that I'm not that heavy into skateboarders - even ones that can do some incredible things like the Z-Boys . But the film here , which has some moments of fine humor and edge and even a little drama , isn't something I would outright recommend unless you already know what you're getting into . For example , if you're the kind of person , male or female ( though probably male as , for the most part , it is a male-dominated activity ) , that shops often at the VANS store , or own many Tony Hawk video games , this is the film event of the year . But for the casual observer of the sport , reactions may vary . The drama , of what is there , doesn't totally pick up mainly until the latter part of the film as the Z-Boys start to gain more notoriety with their shake-up of the skateboarding world . From what I remember seeing , much of the film is set among guys - some very famous future skaters like Stacy ( John Robinson ) and Jay ( Emile Hirsch , who does make an impression with his longish blonde hair and cool demeanor ) - who hang out a lot , and try to one-up each other with their ' moves ' , mostly in swimming pools they sneak into and other grungy places in 1970s surf-side California . Some of these scenes are really funny ; I particularly liked Heath Ledger ( somewhat unrecognizable ) as the head of a skater-shop named Skip . But a lot of this is also a bit aimless , even as it has a quasi-organizing principle . As a much stronger storytelling / visual stroke was in the documentary , director Catherine Hardwicke just tries to make it as ' docu-drama ' as possible , with more attitude than real characterization , and sometimes scenes that come off TOO improvised , if that's possible . Not a bad film in the slightest , and if it's ever a pretty mellow day with some friends who are more into the high-stakes , big-game skater world than I , I'd watch it again . It's just that it doesn't necessarily work either as an affecting tale of a small revolution with the youth in the 70s . |
510,578 | 453,068 | 338,348 | 6 | a little creepy in some unexpected ways , though should be a delight for kids | Maybe seeing The Polar Express would benefit from seeing it again on a big IMAX screen like Robert Zemeckis intended ( it's been playing steadily the past few years in limited holiday IMAX runs with good results ) . But this isn't , if memory serves me , really one of his best films . It does contain that cheerful , strange holiday spirit that's associated with many seminal works ( and like Christmas Carol there is a level of much needed darkness , like with the side-character the hero boy runs into on the train who looks like he's been slumming it in coal ) . There's even some suspense thrown in for good measure at times , like when the polar express comes into the city , but meanwhile our main kid characters are going underground and trying to find another way out to get to all the excitement up above . And it's a daunting task from Zemeckis and Hanks to pull all this off anyway , so as a technical marvel of animation and innovation it stands right alongside Who Framed Roger Rabbit as a grand achievement . But I'd be lying if I thought it wasn't just a wee bit creepy too . The motion-capture technique which makes up the spine of the picture is sometimes stilted and a little , um , just weird for me , though maybe some kids will gravitate to it more than I . The songs are also a downer , as high-flying as they get in spots ( the conductors ' song on the train ) , seeing Steven Tyler was painful in this situation , and the sappy song thrown in at one point reminded me of the lesser songs I heard in animated movies as a kid . And yet , even with the problems I had with the Polar Express , it achieves what it sets out to do with enough confidence to make it a " treat for the family " , as the cliché goes , and may attract them even more than I or repel them even more-so . It has its moments of ingenuity , and a great chase bit on the train involving lots of ice on the tracks . That it's less than the sum of its parts isn't unimaginable either . |
508,210 | 453,068 | 757,361 | 6 | a glimpse at a perpetually torn and frayed family ; Bergman or Rohmer lite | Margot at the Wedding is an admirable but not wholly successful attempt at writer / director Noah Bambach to go another step further following the Squid and the Whale . Where that film had the courage of convictions on the part of Baumbach , making a very personal tragic-comedy where the warts-and-all characters were part of a fully-formed narrative , Margot at the Wedding skips around the narrative , and doesn't have the kind of flow that made such works that Baumbach obviously loves by the masters of intense character studies of intellectual anxieties in love and the mind - Bergman and Rohmer and maybe Cassavetes - so potent . A lot of the time Baumbach has his actors right in the pit ready for a really harsh moment of lacerating drama , he suddenly skips the narrative off to a moment of oddball humor ( I know ' oddball ' is a criticism tossed around often , but what to call it when during a scene with a heated argument , it suddenly has to end when , oh-no , the mother's daughter is lying underneath a tree that is about to fall down after her soon-to-be-step father was cutting down and will also fall on the tent that . . . nevermind ) . Point is , Margot at the Wedding , for all of its strengths in casting , can't quite carry the music despite knowing the words . It's the kind of work too that at 91 minutes feels much too brief ; why shortchange some potentially interesting individuals by cutting off some more time spent squarely with Margot and her sister Paulette and their kids and Jack Black's character to put in some weird unnerving scenes with a Deliverance recast of neighbors ? Those creepy folks , who at separate times go all uppity over aforementioned tree and for Margot snooping in on their house at them cutting up a pig , serve far less purpose for what is really potent and powerful in the picture . And what is also lacking is some context for the actors to work with ; Kidman has her moments of interest here as a woman who is , as becomes all the more apparent as her story goes along , on the succinct verge of mental breakdown ; Leigh is solid as always , even when she only shows her best in the last act while the story starts to collapse ; and Black is strangely affecting here , trading between his ' shtick ' persona of cynically detached heavy and a very sad individual ( and possibly the most sympathetic , save for the kids ) . What happens then is something that is both curious and infuriating ; we're given some snapshots of a family in a perpetual downward spiral , where we're also given at the very end the overbearing sensation ( less subtle notion ) that bad things will continue on . Sometimes there are some moments that really caught me well - Margot climbing a tree is one , and it's a scene shot and edited for perfect impact , and there's also a strangely suggestive scene with Margot and her son sleeping in the same bed , of the complexity of their love / hate relationship - but they were too far and in-between . My complaints are harsh , but it's out of purely constructive critical thinking : Baumbach is a talented writer , as evidenced with Squid and the Whale as well as co-writer for Wes Anderson in the past . He can shoot for the moon if he wants to as a dramatist , as there is enough proof of that not only in ' Squid ' but even in spurts in Margot . But he has not made it yet , as it leaves itself as an exercise , a kind of first-draft of a possibly much better script that instead got made into what's here . This all being said , I was still glad I saw it , and glad that there are still attempts , strivings for a form of harsh truth regarding creative persons who can't connect with one another . It's always worth seeing a film like this , even if it doesn't work all the way . |
508,796 | 453,068 | 1,032,755 | 6 | good try , but not quite cigar for Ritchie on this one | One hopes Guy Ritchie , as with another filmmaker of his age-range Kevin Smith , may grow more as filmmakers as the years go on , but at the moment one senses a kind of rut in the process . It's not even that RocknRolla is an entirely bad film or is unwatchable . On the contrary there are one or two scenes and moments in RocknRolla that could be considered as some of the most accomplished and funny directing and writing Ritchie has done in his relatively short career . But he's also playing on now tired chords ; it's like , basically , Scorsese-lite done to a cup of tea and music video " attitude " pushed to 11 . Which , in all actuality , is like what Lock , Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch were like , which means lots of colorful street characters with colorful language to match , narration , rock music placed in at every turn possible , and doses of black humor that come with the territory . Personally , I'll go back to Scorsese next time around . In RocknRolla we get the story ( or interwoven stories ) of criminals in the midst of a land deal that also involves 7 million changing hands between a Russian , an ' old-timer ' ( Wilkinson ) , a new younger gang called the Wild Bunch ( including One-Two played by Gerard Butler ) , a seductive lawyer ( Thandie Newton , definitely her sexiest yet ) , and the RocknRolla of the title , Johnny Quid . There's also a ' lucky painting ' that mucks up the work as the local MacGuffin of the piece ( we never do see what the painting is , so who's to say why it appears so lucky ) , and a couple of lowly record producers attached to Quid that get rolled into the mess . All the while Ritchie treats these threads kind of in the mode of ' business as usual ' , while throwing a bone here and there to a new ( or used ) idea and some funny dialog , like about a recurring , hard slap , a closet-gay member of the Wild Bunch ( the revelation scene is actually very well acted , but soon devolves into a so-so joke ) , and a note-for-note remake of a specific plot detail from Snatch , with crayfish replacing pigs as the choice of the old-man villain's " we have ways of killing you / making you talk " device . Most of the performances are well enough for the film ( save for Piven and Ludicrous , who have nothing to do and are there as window-dressing ) , and there is one particular sequence where the Wild Bunch get embroiled in a robbery-gone-bad and an ensuing chase with the Russians that is a fantastic and uproarious sliver of genre film-making . But all the same , for all the attitude , for all the cool rock songs like The Clash's ' Bankrobber ' , and for the eventual " twist " that should come a mile away , it feels a little left-out-of-the-fridge . This isn't to say that Ritchie isn't faring better than his previous effort , Revolver , which saw him trying to experiment as a surrealist and falling flat on his face . Yet , is it too much to exclaim " huh ! " when one sees at the end of the film a title card which proclaims in serial-mode to " tune in next time for . . . The Real RocknRolla ! " How can there be enough for a sequel , let alone the proposed RocknRolla trilogy , when it merely comes off as a less consistently entertaining version of Ritchie's first two movies ? Can there be such a thing , in short , as delusions of genre ? I think so , even when it's sometimes a very good show . |
510,806 | 453,068 | 841,044 | 6 | more like ' Voyage to Italy ' than a Before Sunrise / Sunset picture , it's coarse and funny and loses its way towards the end | 2 Days in Paris speaks of some good gifts that writer / director / composer / editor / co-star Julie Delpy can provide when on a project such as this . It's a personal film , with former boyfriend Adam Goldberg cast as Delpy's character's current significant other of two years , and how the two of them go through Europe trying to reignite the passion of their relationship but fall flat . Now , it might sound like it'll be one of those movies , where each partner ends up going off to others for sex , lots of lurid depictions , etc . But it's a lot more fluffy at times , and a lot more scathing , in its sensibilities on relationships than that . In the tone of improvisation with the dialog ( how much or little would depend on the scene , I'd figure , as the voice-overs are definitely right from the script ) seems to come from a Linklater-based formula , but this is probably where the comparisons should end ( with the exception being perhaps the idea of chance encounters , here used with grimace ) . It's about the disintegration of a relationship , as it ends up unfolding , but unfortunately it doesn't seem to amount to much in the long-run . Not that Delpy doesn't have a lot of ideas to express on how each side of the relationship has insecurities and doubts and guises and real love to share . Goldberg , playing a kind of Woody Allen type of neurotic figure , and Delpy also in a form of quasi-neuroses , start off with a sort of sensibility between the two of them that's understood - he'll make subtle wisecracks , constantly , and she'll respond usually in kind . But then come the ex-boyfriends - as a form of unintended proof about Goldberg's theory , formed in Paris , that people across one side of the world will likely meet people one knows on the other side - and it starts to set off a chain reaction of questions raised and poised , trust broken , and the climax coming as exposition and a really stupid denouement with a dance in the street . It wont be anything of a Bergman scale of revelation , at the end of it all , but at the least 2 Days in Paris does afford many genuine moments of laughs and some nifty style amid the pretension . I liked Delpy's parents - played by her real life parents - who were nutty without being too over-the-top as caricatures , weird enough to unnerve Goldberg ( rabbit for dinner ? ) , while being sort of friendly and open ( sex with Jim Morrison , who knew ? ) . I liked the moments of comic tension in the cab rides . And whenever a seethingly uncomfortable moment sprang up in a party scene ( there's one line , I can't recall it now , but it comes during one of those drunken dialog bits that don't sound written at all , and it's the funniest in the film ) , it's a sweet piece of dark romantic comedy . The only shame then is that there's not a whole lot that Delpy adds to anything that hasn't been said in other romantic comedies , better ones , even with more realistic characters than most . Fine to see once with a couple of glasses of wine and with / without cigarettes , but as a tale of two people caught in a foreign land with the weight of circumstance and past ghosts in a relationship coming back up at the both of them I'd stick with Rossellini's 1953 film . |
508,428 | 453,068 | 66,380 | 6 | a good vampire movie ? Probably not . . . but it is something | Calling director Jesus Franco a pornographer after watching Vampiros Lesbos would be unfair , but not simply for the face that he's directed many , many films throughout a career of B to Z grade projects . It's also because it would be too easy . The man is , after all , an " artist " , or whatever might pass for one in 1970 . He was 40 at the time and made a film that , for better or worse , is a part of a legacy of sex-horror trash that must be mentioned in any conversation about sexy naked women and some blood and vampires and stuff . It's definitely not a very good movie , and point in fact it's probably too pretentious to see its own forest full of trees . But it does have some kind of power , some kind of very strange intuition that makes it never too boring - and , if you're into a very abstract love / mind-game story of vampire femme fatales then here you go . In Vampiros Lesbos or , you guessed it , Lesbian Vampires , Jesus Franco tells a story that is about as loosely based on Stoker's mythology as one of the dresses is on any given girl in a sultry scene . A lawyer , Linda Westinghouse ( and yes , Ewa Stromberg so looks like Linda Westinghouse doesn't she . . . actually kind of ) , is on a beach away from her man and meets a carefree woman , Soledad Miranda , who draws her into her world : she's the sole heiress of Count Dracula's fortune , and has also been indoctrinated into the " coven " of other vampires , and by a slip of the " wine " she brings Linda in as well . Meanwhile , another sexy blonde is going nuts in a mental hospital where a doctor tries his hardest to figure on how to kill the darn beasts . So , in truth , there is some relation to the original book , much in the same way a hippie living in a sewer eating rats and tripping 40 year old acid is in relation to Jerry Garcia . This is such a work of its time that it might have actually been close to perfection for maybe one day in 1970 or 1971 , while the sun was setting and everything was perfect for Franco and his production team and actresses all tanned and sultry , and then it was gone forever and locked into a time capsule . It's loaded with " crazy " imagery , hallucinatory passages of subjective viewpoints from its female characters - perhaps all an allusion to lesbianism and it keeping women trapped who normally wouldn't be under different circumstances ( ? ) - and even an annoying recurring symbol of a scorpion in a pool ( yeah , we get it , scorpion , Peckinpah , move on ! ) The acting also isn't good at all by a couple of the supporting players , like that guy who plays Morpho with the same stone-faced look or even Dr . Seward . But at the same time , as a time capsule , it holds some pleasures of some minor guilty measure . While its violence isn't directed with much care , Franco is a perverted master of a certain kind of seduction between women on screen , and here he does get some scenes and moments that are creepy and striking and even erotic . I also liked Stromberg and Miranda in their roles , no matter how at-best two-dimensional they were . And the music is both divinely awesome and totally ludicrous with it being funky and smooth and ' hey , Tarantino ripped that off and it is that great ' , as well as being like a putrid re-rendering of that Pink Floyd song from Zabriskie Point's finale played repeatedly to poor effect . Vampiros Lesbos is one of a kind , so one of a kind that it would take someone with daring and possibly dementia to remake it . I both applaud Franco's versatility in attempting something as maniacal and coolly grind-house-ish , while at the same time realizing I could never in good conscience recommend it wholly . It's one of those . |
508,938 | 453,068 | 91,635 | 6 | at times quite sexy , and a cool look at Manhattan life , but it's also shallow and dated | One of the perks of Nine Weeks is that the stars , Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger , provide audiences of male and female sexes to come together ; they are both eye candy for each sex , and they didn't look much better than they did here . That's maybe part of the attraction for director Adrian Lyne , actually , the appeal on the surface of these characters . The only problem is that he and the screenwriters dance around some of the tougher questions that comes out of this intense relationship between two people who lust for each other but " can't stop . " As far as character development goes . . . I'd guess there was more in the book . We have prototypical 80s New York characters - Basinger an art gallery assistant and Rourke as a wall street broker of sorts ( not quite , but ' sort of ' as we learn ) - and they meet by just chance and soon the seduction begins , and practically doesn't stop . There are some hot moments here and there ( the food scene is a little too goofy to work , but the scene after the near mugging on the steps in the alley is quite sexy in a truly ' urban ' way ) , but it's obfuscated by the dated manner of the presentation . Only once does the music correspond rightly with the action on screen , which is the aborted threesome towards the end , which is when the dark atmosphere is complemented . The rest of the tracks , save maybe for Joe Cocker's striptease bit , are all fodder for the soundtrack sales . You also want to hear these characters speak more , for the shallow / music-video style compositions and smoke-filled atmosphere to peer away and for us to see these damaged souls for who they really are . This only happens towards the very end , coincidentally when the characters have gone past the point of no return to normalcy . Rourke and Basinger are good in their roles , but there should be more than what's here . It's a slightly troublesome sign when there's far more interest in the environment they inhabit ( we get the point towards the beginning of NYC's once former notorious state , when the typical shot of Basinger walking in a group of people on a sidewalk is disrupted only mildly by a purse snatcher and the chasers ) than the state of the relationship drama . It's worth recommending , maybe , but not much for a repeat viewing unless for soft-porn fodder . |
510,747 | 453,068 | 65,401 | 6 | as much to find fun and amusing as to nitpick , decent AIP flick that could be more | Angel Unchained has the ingredients of your basic AIP picture - bikers , ' cowboys ' ( rednecks ) , hippies , and lots of action . Unfortunately , it isn't entirely synthesized . Perhaps I could've known this by seeing it had been re-rated a PG-13 by the MPAA , but I also thought ' hosh-posh , it still probably has that real violent , grungy feel of dueling off between the forces of hicks and bikers ' . Turns out the cooler elements of the film , some of which are some of the more amusing and awesomely bad moments from AIP biker movies , are juxtaposed against a core of a story that's kind of tame , even soft . It's actually got a Seven Samurai-style story to it , with the roles of the bandits and samurai reversed here - this time it's the so-called bandits ( bikers ) fighting off against the good-old boys ( cowboys ) . This starts off some interest even as knock-off material . The acting as well is not that terrible , at least for what's required on such an ultra-low budget . Regulars like Don Stroud and Luke Askew are dependable ( more so Askew who the year before had a memorable role in Easy Rider ) , though Tyne Daly , a strange early part for her before The Enforcer and later Judging Amy , keeps the love story a little too mellow for its own good . Angel ( Stroud ) wants to get away just for a little while from his old gang , so he hooks up with Daly's character and starts working at a commune / farm , complete with dazed bearded help and a token Native American with a special ' mix ' of cookies . But as they get terrorized by cowboys on go-carts ( yes , go-carts , one of the real highlights of the movie ) , Angel enlists the help of his biker gang , with some consequences that unfold . All of this is tricky material , and the co-writer / director Lee Madden isn't totally able to balance out the scenes and moments ( and just visual sights like with Bill McKinney's retro glasses ) with the sappier parts . The latter of which also includes a soundtrack that borders on soft-rock , the specifically wrong tone that suddenly makes the material quite dated . So , if you're looking for lots of carnage , immoral action , and the stomping out of almost everything in sight , you might be disappointed . Even as there is a neat B-movie style climax involving go-carts vs . bikers that does garner up excitement and laughs , the very end adds a point to what ends up being the lesser qualities of the film . It's intentions are swell , but it gets confused as whether it should be more hippie or biker style , with the poor Injun ( yes , that's his character name ) caught in the middle . Worth watching once , especially for genre fans , but not top-shelf AIP material . |
510,584 | 453,068 | 65,436 | 6 | has its moments , but generally is not top-shelf Herzog despite it's ambitions | I actually admire what writer / director Werner Herzog was going for with Even Dwarfs Started Small even if I think he didn't quite execute it in a manner that involved me enough . It's got a great idea behind it - inmates at a mental institution , on one of the Canary Islands pre-tourism , create an anarchic uprising with practically no one else in sight , and the headmaster locks himself in with a retarded patient while the others go wild and crazy , albeit still staying in the confines of the grounds of the area . I also liked when Herzog went for an interesting route in the picture psychologically and in mood , which was to show how chaos and disarray , even if among little people , can actually become rather aimless and uncanny . There is no plot , it's just a series of interconnected segments that seem to be happening in real time , where they do things like ogle at naked girls in magazines , kill a pig randomly , give constant torture to a couple of blind dwarfs , circle around a constantly 360 degree spinning car , and with Herzog sometimes just as interested in the animals ( chickens , a camel , the pig , a monkey ) on the premises as he is with his whacked out little folk . But the problem arises then with the work that since it is plot less - even if it ends with the headmaster , talking to a branch outside , as a metaphor for human control and what is and what isn't a free will or spirit perhaps - there's the danger of becoming tedious with what goes on , and that's exactly the trap that I think Herzog falls into here . It's not that he is out blatantly to mock them ( although , like with Stroszek , the tendency to laugh is hard to avoid at times , especially with its documentary-style anything-goes approach ) , but there isn't any grand metaphor I could really obtain from the material , at least from a first viewing , and Herzog seemed to be having too much fun getting the dwarfs to do both the mundane and whatever to get something consistently interesting . While he does have one character who ends up being quite memorable , the freaky-laughing , hilarious Hombre ( all one-note , of course , but then again isn't everyone here ) , there's nothing to tie the parts together that are worth watching for to make it good enough for the whole . There's surrealism of course ( the fate of the monkey and the car ) , and an image or two that strikes greatly ( when the headmaster or whomever tries to get the attention of the one-passerby on the island ) , but it just didn't compel me or surprise me in ways that Herzog at his best can do . Not that I'm telling you to not see the film , as a fan I mean . The title alone should be a calling card to anyone who might have a bit of interest in the subject matter , and I'm sure a work like this has inspired a few avant-garde director's out there ( I saw it as a possible fore-father for Korine's Gummo ) . Yet it's own lackadaisical use of narrative and Herzog's insistence on ambiguity and derangement , makes it a kind of schizophrenic work that makes it a fun yet flawed trip . |
509,639 | 453,068 | 78,056 | 6 | it has its moments . . . and then it also doesn't | Paradise Alley is set in 1946 in the dingy and dirty streets of Hell's Kitchen - or the Bowery , take your pick , maybe more like the Bowery - and is centered on a group of characters , specifically three brothers , and how they try to maintain in their squalor or , as it turns out , try and make a way for themselves to get out . It's a sentimental picture as it tries to act super tough and muscular , and it's kind of like a Saturday afternoon movie for the guys who have already seen Rocky and Rambo flicks too many times and want to see something sort of " different " . It certainly is . And not always in a good way . What I liked was seeing how the actors playing the brothers interacted . Cosmo , Victor and Lenny are impressionable and work very well as this trio dynamic . One had high aspirations and has a big mouth but a fairly good heart , another is a crippled war hero who's life has not worked out at all like he might have wanted for himself or his girl , and the other is a fairly content and BIG-sized ice delivery man who finds himself needing money to want that boat house . I liked also how Stallone put these characters against the lumbering idiot gangsters who were too bumbling to really make it as big-shots but could be threatening enough to other bums and the like in the neighborhood . Not to mention the character and performance of Frank McRae as the 40-something wrestler who lives in total degradation even as he's very good at what he does . Oh , and Tom Waits of course , for a role that is merely a blip but one that brings a smile all the same . The problems seem to come for Stallone that he isn't confident enough to take the material where it needs to go as a down-and-dirty grungy street flick . He gussies it up with over-blown camera moves and editing tricks ( I hated the freeze-screen effects used ) , and seem to not always be as strong with dealing with melodrama and the natural way people talk as he did in the first Rocky . If there was a time to make this story maybe it was right after he has his first big success , and then move on to more conventional stuff . But it is at times fairly schmaltzy , and not all of the acting is very good ( the female actresses are all pretty weak , and for a couple of good scenes Lee Canalito feel really flat as the " happy " wreslter brother dubbed " The Salami " ) . Stallone and Asante fare better with the material , and even Stallone himself goes hammy with his own words in some scenes ; Stallone is Stallone , not a Pacino or De Niro , so heavy-duty dramatic scenes don't seem to cut it out as well . And yet , the film does have its moments . I especially dug that final wrestling match , the two contenders ( the other being , I think , Terry Funk ) duking it out as a rain storm is coming down in the arena and the power keeps cutting in and out with lightning effects thrown in . Stallone does make this an epic and nasty and brutal final bout , and it does bring a pretty satisfying completion to a film that is enjoyable but too clichéd by half . |
509,795 | 453,068 | 373,177 | 6 | almost too silly and off-the-wall , but it has a charm even for non-Morrissey people | I can't say that I was completely blown away or really impressed by My Life with Morrissey , but there is a definite grungy kind of comic appeal to it . It's too ridiculous and , towards the end , really nuts to be taken too seriously , which is part of the fun and the dilemma in watching it . The dilemma for me , as someone who's heard bits of the Smiths and Morrissey , is how much or how little can I buy into this one woman's obsession with this very English-handsome singer ? Is Morrissey enough to fawn over like some kind of golden cattle God ? Apparently , in the anything goes life of the character of Jackie , it would appear so . She works a day job as a file clerk , but her minds always on her potential future love-of-her-life , who sometimes is in a puppy-love state for her , and other times reaching to masturbatory levels . A whole environment of hysteria starts to come in around her , as her co-workers can't take her anymore , and even out in the open world she's circumspect . For Morrissey fans themselves , it will be hit or miss , and for fans of just plain goofy comedy it might be something more . I myself have noticed it to be a minor cult hit at the college I attended , where the indie-movie side almost had a kinship with indie rockers . While Morrissey and his previous Smiths might be a little more than just ' indie ' types , it's appropriate that this story is not in a higher budgeted or released film . The writer / director / cinematographer Andrew Overtoom , likely taking cues from his previous work on Spongebob Squarepants , isn't aiming high at all in the quality of how he shoots , or even how he directs actors . The same weird charm and glow ( as well as the danger ) in Jackie Buscarino's first film can also veer on being irritating , especially as the film starts to draw to its conclusion . Many individual bits in the office are quite funny , with chuckles throughout , but it's a shame that it never totally comes together to be very memorable . It's watchable and fun enough on a first go if you can find it on DVD , but it may depend on your sense of humor ( or connection with Morrissey himself , the buzz around him ) if it comes off or is simply annoying . |
