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509,315 | 453,068 | 960,144 | 7 | the ' best ' Sandler movie in about five years ( which still means its only ' good ' ) | When I was younger ( i . e . back in the last decade ) , I was an unashamed Adam Sandler fan , as he was made for the kind of target audience ( young teens ) that I was in . Then , as time went on , his comedies got a little bit stale , with only one or two exceptions ( the best , of course , being his role in Punch Drunk Love thanks to PT Anderson ) . As of late , sentiment , or just poor scripts , have gotten in the way of anything that's done it well for me , though I still hold him at the least as being a guilty pleasure . Now comes You Don't Mess with the Zohan , and I'm happy to report that it's overall very funny , probably his funniest since Anger Management ( which was somewhat underrated at the time ) . It's got one of his oddest set-ups , and sometimes the plot kind of clicks along to a stupid tone ( i . e . a mall trying to set up in an Israeli / Palestinian neighborhood ) , but there's a real charm to Sandler's character , behind all of the outrageous gags and running goofs ( i . e . hummus , big-crotch thrusts , Mel Gibson ) . The set-up is simple enough : a bad-ass Moussad agent who can kill a person almost without trying , fakes his own death against a Palestinian kingpin ( John Tuturro ) , and goes for his dream to become a professional hair-dresser in America . He gets that dream , as well as having sex with many , many older women who somehow get turned on like in Herbal Essences shampoo ads X100 , but of course falls in love with the Palestinian girl who runs the shop he works at . There's some minor intrigue involving a cab-driver ( Rob Schneider , not as crappy as usual ) with a grudge against Zohan with a goat memory , and the eventual return of Tuturro's character ( who , I might add , is absolutely uproariously funny in this , easily his funniest part since his days with the Coens ) for a near final showdown . What makes most of the movie work though - co-scripted by Sandler and Robert Smigel for the first time in years , aided probably tremendously by Judd Apatow - is its dedication to the raunchy nature of the material , avoiding sentimentality in lieu for tasteless sex jokes ( i . e . a certain hair-down-there is mentioned ) , and even some funny barbs at Israeli / Palestinian culture . It might not be the deepest satire , as many jokes revolve weirdly around Hackeysack , but it made me laugh , which is all I can really attest to . There are also , I should add , some pretty neat cameos and bit parts thrown in , like Shelly Berman from Curb Your Enthusiasm , Mariah Carey , the " Let's Get Ready to Rumble " guy in an actual small role , and amazingly Dave Matthews as a redneck-terrorist for hire . |
510,508 | 453,068 | 342,258 | 7 | a little hit for Besson and Li | Usually I don't watch much of Jet Li's works ( not against what he does , just not crazy about his movies ) , but Unleashed , aka Danny the Dog , intrigued me for its premise , its writer / producer ( who could've directed it had he had the guts ) , and the surprise casting of Morgan Freeman . Li plays Danny , a quasi wild child grown up and " tamed " by an electronic collar , controlled by gangster Bart ( Bob Hoskins ) , who uses Danny to beat the hell out of those who wont pay up , and for possible future endeavors in fight-to-the-death matches in underground arenas . But a sudden car accident sets Danny on his own - and into the care and council of an old , blind piano tuner ( Freeman ) , and his step-daughter , who teaches Danny the joys of music . But there's more , it seems , than he even knows about his past . Aside from the given fight sequences , which were much better than I expected as not seeming too heavily stylized with choreography ( save for the big death-fight in the arena between Danny and the opponents ) , there's a strong base of story and characters that helps this pulpy stuff stay respectable . Besson's sensibility leans more towards making it half a bad-ass story of a " dog " breaking off from his former ass of an owner ( Hoskins is one-note but fun in the part of the conniving Bart ) , and half a kind of sensitive re-emerging into society story where Danny finds his humanity and how to reconcile his dark past . The director Louis Letterier balances out the expected genre elements and the aspects with Freeman and his step daughter for it to be an emotional trip . It might not be a Leon : The Professional for Besson as writer / producer in terms of doing what he did with that , but Letterier presents an exciting , touching movie that can appease those looking for a solid Li pic , and for those who might give a double-take at Morgan Freeman playing a blind piano tuner ( as usual , he hits it out of the park ) . Not great , but not at all disappointment , it's a minor sleeper among the annals of Besson's career . And there's some pretty sweet classical music thrown in too . |
508,827 | 453,068 | 77,869 | 7 | it's almost like trying to put judgment on some brave , weird , unique piece of interpretation , that only has half its limbs | Godard once said a way to criticize a movie is to just make one , and probably the strongest kind that could be made about Ralph Bakshi's take on Tolkien's magnum opus the Lord of the Rings , has actually been made by Peter Jackson . The recent trilogy , to me , aren't even total masterpieces , but they are given enough room with each book to breath in all the post-modern techniques crossed with classical storytelling to make them very good , sweeping entertainments . But as one who has not read the books , I end up now looking upon the two versions , live-action ( albeit partly animated in its big visual effects way ) and animated ( albeit partly done with actual live action as the framework ) in relation to just the basic story , not even complete faithfulness to the books . And with Bakshi's version , it's almost not fair in a way , as what we do see is really not the complete vision , not what Jackson really had ( probably final cut ) . Robbed of Return of the King's big climactic rush of the story , and with the other two parts becoming rushed , I ended up liking it more for what it did within its limitations , though as such those same limitations make it disappointing . What's interesting too , after seeing the Jackson films first - which I also slightly regret being that I might've reacted to this differently when I was younger and prior to five years ago - is that the basic elements of the story never get messed up with . Everything that is really needed to tell the Fellowship of the Ring story is actually pretty much intact , and if anything what was probably even more gigantic and epic in Tolkien's book is given some clarity in this section . The actors playing the parts of the hobbits and the other heroes , are more or less adequate for the parts , with a few parts standing out ( John Hurt as Aragorn and William Squire as Gandalf ) . The lack of extra characterization does end up making things seem a little face-value for those who've not even seen the other films or read the books and can't put them into context . But there is some level of interest always with the characters , and here there's a more old-fashioned sensibility amid the large aura of it being more . This is not a garden variety Disney adaptation - warts and all , this is a Bakshi film , with his underground animation roots colliding with the mythical world of Middle Earth . And what Bakshi and his animation team bring to the film is one that ends up giving what is on screen , in all its abbreviated form , its hit or miss appeal . Along with being not totally complete as a film , or as stories , the form of the film is an experiment , to see if something can be entirely rotoscoped . The results end up bringing what seems now to be retro , but at the time of course was something that was a rough , crazy inspiration on the part of the filmmakers . Might it have been better with more traditional drawn animation ? In some parts , yeah ; it does become a little noticeable , as was also the case in Bakshi's American Pop , that the main characters move in such ways that are a little shaky , like some kind of comic-book form done in a different way . Still , there's much I admired in what was done . The orcs , for example , I found to be really amazing in they're surreal surroundings . They're maybe the best part of the combination of the animation on top of the live-action , especially during parts where there isn't battle footage ( that's really the real hit-or-miss section , as there isn't continuity from the good and bad rotoscoping ) , and the chiaroscuro comes through with big shapes on top of horseback . It's creepy in a good way . And the backgrounds , while also very rough and sometimes too sketchy , are beautiful with the mixtures and blasts of colors together . It's almost something for art-film buffs as much as for the ring-nuts . So , how would I recommend this animated take on the Lord of the Rings ? I don't know , to tell the truth . It's certainly a good notch above the other Tolkien animated film I've seen , the Hobbit ( and I've yet to see the animated ROTK ) , and there is some real artistry going on . There's also some stilted dialog , an all-too-rushed Two Towers segment with the most intriguing character Gollum being reduced to maybe two scenes in all . And seeing something as fragmented like this ends up only reinforcing the completeness of the more recent films . If you're a fan of the books contemplating checking this out , I would say it's worth a chance , even if it's one of those chances where you watch for forty minutes and then decide whether to stop it or not . As for it fitting into Bakshi's other films I've seen it's an impressive ambitious and spotty achievement , where as with Lynch's Dune it's bound to draw a dark , mordor-like line in the sand between those who hate it passionately and those who don't . I don't . |