510,299 | 453,068 | 65,462 | 6 | very strange , somehow predictable , and still somewhat satirical | Beneath the Planet of the Apes supposes that , along with the cliché that ' if one already came , another will come too ' for a sequel , there are other true mutants on the planet . So , in a sense , Zaius wasn't incorrect in his assumption to Taylor in part one . There is another and another and another - only they're really mutants ! Men and women with telepathic potential to control minds , read thoughts , and basically make their enemies fight to the death instead of " doing " it themselves . This , of course , is unbenownst to Zaius , who is at the whim of a war-monger gorilla who wants to go into the forbidden zone to wipe out every last human alive . And meanwhile there is that ' other ' human , who as played by James Franciscus has a peculiar resemblance to a Mr . Charlton Heston , appearing here in glorified cameo mode . Beneath isn't anything close to great film-making - the competent but mostly studio-bound director Ted Post has the duties here , which include putting in bits of stock footage at the start of the film ( in case , you know , people FORGOT THE ENDING ! ) And it's not even very intriguing science fiction either ; the idea of the weird , Pagan mutants who only use their voices when they are singing psalms , isn't too far removed from your average Star Trek episode . But there is something interesting about it all the same , that - and granted Heston was behind the script in pulling the strings for the end - there were other things to explore in this new civilized ape world . There are some fun scenes here , and seeing Linda Harrison as Nova never gets old to boot . And yet there's also the nagging feeling of ' its-only-a-fair-sequel ' that keeps it from ever even thinking of going to the possibilities the original explored . The makeup and sets look cool as always , and there's some good experimenting with Goldsmith's score . Now , what is behind the forbidden zone ? Who knows . |
508,502 | 453,068 | 455,538 | 6 | How to Make Occasional Sharp Satire & Drab Romantic Comedy | One would think that a director usually makes the difference in distinguishing the material from other , more standard fare . Robert Weide , while working mostly in TV , has over 2 dozen Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes to his credit , and as such one might think he would be prime material to direct some solid satire . Yet perhaps for Wiede it's the writing that makes the difference , ultimately , or just based on some of the actors he works with . Simon Pegg is no Larry David , but on his own Pegg is very funny and with the right material ( notably that with collaborator Edgar Wright ) has created some exceptional British parodies . He's also got a strange charm to him , an affecting wit , and delivery that is up to snuff with other American actors he's working with here . But he can't completely overcome the screenplay . How to Lose Friends and Alienate people is about a wildman writer / editor at a cultish British magazine , and gets some tabloid buzz about bringing a pig to an awards show and getting totally smashed in the process . He grabs the attention of a once-maverick editor of a prestigious Manhattan magazine ( Jeff Bridges ) , who hires him in part because ( according to Pegg ) he reminds him of his younger self . But he never gets an article published , at least without some hassle , and he also has some stiff competition with an older rival , and an attractive editor ( Kirsten Dunst ) , not to mention an insatiable , sexy Megan Fox as a typically snooty celebrity gearing up for an awards-worthy part as a nun in a movie . To the credit of the cast and the director , it is a watchable effort , at least for those who may be able to spot references to La Dolce Vita ( as if it weren't nailing it a little over the head ) , and occasionally there are some really big laugh out-loud gags ( one I'll remember for a long while involves a prank call for a bunch of call-girls into the office of prickly a-hole Lawrence Maddox played by Danny Huston ) . But the actual love-interest angle with Pegg and Dunst is at best competent and at worst just weak and predictable with a few drunken melancholy scenes thrown in for good measure , and the likes of Bridges , Gillian Anderson ( as Fox's stand-offish but shallow agent ) and Fox herself playing on a theme of discontented " hot " talents are usually at the mercy of a screenplay that only intermittently gives them things to latch on to . I wouldn't mind seeing large parts of it on TV again , especially for some of Pegg's stinging barbs of dialog , but it's a partial disappointment . |
509,450 | 453,068 | 210,164 | 6 | the 6 P's . . . | Yeah , it's an amateurish student effort , but from what I got from the film - as presented on the Clerks DVD set - Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier pretty much acknowledge this in their intro . It's kind of amusing , actually , though not in the very funny , outrageous aspects that would come out in Smith's other works . It's a goofy , cover-your-ass effort where Smith and Mosier , without access to a night-club singing transvestite ( I think she sang nightclubs anyway ) , decide to make a documentary about the failure to make a documentary on her . It doesn't quite reach the ranks of a mockumentary in the Christopher Guest style , though it basically is a mockery of ' in-depth exposes ' , practically in a TV-fashion . One of the funnier things is seeing , from the start , Mosier and Smith in complete silhouette , and the title card of ' Directors ' also spelled with the phonetic spelling attached . The documentary then proceeds as the actual members of the crew spout off on the un-professionalism of the directors on the project ( one of the funnier bits being that aforementioned ' 6 P's ' quote ) . Some of the exchanges of the two ' disgraced ' filmmakers end up getting some raffish chuckles , and the tongue-in-cheek method of not showing them from chest up is not a bad idea . But it's so short that it doesn't really give off that much of their side's skills , except to show that they know how to edit in a mock-style and get some genuine reactions out of their crew . So it's worth the viewing if you've never seen it ( actually , no one has been able to outside of perhaps the Vancouver film class Smith and Mosier were in - likely with the best premise of anyone ) from the DVD , if nothing else as a curio . It's one of those trifles I wish could've been better , but it doesn't matter too much as it only shows so much anyway as to the great paths that were to come for the director / producer team . |
509,326 | 453,068 | 963,794 | 6 | Italian giallo in American mainstream clothing | The Ruins takes place in Mexico with four college-age kids ( Tucker , Malone , Ashmore and Ramsy ) and another guy ( Anderson ) , the latter who takes them to a Mayan temple where his brother is working supposedly on a dig . When they get there , a bunch of angry Mexican-Myans attack them , they scurry up to the top of the temple , and are basically quarantined with a host of virulent , monster-type plants and vines , who in typical horror fashion kill them off one by one . That's the basic premise , anyway , and if you know that and have seen the trailer you probably took a guess whether this is up your alley . For me , I was as intrigued by the trailer as I was who I found out wrote the screenplay , and subsequently the book of the movie's title - Scott Smith , who also wrote the morality drama A Simple Plan . What would these two works have in common at all , or to put it another way how would the same guy who wrote one wrote the other ? Maybe it comes down to how I interpreted it through the direction ( Simple Plan had Sam Raimi , and made it one of his best films , this one has Carter Smith , someone I've never heard of before as it's his feature debut ) . But , basically , both works , and this one in particular , are about seemingly smart and resourceful people acting really stupid in crunch-time . The college kids here are more or less cut-outs as characters , with some making stupider decisions than others ( i . e . Malone's character basically killing off some characters thanks to her incessant lack of logic ) . Normally this would be just a given , but it's interesting to see that the actors don't do a half-assed job playing them - especially , surprisingly , Real Cancun star Laura Ramsey , who acts just high-pitched enough to get her plight as she's infected by the vines - and the ambiguity involving the vines and the tunnel and the Mexican-Mayans at the bottom guarding the outer rim is pretty well done . It's a shame then that the horror comes best only in short spurts , mostly as Malone and Ramsey are in the dark recesses looking for a cell phone that isn't really there , and some visceral horror involving a character's leg amputations . Mostly , it veers a little one way or the other with these vines : they hearken back to Little Shop of Horrors and even the first Evil Dead movie , but it's not very goofy . At the same time , the screenplay doesn't evolve these characters too much past their point of no return . In the initial scenes , then the build-up , I was reminded of some Italian horror films ( can't think of one right now but it'll come to me sooner or later ) , only here of course not dubbed over . It is fairly creepy , and it does provide stock characters , and it gives you that double-whammy of an ending that is half happy and half " oh darn , there go some more " . It is what it is , and it isn't much more , depending on the fan of the genre . It probably works best with a bunch of friends who may or may not like it as a legitimate horror flick . |
510,745 | 453,068 | 65,604 | 6 | a biker movie that is ALMOST saved by Bruce Dern | The problems do abound in The Cycle Savages , but it could have possibly been a better movie . I did get into the sheer artificiality , and unbelievability , of the movie at times just on the basis of kinda , sort of buying into it . But it's also got a central problem in that there is really nothing ' there ' in the side of the ' good guys ' . Not that this is a totally bad thing really , for it is the mean dirty rat-bastard bikers that really are the show for anyone seeing the film today . And it's almost luck that first time writer / director Bill Brame has Bruce Dern to fill the part of Keeg , one of the sleaziest of the kind of totally immoral , however with a kind of Little Alex ala Clockwork Orange style of immediate intelligence . Even in all of his occasional mania and outright outbursts getting into the over-dramatic , Dern has this character completely down . It's actually best in the scenes where he ends up being most provoking by having the most controlled , almost calm voice . A lot of his ' wit ' in the film is scabrous , and not really funny , but on the side of giving a convincingly deranged sociopath with a penchant for intimidation and girls it makes the film usually watchable . It's a shame then that Brame isn't able to match him up with more competent actors . Or even , despite having a couple of good ' exploitation ' style scenes of violence and nudity and rape , having not enough for what the rest of the material is asking for . The group , Hell's Chosen Few ( strange for a half biker / half prostitution ring club ) , spends a lot of the movie waiting , and carrying on with side-stuff , while the main story involving the artist who previously drew the bikers who now gets drawn into the deceiving clutches of the decoy is weak and unconvincing . The motives most of the time , even for a B-movie , seem to shift and not seem very solid aside from the man's ' I love you ' phase even after fighting with a slashed abdomen wound . The ending ( coming all too quick and with a lackluster climax ) and the musical accompaniment ( likely the most annoyingly generic riff repeated in any film from the period ) are along with some of the acting the weaker points of the picture , sometimes embarrassingly so . So it does say a lot , however , that I could possibly recommend it on a bad movie level , where some parts become so crazy it's hard not to enjoy it . And Bruce Dern helps bring a good , tiny change of pace to the proceedings of the very typical ten-cent biker production , which by the way doesn't have a big abundance of throughout the film . In a career full of playing antagonists , this one is unnerving and realistic enough to be of note . |
509,641 | 453,068 | 862,846 | 6 | not very good , not very bad - a definite in-the-middle movie that cant stick to one side | Sunshine Cleaning is a Lifetime movie in Little Miss Sunshine skin . It's not hard to figure ; the producers of Little Miss Sunshine had a gargantuan hit , and so they thought they wanted to take on something that might have had a similar flavor and hit lightning twice . Unfortunately , it didn't happen , but it's not really the fault of the actors , as they - Amy Adams ( who doesn't like her ? ) , Alan Arkin , Clifton Collins Jr , Steve Zahn - are all likable to one extent or another ( the exception's possibly Emily Blunt , though that's more for her character than herself playing the part , and that little kid playing Amy Adams ' son who at one point talks to God on a CB radio in a cringe inducing scene ) . It's the script , as it tries too hard to meld the quirky ( yes , I'm using the word quirky , it's appropriate here ) comedy and some pretty dark drama and it doesn't really come off authentic either way . There are a few scenes here and there that vary with potential , but only scene , when Adams sits and comforts the old woman whose husband has committed suicide , felt completely and wholly emotionally satisfying ( then again this scene is not populated with get-rich-quick shrimp schemes or a one-armed guy or a kid who talks to God through a CB radio , or another one of those " I'll hang from something and scream loud ala the canyon scene in Garden State ) . I didn't ever really laugh either , and I was only pulled into any of the drama because of the actors in the roles ( Adams is basically the best you'll get if you want an automatic tearing-up machine ) . If it had stuck either way it might have had something . |
508,921 | 453,068 | 64,647 | 6 | make sure to find it with subtitles | Currently there is a version of Measures Against Fanatics on you-tube , which was how I got to see this short Werner Herzog film from early in his career . It's about horse racing , or rather the people who take care of the horses , and how to , apparently , protect them from the ' fanatics ' of the title . Unfortunately , it's hard to really give a totally quantifiable rating to the documentary , because the version currently available , despite being in excellent picture and sound quality , has no subtitles in English ( and being that I'm not up on my German much at all I could only pick out a few words here and there based on what I've heard in other movies and elsewhere ) . As far as visuals go it's not bad , though there's not a whole lot Herzog can go in photographing such things like horses walking around and their protectors talking ( though it is cool to see one of the horses walking around ) . It seems to mostly be dull even without knowing entirely what the context is usually in , but there are still some noticeable Herzogian moments , like when the one trainer or whomever proceeds to break blocks of wood with his hand . Or with the mere presence of the old man , who always seems to be interrupting the dialog the person answering is having , always with his say . The music is also ironically cheerful , which makes funny in an off-kilter sort of way . It is worth watching , if you're a Herzog fan like I am , though knowing a little German might help add a little extra enjoyment . |
508,794 | 453,068 | 43,265 | 6 | not up to par with the best of Bogart & / or Huston ; Hepburn gets wildly overpraised | Term " overrated " ; it wouldn't be something I would attribute to a film usually as directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart ( co-star Katherine Hepburn is another matter ) . But overtime this little piece of romantic fluff / saga of war-time daring-do has been called one of the greatest American films ever made . And for those who do love it , more power to them . It is a star vehicle first and foremost - and in 1951 if you were going to have two stars for the majority of the running-time these were the two to get - and die-hard fans can praise it as much as they want . But when it comes down to it , the film hasn't aged as well as one might think , and it goes without saying that what was really on Huston's mind during filming ( hunting elephants ) probably had something to do with the focus coming off of things like , erm , logic . It is a yarn , to be certain , and under the terms of what is " light-hearted " ( in quotes because it has some dark undertones ) it works out alright . But an all-time classic I think not . For one thing - and I know I would get some arguing over this - the two stars don't really have that much chemistry . It doesn't help matters that cliché steers the ship ; Bogart and Hepburns ' characters , Charlie and Rosie , are going down a river where at first they can't stand one another as one is a drunkard on gin and the other is a prissy go-for-it-all who doesn't really see the consequences , AND whenever Bogie somehow gets the African Queen over some rapids she suddenly starts to fall in love with the guy . I don't buy it - when comparing to something like , say , the real McCoy in Bogie and McCall , it doesn't hold a candle . Hepburn , until maybe the second half when she changes gears only slightly , and depending on the risks in the scene , doesn't alter much in her personality . While it is , in a way , a good performance at playing someone who is shrill and prissy , it doesn't help make one care that much about her . Meanwhile , Bogie is still a pro at what he does ( though not Oscar-worthy pro , not up against Brando - the performance that really deserved it was In a Lonely Place , which is sour grapes of course long after the fact ) . He , and Huston's occasional outbursts of creativity in the simple framework of the script , do make it mildly entertaining ; it's a good picture to probably check out on a rainy summer's weekend afternoon with lots of tea ( or gin ) . And there's even a few fascinating bits with the dangers of going down a river in Africa , i . e . the swarming bugs and the leeches as they try and get the boat out of the mud . But by the time of the ending , when the ' what-the-hell ' moment happens as the torpedo strikes at the ship at the most unlikely - yet most likely - of moments , I couldn't wait for the recently married to get off the screen . If you haven't seen a film by Huston or with Bogie or Hepburn , look elsewhere to start . If exotic locales and silly romantic river-boat adventure is your game , be my guest . |
508,315 | 453,068 | 78,723 | 6 | even a Spielberg mess has a lot of excellent bits ; it's his craziest effort yet , flawed , BIG , and proud of its longevity | I'm not sure I'll want to sit too soon again through 1941 , directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Robert Zemeckis , Bob Gale and John Milius , but I wouldn't trade the experience . Unlike directors nowadays who go BIG and HUGE with action and cheesy comedy and thrills , and their movies end up possibly leaving a really lousy residue from a kind of soulessness ( Michael Bay comes immediately to mind ) , Spielberg may go way over the top , and in the DVD version I saw it goes on far too long ( whether or not the special edition solves the problems left in the original 2 hour cut boggles my mind just to think about it ) , but it never loses a sense of giddy excitement , like a 12 year old boy given free reign over the controls of a nose-thumbing , immature-yet-intelligent big-budget Hollywood action-war-comedy . For more than a few moments watching it , I thought of what Francis Ford Coppola said regarding the making of Apocalypse Now , when he said " we had too much money , too much equipment , and little by little we went insane . " I wondered how much Spielberg decided to shoot - and shoot and shoot - from the script , though whatever mishaps occur in the picture ( and for the most part goes on in the latter half of the film ) , yet he somehow pulls out a few really extraordinary sequences , and more than few deserved laughs . It's chaos , basically , when less than a week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor the threat of an attack from the Japanese seems imminent . Everybody's up in arms , or at least up in arms with one another ( again , the 12 year-old aspect , both with plenty of explosions , weapons firing off , and more than a bit of innuendo ) , and we're given practically an Altman-esquire view of Los Angeles in this time of wacky despair , even if oddly enough most of what really makes of LA is left away . Then again , any big mash of reality would compact the escapist madhouse Spielberg and his writers intend . Only in a flick like 1941 would you get a bat-s pilot ( a hilarious John Belushi ) , a timid but ready average guy with a gigantic machine gun in his backyard ( Ned Beatty ) , a doubting Thomas General who cries when he watches Dumbo ( Robert Stack ) , two army personnel ( Tim Matheson and Nancy Allen ) who have a deranged courtship involving air travel , and the actual ( yet more-so potential ) threat to the LA area , a Japanese submarine headed by Colonel Mikamura ( Toshrio Mifune , who in a limited role gets to do what he does best - look down-right perturbed ) . It all leads up to a gigantic - and I do mean gigantic - climax that goes on and on and on with the crazed , war-seeking Americans finally finding their sights at the sub . Perhaps if Spielberg and his editors decided to try and tighten it up ( and again I say this after the extended version , perhaps this is maybe a tad different with the shorter theatrical cut ) , it would be a much greater rush of insanity in wartime comedy . A topic like the delirium of Americans on the cusp of war is good for a variety of broad styles ( if that makes sense ) , and the cast assembled here is more hit than miss ( where else will you get Christopher Lee as a Nazi on a sub who can somehow have no problem communicating with the Japanese speaking Japanese ! ) , with the goofy parts still retaining moments of levity . And the madness that usually unfolds on screen , be it small-time or large scale , gets the right treatment at least on the directorial front . There's a dance-hall sequence involving the main romantic love triangle ( I forget all the names , though I remember Treat Williams being involved ) , where the fighting blends with the dancing and completely absurd homaging to a point of delirious genius , and it's one of Spielberg's greatest single sequences from the 70s . I even got a couple of chuckles at his blatant , irrevocable homages to his previous films ( the opening with Jaws , certain shots right from Close Encounters , even a few unintentional allusions to future films ) . But again that frigging script , and the abandonment to pull back from the crazily cartoonish atmosphere , sort of damns it in the last section , where more seems to mean better , even when what might be expected ( more explosions ) doesn't quite come off . It ended up becoming almost an act of annoying the viewer , where already there's been so many scenes of hundreds of people in single shots , stretched into sequences , and grand-standings ( Aykroyd's part ) and wild flights of fancy , that even the best parts end up becoming mired in the thick of it all . I guess maybe it's meant to almost feel like a war in and of itself , but unlike the Coppola picture I mentioned previously , there isn't a lot of art to come out of the sensationalism , just some fun times to have with friends and a very good sense of humor ( mostly a forgiving one ) . This all being said , however , I wouldn't tell you not to see it , most likely if you're a fan of Spielberg and Zemeckis , and I end up recommending it against my better judgment , or rather I don't recommend if as much as the MUCH better works of the filmmakers , but for a certain comic sensibility it might be real gold . I will remember the zany brilliance , but I also won't be able to shake off the fact that it is the sort of midway minor blunder of a filmmaker right in an awe-inspiring stretch of films . |
507,987 | 453,068 | 378,224 | 6 | not Sam Jackson / Kevin Spacey Negotiator , that's for sure | Negotiator , a TV-movie directed by the inimitable Takashi Miike , is two-halves of a movie bread . The one halve is a perfectly terrific kidnapping picture , taking its twists but giving the audience its share of excellent acting and a low-key atmosphere to counter the grueling tension . The other half is melodrama cooked up to 11 and given to us to explain what the kidnapping plot at the hospital was all about - an inside job that goes a lot deeper and more personal than anyone could see . While all of the performances are top-notch , especially the actor Hiroshi Mikami who plays Inspector Ishida ( in one really fantastic dramatic scene , a real barn-burner in the 2nd act , one sees the depths he's gone to for revenge for his lost loved one ) , the script itself thinks its a lot sharper than it really is . It doubles back and gives us information , tricking us and folding us again and again into the mystery of what turns into basically a big ol ' pot-boiler . Which would be fine , except that Miike films it as if he's still in the same mindset he did Gozu the same year , with super-long takes in some scenes ( 5 minutes with an unbroken shot ) that are unnecessary and draw attention from what drama happens in the scenes . I applaud Miike for going a route that veers towards the more realistic and tragic in the sense of the characters , and it's a change of pace from his Gonzo works from that period . But its own low-key quality becomes the undoing , in some part , of the suspense that builds for an hour and then pops like a big fat bubble when we find out the circumstances . Negotiator is a movie I really wanted to like more than I did ; it tries patience even as it has a lot of rewarding elements and things going for it . It is , simply , worth its TV movie status . |
508,178 | 453,068 | 65,760 | 6 | Arrow-feather ! | Roger Corman's Gas-s-s-s , his final film as director for AIP , is dated ( and probably even was for the period it got released ) , but somehow it's almost part of its charm . It's an irreverent comedy about a noxious gas that wipes out everybody - at least in the US much as we can figure - who's over the age of 25 . Party-time ! In what appears to be , in the premise , as a slight twist on Corman's own Last Woman on Earth , it's an epic of low-budget proportions , a rampant fiasco of kids in hippie-wear ( or not as case turns out ) and the Darwinian struggles that take place as the roughnecks , jocks and bikers-on-country-clubs face off against those darn ' commie-anarchists ' . Certainly a good premise indeed , at least for those who love the exploitation fare of the period ( myself counted , even as I'm from after that era ) . While it might be one of Corman's ( intentionally ) funnier pictures , there's a nagging feeling that something's not totally there . It is cheap , it is slapdash , it's episodic . The problem , as with some of Corman's other movies , is that a little more effort would make something even more interesting . If there was , for example , another snappy and sharp writer alongside George Armitage , who could whip the script into a tight and awesome shape , it could even be one of the great exploitation films . As it stands , it's merely OK overall . Luckily the good tries to outweigh the bad , which is that there are some really , actually clever one-liners ( " Hey , we all have our own inconsistencies , that doesn't stop the revolution , " to " Drop that chloride , you commie anarchist ! " ) and seeing the biker country-clubbers and the God lightning bolt climax . Best of all is to see a running-gag in-joke for Corman - probably more than one , actually . The first is more obvious , and laugh-out-loud , which is a biker Edgar Allen Poe , who just shows up here and there like some sage wise-man ( who is , of course , not over 25 ) with his wife and occasional raven on his shoulder spouting garbled quotes . The second is a little more subtle , which seems to be a play on his film the Trip , as in the psychedelic-type scenes ( i . e . dancing to Country Joe and the Fish ) with the camera zooming in and out fast , lots of hand-held , etc ) . Corman's gone through this all before , so it has to be questioned : how much of this is tongue in cheek , and how much is just almost shoddy film-making ? Can't be sure . At least there was consistent chuckling to be had , especially at seeing a young Bud Cort in a cowboy hat , and , of all people , Talia Shire ! |
508,487 | 453,068 | 64,782 | 6 | actually . . . a lot more fun and watchable than I would've thought , maybe for some wrong reasons | How could one not at least try and watch a big , bulky western yarn where Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood play prospectors who are not only married to the same woman but , yes , sing . Lots of singing . And surrounded by enough extras to give someone a hemorrhage . I did try and watch it , and got through it pretty much unscathed . It's not a movie that one would ever want to put in someone's hands that one trusts and say " yes , this is Clint Eastwood's finest couple of hours " or " Lee Marvin , such a bad-ass " ( albeit for the latter it might be so if talking about his facial hair ) . But digging deeper into the careers of either actor , there are slip-ups that looking at them now actually have a good deal of entertainment value to them . It's just that it's executed - if one were to take this seriously - with such a portend of EPIC ( in caps ) quality , of the production values at a level that would be comparable to the 1995 Waterworld at the time that it becomes too much to comprehend on a human level . Yet there's also the sense of buoyancy to it that makes it kind of admirable as it chugs along . Even in the climax , when the entire town is dragged down thanks to the bull that runs through the tunnel , is cheerful up to a point or at least lighthearted . In fact , there's something kind of charming to a movie that takes its subject matter so not seriously . Like , for example , how hundreds of men all drool at the mouths at the sight of Jean Seberg when she arrives into town , and yet the men decide to hold a sort of auction in order to bid her out ( why not gang up on her ? guess the M rating at the time still carried some provisions as part of the puritanical beats of the ol ' West ) . Or how Marvin and Eastwood both become husbands to Seberg when she just can't decide who she loves more ( and , thanks to the most faithful of all , whiskey , the men reach an agreement on the prospect ) . It's all very ridiculous , from the many , many BIG BIG musical numbers - and I say BIG BIG as they are all loudly produced and with a typical movie studio harmony , only without much choreography organized - down to that hat that Marvin wears as he goes about gathering up more prostitutes for the miners . And what about the songs ? Equally insipid , and if taken as real ' quality ' music is to have to smell your socks for an equal effect . But it's also like a good quality brand of cheese : you take a bite and want a little bit more , and the block is still there for the taking . Songs like " I talk to the trees " and " They call the wind Mariah " , plus anytime Marvin has to sing , is classic stuff on the corniest levels . Oddly enough , Eastwood isn't half-bad as a singer , even with some lift and grace to his voice . Marvin , however , can't sing a note for his life , and the song that apparently won a golden globe or Grammy or whatever has him singing like he's Eeyore the donkey from Winnie the Pooh . When Marvin has to act like a drunken wheez of a prospector who's jealous , greedy , driven by humble melancholy and ego in equal measure , he does alright , and Eastwood , who says more dialog here than in all three of the ' Dollars ' films combined , does what he can . Seberg is also a honey of a starlet , who didn't seem to do much aside from this and Breathless . But as I said , you should go into this knowing what to expect . There was an episode of the Simpsons years ago where Homer looks forward to watching a movie on TV that has Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood , and suddenly he finds that they're singing , a lot . It should be a joke , and it's a hilarious bit of irony really , because it's true . ' What the hell ' will be the first thing to come out of some viewers mouths on finishing the movie , if they get that far . As for me , I just have to smile , crack up laughing a few times , and realize that this is one of the reasons the 70s had to happen . |
509,845 | 453,068 | 190,532 | 6 | great for McDowell , mostly blah for everyone else | The reason to check out the Little Red Riding Hood episode of Faerie Tale Theatre is not a ) the ' revised ' story , which puffs up ten pages with so-called feminist phooey and a bit involving rocks in a stomach ' , or b ) much of the acting , save maybe for John Vernon aside from the obvious . No , the real reason to check it out is Malcolm McDowell , who gives some kind of crazy performance , sometimes campy and sometimes just McDowell-esquire , as he turns into this classic character as only he could . In fact , he makes certain scenes with his weaker co-star Mary Steenburgen better than they have any right to be ( albeit nothing can save the always tired " Granny , what big . . . you have " bit ) , as he moves along with fun and verve and a real knack for what the series at its best can be about . But sadly a lot of the episode is just drivel to make up for what is , essentially , a super-short parable that changes from PG to R rating depending on who's telling it ( i . e . eating Granny & / or Riding Hood & / or chopping the wolf with axe ) . |
509,764 | 453,068 | 477,457 | 6 | cheesy acting - very cheesy acting - and true sci-fi channel movie-of-the-week visual effects make this watchable | The Pirates porno , the most expensive ever produced ( at a whopping $150 , 000 ) , is excruciating to watch if you're trying to look for a good plot , or entirely " good " acting ability . It's a showcase for the director , named simply Joone , to showcase a lot of well-lit XXX sex scenes and lots of ultra-corny CGI involving seascapes , caves , ships , and with the icing on the cake being skeleton pirates that have to duel with some bad-ass girls on an island . I can't really recommend it , in a big sense , as it has no real merit whatsoever as far as real creativity goes . But it is , however , of the highest order of sleaze entertainment , and it's a really , really funny movie all the same . It's not even really good dialog so much as good quotes , lines that you and your friends ( or whomever you may or may not be watching the movie with ) will be saying verbatim or close to it for days . Probably the best bet with the ' actors ' though is long-time porno pro Evan Stone , who says his lines with the convincing silliness and strength of a Bruce Campbell ( he's probably the only one who ' gets ' how stupid this all is , and rolls with it ) . Other actresses with one-names like Teagan and Devon maybe aren't quite as adept at that sort of aspect of the performance . You'll get the idea about five minutes into the film , if not sooner . Much of it is basically convoluted ( yes , even more-so ) knock-off material and characterization from the POTC movies , which is not all that bad a thing . A few times it looks as though the director actually understands that a movie like Pirates has to be something of a parody in order to keep the attention of its viewing public - past the obvious points , of which need not be mentioned here . Yet it's good that there's such a high-level of camp value with scenes that look improvised with the actors ( there's one woman-on-woman scene where a bunch of guys stand around them saying " argh " the whole time and cheer on as if truly drunken ) , because if one were to grade this on a scale like the folks at Hustler magazine or other magazines of the sort do , it wouldn't necessarily get a very high grade either , unless if based on subjective perceptions of the sizes of certain ' things ' and how such scenes are sort of staged . Those too are quite cheesy , loaded at times with music that sounds like it might be good to hear while waiting on the end of a busy phone line . In fact , there might be a great deal of camp value that can be derived from these many , many scenes of gratuitous action ( not that there hasn't been worse elsewhere , even as the actors try to go to desperate , raging lengths to get there ) . Overall it wasn't a movie who's big budget wasn't a total waste , all things considered . The R-rated version might even someday find its way onto a Saturday night sci-fi movie channel of the week , and definitely as one of the better ones in recent memory . I'd almost go as far as to say I liked it , but in the sense that I like a good piece of cotton candy : it goes down in an abhorrently artificial way , and it's gone pretty quickly , and then you don't feel like having any more for a while . |
510,234 | 453,068 | 57,129 | 6 | slightly underwhelmed , though there are certainly worse ( like , for example , the remake ) | I liked most of The Haunting , Robert Wise's adaptation of the novel ( and make no mistke folks , it does feel like an adaptation despite its debt to other haunted house pictures ) , as it's about as competently produced , and with some acting that turns up the intensity level in several spots quite well . I even liked the cinematography very much in certain scenes , as Wise and his team made the house come into the realm of the surreal and the unconscious in some instances ( and one is hard-pressed not to at least flinch , if not jump , when Julie Harris gets up the staircase and finds a surprise behind a place she least expected ) . But , even as it attempts to be - as one friend rightfully argued to me - like a two-hour Twilight Zone episode , it's weighed down in exposition and narration . Where it works in a twenty-minute episode , the novel-form doesn't translate for a film like this . Do we really need to hear EVERYTHING in Harris's head ? It works in little pieces , but it's laid in over and over , already with hefty scenes of conversations that , while usually not poorly written ( save for Russ Tamblyn's thankless part of having to often say to the effect of ' you can't really think it's really haunted , do you ? ' ) A story like this requires just simply mood and drive to tell it . Maybe I lost something on the arc of the central character , played reasonably well ( she's not terrible is what I mean ) by Harris as someone with no real home and a future that seems to last in the house , but her character perhaps would keep up the intensity if one weren't constantly informed of her every thought about being in the house moment to moment . It detracts slightly from some good scenes that are there with the other actors , like Richard Johnson , Clair Bloom and Tamblyn , who all have only so much depth anyway . Still , there is a good deal to watch for if you love your classic horror films , specifically of this ilk : the house itself is quite a marvel of construction by way of its ragged edges , imposing height and curves and structure , it is something excellent to see in full widescreen . And it was fun seeing the special effects team go to work full-tilt ; one can even see in a door scene the seeds for something far more disturbing done in Videodrome . There's even a laugh or two . The Haunting is good viewing for a matinée or even for something to show the kids - if they're so inclined to check out slightly-higher-than-B-movie suspense films of the 60s , and of course it makes the Jan de Bont 1999 remake look like the pile of slack crap that it is . One of the best of it's kind though ? I don't think so . |
509,544 | 453,068 | 64,939 | 6 | the biker movie pathos , by Al Adamson | In order to get any enjoyment or entertainment , or just dumb-fun in a B-movie ( if that ) kind of way , like Satan's Sadists ( not inappropriately released on DVD in some circles by Troma ) , is to take into context that it was , of course , the late 60's , and it remains in the sub-genre that is the biker-movie . I almost hesitate to slap the label ' exploitation flick ' on it because one would have to take completely into mind what exploitation entails . Maybe there were many ( maybe mostly ) good-hearted bikers like the ones in Easy Rider that wanted nothing more than to get stoned and ride their wheels without too much trouble . But that is in a particular kind of movie that tries ( and succeeds ) to rise above the expectations of the enclave of biker movies . For the most part , as with Satan's Sadists and many others , a biker gang with a cool sounding name goes into a town , bothers the habitants to a point of total suspense and shock , and the filmmaker may or may not try to dig a little under the surface , go beyond the expectations up to a point . One of the things that makes Satan's Sadists work , up to a point , is that producer / director Adamson usually doesn't mistake what it is that he's making . A film like this , when it played ( where and if of course being part in question ) , would just be used as fodder for make-out sections and beer contests for those in the cars at the drive-ins , just good enough to not make anyone start chucking things at the screen . Adamson brings forth all the ideal elements - a gang of six ( including the perennial grungy / sexy female ) with attitude braced in their eyes and sunglasses , the older straight-laced couple , the good-looking younger couple , and plenty of room for tracking , driving shots of bikes . The gang here of the title run into a cop and his wife , a waitress , another young guy and the owner of a small pit stop in the middle of the California desert . Basically , describing the plot would be moot ; say enough that it is as much of a usual biker film as it is a revenge picture ( and usually the two go one in the same with these movies ) . To Adamson's credit , given a group of non-professional actors ( or B / C / D movie actors ) that are hit or miss ( the bikers are all alright , as are the cop and his wife , but some of the other parts of the younger women are pretty bad ) , he tends to push some of the boundaries of what can be done within the framework of the structure . We have an idea of what will go on , of course , after a crucial moment in the film , but there are little things , like when the bikes brake-down in the desert , or when other minor female characters are introduced all of a sudden in the desert , or the impromptu dance scene in the restaurant ( though that is a staple in many of these flicks , a cool one at that ) . It's when Adamson sometimes kids himself with what he's doing that it steers away , like a little mini-speech given by the groups leader about ' the man ' versus the ' love ' generation before a certain murder takes place . And the music , while with a cool opening number , is draining aside from an interesting drum solo here and there . I wouldn't say to start with Satan's Sadists if you're just starting to get into these kinds of films , as it is relatively hard to find and Adamson , while not without his cult fan-base , was unknown to me before seeing the film and really does nothing more than make your standard genre movie . However it's not to say that within the ' standards ' there aren't some creative flourishes . I liked how there was always the one character clinging onto getting stoned and tripped whilst the others went on with their tough business , who even provides a couple of laughs . And where the film heads to is exciting on the most primitive , fast-food sort of level . There are certainly ' better ' movies out there , probably with better acting and better use of music and locations . But at least in Adamson there is a little experimentation and touches of daring in his style ; little insert close-ups and zooms / pans are interesting , and at times a certain zaniness tries to work its way into the steady shots . If a biker picture , in all of its likely exploitive tendencies and cardboard psychology , is more about attitude and using what is there within the limitations , Satan's Sadists is not bad , though not great . |
509,011 | 453,068 | 412,637 | 6 | a light touch helps from time to time , but it mostly works just enough thanks to the actors | Tom DiCillo is a cool New York-based independent filmmaker , and he's made some good stuff in the past ( most notably as DP for Jim Jarmusch , and as the director of sleepers like the great Living in Oblivion ) , and I wish him the best of luck on anything he does . But on Delirious , he only gets it right some of the time . He's out to , at first it seems , make a satire on media hype and celebrity and the inanities of shallow attention given to people who don't do much to deserve it ( if you need proof of that , watch the Soup on E ! ) . But then it goes a little in a different direction , which I respected and wanted to go along with , as a fable / fairy-tale where Toby ( Michael Pitt ) is just about the nicest , most generous and fish-out-of-dumpster homeless kid who somehow becomes an ' assistant ' to fledgling photographer Les ( Steve Buscemi ) , who shows him the ropes and introduces him to a casting director ( Gina Gershon ) , and eventually - accidentally of course - falls into the company of a pop star ( Alison Lohman ) as the two all but fall in love on first sight . Good premise , and scenes between Buscemi and Pitt most often work the best , and funniest , as one sees subtle layers peeled by Les's pathetic paparazzi who just doesn't admit he's not ambitious enough to not be marginalized as a photographer . There's even some good comedy thrown around , the kind that is that strange , absurdity that we also saw in ' Oblivion ' . But , somehow , it just didn't all click for me after a while . There's a very bitter pill being sent out in , often , very corny and ill-shot scenes ( the latter of which I could accept , but for one brief instant , as Toby walks back to Les's place the morning after he's had that whirlwind night with Lohman , I was shocked at how cheesy a scene it turned into ) . The problem , also , is that it's difficult to mix such a delicate romantic / fable angle while also working in some mockery at the entertainment business . It's all in good amusement to see the " reality serial-killer " show being directed for " realism " , but it all doesn't lead up to anything significant to say past some shallow messages . Maybe I didn't see what others have been ; it's become a minor little hit with most , and I'm sure if you have any desire to see actors like Buscemi and Pitt and Lohman ( who is also very good ) and Gershon ( and hey , there's even a really hip and hilarious cameo from Elvis Costello ) you'll seek it out anyway . However , it's not the best , or least obvious , game in town despite its solid indie cred . |
508,675 | 453,068 | 364,970 | 6 | Babylon A . D is ambitious future-fi with too much that's derivative to stick | Babylon AD means well , and it takes itself seriously enough to not come off too self-parodic , with a few major exceptions with dialog and stylistic choices . Its director , Mathieu Kassovitz , isn't some hack for hire , but someone who does care about the message of his picture as well as the art , of creating a very tangible future of dirt and ugly and gray colors with some super-technicolor sides in New York City , and having an action star as the lead with some moments of actually good acting . He has a vision and he carried it through , but I wonder now having watched the Unrated director's cut ( or what could be the most available director's cut around without sifting through whatever Fox or whomever forced him to cut from the script ) , how much it was studio pressure and how much of it was just second-guessing . This is original in-as-much as one can see some original ideas about it . . . but it's also one of the most derivative mainstream movies I've seen in quite a while . It also veers almost off the deep end towards the very end , which is kind of troubling since that doesn't seem like something forced on by the studios . Action set-pieces and specific , boring usual kind of " WHOA ! " shots I could possibly see ( albeit Kassovitz has claimed the entire affair as a debacle since the studio harassed him from the start , which is hard to argue here ) , but that sort of twist almost makes one grind to a halt - especially when the story itself , when it does make some sense towards the very end , just stops dead in its tracks with one of those very likely tacked-on lines : " Save the planet - yeah , right . " Or maybe not ; maybe this was Kassovit's vision all along , a tale burning with a lot of intelligence for its genre while also leaning towards the generic for influence . To describe the plot , in other words , would be to take it right into a mix-and-match of other futuristic / post-apocalyptic / science-fiction plots : it's Children of Men ( horrid looking future with lots of people living in urban squalor and with seemingly random terrorism rampant in Europe ) meets Serenity ( a " woman " being carried across lines who may just be a " deadly weapon " of some kind ) meets , well , what else could I think of ? At the same time it's also based on a comic-book , which does go to explain what does make the film ultimately work , probably much better than it should . It's a pulp fable told with some intensity and even a few surprises such as Charlotte Rampling and Gerard Depardieu in supporting roles ( Michelle Yeoh isn't quite as lucky , but with less to do ) . The film has such grand ambition , and is filmed from time to time with the kind of brilliance that one might associate with the director of a film like La Haine ( another film with some real social relevance or just something good for our time ) , that it's a shame to see some wretchedly clichéd bits of dialog , some moments of action that lag in that not-too-bad-not-much-good category , and one line in particular involving a " missile linked to my passport " being a laugh out loud line . Topping it is Vin Diesel , a solid star but needing more than what he has here . It's like the rest of the movie : there's depth , their's quality , and their's something really going on . If only there was more , and more originality . |
509,425 | 453,068 | 424,136 | 6 | clever . . . too clever by half a ball , I mean half a something . . . | Note - not that too many people will read this , but this comment has some spoilers . Viewer discretion is sort of advised , depending on spoiler-ability and what-not . Hard Candy was one of the most ' talked-about ' indie features of 2006 . I put that in semi-quotes because a movie like Hard Candy does deserve some conversation time . And oddly enough this doesn't mean it was completely widely raved-about by critics despite its many wins at film festivals . It's meant to split up the audience , which is a fair thing to point out considering , since it's about putting an audience through the visceral reaction the characters go through in the picture . Whether or not what's up on the screen ends up as contrived or just a wee bit disappointing will depend on how much one can actually connect with the characters and this little ' game ' that Hayley ( cute and powerful Ellen Page ) puts might-be pedophile Jeff ( Patrick Wilson , also in the much richer drama-featuring-pedophilia Little Children ) through the wringer . For all that goes arguably right and arguably wrong with the film , it's worth seeing once . The problem is , from my point of view , as the director David Slade and his write Brian Nelson jump off from precocious small-talk that's fine and witty ( if somewhat obvious - " Well , doctors agree that I am actually insane , " says Hayley sort of ironically , though not at all mayhap ) , into a long-form version of the Stuck in the Middle With You sequence from Reservoir Dogs - only here substituting crazy Mr . Blonde and the embodiment of all cops Marvin Nash and some fun ear slicing with an oft continuously talkative and subtly crazy-eyed Hayley with the would-be embodiment of perverts in Jeff . Doesn't work as it should , even with the feeling of ' in-the-moment ' being the same , which is heart-pounding tension . But the director and writer try to have their cake and eat it too by making big statements about the morality of luring girls from the internet into the homes of strange men , AND make an exploitation flick with some art-film pretensions ( as good as Slade is , and he is good , at experimenting with color schemes and an unwavering close-up lens , he shouldn't go for the big shaky-cam scenes like he would later do to somewhat better effect in 30 Days of Night ) . Basically , and call me what you will for even thinking this , but the filmmakers didn't go enough , and it's the problem of having a scenario that ends up unraveling as that , an elaborate game that is not even so much played on by one character over another , but on the audience . As gruesome as it is , you expect that Jeff WILL be castrated by the blindly vengeful Hayley as a " preventive measure " , and as terrible as it is - even off camera - you expect things to probably get uglier WITH this intact . But luckily , he keeps his assets , and the game continues , leading up to the stupid chase up to the roof and final proposal . Why not go all out ? Why dangle a perfectly juicy carrot and fling it away at the convenience of the script or good taste or whatever ? In a strange way Hard Candy starts to turn more exploitive , because it turns away from any questions raised about the vulnerability of youth or the sadism that lies in those who want to get some odd pleasure out of pain from others ( just look at Abu-Gharib for that ) , and it becomes safer , more obvious , with the scripts layers revealing itself as just a pot-boiler in the guise of theater . Slade has the gifts to make it work , but he can't rise it quite to the level that it could be . And yet , this all said , it provoked enough of an emotional response that I can get where both sides are coming from - those who loved the tense unconventional idea of the roles reversed in a common criminal story that's almost become too common as of late ( NBC's " To Catch a Predator " is one of the funniest , if most repetitive , TV shows as of late date ) , and those that hated that it went with no real message at the end thanks to muddled ambiguity . And do see it for the acting , as Page and Wilson do their best to look as cruel and frightened and provoked and unpredictable as possible under the circumstances ; Page , especially , tries and succeeds in filling the shoes of a smarter-than-the-average 14 year old who's probably very clever - too clever by half even for the audience - in her plot . You know what she might do next , but you don't know quite how she'll react at the same time , which is something . |
510,426 | 453,068 | 71,517 | 6 | the rushed production shows , but it still makes for a fun midnight viewing | According to Jack Hill's commentary on the Foxy Brown DVD , there was only so much time to make Foxy Brown , as the surprise success of Coffy sent American Interational Pictures into a Pam Grier frenzy - they had to have something ready on the double . So Hill pumped out this little quickie of an exploitation flick that was meant to be a sequel to Coffy , but then got lopped off due to continuity , among other things , even though a lot of the plot points back to many things in the original Hill / Grier collaboration ( i . e . boyfriend getting knocked off , Grier playing the perpetual bad-ass , surrounded by corruption she must rid , etc ) . So in that sort of manufactured way , I liked it , and it actually gets into some really tough and gritty material when Foxy gets into trouble , deep trouble , when taken as a sort of slave-prisoner ( following this is a really excellent scene of swift revenge , maybe the most exciting scene in the whole movie ) . There's some good character actor work by Antonio Fargas as the sort of flunkie Link , brother of Foxy's , and by the very cold Katherine , played by Kathryn Loder ( and , true to the ' black-exploitation ' fold all of the villains are white ) . It's a shame though that there isn't more of a really knockout spirit to the whole production , even when Grier is at her best ( which is pretty constant as her character has the charm and the sass and the real conviction to be a real star in these vehicles ) there seems to be not as much of a punch as with Coffy . The big action climax is a bit of a letdown too with the airplane chase . But I'd say there are worse things to see from the period , and Foxy Brown is definitely not one of them . |
508,754 | 453,068 | 51,500 | 6 | this rare find is completely watchable on one level , almost in spite of itself . . . | You'd know why you'd want to find this film , as it's the ultra-low budget , barely-a-drive-in quickie that features the great Jack Nicholson in his feature debut at the tender age of 21 ( he was a mailman at MGM in his previous years in Hollywood ) . He plays a youth out of control , though also under duress . He's taken a woman and kid hostage , and outside the crowd builds in anticipation as the cops struggle to find a compromise to get everyone safely out . The film is complete with a theme song that just repeats ' cry-cry-cry , cry-baby killer ' , and in a style that is as polished as a junkyard dog . The story itself , by the way , is told in a way that is so simplistic and with over-acting ( or maybe too trying-to-be-realistic acting ) that is typical of this kind of un-pretentiously kind of fare . But the reason in the end to reach into the recesses of ebay or elsewhere to find it is to see Nicholson in his early larval stage of a career , and somehow he does make the work fascinating to watch . Obviously not his best by a long-shot , and his first big break in the B-world would come later in Little Shop of Horrors and even later in Easy Rider . However I did like how he was keeping his scenes pretty well grounded , keeping to the situation at hand with all of the confusion and shattered rebellion that's in a youth of his real age . It's almost like checking out the Beatles when they were still the Quarry Men or something - it's not necessarily ' good ' , but you might be surprised at how it's not really bad either . |
511,033 | 453,068 | 90,251 | 6 | an obscure 80s feminist neo-noir that may be obscure for a reason . . . | Variety was shot on the super-cheap on the streets of midtown NYC in 1983 , which is for a short while part of its not exactly charm but precise and evocative mood . This is a Times Square that most wont recognize since the clean-up in recent years ; it's dirty , loaded with porno theaters and video stores , and with some exceptions ( like the boss of the Variety movie theater played by Luis Guzman ) there's plenty of sleazy males . In this movie the main character , Christine ( Sandy McLeod ) seems to be a fairly normal girl just looking for a job and finds one at Jose's Variety theater at the ticket window . Little by little she becomes intrigued by the porno movies playing and by a mysterious gentlemen caller ( Richard Davidson ) who takes her out on a bum date to Yankee stadium , stranding her as he just goes away on some urgent matter . What follows is a series of her following him around - even going as far as to the Jersey shore where he does some mysterious " business " shaking hands with people outside of amusement parks - and little by little she sinks further into this porno-type of funk , like a misguided femme fatale sitting in her room and playing 45's in sultry clothes and purple lighting . Some of this sounds interesting because it is - Bette Gordon has a point to make here on the feminine condition in an Urban setting , kind of like a Taxi Driver only replacing the guns with more of the porn , and there are some effective scenes early on showing McLeod surrounded by this creepy but intriguing setting . But there's also passages that , I hate to admit , were just too dull to really be engaged . She follows this man to a fish market , and then we're treated to lots and lots of footage of fish and the like . Why ? What does this really add to the atmosphere ? It's like Gordon doesn't always know if she wants to make a neo-noir or a documentary , and the shuffle between the two forms ( both engaging on their own ) becomes confused . I also didn't care for those passages where Christine gives those ridiculously detailed descriptions / synopses of the porno movies she sees to her exasperated boyfriend ( Will Patton ) , and McLeod in these scenes reaches her most annoying points . She's not a terrible actress throughout , but here she sounds like she's reciting remembered lines as opposed to acting , and one sympathizes with what Mark has to put up with . We're putting up with it too . There is a reason this has something of a very minor cult status , and that it even got Bette Gordon a re-release screening at the Tribeca film festival this year . It's very much a New York movie , made on the dirty streets , meant to capture that dingy side and to give some kind of naturalistic feeling of a strange woman in this environment . But its own mystery undercuts itself . Variety would work far better , maybe even be truly great , as a short film . At 100 minutes , for all of its little moments of pleasure ( i . e . when Chrisitne imagines herself up on the screen in a room with the enigmatic criminal Louie ) , it's too long and too unfocused for what works well to really strike it home . Luis Guzman steals the show . |
510,084 | 453,068 | 443,680 | 6 | both amazing and annoying , it's a revisionist western with content and style | With maybe the longest title of any film this year , the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , writer / director Andrew Dominik is out to make a real statement on the legacy of outlaw Jesse James and the man who shot him , Robert Ford . Was it murder or almost a kind of suicide ? Was Bob Ford a hero , a coward , or just reluctant to get any of the press he originally might have wanted as a youth ? Questions are raised legitimately by the filmmaker , and they aren't questions that shouldn't be overlooked . But there's a catch , actually a couple : as Dominik wants to stay truthful to the original source AND make an epic film , he makes a work that tells too much while also showing in a style that veers between the magisterial and the false . It's a subjective thing , to be sure , when looking at the cinematography of a film and how it is effective to the senses , though it could be something more legitimately arguable in looking at if it works for the material itself . These , of course , are the big minuses , which I'll get to in a moment . But one aspect to ' Jesse James ' that should be noteworthy all the way is Brad Pitt's performance . He's been a Hollywood star since I can remember , even going back to the mid-90s when he started to break out of character actor parts and into marquee status . Now here's a sort of throwback to the best work he's done as a quasi-chameleon and still with the gravitas of a star . It's a mesmerizing portrayal of a man who is as mysterious as he is deadly , psychotic , loving , paranoid , scary , crazy , affable , and even charming . Just a little facial movement or raise or lowering of the lip indicates so much , and Pitt nails it every time , even in scenes where he almost starts to drag along with the dialog . It is , at the least , worthwhile alone to see the film for him ( maybe a little less so for the rest of the cast who , while good at what they do , are there as typical back-up western parts ) . Affleck is also a good co-star , who has to play mostly in one-note status ( mostly pouty , like a nerdy kid on the playground who is scared s-less but out for blood ) . But it is , at its best , the Brad Pitt show , which is rare to see as of late in his career . In fact , it's probably Pitt that probably kept me in my seat through most of the film . Dominik's direction and writing are , on the other hand , a mixed bag . He wants to make a sprawling , affecting tome on the nature of a legend and of the effect it has on those around the person ( who is , as Ford acknowledges , just a person ) , while coating it as an auteur . His tactic is to take as much narration possible , and it's literal overkill ( no pun intended ) ; we hear some moments when the narrator comments on Robert Ford looking through a closet ! What does this add ? It turns right from the start , and off and on until especially the last fifteen minutes , into a history lesson as much as a dramatization , which disrupts the intentions of making it a subjective perspective . OK , it's known , James was an icon for Americans as a figure of anti-establishment as part of a kind of establishment ( not above the law but not one who should've been killed by a man of no consequence like Bob Ford ) . But does it need to be pounded over the head ? It doesn't help then that cinematographer Roger Deakins adds to the mixed feelings . He captures many wide vistas , tight rooms and dark night exteriors ( I did love the train robbing shots ) like a true pro . But what are we to make of the constant shots with soft-focus ? The explanation I have read is that it's meant to represent the truth that is blurred by legend in the story . That's fine to hear after the fact , but while sitting and watching the movie it just doesn't make sense - it's less poetry and more a consistent form of drab self-indulgence . After seeing No Country for Old Men , where Deakins made , ironically , a better looking western set in 1980 , it becomes clear that the directing has to also be taken into account . And this goes without saying that it isn't a bad movie at all . Dominik does explore the themes at work here , with the damnation of betrayal and the fatality of the criminal , plus the side of America as a kind of hidden backdrop of pain and misery and fear of death . It's just that they're explored for too long and without the kind of depth that's really required . If you're looking for a real classic interpretation of the Jesse James / Robert Ford saga , watch I Shot Jesse James by Samuel Fuller . It might not have the aspirations of great art that ' Assassination ' has , but in its B-movie way it's almost a masterpiece in examining some of the same material . |