510,841 | 453,068 | 481,797 | 7 | certainly won't be one to show to all ( some , frankly , will hate it ) . but it's challenging in ways filmmakers usually shy away from | It was bound to happen that Youth Without Youth , the first film written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola in fifteen years ( the first directed in ten ) , would be lauded by the critics for not being a real " comeback " kind of project . It's surreal , philosophical , mystical , and even has a mood about it that calls as a throwback to old romantic melodramas of the 40s and 50s ( hence the opening titles ) . It's not even any kind of great film . It's pretentious in a few stretches , maybe more-so , and it takes a convoluted explanation that comes second in 2007 film only to Southland Tales for being more complex and bizarre . But unlike Kelly's film , Coppola at least has a hold on what he's doing , or what he's trying to accomplish . Coppola once said that art is all about taking riks , and to make films without risk is like sex without children . In the grand scheme of things , at least with his career , Youth Without Youth seems to be slightly minor a risk when compared to the likes of Apocalypse Now or One From the Heart . But it's a risk that Coppola takes all the same , and through the intellectual thicket ( which , contrary to some critics , isn't completely dense ) there is some truly potent cinematic expression . So , the plot , the plot . . . A linguistics professor , Dominic ( Tim Roth ) is an old man when he gets struck by lightning in 1938 , then proceeds to age back to 40 in recovery , only to then find that he's being watched - and planned for abduction - by Nazi scientists who want to use his newfound super-powers ( mostly that he can , at times , harness powerful energy , as Dominic describes as " out of a science fiction novel " ) . This might be enough for a movie alone , but there's more - years later , a woman from Dominic's past ( from before the lightning strike ) appears again , also still apparently young , and she can talk in ancient languages , so then . . . Yeah , I could go on with that . Suffice to say there's also talk about how this whole time-warp connects into the realm of consciousness itself , or what makes up knowledge or the pursuit of language , and all relating to time , leading up to an ending that flips around itself , all inspired by an old Chinese tale that goes around and around . What it means I still can't quite figure , and it at least shows Coppola won't spoon-feed any kind of easy ending ( even the whole " it's only a dream " concept has some holes to fill , leaving ambiguity as something a little more logical ) . Frankly , I've never read any of the Mircea Eliade's writings , but there's a lot to it that strikes up references to other works . I couldn't help but think the plot , and its themes , were as though Philip K . Dick was forced to make a melodrama - on his own terms - from an unpublished book . Or that there was a connection to the Fountain , or even Dr . Who or something else . The comparisons are endless . But what remains , at the end of trying to figure out what the hell Youth Without Youth will say as its ultimate message , is an original work , sincerely with the verve of a filmmaker who just says ' f it ' and makes the movie he wants to make on his own terms ( with , subsequently , his own money ) . If there is any risk to the project it's that Coppola gambles on narrative cohesion with elements like two Dominics following the lightning strike ( one of which , of course , prods the other to complete his life's work as a " failure " ) , or the power of emotion with two people in love vs . the tremendous , daunting task of unlocking secrets of language and consciousness and what time even means . Couple this with technique that veers into the abstract , with upside down camera angles and upfront anti-Nazi imagery ala Indiana Jones , and a music that strikes up the most melancholy and precise of aforementioned melodrama , and it becomes the weirdest hybrid Coppola's ever made . And yet , and yet , if Youth Without Youth is one thing above all else , it's , well . . . interesting . I never felt like getting up and even leaving to go to the bathroom much less leaving the film for good . I cared about Dominic and Veronica as I did the direction Coppola took the story ( even if pretensions , particularly in the second half , seemed to loop into the equation ) . And Roth is , not to forget to mention , terrific in the role , seeming to understand where his character may ( or may not ) be headed as he continues with his research and finds that he is sort of doomed in time unless he goes down a certain path . He even gets to dig into a certain subdued humor underneath the skin of the picture , where a few times there's some laughs to be had at the expense of what's going on with Dominic , as though some old philosopher discovered a comic book and incorporated it into his character . It's a very strange movie experience , and not one I can easily recommend . But I do all the same , and Coppola fans will either like it or , as case is turning out , they wont . |
510,748 | 453,068 | 66,495 | 7 | both delirious and low-key in separate measure , a decent early turn from Brooksfilms | The Twelve Chairs is not one of Mel Brooks's funniest comedies , but then again it IS a Russian based comedy , where big laughs are as hard to find as a tropical climate . This film does , however , display the director actually able to really tell a good story , and act as storyteller with characters in a plot to care about . If it is not really as successful as his other films though it is in this - I didn't really have a BIG laugh during the length of the 90 minute running time . I note this not because it is a laugh-less comedy , as I had good chuckles , grins , and smiles at the material presented . But in most of Brooks's films , even when the structure is held on a thread of sketches and bits , they become the funniest in modern movies . This time there is actually a lot of reverence to the early 20th century Russian times , even as there are some moments when the irreverence Brooks is best at pops up . Perhaps if you're die-hard into Russian history it might serve more for the in-jokes and the well-captured reality of the times . The acting is good , and the main cast is well placed , even if too not the best work is turned in . Frank Langella is definitely very good as the straight ' handsome desperado ' character to Ron Moody's crazy old man , as he is an actor who maybe pulls out one good joke in the film . Moody meanwhile delivers some of the funniest moments just based on the delirious , if repetitive , bits on his face and in his unwavering dedication to the jewels stuck in the chair . It is Dom De Louise , on the other hand , who comparatively to other work he's done ( primarily Brooksfilm work where he's genius in bit parts ) , as he really has to rely mostly on physical gags more than hysterical dialog . It becomes a running gag as the most desperate quack of the three hunting for the chair , and only intermittently ( mostly when he tries to get the chairs from a husband and wife on a wild goose chase ) is funny . And possibly some of the most memorable bits come with Brooks himself as the dim , clumsy but well-intentioned servant to Moody . One almost wishes he might pop up unexpectedly later in the film just as a brilliant goof . This is not to say I wasn't glad to finally see the often under-seen film in Brooks's oeuvre . It's certainly a good notch above the worst the director's done ( Life Stinks and Dracula Dead and Loving It ) , where unlike those unfortunate moments he doesn't shoot for jokes and gags and puns that just don't work . Here they do , and they're juxtaposed with a story that allows for some good tongue-in-cheek moments ( including a few smart moments when people chase each other in sped-up silent-film comedy style ) , while with a dramatic adventure story . There's even one or two moments where Brooks reveals a fine cinematic eye for the real locations on the character's travels . At the end , I felt I hadn't seen the great sleeper of a career , but a fun enough romp that has good intentions for something different - and what's more ' different ' than a comedy set in Russia . |
509,473 | 453,068 | 147,746 | 7 | good , if not great , follow-up to Batman the animated series | Batman Beyond was described by Paul Dini as meant for " selling toys . " It goes without saying how much merchandise works into Batman - lord knows that the toys and videos and movies make more money than the comics have in general in years - but it slightly underrates the strengths in this show . As a kids program , it's often very exciting , and even as a guy now moving along in age ( i . e . 