510,398 | 453,068 | 408,345 | 6 | good story , in the mechanical sense , Ford doing what he does , nothing too special | I was telling my Mother I had just returned from seeing the latest Harrison Ford movie , and all I needed to say was ' it was , you know , a Harrison Ford movie ' , and she said without any real knowledge of the story in the film what the story was about . Because the components are the same as what Ford has been working with in these kinds of thrillers he's been in for the past twenty years or so : Ford's a businessman , family gets kidnapped / held hostage , criminals need Ford to get them money , yada yada yada , cut to the chase , and the climax with Ford kicking ass and taking names . Going into Firewall I expected that , as it being a kind of Hollywood A-list formula picture , and all I asked was that it deliver some bang for the buck . It did , though there are certain points I wondered if little holes in the story ( and a bit of a stretch in believability for the climax ) were worth some of the more rewarding aspects . At the least there's a competent actor to play the antagonist , played by Paul Bettany , already making his mark as a solid character actor . He and his five man crew take said Jack Stanfield's ( Ford's ) family hostage ( with Virginia Madsen as his beautiful - and in real life twenty years younger-wife ) , in order to get 100 million out of a bank that he works at . Things seem to be going as planned for the robbers until - surprise - the banker turns the tables on them . Director Richard Lacarne is also competent enough to not muck up ( some of ) the suspense scenes , and even supplies a couple of un-formulaic scenes to work its way through for the actors to work with ( one example for me was a brief scene with Bettany and Ford's son watching the Flintstones ) . But then at some point then the story takes its turn , and I just sat back waiting for the inevitable to come around . The storytelling of the film isn't too much of the problem with Firewall , but its not the same really enveloping , truly tense territory of the Fugitive or Air Force One . Not that I would complain too much , I'm sure I'm maybe part of the audience that would go see a Ford picture just for the fact that he's in it doing what he does in his successful ' escapist ' way . However I also know that these kinds of films can't last much longer for him and he may have to pick different scripts ; the final confrontation / fight scene that happens in the film is watchable , but even for someone leaving disbelief its a little too much to comprehend . Like Clint Eastwood , Ford has here a movie for his fans , and it's a notch above some of the other work he's done in the past several years . But as the mechanics of this movie turn , however good , it doesn't reach for anything more to work with . |
509,668 | 453,068 | 48,682 | 6 | an illustrious beginning to Corman's career | Roger Corman started off in the B-movie arena and never left , for better and for worse . This , his first film , gives the false impression that this will be some weird sci-fi movie with actual swamp creatures or something . Instead we get one of the early girl-prison type flicks that would later be popular in the 70s to a degree . Here an undercover cop goes incognito in a women's prison with three girls ( including Marie Windsor and Beverly Garland ) , and their plot to escape from prison and get some stashed diamonds in the bayou swamps . Then , as they are making their escape , they kidnap a man and woman ( including 3rd rate James Cagney knock-off Mike Connors ) to lead them along in their boat . But they need to watch out for their flaring tempers - and a few alligators here and there . It's all , of course , pretty cheesy and at best acted with a little estrogen-laden grit . It's fun to watch some of these girls going at each other in big ham-bone performances , and all by a first-timer Corman who can direct just about to not have us leaving down the aisles ( or our homes ) in droves . It does make it more worthwhile , of course , to seek out the Mystery Science Theater cut , as the boys rip into it where appropriate ( which is , indeed , quite often and with a relish , like with the alligator attack scene as they dub over completely ) . What is surprising , despite the obvious shortcomings , is that Swamp Women isn't a total loss . I actually enjoyed some of those scenes in the swamp , with the prisoners acting all bad-ass with their prisoners . Only when actual plot needs to be developed early on is it incredibly stagy . And , luckily , Corman ( or the " Cor-Man " that is to be lived by as comes up with his director title card ) , provides some substantial humor without the MST3K track . |
509,982 | 453,068 | 257,516 | 6 | not terrible if you take it for what it is - B movie trash in the guise of the latest Dimension films fright-fest | Cursed isn't any great shakes as a horror film , and I would never put it anywhere near Wes Craven's top tier work ( i . e . Nightmare on Elm Street , Scream , Hills Have Eyes ) . But considering all the work they did to hack through it all , in the re-shoots and the overworked CGI , it's actually not really all that horrible . I remember going to see it and even though it was at night the feeling in the audience was more like being with a bunch of little kids at a Saturday matinée theater in the 50s or 60s - cheap thrills and stupid laughs , and some wicked teens engrossed in stupid antics like , well , romance . Christina Ricci is also not bad at all , and even holds her own when the Kevin Williamson script gets creaky into the media portions of the storyline . There's good jokes to be had at the expense of a ' retarted ' character , Jimmy , who may not be what he seems . And as far as your werewolves go , Cursed at least doesn't have the crappy ones of American Werewolf in Paris - there's some texture within all of the overlap . Hell , Craven and Williamson even go for the ' accident at Mulholland drive ' angle , which strives to be like a version of the accident in Mulholland Drive , only with a dash more exploitation and less dream-like personality in its rush . And an attack scene in a bathroom is actually kind of memorable in its own trashy aspect : you know what's coming , and it's not the best executed scene , but even on a bad-movie level it does its job well enough . This all might sound like being defensive , but it isn't . I'm not saying it's entirely a good movie . But it isn't a very bad movie , not least of which deserving of the cruel lashing it received when released early in 2005 - some of Craven's worst reviews , which I'm sure he bounced back on once Red Eye was released . The thrills are sometimes pretty surprising , a murder investigation sort of interesting , and a climax that is more nutty than a prank box full of spring-snakes . It's like eating a box full of candy that won't last long , and might make your teeth rot , and yet has an inviting texture as candy all the same . |
510,644 | 453,068 | 67,229 | 6 | one of the awesomely bad exploitation flicks of the early 70s ; doesn't mean it's any good , but it's bad fun while it lasts | David E . Durston's most readily available motion picture - which means it's the only one that isn't either an obscure porno or others - is I Drink Your Blood , a quickie made for peanuts and meant to be artful to those who have said peanuts in their brain . All you need to know : satanic hippies - a winning contradiction of course - find an abandoned house , beat up grandpa ( who looks very oddly enough like Luis Bunuel ) , and the grandson gets angry enough to shoot a rabies infected dog , draw out its blood with a syringe , inject the blood into MEAT PIES ( yes , meat pies , what kind of meat is meant as an eternal mystery ) , and the Charles Manson wannabes eat em up . The response : they all become , to one extent or another , ravaging quasi-zombies who go after the rural folk one by one , some with a pure ravenous delirium like the black hippie or the native American , and others who's madness grows more steadily ( the women in the group ) . There's even one , I won't say who , goes almost Shaolin-style on the situation . Filled with nobody actors who probably all knew they were going nowhere all the same ( save perhaps for Lynne Lowry , who had somewhat of a successful B-movie career with her cat-eyes appearing later on in the Crazies ) , it's a cheapo attempt to cash in on Night of the Living Dead , but it does have some really fed up ambition going for it in hindsight : it's quite possibly the very first ( un-official ) Troma production . Spared all expense , I Drink Your Blood shoots its financial wad on what little special effects and gore and make-up there needs to be , and that alone . No need to get things like the foam from rabies infected people right , just dab some shaving cream . And why bother rehearsing ( at least , that's what the way it seems of course ) , which is more than evident in possibly the worst child actor I've ever seen in a schlock fest playing the kid who starts this whole she-bang . Yet it is , living up to its hype , a very violent movie , however without a single socially redeeming statement in the process . But unlike some other ultra-violent horror fests of the period ( Last House on the Left immediately comes to mind ) , I Drink Your Blood isn't really out for loftier goals than to shock , and Durston's most significant achievement , if nothing else , is to make all of this bad crap really , hysterically funny , if only in big bursts amid scenes that are also , predictably , dull . The aforementioned Chinese character is the oddest one to have in a satanic LSD cult , though it's also a lot of fun seeing how sleazy the director can get in exploiting racial stereotypes . Of course , due to budget constraints , no " daring " exposes of what it MUST be like to trip , however just watching the hippies chow down on the meat pies is enough to get some chuckles . It might even make for a decent do-it-yourself Mystery Science Theater night , as the ultra-violent rabies-infected LSD-satanic-hippie movie was sort of left in the dust during the show's run . |
509,078 | 453,068 | 90,568 | 6 | for any other director it'd be a very good if dated 80s effort . . . | . . . for Hal Ashby , it's something of a tragedy in the course of his career . At this point , to give some background , he wasn't getting the same kind of prime work he did in the 70s ( Harold and Maude , Last Detail , Coming Home , Shampoo , Being There ) , this despite the fact that he won an Oscar as editor and nominated for director . After some low-budget comedies - and a less than great Rolling Stones movie - he took on this neo-noir co-scripted by Oliver Stone , and had a good cast in place with Jeff Bridges playing the on-off lush ex-detective , Rosanna Arquette as the call girl entrapped by cold , grinning / vicious pimp / pusher played by newcomer Andy Garcia . It seemed like a solid genre picture , one that could hopefully make a few bucks among the crowds looking for another fix of action and crime and romance and what-have-you . As far as I know , I'm not sure why Ashby was then fired midway through by the producers . Maybe it was paranoia on the producers part ( Ashby had an addiction to cocaine , ironically considering the subject matter of the film , and perhaps he was still on it during filming ) , or he did genuinely screw up somehow , but seeing that he wasn't part of the production all the way through , it casts the film in something of another light . Taking it as it is , there's some entertainment to be had with the tense dialog from Stone between Bridges and Garcia , and also some good chemistry between Bridges and Arquette . Hell , there's even a compelling undercurrent of redemption that's to be had with Bridges's Matthew coming back from bad alcoholic blackouts to track down the killer of the call girl Sonny . But , and this is the crucial part , the film often has the feel as though it was seriously meddled with by the producers . This isn't to say Ashby's touches with his actors isn't there , as that's compelling enough , but the soundtrack in place makes this so painfully scream out 1980 THRILLER ! that it boggles the mind like a hangover with Miami Vice . And there's even a section of the plot that , as perhaps with Matthew as well , blacks out right after Sonny's death . Certain other scenes don't feel like they had that touch of what came at least mostly naturally to Ashby , which was interesting editing . It would've been one thing if this was just another in a series of damned efforts from the director ( apparently another film he made also had this happen to him ) , but given that it's also his final directed feature , albeit after the fact , adds to the shamefulness . Does 8 Million Ways to Die deserve a director's cut ? Maybe so , maybe not , as it stands it's a competent , mostly satisfying thriller . But we'll never know either way . |
509,742 | 453,068 | 465,624 | 6 | decent enough entertainment for what you might expect | Ivan Reitman unfortunately ( today ) doesn't have the real goods on directing spectacular fantasy comedies that work for all ages and can rake in the huge bucks . It's not that he's become a bad director , but that in an age where the ' Frat pack ' grosses nearly 100 million or more at a clip with each film they put out , his kind of comedy is a near-dying breed . This being said , I was glad - if not enthralled - to see My Super Ex-Girlfriend , a pleasant diversion that gives some good moments on its one-joke premise . It boasts also some very good performances from Uma Thurman as the ultra-neurotic and high-strung Jenny Johnson aka G-Girl , who can be as nuts as she is sweet and dangerous as heroic , and even Luke Wilson playing a typical kind of role with his sort of charm and off-handed way of playing scenes . Anna Faris from Scary Movie is decent enough too , if not much to work with character-wise , as the real flame of the story . Even Eddie Izzard pops in as the ' Arch Nemesis ' of the picture . Even with a premise as catchy as the one for My Super Ex-Girlfriend , only so much is made up from it . And there are , needless to say for an Ivan Reitman comedy , some really funny moments . One of them is when Thurman's G-girl persuades the reluctant Wilson to get it on while in mid-flight up in her super-duper grasp in the sky . Even the shark bit , which can be seen countless times on the TV ads , is amusing . Unfortunately , Reitman's writer doesn't really mine enough chances for bigger laughs aside from mostly sexual gags an innuendo , and the performance by the buddy of Wilson's , played by Rainn Wilson ( no relation ) is an under-cooked character of hormonal ties that keep him tethered as the hapless advice giver that really isn't too smart or of as much enjoyment as other characters . Indeed , that might've been my biggest beef with the film was that parts of the story - which Reitman obviously cares about and does make interesting past the gags - becomes undercooked in the last act , and ultimately very transparent . It becomes somewhat of a struggle to care about these people , even amid absurd situations , which was never really a problem in other more successful Reitman films . My Super Ex-Girlfriend does provide enough good gags and humor , decently professional craftsmanship ( no quick editing , with the special effects kept grounded enough not to get too goofy or off the wall ) , and it's a fair bit of summertime fun for audiences . That it is less than the sum of its parts isn't too surprising though . |
509,790 | 453,068 | 443,543 | 6 | there's more potential than is really tapped into in the Illusionist | The Illusionist is actually more than anything an actor's movie , which is a little ironic considering how much romantic sweep and movement there should be in the writing and directing . In terms of Neil Burger's direction , it's never really bad at all , and is very competent most of the time ( aside from a couple of notable instances involving the ' soft focus ' around the edges of the frame in flashbacks and one sex scene ) . The writing , however , is a little more lacking even if it's also never annoying or deterring from what's watchable in the film . But there's contrivances as well , through all that is supposed to be seen as complex and very intricate and exquisite . The latter of those can be tapped into in the period setting of early 20th century Vienna , and it's always professionally done . But there's something lacking to it as well - a real driving force through the romantic core of the story , and that supporting characters are more interesting than the main characters , almost in spite of the performances . And as mentioned , if there's any reason more than anything to see it it's for the acting , where Edward Norton makes a character who's own purpose and need in the film is very narrow ( to make his illusions , but more than anything all for the possession and togetherness of another woman , played by Jessica Biel ) . As a child he , Eisenheim , and Sophie meet and fall in love , but are separated by the boundaries of class . Years pass , and she comes back into his life by chance , but now she has a suitor , a Prince played by the icy Rufus Sewell . When a certain tragedy befalls the situation of the Prince and his bride-to-be , this sets Eisenheim off into a whole new direction with his illusions ( Norton often in a trembling , shocked trance look that is always convincing ) by conjuring up lost souls . This the sets off Paul Giamatti's inspector character , and the ties become all the greater to what may become of the central question , however elusive it might seem . All of this might be even more compelling if the actual romantic plot felt stronger . But despite the impeccable skills of Norton , who makes this bland character driven and intuitive ( his choices as an actor are very good here if not great ) , and the OK presence of Biel , their characters aren't as interesting as the tricks and leap-of-faith sized wonders that Eisenheim creates on the stage . If anything at times the film felt stronger and with a better purpose and strength with Giamatti on screen , as he is more than anything the part of the audience , trying to figure things out . By the end his own revelation is probably the biggest leap of all , almost Shyamalan-sized , yet I find his performance is what sticks with me as opposed to the twists and surprises thrown to the audience . It's almost as if the iron-clad conventions of the plot and the intensity , passion and creativity of what goes on in Eisenheim's total control battle it out for dominance . I'd recommend the Illusionist , but with some reservations that not the spectacular event that it might seem to be . Its got skill and tact and a very fine sensibility with Norton and Giamatti and even the dastardly done Prince by Sewell . Though at the same time it's really got nothing up its sleeve . |
510,984 | 453,068 | 430,357 | 6 | a film I admire even as it's lacking | I think after seeing writer / director Michael Mann's the Insider and Collateral , maybe I expected a little too much from Miami Vice . But then , even as an 80's baby , I've never seen a single episode of the original Don Johnson TV show that Mann was crucially part of . His film adaptation of the show will definitely appeal to his main fans , but as a stand-alone action-packed blockbuster thrill-ride , it does and doesn't deliver . It's hard to explain why a film like this should work better , because it does contain enough grit and intensity to be a step above other knock-off type films with rough , smart , intuitive cops who don't take s from no one , and the even more dangerous criminals . But for a film from Mann , who is probably one of only several in Hollywood who can have such an auteur-like status over a production as sprawling and big-time as Miami Vice , there's something that just didn't connect with me like his other films . And it's something that is hard to really say as criticism , but it is a film that is more interesting as a kind of digital action-drama experiment than as a real entertainer . The people on screen might be depicting some kind of close-to-reality type of world where the guns are very real and those on either side don't have overtly tongue-in-cheek jabs at each other . But on the other hand , it's not really that much fun either . Another liability with a film like this , which takes itself seriously enough to try and use the style of its different look and of its two leads , is that the story should be more clear . At the core of this film is a story that was meant , I'd assume , in the vein of the Miami Vice TV show , is more of a B-type story than something big like Mann is aiming for . To compensate , the director's script is so concentrated on keeping to the lines of the tense and narrow ( and occasionally clichéd which is good and bad ) that a kind of un-reality permeates through the characters and the scenarios . In other words the story is not really as interesting as it thinks it is . Nevertheless , the actors as mentioned do carry themselves enough for their parts , with each understanding their character's lack of characterization left mostly for broad strokes . For example , the sub-plot involving Colin Farrel and his romantic interest ( who is also the main drug dealer's beau and business partner ) , doesn't develop much further than allowing for the stylistic flourishes . They do look terrific together on screen , as repeated Audioslave songs pop up with the near cinema-verite angles Mann imposes . But the script doesn't give them much more to do than provide two-dimensional fodder for later in the film . I guess what I mean to say about Miami Vice , for all of its ambitions to rise above the material and be a kind of fresh take on the crime / cop action genre with drugs and SWAT teams filmed in HD , is not up to par with what Mann is capable of as a filmmaker . His heart is in it , but it's one that doesn't seem to be as interested in going a little deeper into the character's psychologies like in the film's previously mentioned , but more into getting tighter angles and tough hand-held night shots that border on becoming distracting . It's a picture in the end that does deliver what it promises to its viewers - sexy scenes , thrilling gun-fights , tense negotiation type moments , rotten-to-the-bone villains and slick good guys - and will probably be a let down if you look for more underneath the surface / think about it much afterwards . . . When I look back on it now months later , not really memorable . |
508,595 | 453,068 | 67,525 | 6 | post-apocalyptic quasi-guilty pleasure that's better for Heston fans than those looking for I Am Legend | I got what I wanted out of the Omega Man , though if it were a better made movie then I might feel the need to add it to my collection as opposed to sending it back as a rental . It starts off with a very funny and terrifically surreal set-up as Charleton Heston drives around in a red convertible , no one else in the city , with an 8-Track playing muzak . Suddenly , he stops in front of a building , sees something moving around behind the window , and takes out his machine gun firing off some rounds at the figure . Bizarre enough ? How about when he stops off at a movie theater , which has " held over " the documentary Woodstock , as Heston reels up the film in the projection room and watches it for what must be the 10th time ( he talks along with one of the interviewees at one point ) . So far in the film it's deliciously ambiguous as to what the hell is going on , aside from Heston being the only guy in a deserted city ( LA ) with a machine gun and love for the Woodstock film . Deep down , I knew that the story would soon have to unfold , but I wonder how classic the film could be if it continued on this experimental track of mind . The story then unfolds , and it's sort of hit or miss as far as 70s ( pre-Star Wars , post Planet of the Apes ) science fiction goes . A group known as the " family " survivors of a nuclear holocaust who go around in black robes looking like monks with pale faces and completely white pupils , are after Heston's ex-scientist , who somehow got a vaccine together for himself before the plague went totally widespread . He has a good hold-up in a penthouse , with an amusing bust of an old general he talks to and a big TV / mirror he uses for narcissistic purposes . Did I mention the guns ? Lots of them ; one wonders if scenes from this film are ever shown at NRA conventions ( ironically though , the scene where he shoots a monk who's somehow crawled his way up to the penthouse , was in Bowling for Columbine for a moment , which adds to it being unintentionally hilarious when it comes around ) . Soon though once the more strange parts of the film give way to the more typical ones ; the other survivors , not the ' family ' but some group who somehow didn't get infected ( though could ) , bring Heston into the fold , though with some mixed results . Chiefly that our hero gets to bed down with a foxy black lady with a huge afro , and one of the kids infected , who gets cured , stupidly ( more-so stupidly plot-wise ) tries to convince the ' family ' that they can be cured too , which is the last thing on their minds . As an action film , it's surprisingly not as intense as I imagined from hearing the bits of hype and seeing clips from the film . True , it's a lot of fun seeing Heston chew on the dialog and give just a look , or a laugh , and make it worthwhile as some typical Heston machismo , and if there is a situation involving lots of half-dead fellows with wicked intentions it's a sure-fire bet to have a guy like him around . But the story around it seems too undercooked - this is from someone who has yet to read Matheson's book - or rather not appropriately enough in ambiguity while at the same time not really raising any questions like the much more successful Planet of the Apes did . When it comes down to it , The Omega Man is a neat time capsule , especially for those who want to see Heston kick ass and sort of take names ( and maybe just to watch it for all the ironic reasons of a nut like Heston being president of the NRfantasy for him , who knows ) . Just don't go looking for a landmark . |
510,332 | 453,068 | 469,641 | 6 | good if you're looking for a memorial of heroism and courage , though short of really affecting | Maybe part of my reaction to Oliver Stone's latest directorial effort , World Trade Center , is not totally the film's fault , or maybe it is , I still can't decide . Months ago I saw what I thought was the ultimate take on the pain , horror and bottomless grief that came from with United 93 , which took a full-on documentary approach with one particular story from that day and without a known cast or really well-known director made an incredibly emotional film . With World Trade Center , this time we get one of the chief directors working today with melodrama and heightened emotions , who more often than not does make it work for his goals . It also has a cast of known Hollywood actors , such as Nicholas Cage ( as the star ) , Maria Bello , Maggie Gyllenhaal , Stephen Dorff , and Jay Hernandez among others . That matched with a story that has no real villains aside from the elements around them ( i . e . a mountain of rubble ) , and given a more old-fashioned approach to the devastation , puts the film at more of a distance for the viewer . This is a respectable , well-made dramatization of the events of these two un-questionably brave policemen . If it isn't better than it could've been , it's because of its ambitions as a simply respecting , and sentimental detailing . This is not to say that Stone and first-time writer Andrea Berloff don't put up some very effective scenes . It's just that they often have to share time with material that , while probably not far from the truth , are too typical or diverting from what is compelling . For example , the early scenes as the chaos first comes up with the first plane hitting the tower , and the officers going in , is just the right pacing for this set-up material . When officers John McLoughlin ( Cage ) and Will Jemeno ( Michael Pena ) are under the rubble , which is very well constructed by Stone's designers for full authenticity , their scenes together are close to touching . Even a moment when Jesus comes into the picture via Stone's use of symbolism isn't lost on me . But it's in the cutting back to the families of the men where I started to feel the disconnect . I understand the purpose of showing the worrying , sorrowful wives and kids in this situation , but it becomes almost like filling up the running time , especially in the most unnecessary scenes of the film in the flashbacks showing both men before the incidents . This added with Stone's hit or miss tactic of visual melodrama makes the film lesser than it could be . But this is all personal gripes , and what I did expect from the film I did get . There are more than enough scenes that hit the buttons that should be met about the bravery and heroism of those who responded to the towers collapse . And Stone is tactful enough not to go all Michael Bay on us with his style ( and , at the least , keep a kind of restraint that seems to be a good rebound after Alexander ) . He keeps his actors in a state of mind that fits the subject matter , and even in the moments that do border on being in a TV-movie ( though in the end a stroke above a TV-movie ) , they're never un-true to what their characters need to be for the material . World Trade Center is meant to hit the mainstream movie-going audience , unlike the more independent-minded and un-restricted United 93 , and for a mass audience it's just the right touch of pathos that's not too soon five years later . |
510,075 | 453,068 | 389,790 | 6 | ends up working better than it should , thanks to Seinfeld and some irreverent puns and jokes | My expectations weren't very high for Bee Movie , but it somehow fulfilled what little hope I had that the star power would come through . Unlike Sharktale , where an equally admirable couple of talents combined voice-work ( Scorsese and De Niro ) , Jerry Seinfeld , who co-wrote and co-produced the picture as well , has the right kind of attitude to change up the typical animated movie while not ever reinventing it . It's a tricky enterprise to recommend , because for kids it might have some wit to it that they might not really get , despite the color palette being almost as fresh as Pixar's Cars , and for adults there isn't the plethora of instantly quotable lines and unforgettable innuendo and eccentricities from the great ' show about nothing ' . But considering that it's coming from a man who's never done a starring role in a movie , let alone an animated one , or that it's his first time attempting to write one , it's successful in a sense . That sense , really , is that a sort of sensibility from his stand-up comedy has carried over . All the little observations on the topic of bees and honey and what have you are covered , head to stinger , and a lot of the best moments are when the actors feel like they're riffing like on a stand-up stage . Although the actual storyline itself is kind of clunky and a little like a so-so children's book ( save for the elements of the lawsuit and its outcome , which if one pay's attention to the news lately has even environmental relevance with bees and their connection to pollination ) , the filmmakers are able to straddle the line to make it worthwhile as a ' family ' film , with equal bits of fun for young and old . Old , in the sense that the jokes about Ray Liotta , Sting , southern lawyers named " Ali-Buy " , possible ethnically stereotyped bees ( Barry's family , wee bit like his folks on Seinfeld ) , will get them more than the kiddies . Even when interest in the actual outcome of the situation grows a little weary , and a climax at an airport and up in the air doesn't completely work , little things just stick out very well . It's a vibrant , fast-paced CGI-feature , lacking the power and gravitas of a PIXAR film , but at the same time not stooping to the sophomoric levels that many another CGI movie ( including the Shrek films ) go for . Not exactly a very good movie , but very far from a bad one : it's like a Jerry Seinfeld concert special about bees , nothing but , and somehow , however unlikely , with a fairly charming performance as an actor - as opposed to the sitcom , where he was , more or less , playing himself in an equally crazy world . Other cool voice-work , by the way , from Patrick Warburton , Chris Rock , John Goodman , and Michael Richards . |