20s ) , it's recognizably a cool , if updated , Batman reboot . To also say that it's nowhere near as groundbreaking or amazing or sometimes genius as Bruce Timm's original series from the 90s is also a given ; they're out to carve some new ground here , but it's only with new variations on characters and bringing back the ' relics ' ( i . e . old Bruce Wayne , Barbara Gordon , Mr . Freeze and Bane in a couple of episodes ) on top of the new ' versions ' ( i . e . Jokerz gang , which is in no relation to the Return of the Joker movie ) . As it stands , solo episodes not dealing with that opening struggle between CEO-cum-radioactive man Derek Powers and Terry McGinnis are not always that great . Sometimes they are , in spots , and other times they're mired in predictable action , plots , and characters that come out of the stockpile of clichés that kids can gobble up like M & Ms without much afterthought . In a sense it's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer , only not quite as imaginative or funny , yet still filled with big amounts of action and cheesy one-liners and villains that spring out of nightmares of high school and craziness . That's part of it , anyway ; as the series goes along some of the themes start to run deeper - not least of which Bruce Wayne's role as surrogate father / mentor to Terry - and occasionally it's even poignant . Most of the time , it is what it appears to be : Saturday morning fodder that is a step above The Batman series of late and is just a bit more than the ' toys ' angle . |
508,499 | 453,068 | 171,359 | 7 | certainly a better Gen-X update than Romeo + Juliet , if not great | This is an interesting if not altogether successful adaptation of Hamlet . I'd think if you're young and about to read the book in high school watching this would soften the blow of the text ( if , of course , not providing an entire picture ) . This is a little like the cliff-notes contemporary example as opposed to the 98 % faithful adaptation that Branaugh had made a few years later . The director has assembled no-less a fascinating and capable cast - I liked Ethan Hawke in the role , and loved supporting work from Kyle MacLaughlan , Diane Verona , Bill Murray ( yes , Bill Murray , who is fantastic ) and Julia Stiles - and he's created a situation and framework where the original text fits in with the 20th / 21st century business and clothes and technology . Unlike Lurhmann's wild take on the play ( too wild if you ask most , including me ) , this is a little more meditative in pace and tone , if not without any energy , and it's a fine sight to see the perennial " To Be or Not to Be " monologue spoken in a video store . Not for all purists , but a fun and strange adaptation with little hints of wonderful satire . |
509,933 | 453,068 | 409,182 | 7 | it's action and ' what's coming round the bend ' entertainment , nothing more or less | Poseidon is based on a novel , technically , although most will associate it with the original film The Poseidon Adventure from 1972 , unseen by me . What I do know whenever someone mentions it is that Shelley Winters is very memorable in it ( and actually when they refer to her career they bring up that film or Lolita ) . But I knew basically that this was your standard Hollywood-sized blockbuster with a man who could either hit just well enough or miss ( Wolfgang Peterson ) . What he provides by way of being director serves this material more than the lackluster Troy from two years ago . Here he's in his element doing something very elemental , however a lot of the time abandoning logic like the several passengers from the ship . It's popcorn entertainment on a scale that I enjoyed for what it was , while noticing that the investment in the characters was only up to a very small point . Then again , I'm not seeing this film for character development , and the screenwriter Mark Protosevich knows this so he just gives unpretentiously what's needed - the main cast who are all just ' types ' ( i . e . Russell is ex fireman turned mayor , Dreyfuss an architect , Josh Lucas a natural leader , and various female roles of equal strength and shame ) . While I can't completely recommend the film like I would other more successful big-budget ' disaster ' films , I can recommend it perhaps more than others , and unlike the other three big films from this month it doesn't necessarily kid itself too much or go for a way too muddled storyline . And it is actually best to see the film on an IMAX screen ( its effectiveness may actually be lost somewhat once its on TV ) , where the actual first turning point of the ship getting tossed over by the ' rare ' wave is almost worth the price of admission alone for its visual prowess and , indeed , excitement . The rest of the picture is just a series of cliffhangers ( some more literally than others ) , and a lot of running , swimming , ( some ) drowning , and heavy-handed dialog when need be . Peterson is also smart enough here , unlike with Troy , not to overstay the welcome with the material . It's compact enough to be enough of a vehicle of danger and with the technical side all intact , while the characters only get testy up to a point . Some of the early scenes are , of course , too predictable ( even if Dreyfuss's romantic side seems a little displaced and unnecessary ) , as one just wants things go forward with the action . Luckily , on that end , in the tradition of bubble-headed ( pun intended ) thrillers with all the elements of a matinée serial , it's not bad . |