510,363 | 453,068 | 482,572 | 6 | strong performances + significant problems in NYPD drama | Interesting to see the reactions to Pride and Glory on IMDb : some people like it a lot , so much so that they rank it as one of their favorite films of the year , while others rank it low , very low , saying it's low-end predictable trash that rips off from every other cop movie around including last year's We Own the Night ( that title comes up often , which I can't comment on as I've yet to see it ) . I might be one of those small handful that are in the middle : Pride and Glory is an alright cop drama , not amazing or really terrible . It borrows from many movies and TV shows , this much is definite , and its directorial style goes between fine competence with actual dialog scenes ( with the occasional noir-ish flourish ) and overbearing with the hand-held in action scenes . It seems as if no cop drama in recent memory can quite come up to the height that Narc reached with that - coincidentally in this case Narc director Carnahan had a part in writing P & G's script - and for most of the running time the film suffers from a lack of real stylistic vigor . But , thankfully a big but , the performances are all stellar all-around . From the big players like Edward Norton ( who , unless under duress or restraint by the studio , turns in fantastic work that's subtle for the camera but as intense as a theater performance ) and Colin Farrell ( gaining cred fast this year with this , In Bruges and underrated Cassandra's Dream ) , Jon Voight ( who , somehow , has bounced back from the STP-nightmare appearance in Bratz ) , and character actor Noah Emmerich ( often with one facial expression - tension and an inner sadness - but still good if not as good as Little Children ) , to Jennifer Ehle who plays Emmerich's dying wife who is , for every moment she's on screen , absolutely terrific and even makes great scenes out of otherwise OK elements . This is , in fact , a real actor's movie , unlike Righteous Kill which rested entirely on he heels of its two stars , and for all the black - and - white - and - sometimes - gray areas of the script - about a family of cops who become embroiled in one member , Jimmy ( Farrell ) and his incredulously corrupt dealings and murders - the bulk of the cast make it more than watchable : one is almost fooled from time to time , with all its rampant cursing and crazy bits ( i . e . threatening hot-iron on a baby ) , that it is great . But it isn't . So much of its plot is middling and only sparks of fascinating scenes keep it together , like when a sleazy Hispanic character pays a personal call to Jimmy's house while his family is home , and its final 15 minutes are a mix of wild hysterics ( a supporting character , part of Jimmy's corrupt crew , snaps in a convenience store during a ' pick-up ' and a big race-inspired protest happens on cue ) and a true-blue Irish bar fight that perhaps would've benefited from John Ford rising from the grave to guest direct . So catch it on TV , now that it's almost gone from theaters , if you haven't seen it yet , and judge for yourself if it's high , low , or in the middle of expectations . I'm in the middle , though it does seem like the kind of OK movie that may play better on repeat viewings when nothing much else is on . |
509,467 | 453,068 | 817,538 | 6 | a minor effort from Apatow and company , but still better than some other comedies | Could one expect more from Drillbit Taylor's script ? Sure - it's written by Kristofer Brown and Seth Rogen , Beavis & Butt-head alumni and Apatow mega-star respectively ( plus a guy named ' Edmond Dantes ' , which is really John Hughes oddly enough ) - but for what it's worth , as a rental , it's not the worst that could happen . If it is lackluster it's because of the prototypical nerds-vs-bullies element , plus the nerd that wants the girl , and the ' hero ' of the story of the title who goes through ups and downs with his " employers " . Of course , it's also hard to dislike Owen Wilson , who's like one of those scruffy dogs that comes up and yaps and chases its tail and has a charm and fun time , when it's needed . Here Wilson is a bum AWOL soldier who by quick luck sees a job posting for a ' bodyguard ' . The job is posted by a few freshman kids , two longtime friends and one an even bigger geeky dude than the others , who are looking for protection against a really horrible bully and his cohort ( he's the kind of bully that will charge if you put the color red over his face , and of course no one else will stand up to him ) . It's fun times then seeing Drillbit - named , we later find out , for a pinkie accident in high school - teach these kids to buck up and fight the bullies . It becomes a little cluttered plot-wise with Wilson starting to then date the school English teacher ( Leslie Mann ) , and it's sometimes only mildly amusing when it could be shooting the moon comedy wise . Then again , I'm not quite the right demographic for this kind of formulaic high school comedy ; if you're a 11 or 12 year old kid , you'll like this movie a whole lot , and without sounding too sanctimonious it's a little more appropriate then some of the raunchiest stuff in Superbad ( if , again , not as funny ) . Perhaps it's slightly ' safer ' than some of the Apatow productions , even if it's still fairly violent and intermittently crude . A lot of , thankfully in a way , rests on its young actors playing the nerds , the whacked out bully , and Wilson who can go between straight-man and comic relief pretty well . In short , a good rental , though don't rush out for it . |
508,039 | 453,068 | 105,665 | 6 | a fever dream that fans may or may not respond to ; a flawed trip into the world of nightmares | Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me is quite the perplexing film as both a David Lynch and Twin Peaks fan , because it's got qualities that should make for one of the best works of the director and doesn't really hit the mark . The problem , in a way , is somewhat comparable to the problem of Dune . There , Lynch's lack of control was something that made it a tough journey to go through , even as there was much to see as pure Lynchian cinema . Yet here with Fire Walk With Me it's almost an overwhelming notion of control that has him going way into a column of intriguing danger where pretension becomes a recognizable factor . It also doesn't help that the end result would benefit from being instead one crammed-in crammed as two . The story of Chester Diamond ( Chris Isaak ) and his disappearance while working on a Twin Peaks-related case has the makings for a much more interesting spin-off , where the universe is still intact that Lynch and company have created but has a whole different trajectory with the characters . Meanwhile , there's the detailed back-story of Laura Palmer's final days , and it's here that Lynch starts to lose his balance . Because Lynch and company made Laura Palmer a much more captivating and deliriously melodramatic force with pure , surrealistic overtones in the past tense on the show , seeing it unfold in present-tense time , with the singularly warped Palmer / Bob / father-daughter dynamic going loses its power . It might not for some ; the bits where one can see why Lynch and Engels went into this excursion in the tale of Palmer are reminiscent of the best that Twin Peaks on TV had to offer ; some of these are the dreams , like the re-appearance of the dwarf with " I am the arm " as a crucial , hilarious scene . But at the same time it almost feels exploitive , as a fan , and for newcomers to TP ( which would be better if you're not in seeing this , unless you're up for a lot of upfront scenes of weird and wild characterization and style ) the revelations feel a little more shallow and sensationalized for content purposes . All your favorite cast members are back , and in Phantom Menance style not really always with as much attention or depth as one could want or feel necessary . But then , was a Twin Peaks prequel necessary to begin with ? This question , which can be a nagging one watching the film at times , has to be put aside for the fact that a prequel now exists and it is what it is . The perception of Fire Walk With Me is tricky because Lynch , Engels and company are not really about getting to deeper truths about the nature of mystery , evil's ongoing pervasive quality , and the subconscious , but in flaunting style ( i . e . the nightclub scene , a likely inspiration for the one in Babel ) as a means of going further and further with the ever-lurid , more HBO-than-Primetime story of Laura's downward spiral . It goes without saying that the line between psychological upheaval and mythology is tested to a degree of fascination as part of the whole creation of the ' Bob ' myth and the Black Lodge themselves . This being said , it's sort of odd and all the same seeing Lynch try to get through a work that is almost too big , too personal , too abstracted , and nearly too easy as too much in a scheme of excess , as he's one of the few American filmmakers today who can create some watchable cinema - occasionally powerful and frightening - as it ironically doesn't work . I'd rather watch Lynch mess something up than a far more deliberate attempt from a Hollywood director . Perhaps a late night viewing sometime may change my mind at some point in the future , as will more contemplation in general about what the darks side of Twin Peaks has to offer as opposed to the more light ( if ' light ' is the word to use ) scenes and well-rounded cast of eccentrics . There's even a noteworthy turn by the film's leading lady , Sheryl Lee , and a wonderfully outrageous dream sequence involving Cooper and some random southern guy played by David Bowie . Nevertheless , FWWM is a slight , disappointing trip , and not up to par with the standard , however high , set by the show as a whole . |
511,005 | 453,068 | 448,157 | 6 | there are complaints to be had , but mostly it's a fun summer action movie | Will Smith is a great star in Hollywood , and it's fun to see him in Hancock work his way with a character who's an " a-hole " ( don't call him that , by the way , that's the buzz word ) for the first half and then starts to open up and not be so much one in the second half . If for no other reason to see the film it's for him and for people like Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron to show what potential they have with their talents ; Theron especially reminds an audience every once in a while that she won an Oscar for a reason . And , it's also for the first half of the way through the 90 minute running time a wonderful dark comedy that takes itself seriously but also pokes fun at a superhero who doesn't give a flying f and bums around saving people while also drinking his ass off and destroying lots of property . But at some point when the writers decide to develop the mythology of the character , who is apparently somewhat God-like and is immortal under specific circumstances but also has ' another ' like him ( I won't say who , spoiler ) , and they don't give it enough time to really sink in after the somewhat ' twist ' occurs of the way through . And anything humorous in the first half is gone pretty much by near-movie's end , leaving it in the hands of Peter Berg , the director . This was the aspect of Hancock that grated down at me . Berg and his cameraman's style is to usually not bother with things like steadicams or dollys or a camera simply still on a tri-pod or other and to make everything hand-held and wobbly and oddly shot and ( in the case of the hospital climax ) just awfully lit and shot . It comes off as more-so amateurish than being intense or realistic , and it definitely doesn't fit the kind of movie it's meant to be placed in ( i . e . JULY 4TH SUMMER BLOCKBUSTER , hello ! ) And yet , even with the problems I had , I wouldn't stop anyone from seeing Hancock , as a good way to kill an hour and a half and to enjoy some of Smith's best work to date . He's a charismatic and multi-faceted actor , but his star quality meshes well , and it's a performance that's worth every minute to see he's on screen for . If only the rest of the movie were as good as he and his co-stars . |
507,981 | 453,068 | 114,367 | 6 | a combination of Phillip K Dick and Dan O'Bannon in a better than average / less than great sci-fi flick | Screamers is like one of those made-for-HBO science fiction programmers from the mid 90s , except that there's some brighter things going for it . One of these is that it's based on a short story by one of the hallmark authors of science fiction , Philip K Dick , and another is that the script mostly got work done ( and seems most noticeable ) by Dan O'Bannon , writer behind Alien and Return of the Living Dead . There's more weight in levels of irony , not always the uproarious variety but more nuanced and violent , more in putting some good twists to the clichés that are taken for granted in stories set in desolate futuristic environments ( the discovery of a cute abandoned child , the devilish nature of the ' screamers ' themselves and how their more advanced counterparts work , the personalities of the crew that Peter Weller's character discovers at the base , and how each member soon dies / gets killed off ) . This might also be attributable to O'Bannon , who tackled this in his previous successes in films , but to say who is totally responsible for what can only be said for those who've read Dick's story Second Variety , which I have not . However it should be said , if only on some level of understanding from reading past works of his , it feels like it has a level of faith to the source , albeit changing locations and certain details in the situations , by being approximately cynical to the characters . The only problem then comes in with it being directed , more or less , as a standard slightly-higher-in-quality made for TV movie . It's by no means a sci-fi channel movie of the week , however Screamers might have fared a little better with its challenging and darkly funny bits without director Christian Duguay , who is professional enough to make it watchable on such a low budget ( low for how it looks anyway ) , but doesn't give certain scenes enough juice to really fly past where it stays at being average . The cast too is a little more of the regular variety , with isn't totally a bad thing ; by having character actors , B-level character actors ( if that ) , it helps add to the levels of slight subversion in this story they're in about technology gone to the dogs on a snow planet in 2078 . I liked seeing actors cast to type , like Andrew Lauer as the ' kid ' who's got enough experience as a soldier but is still pretty naive in other ways ; Roy Dupis in a sublimely duplicitous role ; Jennifer Rubin as the token tough girl . Even Weller has his right place in the framework , not too cocky a hero but with enough confidence to carry a picture without the Robocop gear . I even enjoyed some of the action set-pieces , with one especially involving a whole field of Davids ( the little robot boy ) . There's also a slight issue that has to be contended which is too many ' gotcha ' addendums to the climax . It's not enough that one character suddenly appears as another cyborg , but that there's another , and then another . . . and then finally one last wink in the final shot ( which actually does work as a creepy last bit ) , and it's detracting from what is attempting to be a little more substantial . It's only when the hints of things not staying all happy-in-the-end do the director and actors really hit good ground . Screamers has more than its share of moments , and it will continue to be an underrated find by sci-fi fans as the years go by . That it's nowhere near the best of Dick's adaptations - and not the worst - is understandable . |
510,704 | 453,068 | 166,843 | 6 | I can't really recommend it , but I was engaged enough in it as a die-hard Romero fan | Oh the days when independent films were made and sometimes barely ever seen . That still happens to this day , but at least now there's DVD ( matter of fact that was the only way I could get to see There's Always Vanilla - it's next to impossible to find on bootleg ) . In , George A . Romero and the Latent Image , his production company that previously established itself big-time with Night of the Living Dead , decided to go a more romantic / dramatic route , as there seemed to be a possible small market for it . Unfortunately , the scriptwriter , Rudy Ricci , was haphazard and scatter-shot with his contributions , and the script was never finished until the end of filming ( it came to the filmmakers scene by scene ) , so even though there are characters to get interested in as a ' character study ' , Chris Bradley and Lynn Harris ( Ray Lane and Judith Streiner respectively ) , sometimes the dialog and situations become contrived . The main thrust of the story comes from Lynn's relationship to Chris , as Chris is a sort of man-child , who comes into her life suddenly one day after abandoning an older women he may or may not have fathered a kid with , and somehow through his constant sarcasm and lackadaisical charm that gets her into bed . But Chris , as we soon finds out , uses the wit and charms and occasional obnoxious means of talk to mask insecurities . He doesn't work , and when the opportunity comes he backs out . It all leads up to his father relaying a ' meaning ' : there's always vanilla . It's not totally incomprehensible to see why Romero , on an interview featured on the DVD , is completely assured with his feelings that it was a low-point in his career where he tried to gain more experience as a filmmaker and fell flat on his face . There is that side to the picture that is unequivocally dated , and the lack of a better budget or a means to a better structure ( particularly an ending that feels complete or make sense ) is frustrating . But a filmmaker sometimes has to feel that way about certain films , as the experience making it becomes a personal struggle whereas other times it could become a personal triumph ( he still considers Day of the Dead a favorite , mostly for the experience making it ) . Ironically though it's his own skills as a director and editor and director of photography that rises the material to a level of watchability . It's no Cassavetes - as another reviewer noted - but he treats the material with a control that wavers between late 60s early 70s exploitation film-making ( of the period , of course , with some scenes with psychedelia bits and music and pot ) , and a more grounded tone for the actors to follow . And sometimes Romero's given by Ricci a compelling scene to shoot , like when Lynn has to deal with a certain ' problem ' she may need to take care of , but decides at the last moment to run away from it . Or , of course , when Romero cuts the scenes together , sometimes around Chris's confessions to the audience about his mistakes and own feelings at certain times , which pop in at a good rhythm . Or the way he doesn't putz around with montage - often a high-quality trademark in Romero films - even when dealing with schmaltzy scenes like the quasi courtship of Chris and Lynn in a park or on a boat ( I also really liked the one liners each character traded off on one another in the park - marking the shallowness of the period ) . And the actors do bring qualities of believability to scenes that somehow work almost in spite of the flaws in the material ; Laine is actually charming and affable , carrying over similar qualities from the next collaboration with Romero in Season of the Witch , and Streiner is even better here than she was in ' Living Dead ' , as a woman who has to contend with being the mature one in a relationship where a falsity to it rings true almost every day . By the time one sees those balloons fly out of the cardboard box to the cheesy singing ( and usually there is cheesy music here ) , it's clear that this isn't Romero's finest dip into a change of pace . But even in a miscalculation there are intriguing , humorous notes touched on , and that no matter what Romero can somehow be pragmatic with his material , and chooses experimental angles in an otherwise typical low-budget effort . |
509,260 | 453,068 | 1,104,733 | 6 | only a little more than South Park-lite thanks to Steve Coogan | Hamlet 2 is sophomoric , satirical , stupid , trying to be smart while being stupid , and anchored by another winning go-for-broke comic turn from Steve Coogan . It's hard for me to see him doing much wrong , be it the segment with Alfred Molina in Coffee and Cigarettes , 24 Hour Party People or , most of all , Tristram Shandy . It's the biggest credit of all that he is even able to make this film directed and co-written by Andrew Fleming as watchable and occasionally clever as it is . He tries , Lord , oh how he tries to rise up this character into something really memorable , and it is . Though not too ironically while he gave the more prominent and funnier performances in Hamlet 2 his supporting turn in this month's Tropic Thunder was another reminder how brilliantly stupid that was compared to this . Perhaps it's also a difference in talent - instead of Robert Downey Jr giving the bravura comic performance of his career we get Amy Pohler in a hysterical and unsatisfying bit as an ACLU attorney and Elisabeth Shue as , well , Elisabeth Shue - but there's also a factor in the script that separates one as a modern classic and the other as more of a minor work ( if more raunchy and intentionally un-PC ) . It's about a down on his luck actor played by Coogan who's married to a drunk wife ( Catherine Keener ) who scoffs at him any chance she can and after striking out in commercial gigs now teaches pro-bono as a drama teacher at a high school . He's about to get thrown off that gig too ( unlike Max Fischer in Rushmore he can't seem to get luck putting theatrical adaptations of screen classics like Erin Brockovich ) due to budget cuts , but suddenly gets inspiration : he writes Hamlet 2 , a crude musical about a time machine , a rock ' n ' roll Jesus , and face-rape . It's in part a parody of all those goody-too-shoes feel-good movies of inspiration with the teacher leading the rag-tag group of kids into something worth their while ( Dead Poets Society is mentioned more than once in this regard ) , and as a lighter and more raw satire on celebrity and the craft of acting . Sadly , however , it's a slightly hit or miss affair ; sometimes I'm laughing a whole lot as some of the scenes and set-pieces , other times I'm rolling my eyes or lightly groaning at the obvious moments even as I know they're taken as a goof on other movies . The script was co-written by South Park writer Pam Brady , and it's worth noting that a lot of the humor is akin to that Parker / Stone creation ( there's even a character slightly akin to a Kenny , a mute girl who gets knocked about every other scene till towards the end when she SPEAKS UP in caps ) , only it lacks that really stinging wit and almost arrogance in going to the limits to offend with hilariousness . The closest she and Fleming come to this delirious attention to detail is with the actual musical as the climax , with everything from a Grease send up ( " Rock Me , Sex Me , Jesus " is my favorite ) to Elton John is used , and even then there's an inter-cutting scheme to the big brew-haha outside with protesters and firefighters and Amy Pohler screaming about who knows what . And at the center of it all is Coogan , who delivers on little things like singing poetical on a keyboard to Flashdance songs and is funny just skating on his roller skates everywhere because he doesn't have a car ; and don't get him started if he's got acid or grain alcohol in his system . It's a swell showcase for his talents , and maybe shows some promise with the high school kids , but it's also kind of a slight work . I wouldn't say it's a very good movie , but if you must rock your sexy Jesus on , or find Coogan the funniest thing around , then it's a good pit-stop for the moment . |
510,884 | 453,068 | 161,216 | 6 | Greenwald is better at documentaries than fiction , but its fairly watchable | Unlike some others who have commented on Steal This Movie on IMDb , I don't know that much about Abbie Hoffman , aside from the obvious that he was a fervent protester in the late 60's , and enough of a symbol of the anti-war and anti-Government movement to get a bit part in Forrest Gump ( he's the " war in Viet-ing-Nam " guy ) . So as part entertainment and part information this film does its job adequately , even as I recognized the film's flaws . It's not without its plus side - if you're a fan of Vincent D'Onofrio ( and to me he has an impressive career as a character actor from Full Metal Jacket to The Cell ) , this is one of the better treats of his career as he lets his hair down ( literally ) and portrays a man on a downward spiral . What's interesting about the story of Hoffman is how he keeps on with the same spirit even as he's forced into hiding in the 70's . D'Onofrio plays the chaotic , but focused , counterculture icon with enough energy and conviction to make up for the fact that it IS a movie-version of the character . As well as this , actors like Janeane Garofalo and Donal Logue are really playing versions of these people that are convincing up to a point . But the problems in the film are more to do with the direction by Robert Greenwald ; he's not as imaginative in treating the material as he thinks he MIGHT be , even as he uses numerous visuals and cutaways in some montage scenes , and adds a typical soundtrack to the proceedings . The script doesn't feel too false in later scenes showing Hoffman's mental breakdown , but it isn't as convincing as I imagine the book ( s ) on and by Hoffman must be . It's a very intriguing subject ( and I'm already a fan of the period ) that's given an adequate cinematic treatment . What's disappointing though for those who come across it will not be what's there but what isn't ; this is the kind of story and character that needs an Oliver Stone kind of treatment ( this is close to it , more like a knock-off ) . |
509,761 | 453,068 | 66,603 | 6 | it's good for a one-time viewing , but I'm not sure if I'd rush to see it again | Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo was good as a throwaway movie-of-the-night to watch with friends ( friends who were into Zatoichi and old samurai movies ) , but in the sense of it being something worthy of its stature , it didn't quite deliver . A big chunk of the problem , as many of reviewers as well as author Stuart Galbraith , was Toshrio Mifune wasn't really playing the character really as he was in the Kurosawa films . In the original Yojimbo and Sanjuro , Mifune crafted a true anti-hero bad-mutha samurai , who was grungy with his scratches , but also very cunning in how he could play both sides or act a little uncouth in his manipulations . Here , one just sees him acting like a stumbling drunk , and even a little like a scummy caricature of Yojimbo . Truth be told , it's meant more for Zatoichi fans - he was a HUGE title character , as played by its star Shintaro Katsu . But the problem there as well is that there have been better Zatoichi movies ( I haven't even seen many , but the few I've seen , and as repetitive as they can get , aren't shoehorned plot-wise like so ) . And this isn't totally to put the movie down , as a cash-in flick it does attempt at making some entertaining segments ( and I do like how the two of them decide at first to combine forces , so to speak ) . But it's all not very memorable , as many franchises end up doing when trying to combine their vehicle-makers , except for real die-hard fans of the stars or the genre . It's even sort of lackadaisically shot and edited , in a very formulaic manner . |
510,798 | 453,068 | 361,862 | 6 | almost in spite of , or despite , the shabby been-there-done-that script , and a near gimmick of weight loss , Bale makes it watchable | The Machinist is kind of like intellectual counterfeit money , and with a few twists meant to keep some interested and some keeping far as possible away . The more one thinks about the Machinist , the more it's irksome by the cluttered screenplay ( Scott Kosar , with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Amityville Horror remakes to his credit ) , which reveals no surprise , or much suspense , in the mental downfall of one-year insomniac Trevor Reznik ( mega-gaunt Christian Bale , even more-so than in the recent , more worthy cause Rescue Dawn ) as he keeps seeing a portly bald guy named Ivan who may or may not work at the factory he's a machinist at , and may or may not be dating a prostitute ( Jennifer Jason Leigh ) , AND who may or may not have taken a little boy Trevor sort of knows as hostage . By the time the obvious twist comes along - the kind that my girlfriend points out about a third of the way through the movie , aw-hell ! - there's a feeling of being cheated from the smug retread of better post-modern psycho-twister fables ( i . e . Fight Club ) . That Kosar does ' clever ' tricks like putting in Dostoyevsky hints , without ever making much light about why they're there , compounds some of the BS . It's a shame , too , because he sometimes gives these characters some believable dialog ( mostly with the machinists and in some of Reznik's talk ) , without trying to take into account a conceit that is used : an insomniac for a year is , practically , not possible , hence there has to be a catch at some point or another . It's almost like a battle that wages on the creative side of things between director Anderson's very good compositions and ( typical-for-this-stuff ) lighting , and the script . Meanwhile , Bale holds up , even if after the fact it's a wonder why he went to such extreme lengths for a character like this ( i . e . would losing 40 pounds be any different than the whole 60 ) . Bale remains totally captivating , immersing as always in service of the character like the most method m-fer since De Niro , though in the reverse here . Because it is such an extreme transformation - unlike the more gradual turn in Herzog's film - we're called attention to it at times , which is unnerving , and works to a much greater effect as a sign of his deterioration than that of the script providing the mental faculties . But Bale does his best to fill in some emotional blanks , and to his credit makes the Machinist at least a passable effort . That being said , it's hard for me to see myself watching this all the way through again . |
510,790 | 453,068 | 71,120 | 6 | has the makings of a good remake , though on its own it has its share of flaws | All the Kind Strangers was one of the fifty films that came packaged in a box-set titled " Nightmare Worlds " , and it was one of the rare films that wasn't science-fiction . Yet it probably has just as reason for being in the box-set as sci-fi flicks ; it's got the premise , at the least , and from the description ( wedged in with another movie on the one side of a two-sided disc ) sounds like a cross between the Little Rascals and Deliverance . At least , that would be the first impression had it reached its potential . As it stands , All the Kind Strangers does keep a hold of its creepiness for a while , as Stacy Keach ( playing well as a leading role , which he usually doesn't do ) is a photo-journalist who picks up a little kid carrying a big bag of flour back to his home . Just a normal thing , it seems , to help the little critter out . But then it's a long trek through the backwoods , specifically through a creek , and then to a house where there are seven kids and one " mom " , who really has been sort of kidnapped by the kids . He's kidnapped too , and made to be their dad as their parents are five-years gone . Dogs line the premises , and the pain kid Peter ( John Savage ) carries a shotgun . What to do ? There is actually probably a very good movie , even an extremely controversial one ( maybe on par with Deliverance if not more-so ) with the ingredients here . There's a whole power-structure element in place , the psychological unrest as Peter really is the head of the household - the kids don't know any better , least of all for wacky John ( Robby Benson , maybe the most tongue-in-cheek kid actor of the 70s ) - and how the kids , including Peter , do listen to Keach's ' dad ' if he's forceful enough . And there's even subtext thrown in that is never quite cleared up with a mute girl in the bunch ( obviously , as Frank Miller once wrote , grew up and filled out ) who keeps on eying and making subtle advances towards her new father . This would actually be challenging in better hands , but unfortunately it's A ) a TV movie , and B ) in an odd way meant as a dark twist for the Little Rascals kid's club . So it ends up playing it safe with material that , in the end , becomes preachy and tacky as the kids all decide that it's better to give in instead of having a ready-made mom and dad at the helm . Other things like the cars all drowned in the lake ( and the fact that who-knows how many people have died is left up in the air ) , and little technical things with the production ( i . e . do the kids really pay for the gas , and if not how come there are lights on in the house ? do kids take care of candles that well ? ) Not to mention the length issue ; at 74 minutes the holes are fairly abundant in the plot . But there are strengths here that do come out , even if seeing John Savage might inspire a " I believe in God " bit from Hair , as the acting is more than competent , and given how low the production values are the director gets a good amount of chills from the kids ( awkward might be the way to say it ) and chase scenes . It could make for a remake in good hands , exploring and altering some of the details . As it stands , it's an OK effort with an undercurrent that's sort of unique . |
509,319 | 453,068 | 455,805 | 6 | decent Lifetime-style movie that tries to deal with some simple-but-complex issues | Then She Found Me is Helen Hunt's directorial debut . Not a terrible one at all . She involves us , the audience , maybe more-so a female audience than male ( not that a man can't enjoy the movie on its comedy / drama terms ) , though this is mostly after its first quarter or third way through . Up until almost half an hour into the film , the entire picture feels rushed with incident and things suddenly happening to April ( Hunt ) , as she gets married , gets separated / sort-of-divorced , her adopted Jewish mother dies , and she maybe falls in love . Also , I forgot to mention , her real mother ( Bette Midler ) contacts her out of the blue and tells her that her father is maybe Steve McQueen . All she'd need is a bird going to the bathroom on her head to put the icing on the cake . What the story then develops as is how April deals with the men in her life - her new love played in the best performance by Colin Firth - and her ex played by Matthew Broderick , who may be the father of 39 year-old April's first possible baby . And , also , how the hell to cope with finally having a mother who abandoned her at the age of 16 . So much drama ! So much awkward comedy to boot , like both Firth and Broderick accompanying Hunt to the doctor on the baby situation ( featuring a surprise bit part from Salman Rushdie ! ) It's a shame then it only works so much ; Hunt wants for so much of this to click , but it's kind of like Bergman or Woody Allen-lite . While this makes it a slight cut above the other crappy Lifetime movies of its ilk , it isn't helped much by Midler , who is annoying as ever , and an unsatisfying ending . Take the wife or the misses or the new girlfriend . Then only remember in passing that you saw it and maybe liked it , a little . |
510,791 | 453,068 | 389,722 | 6 | can a vampire flick be occasionally interesting , usually OK , and sometimes really illogical ? 30 Days of Night is all that | 30 Days of Night might be a lot better in the form of a comic-book ( never read it , heard many great things ) , but as a film it's derivative and original , really stupid ( mostly towards the end ) and with some solid thrills in both the classic and neo-forms . David Slade and his crew do an excellent job at creating a little Alaskan community surrounded by the ominous cold and snow , no argument there . It is something to see the baron streets like out of some ghost town in a western painted with splatter spots of blood , and then the shadows of these pesky vampires coming around the bend to catch their victims . And sometimes he and his director of photography get creative in a good way : I liked the over-head shot that looms above a scene of carnage , probably as something closest to the style of a comic book of this variety . It's also cool to see how Slade tries to emphasize the importance of the background , how even if it's all out of focus what you need to look out for what you don't expect to see , which will pounce and tear you to ribbons . This side is worth looking for in 30 Days of Night . But there are problems . I can see how there is already a surge of ' fan-boys ' for this movie , as it appeals to a chilling aesthetic if one hasn't seen many vampire movies before . I can also see how people hated it even more than me - it is trashy in the sense that it doesn't stop to make any logic out of how the vampires even get to the location by some wandering madman ( Ben Foster , should be the performance to garner him an Oscar - for overracting that is - following his actual terrifying part in 3 : 10 to Yuma ) across miles and miles of endless terrain from some foreign land . But in its own way it's a decent B-movie , loaded with some better budgeted effects and production design , as it lowers its sights into being a survival tale without too much pretense . This being said , it's hard not to look at how Slade and company make the vampires , how they move and attack and eat like they're the infected in the 28 Days Later movies , but at the same time still sort of generic when it comes time for their close-ups and one-on-one time , including having a leader of sorts , going back to the Blade series . And while it might be a little harder to make the connection , I can't look at bloody snow dogs in the snowy wilderness without thinking of the Thing - particularly the scene where they're most prominent . At the least , it stays conventionally pleasant , or gruesome , as it needs to be - it's predictable to a fault , but until the last five to ten minutes comfortably so : we got the hero ( Hartnett , who is OK in the role , but is better as a garnish ala Sin City ) , the tough girl , the big guy who has all the chops to take the buggers on , the young sprout teen who wants to prove himself , the naiive old folk , and Foster as the crazy guy . . . But then that ending , which makes any logical flaws beforehand look irrelevant in comparison . Hartnett , in an attempt to stop the vampires from getting the lead female , who's hiding under a car , amid a huge blaze set all across town the vampires set up , injects himself with a deceased vampire's blood , becomes one in part , and then goes out to fight the main bad-ass vampire leader . There's sections I could go on and on about this , from the factor of the fire to the other vampires just standing around not doing anything while there's a big meant-to-be-romantic fight to the un-death , to why they all left the convinience store in the first place . But it all comes off as unbelievable , even for a horror movie , and I couldn't help but laughing out loud as suddenly Hartnett comes back to win the day through a ridiculously gruesome manner . It's one of the worst endings I've seen in a movie this year , and almost left me with a worse taste in my mouth from what was previously an alright entry in the Sam Raimi-produced horror-for-kids of the moment . |
510,768 | 453,068 | 82,009 | 6 | if only the script were halfway as captivating as the animation / music | I remember seeing American Pop years ago , but not remembering much from it aside from its ' different ' kind of animation ( which I now know is rotoscoping where characters move life-like to the point where it's basically plopped onto the real people's action ) and music . The music , actually , more than the animation in a way . I remembered a few of the songs too , like " Somebody to Love " and " Night Moves " . Watching it now the animation pulls together with more of the historical concepts , but there's a problem with the film that I couldn't quite shake . Despite the really interesting and could-be-really-something kind of idea of charting one line of generation after generation in 20th century America through their disjointed lives and their connections to music , the script is weak . I'm not expecting it to be 100 % realistic - the animation of course in Baski's style makes things that much more abstracted - but in most scenes a ' point ' has to be made , and only very , very broad strokes are made with the characters . Only early in the film when the boy is passing out the fliers in the club , and with some of the scenes with Frankie , are there some convincing moments with character and dialog . But , then again , most who watch the film aren't looking for an amazing story , as the progression of one generation to the next is really just a bridge to the musical side of the film . This , on the other hand , is quite good , if understandably abbreviated for everything in American popular music ( i . e . blues isn't nearly given as much time as Jazz is ) . The early music in the film is typical , but quite amazing in how it then relays off of the images , later becoming all immersed in the counterculture times of the 50s , 60s and 70s . And the rotoscoping used here , while not of the highest quality , is at least trying to do something different with the medium , and on the visual side Bakshi does pull it off . Some sequences look rather complex ( world war 2 scenes come to mind , also the more psychedelic scenes ) , even as it all does border on becoming tedious . The combination of music and film does create some memorable , if dated , material to view on and see years from now . But it does miss the mark of its ambitions by not giving more thought into the script , as it does have a concept ( using music to chart the discord in a family born from immigrants ) that is great and could be used better in other films . |
510,304 | 453,068 | 825,232 | 6 | probably better than it has any right to be , mostly due to its star power | The Bucket List only mildly calls into the A-list of Hollywood screenwriters Justin Zackham , and it only slightly elevates Rob Reiner as a director . He's had a slump as a director for what seems like the better part of fifteen years ( oddly enough the last time the co-lead of this film , Jack Nicholson , appeared veraciously in A Few Good Men , was then ) when before that he had one of the strongest careers of any Hollywood director . With the Bucket List he's made a film that's respectable , entertaining for its time being , and about as deep as a kiddie pool . It's nowhere near as bad as North or Rumor Has it , to be sure . But there could be some tweaking to the Zackham script , little things that could make it stand out just a bit more in dealing with aspects of the drama - what could be really dark and biting to level off with the cynical , jab-in-the-ribs sense of humor to it . What we're given , basically , is two old guys who are out to ' find themselves ' in their time of dying . Ho-ho ! OK , to be fair , it is a major credit to the stars that this even works as well as it does . One is an auto mechanic ( Morgan Freeman ) and the other a billionaire ( Nicholson ) , and the two meet as sharing the same room , undergoing immense cancer treatments . Instead of undergoing " experimental " treatments after each finding out they'll be dead in at longest a year , Freeman's Carter has a hypothetical list of things he'd like to do before he dies . With Edward ( Nicholson ) , he'll do it because , of course , Edward is wealthy enough to go the limit . It's interesting then to follow along these two figures for the simple fact that they are played by two of the best leading men of their generation . Strangely , however , if anyone could be said to have the edge over the other ( all the more strangely because of how much I love the latter ) , Freeman did more with his part than Nicholson with his . This goes without saying Zackham doesn't reveal too much about Edward until late in the game , and only provides enough in the meantime for Jack to be " Jack " that we all know and love - perhaps , sad to say , too much so - while Freeman plays it touchingly , making the most out of a more well-rounded character with a few very good scenes ( i . e . him at the bar in China ) . It should be way too schmaltzy to recommend , and if you do want the kind of studio movie-making that tries its absolute hardest to tug ever so hard at your heartstrings The Bucket List it certainly is that . But what offsets what could be a totally painful ordeal with such ideal stars . But Zackham , at the end of it all , does give enough fun lines and dialog exchanges and things for Nicholson and Freeman to do that one is distracted by the fact that Reiner as a director provides typical and dull imagery to the proceedings , only wisely enough giving the breathing room for the actors in some scenes . It's cheerful to see the bickering before sky-diving or the machismo flaring up during the car race , and it's insightful to see when the two just have a quieter scene like in front of the pyramids . It's a pithy romp about men being men dying of cancer . It's neither Nicholson or Freeman's best day as real masters of the acting craft . But it wouldn't be too bad to catch again , in bits and pieces , on TV . |
510,672 | 453,068 | 413,466 | 6 | a somewhat memorable Indie-doc-B-movie | For the first 20 minutes or so of Wassup Rockers , I thought " been there , done that . " Meaning that , simply , Larry Clark has done this kind of movie before , better , more wisely and with some extra depth on the subject of stray kids doing their own thing without much parental supervision . But then , finally , something started to take shape : the film is , if about something , a class tale , with the South Central Hispanics roaming around Beverly Hills just looking for a place to skate and getting into various misadventures ( some funny , some deadly ) . And at the same time , even more than Kids , there's a raw quality to the performances , with mixed results . It's like that docu-drama Streetwise from the 80s with a touch of Ferris Bueller and then put to a soundtrack of rip-offs or sound-alikes of the Casualties . Part of the problem of Wassup Rockers is that it is not too interesting within its aimless structure . Having a film without much of a plot can work fine , they're made all the time in independent quarters in America and especially Europe . But it should amount to something by the end , and by the end of Wassup Rockers there isn't very much of a point except , well , don't go into Beverly Hills for too long if you're Hispanic and looking like a member of the Ramones by way of Tony Hawk . But within this jump-around structure , around some of the random sex scenes and skateboarding and the kind of cool scenes of the kids riding their boards to LA punk rock , Clark does create a fun B-movie . At the least , it's never boring , and if it isn't really groundbreaking or as revelatory or whatever as Kids ( and it isn't ) it does provide something of a small window into something we haven't seen before , or at least I haven't seen before . Not all of the performances are below par , an in fact there's a charm and down to earth honesty to a lot of scenes ( a scene that made me think a lot of Streetwise is when the kid Chico is talking to the Beverly Hills girl in their underwear in her bedroom - this is stripped down to the point of simple documentary , and it suddenly becomes affecting strangely enough ) . And , if nothing else , it works as a B movie , a kids-on-the-prowl story that should appeal most to anyone who likes to just roam around when they have nothing to do when they're 14 or 15 . It's a minor work that has moments of real power . |
509,980 | 453,068 | 396,171 | 6 | fantastic production design , usually spellbinding editing . . . but the results are frustratingly uneven | I'll say it off the bat - I haven't read the book of Perfume by Patrick Suskind . But I have heard that the film is , ironic considering most directors ' claims that it was unfilmable , quite faithful to the source . I don't doubt it , as it has a literary quality all about it . From the John Hurt narration ( and even when it's not necessary or adding only bits to the psychology of the characters , it's good to have Hurt doing it ) , to the fast-paced storytelling , to the detail likely expressed in the locations and settings , it feels novelistic even when it's at it's worst ( which is , regrettably , the last twenty minutes , as Truffaut said is the most important section of a picture ) . The initial story itself , the first half of it , does spell some entertainment to come . An orphan grows up into a slave , but has somehow had since birth the incredible gift of smell , to smell everything ( yes , even in smelly old France ) , and is tempted more than ever after accidentally killing a woman one night and smelling her from head to toe . The idea of catching smell , scents of people , drives him bonkers as he later learns of perfume from a master ( Dustin Hoffman , one of the bright spots acting-wise ) that there have to be a set number of ingredients - and that special something to put it over the top . And over the top it does become ! But not before Tom ( Run Lola Run ) Twyker , cinematographer Frank Griebe ( also Run Lola Run ) , production designer Uli Hanisch , and ( surprisingly , considering his past work was with Paul W Anderson ) editor Alexander Berner create the look of the film as something worth watching for . In fact , for the latter , it sometimes is really absorbing the way the images move forward , at a clip that is a little reminiscent of Thelma Schoonmaker ( and , perhaps through that , Scorsese to a very small point ) . If looking squarely on the technical grounds , Perfume is one of the best produced out of Europe in 2006 . Yet however much Twyker and his crew - save for the music which is a befuddling mix of Popol Vuh and orchestrations for a Disney channel movie - go to lengths to make this feel real and gritty and dark , it's hard to obscure how there is , in a way , a silliness to the conceit of the character . On the one hand it is compelling to see him in his early stages , his first victim , his ' training ' ( in quotes as he doesn't need it exactly , just a little guidance ) . On the other hand , and a little more ironic considering the draw of the suspense and horror of the murders , when he starts killing it's not quite as compelling . I know there's a level of disbelief to be had , and this goes without saying that every time Jean Grenouille leaves someone ( orphan caretaker , slave owner , Hoffman's character ) that person dies . And even up until the last twenty minutes I could take that level of disbelief , and it's still a good movie . But when it comes to the climax - and Grenouille's " demise " ( from a point of view may depend on how much you take it as Christian allegory , or devil-allegory , who knows ) - it falls apart for me . It may not for some , as it's own pretentiousness might be part of the appeal - frankly there's a touch of the Passion of the Christ in the mix there as far as slow-motion melodrama goes - and some might hate it to no end . It's a flawed conclusion , though mostly cause of what has been set up before , while sometimes in the ridiculous ( so many murdered , none seen in the act , eh why not ) , feels and comes off realistic in that gritty 18th century set-up that can only come out of the poor and rich sections of French life . By the time we get the messianic image towards the end , I felt like turning off the movie - and luckily it ended . So Perfume ends up being neither a debacle nor a full-blown artistic success . I was glad to see it , and it's fairly well acted ( watch Alan Rickman as he speaks in a very low , sinister tone to Grenouille as he is dunked in the barrel of water ) , even to a point by the hollow-eyed Ben Whishaw . But it just , well . . . does not smell quite right at the end . |
510,502 | 453,068 | 86,250 | 6 | Fascinating storytelling , not so fascinating lead performance | Brian De Palma's Scarface , a remake of the 1932 gangster classic by Howard Hawks , changes locations to Miami where Tony Montana ( Al Pacino ) arrives without much going for him . Soon , under circumstances at his disposal , gets to the reign of the gangster's world of 80's cocaine , soon having a sort of empire around him that soon becomes too much to control under the influence of snow . The elements that kept me interested the most while watching this film were Brian De Palma's direction and certain aspects of Oliver Stone's adaptation on Ben Hecht's material . The direction by De Palma ( which owes a little credit to the cinematography by John A . Alonzo and the splendorous production design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti ) is always at an edge and style to kept the audience hooked into where the story is going even if it seems inevitable in the sort of rise , seize , and fall saga of the money dream . Even though De Palma's presenting us with a more-often-than-not despicable character in Tony Montana , the techniques aren't tiresome or boring in the near 3-hour length of the film . It was by De Palma - and Stone's script , which delivers some good , tongue-in-cheek dialog , and tries to understand the scope of the characters in this world - that I stayed through till the end of this film . There were also a couple of surprises amid the conventions ( i . e . the infamous " Chainsaw " scene ) . And yet , I was not one of those who thought that Pacino's performance was something incredible . I'm sure it's been influential in the twenty years since the film's been out there ( the DVD did a whole tribute special by various rappers and real-life hoodlums ) , but from my perspective it served as something of a big liability . The supporting roles are alright , but his bravado , heavily-dramatic style seems like it COULD fit this revised version of Paul Muni's performance . BUT the accent and accentuations he uses from start to finish become distracting , and overtly comical , very quickly . And his booming persona is misused here ; I can think of at least a dozen other performances where Pacino's been able to utilize his presence and style magnificently for the sake of a picture ( The Godfather movies and his movies with Sidney Lumet are great examples , but so are some of his recent films like Insomnia or even the Devil's Advocate ) . This isn't one of them - here he confuses theatrical , operatic acting with ridiculous showmanship . What's even more interesting to me is that Pacino and De Palma's second collaboration - Carlito's Way - was a bit more mature in dealing with the conventions within the crime genre , and found that balance of forceful directing and acting . I do recommend Scarface and yet I don't recommend it as well . There were elements about the film that kept sturdy , even gripping ( the last fifteen minutes or so is rather bloody though brilliantly filmed ) . However the film does have a number of flaws , and not just in Pacino's work ( some scenes are a little too much for me , and I get a kick out of most crime films ) . |
510,327 | 453,068 | 39,090 | 7 | emphasis on it being ' melodrama ' , an early Kurosawa curio with a strong second half | Perhaps I'm least likely among the several who've commented here about Akira Kurosawa's first post WW2 film , No Regrets For Our Youth , to recommend it so high , as despite it still being a good film it might be ( for the moment ) my least favorite from the director's 30-film oeuvre . It's still got something to it , but it takes a while to get there . And some of the problems with the film are even acknowledged by the director himself in his autobiography , where he mentions that the film was shot from a revised draft - done so by the insistence of censors who , while wanting a film the opposite of the militaristic propaganda that had been going on during the war , wouldn't let his full artistic vision ( and , more importantly , script by him and Eijiro Hisaita ) make it to the screen . Most of these are not very prominent or awful , but they keep the film from being the utmost powerful and immediate with the style alongside the content . The director's techniques , and ( one of the only times in the director's career ) female star make it worthwhile , though if you're not a fan of the filmmaker or much of a Japanese film buff or historian it's sluggish going . Basically , it was hard for me to really connect with much of what was going on in the first half , which showed Japan descending through the 30s ( mostly in 1933 , the film's first half-hour ) into a fascist state where freedom - prominently here in schools - is quelled . The quasi-love triangle that is set up between Yukie ( Setsuko Hara ) , Noge ( Sususmu Fugita ) , and Itokawa ( Akitake Kono ) is melodramatic to a fault , where Yukie starts as a bright , pretty but un-deciding girl who soon figures to start out a life for herself independently . It's after years of student revolts ( which are brilliantly filmed and edited , one of the few times early in the film ) , where her two main male companions show their sides - Noge for freedom and independence , Itokawa for conformity and the militaristic side of things . Much of this part of the film is done in line with what I might've seen in a Hollywood melodrama of the period , nice music with some heavy dramatic points , all put alongside a political side that doesn't really work . It's only after Noge reunites with Yogie , and the two marry , and No Regrets For Our Youth really gets interesting . Kurosawa also stated that he put a lot of " feverish energy " into the images in the last twenty to thirty minutes of the picture . This does indeed show , as Yugie - following Noge becoming the espionage story of the moment , disgracing his farmer parents - decides to purge her sadness and sacrifice herself into farming the rice fields with Noge's mother . These scenes reach that near silent film magnificence , merging Kurosawa's great eye ( here aided by a later prominent collaborator with Asakazu Nakai ) , and Tadahi Hattori's musical score . The dramatic focus here finally become more compelling than in the weaker first half , and throughout the film this becomes clearer through maybe one of the best reasons to see the film , actress Setsuko Hara . Hara , who became one of the stock company members of Ozu's 50s films , is perfect here in the role , and even elevates some of the slower-going scenes in the film . She adds some dimension to what is at first a seemingly ignorant and content girl , and by the second half really adds well on her becoming aware of herself and what she's capable of . The film could've fared less without her , and it speaks well that even in a lesser film by the director he still casts some excellent talent . But to say that it is a lesser film might be underscoring what is good about the picture , even memorable at times . Kurosawa still puts up some memorable shots or sequences of them , rather . Aside from the aforementioned riot scenes , there's a sequence of shots with the ' youth ' early on running through the woods that makes for a nice precursor to other Kurosawa films with tightly edited , fluid shots . And one little scene where Yukie is in different poses when she hears that Noke will be leaving for a while ( in the 1938 scene ) that gave me a smile . And that such an imperfect and ( occassionally ) dated film , where not even the suggestion of an embrace or kiss can be shown ( see cutaway to bag dropped on the floor in one scene ) , is nevertheless worth watching more-so than the best films by lesser directors says a lot of what Kurosawa can bring to the material . |
509,486 | 453,068 | 940,502 | 7 | watch as David Lynch goes on a boat . . . . and , apparently , directs water | This little short film / experiment from Lynch is meant to be some kind of home movie-cum-fever dream where the basic act of going out onto a lake with a motor boat becomes like some sort of journey to some unknown destination . It's at it's best an immense jolt of visual splendor , shot on Lynch's hardy digital camera , where one of Lynch's expressed joys as a filmmaker - to be able to make the flow of water a truly cinematic feat - is put to a successful test . At first he just shows images of the boat , with a girl doing a voice-over meant to be very mysterious but somewhat cognitive of having an idea of what's around her ( or it , as it might be ) . Then the boat goes off , Lynch himself ( steering the boat ) says to the camera " we're gonna try to go fast enough to go in to the night " , and soon all there is to see is water rushing past , very fast , and then superimposed is night over day . The voice-over itself is probably the lesser part of the experiment ; Lynch says on the DVD the short is on that he thought there was a story there , so he put on a voice-over track to go with the images . The narration , truth be told , makes it a tinge more poetic , but not necessarily for the better ; I had flashbacks during some of the narrative bits to short films ( and not the better short films ) I used to see in film classes at school . Yet it's a good little effort that Lynch has strung together here at least by way of eye-catching digital video , where everything seems a little extra heightened ( very bright by way of daytime , then nighttime is much darker , naturally ) and the movement of water at such a fast clip , as one might take for granted , makes for some powerful viewing . |
508,266 | 453,068 | 61,189 | 7 | a drive-in movie classic that doesn't totally succeed but has nihilistic fun | Roger Corman , though having his rightful clout as one of the pioneers of drive in movies and exploitation pictures , doesn't have a great film with The Wild Angels , but then it's not meant to be . As I watched the film , I thought of an adjective for the film that I hadn't used for one in a while - it's reckless . Like the bikers themselves that Corman and his writers are ' following ' , the film never really comes together and the parts are definitely greater than the whole . Too many scenes end up kind of flailing around with not much to do except act as filler in-between Corman's rule-of-law of their being an action / fight scene & / or scene of sex every 15 minutes . But on the other hand , as a purely drive-in movie , where people watching aren't necessarily meant to keep track of the whole picture ALL the time ( likely ' making out ' Corman must've thought ) , it doesn't break under time that much . And , sometimes , Corman is actually pretty creative and intuitive as a filmmaker . His cast is Peter Fonda ( quite similar to Easy Rider which means maybe too esoteric and contemplative to be the wild leader of the angels ) , Nancy Sinatra ( not that great , though she can fake a crying scene pretty well ) , and Bruce Dern ( in a role that actually does ask for some real ' acting ' as opposed to biker posing ) . There are also other real Angels riding about in the background , and basically the story revolves around the wounding - and later unnecessary death - of Loser ( Dern ) , who is also given a proper Biker funeral . In between there are plenty of fight scenes , some exciting moments of the men on their bikes , a few sexy , bra-clad women , and the ' squares ' being almost everyone else not an Angel . Sometimes the scenes are pretty basic , lots of generic ( even for the period ) rock and roll tunes put to the Angels riding around , and partying , though once in a while Corman actually makes it interesting . A scene that is finally quiet , for example , when Dern is getting operated on , is one of my favorites in the film ( in general his provide much of the interest ) . But for the most part , it's just the simple tale of youth who just " want to be free , to ride without getting hassled by the man . . . and we want to get loaded ! " In short , it's kind of like the fast-food equivalent of a biker-movie . It's got many ingredients , it fills you up , but it definitely isn't really ' good ' for you despite serving up what's promised ( it doesn't have that healthy portion of being cohesive in structure and with at least a little nuance ) . Though for Corman this could possibly be one of his better entries . ( Strong ) |
509,058 | 453,068 | 105,121 | 7 | the kind of film that still , years later , gives me the chills | The People Under the Stairs was one of the few films I can recollect that I saw when I first got into the horror genre when I was a lot younger ( the most promising time to get into the genre if it's good , early teens ) that really gave me the ' willies ' . The whole concept has a very demented connotation to it , even as it starts out with a not too unfathomable or retreaded beginning . A boy in the ghetto gets lured into a creepy house for a robbery , only to suddenly find himself unable to leave due to the owners - the ' landlords ' over the property of the burglars - and to the ' inhabitants ' inside of the walls , literally . The boy becomes a prisoner when the other burglars meet their demises , and suddenly it becomes a real cat & mouse situation , in the sickest way possible really . I saw parts of it again recently and it really still puts the zap to my head somehow , even as it's now not as affecting as before . Craven does have a sort of keen understanding of how the outsider outcast freaks of society can make for some good horror villainous times , even if it seems too bizarre to be true . I loved how Craven made the campy conceit of the owners of the house really brother and sister ( Everett McGill as the father , excellent work ) . I also remembered many cool camera shots , usually when capturing the action behind the walls . In the end , all I can think back to is how it left an impact just following two showings around that same time I also saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the living-dead movies ( not of that same caliber , due to the writing being sometimes a little unconvincing when it has such great ideas in the works ) . It doesn't either reach the surreal heights of Craven's Elm Street movies . But I wouldn't look at it as a lesser movie . |
508,006 | 453,068 | 281,686 | 7 | plenty of irreverence , nothing great , but has enough laughs and balance to work | Bubba Ho-tep is one of those films that might work against my better judgment as a film critic IF I didn't know what I was getting into . I heard plenty of word of mouth about the film , and it only made me want to see the movie more , however not in a ' right-away ' fashion ( I just saw it tonight as part of a Halloween movie-night with friends ) . When I hear that Bruce Campbell , star of the equally hilarious and inventively gory Evil Dead films , plays Elvis Presley , co-starring Ossie Davis as a black JFK , AND they're both in an old-age home , it sounds like I know what I'll get when I watch it . I did , and I didn't at the same time . I knew it would be funny , and it was , but I also wasn't expecting there would be some depth of story to it , or that director Don Cascarelli would inject a weird , off-beat , if a little strenuous style in the mix . Story is simply this - Elvis ( err , an Elvis impersonator , or Elvis who became an Elvis impersonator disguising his true Elvis identity ) is now bedridden after a hip injury , and is old and forgotten behind the walls of a East Texas retirement home . Among his fellow retirees are some oddballs ( to say the least ) including , of course , a black JFK ( or someone who thinks he's JFK to the bone ) . They get mixed up in an apparent un-dead / mummy curse over the old-age home , as the mummy keeps eating up souls out of a rather unpleasant area of the bodies . It's up to them to stop them . This then sends off the film really more as Elvis ' story , as he narrates from his bedridden position ( for most of the film , otherwise in a walker ) about the good old days , how they've gone , and how he can get it back . In an abstract sense it's as much a film about getting old , dealing with fame , and learning to cope with your soul and your inner being . In a way this is something that did sometimes get in the way of the film ; on the outset , and maybe it was too much of an expectation , I expected this to be laugh a minute , almost on the level of the insanity of Army of Darkness ( Campbell's most off-the-wall performance , this being Shakespeare . . . if Hamlet was Elvis that is ) . It wasn't . But there are times when the script does connect with the unusually dry deliveries given by Campbell and especially Davis , who is somehow very good in a role that goes completely against his better skills ( it's not Do the Right Thing , but hey ) . It does give a helluva good time if you want to watch something silly , but cool , with your friends , even if it's not up to par with either actor's best work . |
509,163 | 453,068 | 112,817 | 7 | Jarmusch's most ' heavy ' film - original , bleak , tedious , funny , existential . . . | Dead Man is a film I saw two times two years ago . It was the first film by indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch that I had seen ( it was something about the cover of the film - Johnny Depp in Indian war-paint in black & white holding a gun - that intrigued me ) , and the first two times I did and didn't understand what it was ' about ' . I read from other comments that it was meant to be taken as a ' spiritual journey ' , an existentialist trip through 19th century western country . I watched it again recently , and I understood it a little more clearly , if still a little muddled . Although Jarmusch's trademark knack at pacing is evident , and the rhythm of the film is weirdly in sync with Neil Young's lonely , grungy solo electric guitar , its not as strong or moving as in his best work ( Mystery Train , Broken Flowers , Down by Law ) . Still , Johnny Depp gives a very nuanced , controlled performance . It's as interesting , if sometimes in almost out of curiosity , to see Depp in a role like this when he's been at his peak playing eccentrics and crazies ( Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas , Pirates , Chocolate Factory ) . Here he is William Blake ( less a running gag in the film than a down-pat comparison to the infamous poet ) , an accountant who gets turned down in a grimy , bad little Western town in the middle of nowhere . Aftern an altercation , he gets shot and winds up in the hands of a Native named ' Nobody ' ( direct reference to a Sergio Leone production , among other homages ) . They then go on a sort of journey as Depp's Blake is on pursuit by a trio of bounty hunters ( this brings some of the best parts of the film , and funniest ) . Somehow in the midst of this heavy film Jarmusch doesn't miss out on some chances for surreal humor - there is one scene that includes Billy Bob Thornton and Iggy Pop as intellectual cannibals who argue over Blake . There is also some unintentional humor in Farmer's performance of ' Nobody ' , who at times is profound , confusing , absurd , and very mystical in the Native tradition . Towards the last twenty minutes it is mostly just Depp looking woozily on the landscapes and Native tribe sites . It's fascinating in one way , but ponderous in another . It is always worthwhile to see a filmmaker who is putting forth a vision and letting the audience make up their mind about it , leaving things ambiguous as possible . But it's also the kind of film where you really need to be ' in the mood ' so to speak to really find total artistic value in it . I'm sure I may watch Dead Man one day and come away with it some great poetic / philosophical extractions ( I did on the third viewing , after getting more acclimated to Jarmusch's style and ideas ) . If you're more of a Depp fan though , it's hit or miss to recommend ; the same teenage fan of Pirates may watch Depp in this film and wonder why he even chose the project . |
507,939 | 453,068 | 295,178 | 7 | one of the funniest film of the year so far ; though not for everyone | I'm sure there's an audience out there not for the comedic taste of Mike Meyers - there are more flatulence / penile / bowel movement / general excrement jokes to fill three other movies , and it's all crammed into a 96 minute piece . With that said , I loved it ; I've been a big fan of Meyers through his career and with this third installment I can faithfully say I laughed more during this than Spy Who Shagged Me ( the laughs grow less and less since I first saw that three years ago ) , although it doesn't top the first if only because it still stands strong as a solid comedy with originality as its strong suit , not gross out , albeit hilarious , gags . This time , Meyers adds the eccentric Goldmember ( said title ) , from Holland , he has his private area submerged in gold and can lift both legs up at will ; he plots to destroy the world with Dr . Evil and Powers teams up with Beyonce Knowles ( Foxy Cleopatra ) and his father ( Michael Caine in the slyest role of the movie ) . With cameos from the likes of Tom Cruise , Britney Spears , Kevin Spacey and Ozzy Osbourne , and a moments where laugh a minute is more than literal , this is a highly recommended flick on the front of strange and funny . |
510,775 | 453,068 | 439,815 | 7 | a not too shabby Troma movie with a big studio , and effects galore | I've seen at least a few Troma movies over time , some almost imports ( Satan's Sadists , Cannibal the Musical ) , other born and bred productions ( Toxic Avenger and Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town ) , and it's at times like second generation Roger Corman , with more or less the same entertainment value . It's all fairly low-budget , with the actors hit or miss , and plenty of gore to chock up along with the over-the-top laughs . Slither , from Troma filmmaker James Gunn ( also scribe on the Dawn of the Dead remake ) , is a bit like that , only it's been given a higher rate of visual effects , enough gore to satisfy the horror-a-week crowd ( and R horror by the way ) , and it is creepier than could be expected . While it is definitely over the top though , maybe at times some of the possible laughs gave way to the strangeness that's going on . And make no mistake , if you don't like slugs , you may be a little uneasy throughout the second half of the film . Because Gunn , who does happen to throw a few turns of the screw in what is at the core very much a B-movie storyline ( with enough ' you-know-these-types ' for two common Troma flicks ) , has some tendencies to really make the action on screen appropriately outrageous ( if that makes sense ) . But the thing that puts the film to be watchable even in its more discomforting moments & / or gags , is the persistence that's given to it all . The alien-slug element is not a new subject , and one could even go back to the sci-fi films of the 1950's for some similarities . It's in the shock-value and the amount of ( ironically ) believability that gives it the edge . Certain images like the first slug-mother ( if you haven't seen it I won't explain it ) ; moments with the slug-zombies in action ; the cheesy thrills relatable to more gruesome horror films . It's not to say there's really brilliance here , but then , how could there be ? For me , Slither has its lulls here and there in some of the dialog scenes ( Gunn wasn't necessarily any kind of strong-point on the DOTD remake ) , and it has the value of a decent pulp sci-fi piece when compared to some other movies . But when the pace and terror does pick up , or there are some true laughs , its not bad at all . At the least , I could see this film having its bit of a cult , if not as big as others . |
510,827 | 453,068 | 330,373 | 7 | not the best of the ' Potter ' movies , but it's got some captivating sights and even extraordinary scenes | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire pushes the franchise into the PG-13 level , and for good reason : Lord Voldermort , played to a chillingly Gothic T by Ralph Fiennes , is much more present not just as an ominous , unnamed presence , but as a vindictive , murderous threat from the grave . He's the Nosferatu of the " Potter " series , but with a further sense of dread that is the unwavering sense of pure evil in such a world of wizards and magic . But Goblet of Fire isn't just about the evil , or just put-on evil by way of a curse or other dark forces at work , though it's in this that the film works usually at its strongest and most surreal points . There's a whole section dedicated to a new form of competition : get the dragon's egg in the Triwizard tournament . Some of this is compelling , mostly involving the actual under-water part of the tournament , where the suspense level isn't very high but it's highly watchable for its interesting look . How does one see " magic " happen underwater ? If there perhaps is any significant problem , or perhaps just big gripe , to have with Goblet of Fire it's that as an emotional experience of the conventional kind it works much better on a first viewing , in the theater , where the big crescendo happens ( murder is a key factor here , of a character I won't mention ) , and one gets caught up in the first truly significant tragedy in the series , if not the film . But on a repeat viewing , somehow , this is lessened in impact , and if anything there's certain flaws in some of the performances ( a father's wailing cries , to not spoil too much for those who haven't seen the movie or read the book , are pretty poorly delivered ) , and even what seemed like really riveting scenes of competition - and some of the quasi-teen drama developments involving Harry's friends - seem a little more contrived or just not as interesting as before . But on the other hand , director Mike Newell finds ways to make his entry in the franchise watchable in many tight areas . Brendan Gleeson was a great choice for Professor " Mad-Eye " Moody , who has a look about him where , as with Rickman's Snape , you can't totally be sure what his intentions or alliances side . And there's some moments of levity thrown in in good levels of measure . But , if for nothing else , the aspect of the strange , violent and , as far as a series like this can go at this point as the mid-way movie , incredibly dark presence of Voldemort , with Fiennes's physical prowess going past the fact that he's under lots of make-up ( or CGI ) and pitting to the most effective villains in contemporary big-budget big-studio movie-making . To put it another way , if the last half hour or so pops up again on TV , I'll be sure to watch it all the way to the end . |
508,731 | 453,068 | 91,369 | 7 | not as successfully fantastical as the other Henson films , but it is an entertaining KID's flick | Watching Labyrinth on TV the other day , after years of having not seen it , I'm reminded in general how I see Jim Henson's work , via the usual Muppets ( in the ' Muppet ' movies ) or in the non-traditional ones ( the spectacular film ' the Dark Crystal ' ) , just a smidgen different than as a kid . For one thing , there's the nostalgia factor , of having loved the muppets as a kid and seeing how the entertainment value is still there , if on a slightly different wavelength then as a kid - some jokes more received and understood and some moments not as freakish as when back in the day . But with Labyrinth I just thought , despite all of the talent and marvelous special effects , " this hasn't really changed much for me since I was a kid , it's still just , well , good . " The story itself - of young Jennifer Connelly going after her baby brother kidnapped by the Goblin King ( David Bowie , in full-on regalia ) while navigating through the tangential directions of the Labyrinth with help ( or not ) from creatures - is just a fairy tale for kids . That it's got some clever direction from Henson is not without its merits and some scenes get the fantasy feeling right , even for its time and visual FX limitations . But if there are limitations anywhere noticeable it's in the script by Terry Jones , from the story by Henson and Dennis Lin , where chances to reach to a larger audience ( like with the Dark Crystal , which works for adults just as well as for kids ) are missed . The humor in the film does work here and there , but there are also the Bowie songs to contend with which are , more or less , rather disappointing and , well , 80's in retrospect . I still liked the inventive uses with the supporting Muppet-type characters , the little troupe of sorts that follows Connelly's character till the end ( almost ) . However , having seen it again , I'm not sure when I would want to watch it again , unless I had some kids around . In short , one of the lesser Henson films ( ironically the only one produced by George Lucas ) which means that it still has enough visual prowess and imagination to top the current films reaching for its target audience . |
510,873 | 453,068 | 65,134 | 7 | a good Eastwood vehicle , competently directed by Siegel , and two great scenes with the mules | Every once in a while watching movies I come across one that has a peculiarity to it , at least as a genre film . Two Mules for Sister Sara is a star vehicle for Clint Eastwood - in his usual Western movie-star swagger and ultra-cool sense of humor a1nd style - and for Shirley MacLaine as a nun ( in clever , convincing disguise ) along for the ride . It's also directed by a seasoned pro of action genre pictures , Don Siegel , who one year later would take Eastwood to their most notable collaboration ( not sure yet if it's their best till I see the Beguiled or Coogan's Bluff ) , Dirty Harry . It's got some of those good elements for a genre picture of this kind , some scenes with amusing , typically Eastwood - character - with - a - woman conversation , a surprising start to the story as well as revelatory moment later on in the film , and the inimitable Ennio Morricone score . That it isn't all that spectacular overall is mostly due to how low-key at times Siegel keeps the picture , and that the screenplay , while not without merit , doesn't deliver a whole lot of bang for the buck , so to speak . It's not a retread of spaghetti westerns as Siegel has a slightly different style than Leone , but it does definitely resemble some of the spare parts from the films that were spawned off of those . For the most part it is just a film doing what it does - a buddy Western flick with a bit of a slant on the premise , with the enemies rather standard . However , wedged in the middle of what is usual business for Eastwood and Siegel two really terrific scenes that I actually watched twice . It's almost uncharacteristic of the rest of the script , and indeed of how the performances click ( they sometimes don't , akin to the animosity between the actress to the actor ) and the direction works just a little better , that two scenes stuck out for me . The first is when Eastwood's Hogan gets shot by the natives , then sister Sara has to collaborate with him to get the arrow out . This involves a lot of drinking , and some careful maneuvering on both their ends . Looking at how Eastwood acts this scene , it's really one of the best I've seen him do in any western , as he carefully balances it out to not be too over-the-top , while keeping a certain crude charm as sister Sara lets her guard down ( MacLaine , too , is quite good in the scene ) . Following this comes the other memorable one , where the two of them set up a dynamite pinch under the bridge to stop a train . I loved the way Siegel used the hand-held camera in this scene , with a tense way about it that reminded me of the chase scenes in Dirty Harry . And again , something just clicks overall with all of the screen elements , and this centerpiece of sorts , for my money , rises above a good lot of the rest of the movie . If only the rest of the movie , while decent enough , could be this captivating . |
508,870 | 453,068 | 87,995 | 7 | the damnedest cult-movie ; uneven but rocking with attitude , humor and individuality | Alex Cox probably knew what he was doing with Repo Man , but it was probably something he concocted while in the basement of a young punk rocker with a lot of dirty second-rate comic books and a lot of booze . How it comes out on the screen makes it a kind of bizarre outcast in the realm of science-fiction comedies , because it's not entirely a comedy ( there's some moments that feel like they SHOULD be more dramatic , like the dynamic between Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez for the most part , or the scenes with secret-service-type alien chasers ) . In fact science fiction seems to be looming over the heads of everyone like it's some sort of half-goofy half-conspiratorial quagmire , all leading up to a Chevy Malibu that has a certain ' quality ' about it . Much of the story's tangents don't even seem to make too much sense , and the structure feels like it's been put together in cheap ( hence the comic-books ) . But Cox is always working with a mind-set for what's unexpected with absurdities and , oddly enough for such a punk-rock movie , quirkiness . Estevez plays Otto , a perennial punk-rocker who has a ' f you ' attitude to practically all authority figures , which keeps him usually unemployed . Enter in Stanton with his job as a repo-man , with cars getting taken away by " dildoes who don't follow the rules " , and so he joins up as he's got no prospects at all . As he learns how to go about getting car after car , a suspicious wormy guy in glasses is driving around a peculiar car that has a trunk that's similar to something out of the Ark of the Covenant , only more alien-like . So then , as Cox's rude and crude attitude goes , we get the secret-service guys , the bizarre punks who are all about causing disorganized chaos and robberies , ill-tempered Hispanics , a far-out guy at the repo place named Miller , and meanwhile there's always wackiness around the corner . The characters are more or less the main thing Cox works with here , as almost everyone here is an eccentric , or an oddball , or a total off-his-rocker loon ( or just , you know , with their ' secrets ' ) . And Otto himself is a prototype of the typical 80s kid , with no respect but not necessarily stupid either . And around these characters a lot of crazy things go on , or lines of dialog , and they either work or they don't . The only problem is that Cox isn't always focused with everything from scene to scene , and there's a mid-section that just comes off even too weird for me . But I didn't mind this for the most part ; there's almost a sense in the narrative that it's supposed to be sloppy and mismanaged , and through this there's more inventive qualities than one might find in a more prestigious flick with more money . Add on to this one of the great 80s soundtracks , and an ending that gives a big laugh with a big raised-eyebrow , Repo Man is a shaggy dog story , a rebellious-youth pic , and an urban take on the old tale of aliens coming to Earth ( for what reason I still can't tell ) . A minor work of ingenuity that is understandably with its cult audience . |
508,667 | 453,068 | 35,082 | 7 | a decent noir with a few really nice touches , such as the main stars | Jean Gabin didn't star in many American films , and Moontide was the only one I could find from my local library . Maybe it was for the best ; his presence on screen is very ( and I mean this as a compliment ) French in tone and inflection and even in style of speak . In English he fares reasonably well , and gives a solid performance as the " gypsy turned peasant " Bobo who saddles up with ex-suicide-attemptee Ida Lupino on a tiny bay community . This being said it's a kind of character that works for Gabin's limitations in the language . Because Bobo is a Gypsy it works that Gabin's English is only so fluent and has the kind of facial expressions that reflect that ( as opposed to say Grand Illusion where he was so natural that it was staggering ) . Lupino , thankfully , is a great match , and the two have some very nice scenes together as a married couple who face trouble when one of Bobo's prior troubles comes back to haunt him , even as it wasn't his fault . The direction is competent and the writing has some moments of cleverness or tenderness or even insight . And as the drama ratchets up one gets involved if only on a perfunctory , conventional level . But the director Archie Mayo ( replacing , of all directors , Fritz Lang ) some moments that really stand out for me . One that I might never forget , and should stand up among some of the quintessential early 40s noir films , is when Bobo has his drunken binge the first night at port and after causing a ruckus in the bar with punching out the guy and making the girl upset goes from bar to bar . In a montage that provides a drunken angle to the camera and editing tricks , we see Bobo going further and further , hearing characters repeat things like " drink , drink " or whatever and it is purely intoxicating to see this . It's the kind of sequence , which lasts a good long 5 minutes , that almost promises this to be a great film . It isn't , but it was worth a shot , and for those who are curious or just big Gabin or Lupino ( or Claude Rains ) fans , it's worth a shot . |
508,145 | 453,068 | 221,300 | 7 | Once you learn more about Jazz on your own , the more " Jazz " feels incomplete | Ken Burns ' Jazz documentary , which is a twenty-hour documentary ( too long or not long enough would be the argument , I'd go with not long enough ) , details the history of Jazz from its origins in Ragtime , up until the 1960's . It is indeed insightful for those who do not know the histories of these people , pretty much all of them terrific or outstanding , and it does try to take you inside their world . As one who has only really gotten into Jazz within the past few years , as just a history lesson it keeps attention most of the way through . The problems one can find in the documentary could be really squared down to two . The first is that Burns , while talented and obviously with a good research team and plethora of pictorial aids , forgets something about Jazz - it's supposed to be fun ! There's something about the sense of humor and vitality of jazz that gets lost among the heavy-handed narrations , that make jazz out to be as mighty and colossal as the Greeks or the Romans . Jazz is important to the world of music , but much of what is spoken trumps most of the experiences in the stories ( not that a few of them aren't entertaining - most of the stuff involving Armstrong , Bix , Blaisie , and Art Tatum keeps interest that way ) . The second problem , which is a given considering the length of the documentary , is that there isn't enough room for everyone , and after Miles and Coltrane , it just halts . It would be intriguing if Burns went back and did a ' special edition ' treatment , and cover more ground on what he had , and expand into the great jazz that did come out since the 60's ( and there has been a few , believe you / me ) . If you're wanting to get into the atmosphere , the moods and histories ( and of course the music , some of it rare here ) on Jazz , basically this is the best place to start . But if you're already an aficionado , or if you don't have the utmost attention span to watch all of the footage , it may comes to let-down . |
509,491 | 453,068 | 462,338 | 7 | a film about trickery , done in a tricky style that works , with crackling performances | Lasse Halstrom isn't out , as a film-making , to make really extreme and probing insights into what goes into a prankster / forger like Clifford Irving . Maybe it's because he , like I , saw Orson Welles's film F For Fake , which covered similar ground and has the only substantial footage of Clifford Irving on record and in full bloom with his BS meter going sky-high . That film , overall , dug very deep into what is to have forgery , a hoax , as part of personality . Halstrom doesn't quite get that , but nevertheless he's made an entertaining mini-saga of a man - or rather men in this case - who went to the edge of credibility and almost got away with the whole shebang . His story , as covered as well in part in F for Fake , is about Irving's incredibly smart and incredibly stupid attempt at passing off as his own the autobiography of Howard Hughes , then the notoriously reclusive and nutty billionaire with his fingers in enterprises all over the world . He passes off Hughes's handwriting to the publishers and lawyers as his , even as it's really Irving who wrote it all , and even went so far as to have mock audio recordings of Irving AS Hughes to get down in the book via assistant Dick Suskind . As the walls seem to be closing in on their scam , as well as Irving's marriage , it goes as far as mass printings of the book Irving presents - until the ' real ' Hughes makes a press conference call ( call , of course ) , to disprove the book altogether as a hoax . Halstrom surprisingly makes his film light and dark in tone , depending on what stage the story is in , and it's even fun at times to see Irving and Suskind go about their risk-taking maneuvers to get all documents and information they can on Hughes , as if it's guerrilla research . Then as the despair of constant lying increases , and the threat of capture and revelation is nearer , Halstrom makes it more like a paranoid thriller . This latter part may actually be not quite as convincing - so to speak of course , as one can't be sure entirely what's true or not in The Hoax - because , simply , one might not see Irving so much as a crazy person ala Hughes so much as a kind of strange artist-cum-professional at what he does : to make himself believe the BS before he even feeds it to others . Scenes like Irving getting caught by Hughes's " secret agents " in the middle of the night are not as striking as Halstrom might have intended , even as all the while the performances are still good . And the realm of placing the story in context of the times is hit or miss ; it works , to be sure , when going into the Nixon administration sections because it's crucial to the story ( and , according to some articles on the film , is possibly really accurate ) , though putting in the footage of Vietnam and protesters and so forth are sort of padding to environment and period . The music , costumes , locations ( i . e . Las Vegas ) and simple political ramifications make it enough . This being said , The Hoax provides the audience with some very effective performances . Gere , under the right director , can be terrific , and this is one of his best performances in years , as he balances out Irving's higher aspirations of wealth and notoriety with his latter plunge into confusing his own personality with that of Hughes , with suspicions of everything or anyone around him . The filmmakers wisely don't make Irving very sympathetic , and Gere plays this for all it's worth with moments of charm , tension , and delusions of grandeur played out wonderfully . However , if Gere is good , Alfred Molina is better as Suskind , Irving's collaborator and the real behind-the-scenes guy who helps make Irving's fabrications all the more palatable , like hiding documents out of the Pentagon or flying to another country to mail an envelope . Suskind , unlike Irving , ends up dealing with the hoax with more of a psychological / moral burden , and it ends up weighing on his conscience like a brick . It might make Suskind the more conventional character in the movie , but Molina makes him very real and more of the tragic case than Gere's Irving . Molina's track record , at the least , remains untarnished . Other supporting players like Marcia Hay Harden , Julie Delpy , Eli Wallach , and Stanley Tucci are better than average here . The Hoax is a good treat in this month's lot of schlock and big-budget trash by sticking close to making it an actor's movie , and sort of a bittersweet take on what a hoax does in such a grand scale as that of Howard Hughes , and what it does to a person the longer and more intense it goes on for . |
508,733 | 453,068 | 43,879 | 7 | more melodrama than film-noir , but it does have some excellent stuff in it | I would be inclined more to give On Dangerous Ground a higher rating , or just think of it as a great film , even as I find there are certain things in the second half that doesn't quite click as well as in other parts . Two pieces of brilliance go by way of co-writer / director Nicholas Ray , however - casting Robert Ryan as the stoic-faced Jim Wilson , and getting Bernard Herrmann for the musical compositions . Ryan here has a great performance almost by not doing anything spectacular , by just having this very hard-boiled look to him in the early scenes in the urban , film-noir landscapes , and then as it very subtly peels away as he gets a touch of the ' heart ' he's been lacking back home . As the sort of masculine-centered core of the film , Ryan is quite good . Herrmann's score , meanwhile , in what he referred to as his favorite of his many many scores , delivers up emotion through the strings in the dramatic bits and the tougher stuff when need be . He , too , is on top of his game here . What's interesting about what didn't quite work , at least for myself , in On Dangerous Ground was a little more in due to the screenplay and to the performance from Ida Lupino . For a director who often has a script as one of the best parts of what he's doing , the writing here starts off fantastically in the city , then as it goes further on in the snowy , rural setting , the melodrama-side starts to loose some of its shape . It's not that the more rough , gritty style of the first part of the film doesn't correspond well enough with the later scenes ; in fact some of these chase scenes and shots of Ryan going through the snow after his ' suspect ' are well done from Ray's end . But part of the acceptance of the change that occurs in the character of Jim Wilson has to be as believable as Lupuno's performance can allow , and she is good in her blind - girl - who's - totally - compassionate up to a point . For example , I did get a lot of emotional contact when Ray shot her in close-ups . But overall there just seemed to be some spots in not just her portrayal of the material , but also in the performance of her character's brother ( not right in the head , perhaps , but is his work interesting , not really ) . I would definitely recommend On Dangerous Ground for the crowd of film-noir lovers , and those getting into Nicholas Ray's work ( as this will finally be on DVD soon enough ) . Yet if certain parts of the story's fabric and sentimentality might not click as well as it should to you , you're not alone . At the least , there's a heap-load of entertainment to be had with the scenes following the cops on their nights across the city streets , like a superlative short film amid a tragic tale of losing and finding yourself . |
509,763 | 453,068 | 26,174 | 7 | not as exciting as one might expect by today's standards , but it has some good old Hollywood spirit to it | Captain Blood isn't the best film by far for Michael Curtiz or Errol Flynn - the latter made his big Hollywood debut here - but it's a surefire Saturday matinée program all the same , a good one considering that it's from the early days of Warner Brothers's ' on-contract ' pictures , where a stock company of actors and crew would go from movie to movie to movie . This first collaboration between the ( future ) star and director , a volatile one , is a swashbuckler of mostly the light order ; it's a tale of a slave of the title ( Flynn ) who escapes his enslavement to a bourgeois woman ( de Havilland ) , and rallies a bunch of men to become a pirate captain , soon merging ( and breaking off ) from French captain Levasseur ( Basil Rathbone , maybe the best or just right actor in the film , which might be saying something ) , and then going off to attack the British . It's a high-spirited sea adventure with some dramatic moments in the last third of the picture , which comes mostly due to Flynn quitting his smirking and grinning - a sign of his early star charm but also that of inexperience at playing a pirate - and some classic Hollywood grace in showing great character actors play their parts finitely . There's also very entertaining scenes of a pirate ship attacking a seaside village ( the one where Flynn and his men overtake the ship ) , a montage with inter-titles telling in bold how they became sort of official pirates at large , and best of all is the climax where things become close to too complicated , but never do . It's a blast to watch Curtiz get such conventional material into a form that is sometimes silly and usually with an accessibility for anyone aged 5 to 80 . It's not anything very revealing as far as in true artistic terms ; you won't read too many ( though I'm sure there are some ) scholarly papers about the methods chosen by Flynn and Curtiz and the crew and so on . But in its own simple and direct and carefree desire to please with a tale of a swinging anti-hero , it trumps a more charged and stylized but complicated modern work like Pirates of the Caribbean . |
509,109 | 453,068 | 780,622 | 7 | part crafty and topical satire , part crazy ' feminist ' horror story | I was a little worried about this going in , even as I loved the joke that was the premise : a vagina with razor sharp fangs inside the walls . How much could be done with something like this ? As I found out , a lot more than I expected , but especially surrounding it as a nifty satire on the world of abstinence pledgers in high schools . There can never be enough room to make fun of these ' abstinence-only ' folk who wear the " Promise Rings " and are amid a self-made desensitized cult that , in essence , dissuades those who do have romantic connections from giving in to their desires . And there's mythology to boot ! If anything , the burgeoning relationship between Dawn ( Jess Weixler ) and Tobey ( Hale Appleman ) shouldn't be something they should ever have to avoid . But they do for " purity " sake , despite each others ' curiosity about each other's bodies . The first attack is the most savage , and perhaps though the most anticipated , and with a sweet twist : it's a shock to each of them , as she has no idea what is " down there " ( all the sex-ed textbooks have the vaginal area censored , this despite the penis right in diagram , a possible reference to how it turns out in visual-style in the picture as men may grab their crotches in unified pain ) . To be sure , some of the satirical jabs and slight plot twists aren't totally effective . While the brother character ( effectively played as scum by John Hensley ) is needed to move the plot along at a crucial point , there's never much explanation to how he's such a sex-psycho with a big dog . There's also a touch of familial drama that feels a little forced ( though , again , as part of disbelief that must be upheld throughout ) . What I liked , and at times even loved , as the pure abandon , like a talented filmmaker tackling the sexploitation genre with some juicy under-cutting to the society that this springs out of . Somehow this guy in his 50s - his first feature no less after years of acting gigs - has crafted some of the funniest penis jokes that could never be fathomed by , um , most people . To say it's a guilty pleasure doesn't do it justice , be it the most obvious jabs or the visual gags and symbolism ( the cave opening , the phallic rocks , etc ) . One more note : this is truly a " breakout " performance as Weixler plays Dawn for all its worth as a character who truly has an " arc " , if you could call it that . Whether it's the sexually confused innocent early in the film , to the totally mind-fd soul who realizes an old myth called Vagina Dentata may be why she has this via nuclear radiation , and then onward as someone who can use that tunnel of love for all its worth . She's someone to look out for in the indie world , and leads this film along like it's worth every minute . |
509,337 | 453,068 | 70,608 | 7 | it's less than great , but I liked watching it as a kid | I wouldn't recommend the Disney animated 70s movie of Robin Hood as essential Disney , but I have some great memories of it as a kid anyway . If there's any one thing I could probably criticize it's the song numbers - they just don't work and lack the fine polish of the Sherman brothers collaborations . Looking back on it it's very dated in that respect , sort of serving to the kids of the moment in part , and even to the point of reusing actual dancing bits from the Jungle Book ( if you've seen these movies as much as I have you start to notice these things ) . And as far as energy goes it's sometimes pretty lackadaisical . This being said , I also found a lot of it to be very funny , with the interplay between Peter Ustinov and Terry Thomas is fantastically good - they're such laughable villains , yet when they do strike their irons down it goes pretty dangerously . Of course you wont find anything at all in way of getting at all into the character underneath their basic demeanors - Robin Hood and those on his side , good , Prince John and those on his side , bad . But within those boundaries there is entertaining stuff going around , with the first robbing of Prince John through the very cheap disguise Robin puts on one , and another when Little John disguises himself as a Duke . Again , nothing immediately noteworthy , but as a kid I found a lot to go on it , with the more cartoonish aspects of the villains and side character outweighing the weaker sections of music and song , stale Robin and Mariam parts , and so on . |
510,695 | 453,068 | 101,026 | 7 | two-thirds of a fantastic dark comedy on the nature of sexual insanity , though not as successful as later Almodovar | It's safe to say that even in a film by Pedro Almodovar that is only marginally successful within the margins there are some good , steamy , questionable times to be had . I can just imagine Pedro sitting in front of his notebook just figuring out ways to mix sex , film-making , kidnapping , and other lewd exercises into some kind of cohesive single film . What makes a very good chunk of Tie Me Up , Tie Me Down exciting satirically is that Almodovar never gives in to making anything TOO serious . Which is perhaps what ends up transitioning the situation Ricky ( Antonio Banderas ) and Marina ( Victoria Abril ) are in from the absurd and flirtingly masochistic to the ( ironically ) conventional and quasi-sweetness that is obviously deep in Almodovar . Perhaps the tying up and re-tying becomes part of a metaphor on the filmmaker's part , that despite it being something very dangerous and totally provocative it's also inviting in ways that would be elusive otherwise . Then again , that the material does ( mostly ) work , by being so disturbing in the bluntness and perpetually deranged mind-set of Ricky , but then in the human connections that are enhanced all the more . If only the motivations - even in such loose and wacky-Almodovar circumstances - were a little more convincing . Nevertheless , I liked a lot about Tie Me Up , Tie Me Down up until it goes off the rails with its logic turning into knots ( simply , I just don't buy that Marina falls for Ricky just like that , even if she was an ex-junkie porn star , and Ricky's advances are like that of a uppity , headstrong but shy 13 year old , a slight reminder of A Life Less Ordinary's bizarrely innocuous kidnapping turned romance ) . Chiefly , the performances and the usually arty-yet-trashy style from Almodovar and his crew . Banderas is , by the way , in one of his best and funniest performances here , a near emblem of the male ideal for a life with a woman , and a with an innocent yet fervent attraction to bondage , with that perfect look in his eyes detailing all even in brief moments . Yet there was something about his stay in the mental home all those years that did something to his ideas towards sex and what it is to live , and Banderas captures this mix of intense sadism crossed with the heart of an old Hollywood-studio leading man who will do anything to brush the leading lady off of her feet . Abril is always believable too , even when Almodovar gives her character a turn around into something more akin to an exploitation film , however sweet it tries to be . While she decides to underplay her immediate fear of her kidnapper , it works to add a level of comic timing to Ricky's own odd-ball ways . They make a great pair , really , especially when it comes to that ' turning point ' , where Almodovar uses his unique style to get five ceiling-mirrored shot of a pivotal scene . There's also a fantastic role of the director of the film Marina is starring in at the start of the film , the aged Maximo Espejo ( Francisco Rabal , who's been in countless films including the Eclipse and Belle de Jour ) , who has the ideas burning and changing around at a beat as to what his ending will be for his actress - death , being saved , something else ? His moments on screen display a richness that lies often in Almodovar's script , where the surreal pressures of shooting the movie for Maximo somewhat carry over - and sort of dissipate as the characters become vulnerable - into that realm where reality and un-reality cross paths . This is heightened , and made a little additionally conventional , by the musical score , which like many of Almodovar's work is a tip of the hat to Herrmann compositions and old Hollywood romantic classics . There's even an emotional upheaval when Ricky and Marina meet again on that balcony overlooking the vista . The wildest thing about the picture is that one does become absorbed in the push and pull relationship between ' kidnapper ' and ' kidnapee ' ( I quote that for its a little redundant to use those terms as the film goes on ) , and that these fed up people are practically the most average couple you'd ever meet . There's sensational comedy stacked in there too , in Ricky's behavior ( moustache ) , the film within the film being shot ( that strongman character is amazing ) , the random TV commercial about Spanish retirees , and just the consistent absurdity in the repetitive , ritual-side of the tying up and down . But there's something missing in Almodovar's third act to live up to the better parts early on , and he chickens out on really making this a much better , more challenging effort . I'll probably watch it someday again though , if only for Banderas and Rabals ' performances . |
510,015 | 453,068 | 455,590 | 7 | contains both the conventions and convictions of good thrillers , with a ' tour-de-force ' performance | It would be one thing to make the pat statement ' this is worth seeing if only for Forest Whitaker as dictator Idi Amin ' . For some it will be , and in fact some may just go to see it based on the hype he's been building up in the awards season ( not that it's undeserved ) . But the director Kevin MacDonald , along with his DP Anthony Dod Mantle ( behind the modern classic as 28 Days Later ) , gives the film an edge to it that might have been lost on a technical crew less interested in getting part of the psychology into the style . In the core of the Last King of Scotland , which is purportedly based on the true story of Amin and his doctor Nicholas Garrigan ( James McAvoy ) who becomes soon an adviser and soon like a " son " in Amin's bi-polar mind , is a thriller that does thrill , and also pulls into question what it means to practically become a participant in the madness of a brutal dictatorship . Garrigan randomly picks Uganda to go to after he graduates from medical school in Scotland , tries to be a doctor where needed , but somehow becomes enveloped in the world of Amin after a chance encounter on a road-side . He becomes charmed by Amin's upfront likability and candid manner , plus his vulgar humor and promise of both peace for his people and excess in his domain ( he has three wives ) . But soon this turns to become sour when Garrigan sees the darker side to Amin - a paranoid fear-monger who can flip on a dime on his closest advisers . He knows he has to get out , but it wont be easy , at all . It's a shame then that such pungent subjects - of the towering force that is Amin , portrayed by Whitaker with a look in his eyes that always perfectly conveys what the scene should feel like , and towards the end becomes absolutely chilling in both his rage and even his amiability . Even McAvoy is able to rise to the challenge of his counterpart , as the guy who inspires more in Amin to be " Scottish " , but also becomes wayward himself . His plot line though becomes a little mired in bits that don't seem truthful ( who's to say if they are , as it's based on a book likely based on what happened ) , with his romantic asides the most unconvincing portions of the picture . The whole sub-plot with him and one of Amin's wives ( played by Kerry Washington ) becomes a little soapy , and puts such realism into the realm of near contrivance ( I also would've liked to see , aside from the one scene where Garrigan sees the pictures , the furthest extent of his murderous ways on his people ) . But when pit into the reality of Garrigan's situation , and the environment around him , it becomes a richer picture . It does have the goods with being an engrossing entertainment of course , and of the two films out now ( this and Blood Diamond ) set in turbulent Africa I'd recommend this a little more for the style and acting . That it isn't great isn't ever a fault of Whitaker , however . |
509,827 | 453,068 | 245,171 | 7 | If not a great movie , it is a good one , stirring up questions of Good vs . Evil | Of the filmmaker Werner Herzog , I've heard and read strange things about him and his films . That two of his works , Aguirre : The Wrath of God , and Fitzceraldo , are two of the most bizarre modern European films . That he once ate a shoe from a bet with Errol Morris , and made a documentary about it . That he once said ( and I'm paraphrasing ) " some people make movies with their minds and hearts , I make them with my ( expletive ) . " So , when I saw this film at the rental store , Invincible , and the image of Tim Roth in a truly Gothic pose on the cover , I expected it to be a dark , brooding film about pre-war , pre-dictator Hitler Germany . In a way it is , and in a way its not . Although the film is rated PG-13 , I would imagine that for the die-hard Herzog fans this is like his family film , or at the least kids might not be too freaked out to watch it . Surprisingly , Herzog brings a fable out of a true story , about how each side of the coin is a certain way , black or white , and whichever role you choose defines you , though there can be an exception . There was one sequence , however , where I saw that Herzog brilliantly had a kind of surreal , one-of-a-kind filmed scene that I expected amongst the more typical dramatic scenes . It involves a dream of Zishe's ( played by near unknown Jouko Ahola in a mostly one-note performance ) where he walks around on a rocky beach . He is surrounded by bright red crabs , and steps around on the rock trying not to knock them down or get snipped by their claws . But he does so casually , with the searing Hans Zimmer / Klaus Blaudet music in the background . This dream occurs again towards the end of the film , as his younger brother leads him by the hand through the crabs on the rocks , somehow giving him strength . These are powerful scenes in a movie that could've been even more powerful . Take Tim Roth's performance - it towers above all the others because most ( aside from Udo Kier whom I recognized ) are non-professionals . It's to Herzog's credit that he makes these people in Poland shtetels and in Berlin to be believable , but he's not a great director of them like the neo-realists in Italy were . And because Roth , as this brooding , tragic anti-hero witnesses what happens with his strongman from Poland , is so good and subtle at his role , he out-acts pretty much anyone else in the film . Watching him is fascinating , especially when he's quiet and subtle , or in the scenes when he's on stage performing his acts . It shows how versatile he can be in this film . I just wish it was the same for the others . ( strong ) |
510,221 | 453,068 | 95,385 | 7 | a Linklater travelogue where it's about alienation and meandering around ; better on a second viewing | There were moments watching this narrative experiment - the first of many for Richard Linklater - where it comes about as close to being totally mundane as can be possible with the camera . It probably wasn't a problem for him to get his shots , as it looked as if he was making his own personal ' home movie ' with him either on the train or in stations or just bumming around Austin , Texas . In that sense it's almost close to being a documentary even though , according to Linklater , it's not really quite himself on screen even as it is himself . In real life he isn't this mundane and sort of drift-less , however does admit that the feelings are in him , and were in him then , and it's on a second viewing that a sort of pattern emerges from what looks like bare-bones storytelling . Unlike Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation , it doesn't necessarily try to relate some sort of ' character ' in the sense that it's something created by the actor , and then surrounded in the typical indie-movie easy-going scenes . Here , Linklater is showing how such everyday things like traveling on a train , walking through a town , getting stopped by someone to see your t-shirt , watching TV , watching movies , reading , doing laundry , doing dishes , reading a Kafka quote , driving , listening to music , so on and so forth , can have some kind of interest in the initial disinterest in seeing this . On the one hand the narrative is lax , and unlike Slacker there isn't even the framework of a bunch of characters in a small town . But on the other hand out of all of these seemingly random shots of a guy going through the motions in life , dealing without a job , the ' whatever ' attitude of hanging out with friends or a girl , taking care of a car , becomes a narrative itself . It's experimental and as Linklater also has said certainly not for a large audience to see ( and many haven't until the DVD of Slacker was released with this film included ) , but the visual language is rich in its detachment , and at the least is a curious effort that doesn't just keep the audience on a sort of line away from typical emotional involvement but is about the same thing . Far from being any great success , but for a real " student " effort ( self-taught student ) you could get much worse . Watch for a Sterling Hayden tribute in one scene and a sense of dissatisfaction with 80s TV . |
508,209 | 453,068 | 478,049 | 7 | Lennon the peacenik vs Nixon the warmonger paranoid ; a bout that's given good , not great , treatment here | The central premise of The US vs John Lennon ( the latter as described in the Departed , of all movies , semi-sarcastically as " the president before Lincoln " ) is that public figures are always up for grabs if they come out on either side of the fence . Lennon was fervently anti-war - if very unsure about going all the way into the dangerous political zone ( hence not going , wisely enough , to the violent demonstration that happened at the 1972 Republican convention ) - and because of his connection with various people like Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffmann , as well as questionable ties with the Black Panthers , he was monitored openly , and threatened with deportation for a bogus pot arrest in 1968 . Nixon , meanwhile , was one of the all-time nut-job presidents when it came to the military , who ran in 68 on an " I'll-end-the-war-honorably " ticket and instead kept the war going for years , including invading Cambodia . Many of the facts brought up in this documentary aren't new , especially to those who were alive during the time it happened and the media went all over Lennon ( so it goes in today's tabloids as well , only here it was some kind of real news ) . But they are presented compelling enough so that they can offer up some bits of insights for newer audiences to Lennon's music and politics . To be sure , it is a slanted argument , but slanted for the right reasons ( you're bound to not find anyone in a doc like this saying " oh , Vietnam , not so bad " , unless maybe Liddy ) . Yet the argument holds strong throughout , about the nature of political practice and the ideals of changing things not going well with the establishment . And there are questions raised for the audience , if not directly : should Lennon , who technically wasn't American , be apart of a movement that was going on , or just stuck to doing his songs and music ? ( The filmmakers , by the way , wisely cut out much at all to do with the Beatles , albeit they kind of skirmish past the whole issue of " Beatles bigger than Jesus " when it's presented more as a footnote of the outspoken side of Lennon than connecting to the main focus ) . It's interesting though to see the footage of the " bed-in " , when Lennon and Ono did almost a kind of tour of protest-by-lethargy , and had the press in there as part of the ironic-not-quite-joke of the matter . And there's also fascination in seeing Lennon describe , candidly in archival interviews , the toll the media blitz and upheaval from the government had on him . Only towards the end do the directors start to waver the attention a little bit , even as it is , to be sure , part of the story of Lennon and his eventual tragic death in 1980 . But the core idea behind the documentary is one that will always pose something that the viewer should look for : what is it about two unlikely connected figures - popular celebrity musician-cum-activist and one of the craziest presidents this country ever had - that still seems relevant today ? Can people take away anything from Lennon's struggle with the powers-that-be ? It might be a little obvious ( i . e . getting past apathetic stances and doing nothing to just trying to do ' something ' ) , but the point is made nonetheless in the film , and not in a manner that is too schmaltzy or heavy-handed . Just make sure you don't have a BS drug bust to worry about . |
509,407 | 453,068 | 105,378 | 7 | fun to watch for some of the actors and the ' character ' of the fog , but lesser Woody in my book | I could enjoy Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog without really taking it in as being as superior a work as his other 1992 film , Husbands and Wives . Both are a bit like cinematic experiments , H & W being a very loose and improvisational-feeling take on couples in the style of something like Cassavetes or Bergman , and S & F being an all-out homage to expressionism in Germany , with touches of Kafka , horror and film-noir ( hell , that's all the film is , the latter I mean ) thrown in for good measure . But watching Shadows and Fog becomes a little more tedious as it goes , and a laugh or two and the usual heaping pile of Woody wit doesn't compensate for there being only the ingredients for a story , not a connection of one . We get Woody Allen as Kleinman ( or is it Klienman ) , who gets woken up in the middle of an ultra-foggy night to find a killer , but then finds himself on the other side of the investigation after the murder of a doctor ( Donald Pleasance ) . Meanwhile sexual liaisons go on with John Malkovich and Mia Farrow's characters , just not with one another ( one with Madonna and one with John Cusack ) . All the while scenes go in and out , and Allen is without a doubt very much in love with the period , actually the period put to film , and uses style to its excesses . One example of this is Farrow's visit to a whorehouse , where Allen's camera repeatedly goes around and around in a circular move around the women in profile . There's no real reason to do it just for the sake of having a 360 shot , and this is part of what's good but unfulfilling about the picture . The style is laid as thick as the fog , where motivation is totally lost for the sake of a more ' moving ' change for the characters , like Malkovich and Farrow finding the baby . There's a nice lot of whimsy with magic towards the end too . But seeing Allen in his usual nervous talky mode doesn't match up as well as he thinks it might , or that his intention might have been . It's not spoofing , because there aren't good enough jokes out of the atmosphere . I liked the Kafka side to it , and its all-star cast gets some points for sticking to the material , but it doesn't stir up much thought , or act that memorable in the way that other comedies by the filmmaker work . It's neither boring or dour , yet a trifle compared to Allen's other ' experiment ' that year , which aims for much more within its limits . |
507,898 | 453,068 | 113,101 | 7 | a cool batch of 90's indie pathos | Four Rooms was concocted like one of those many , many collaborative efforts from directors in the 60's and 70's ( i . e . The Witches , Ro . Go . PaG , Boccaccio ' 70 , etc ) , except this would revolve around a bell-hop on New Years Eve . It disqualifies itself as being any kind of masterpiece or classic in independent film-making , and sometimes the filmmakers ( Alison Anders , Robert Rodriguez , and Alexandre Rockwell , and Quentin Tarantino , the last two also serving as executive producer ) look like they're relishing too much in their ( limited ) clout and exuberance to concentrate . As was with many others who viewed the film , I found that the first two segments were the lesser ones , and the last two were the best ones . It all comes down , in this case , to which two were funnier . So , let's break each one down : Allison Anders ' film is a quirky , quasi-lesbian take on a coven of witches , featuring the likes of Madonna and Lily Taylor , are the first to shake up ( perhaps for the better in this one ) Ted the bell-hop . Ted , by the way , is played with a continuous , nervous-type of fervor that goes from being innocuous , to annoying , and then acceptable again . It's also interesting to see how his character goes through different motions when under each director ( for example , in Rodriguez's film he's more of a cartoon-type of character , and in Tarantino's film he hearkens slightly to his previous collaborations with the director , quieter , on edge in a particular way ) . Some of the laughs are surrounded by a kind of attitude put forth by the director that seems a little off . Maybe I'm the wrong audience for it , though - the women in the audience may appreciate it , or rather amused by it , more than I . I give it a B-Alexandre Rockwell's The Wrong Man is my least favorite of the bunch , as Ted gets stuck with a couple of crazed fetishists ( David Proval and Jennifer Beals ) . The problem here lies with two things - the fact that the comedic timing / chemistry is a little iffy / off with the three actors , and that the writing doesn't come off like it's naturally funny . When Beals ' character Angela runs off about Ted's private parts , this could be funny , but it's more ' ho-ho ' than ' ha-ha ' to me . Some of the tension from Roth brings some laughs , but not enough to compensate the uncomfortable atmosphere around the whole segment . I give it a C-The third segment , The Misbehaviors , displays how clever and quick Rodriguez can be with physical comedy ( slapstick ) as well as in getting laughs from kids ( as he did here and there in his Spy Kids movies ) . It is also a boost that the whole segment comes off as though it's like a live-action Looney Tunes short - it's so ridiculous that in some scenes I burst out laughing ( i . e . Ted's reaction to the corpse ) . The set-up with the parents was also amusing in how Banderas and Tamlyn Tomita act towards the kids . Then the pay-off knocks it out of the park . Then we come to the closure , featuring the indie wunderkind at the time , Tarantino , as he takes on two sources of inspiration - Rohald Dahl's " Man from the South " short story , later translated through Alfred Hitchcock's television show . It's a smart , hip little piece of Hollywood satire from Tarantino , as he himself plays an overly obnoxious Hollywood filmmaker , with two guys by his side ( Paul Calderon and Bruce Willis ) , as they take a gamble right after the stroke of midnight . It took me a couple of time to watch this to really get into it , but when I did it was even more promising . The camera-work in the scene ( via ' Dogs ' and ' Pulp ' cinematographer Andrzej Sekula ) is deliberately paced , and it's perfectly leisurely for the pace of the last segment . That much , if not all , of the dialog is funny it's because of the skill and chemistry between the four of them . Plus , a little prologue with Marisa Tomei and Kathy Griffin gives the indication of what insanity is in store . Grade - A . So , is this film a success ? For it's time , I'm not sure . With the power of four million off the success of each director's previous efforts ( Tarantino with ' Dogs ' , Rodriguez with El Mariachi , Anders with Gas , Food , and Lodging , and Rockwell with In the Soup , all from the 92 Sundance place ) , they did whatever they wanted , and it's not the success it could've been . On the other hand , when one looks at the films in perspective , it could've been a lot worse , and it wasn't . At the least , it works as one of the quintessential party movies for fans of the 90's " new-wave " crop . |
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