509,042 | 453,068 | 1,032,856 | 7 | an amusing , small detour on the highway of life | The band , an group of eight Egyptians looking slightly stilted and uncomfortable but always professional , are dropped off at the Israeli airport , but there is no bus to drive them . They eventually get one , but it drops them off in the middle of nowhere . They walk to a local restaurant / dive that's about as empty as the rest of the small town - it's the wrong town , of course , as one letter was off in the name of the town of the band-mates inquired about . So it's time to stay overnight in this sleepy little desert town before things get straightened out to their destination . With that simple premise , Eran Kolirin creates an atmosphere that seems like the awkward , piercingly funny but " low-key " ( in other words not overly dramatic ) characters in a Jarmusch film , and despite the ' small ' nature of the story , that there isn't very much to go in its 80 minute running time , a lot can be explored through interaction . This is probably not a ' great ' film , but it is a great example for those skeptical that an Israeli film has to have some political context or subtext or whatever . The only scene that has the hint of unease between Israel and Arab is an already warm , strange scene at a dinner table where an Israeli man recollects singing " Summertime " as everyone at the table joins in . There are looks exchanged here and there , but nothing to suggest unrest of the expected sort . This story could take place in just about anywhere . By aiming things towards the little details of people relating on terms of friendly interaction , of the light dances of affection like between the boy who " hears the sea " and the " gloomy girl " at the skating rink ( probably the single funniest scene without a word spoken , all movement ) , the first-time director creates a little play on people who live and / or work in a marginalized part of the world . That doesn't mean they're poor or ignorant , far from it . But it's a sweet view into people we otherwise wouldn't know much about ( after all , who makes light , wise comedies on the misadventures of a police band from Egypt ? ) The performances are endearing , the music has the ring of not taking much too seriously , and melodrama is kept at a low ( if not , in the underlying sense , melancholy ) . Only a few scenes ( like the running story strand of the officer and the other guy waiting at the pay phone ) fall sort of flat based on the tone already sent . |
509,139 | 453,068 | 264,464 | 7 | it did make money over its time . . . entertaining | . . . but did Steven Spielberg's latest Blockbuster-fodder , Catch Me If You Can , have to be released now ? The two leads , Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks have already turned in their best for the year ( Gangs of New York and Road to Perdition , respectively ) , even if those performances weren't great , and Spielberg's other chase film released during the summer , Minority Report , was one of his best films . While the release date shouldn't directly effect the film itself , it might've given Scorsese's Gangs a little chance to breath without having this and that as two Leo films at once during the Christmas-break film rush . Catch . . is inspired by the story of Frank W . Abignale Jr . , who as a teen became a con-man , impersonating an airline pilot , doctor , lawyer , etc , and was finally caught in France . DiCaprio plays Frank , and tries to play him as a suave , if occasionally panicked , teen , and while there have been worse performances this year , it is very clear that the better work for him is in Gangs , not here - he's often too straightforward with his emotions and only hints to that he's someone outside of a conniver . Hanks , on the other hand , does a decent job , with a keen accent and demeanor , and Christopher Walken , who plays Abignale Sr . , turns in the best performance of the film , and shows more depth than his son in the few scenes he has . Overall , there are some moments of fun that shine through , like when Frank Jr . does his first con as a school teacher at 16 , or when he fools Hanks at the Miami airport , yet it can be seen in many scenes that more challenging material was manipulated by Spielberg and company . Still , it should appeal to the mass market of movie-goers . . . . . this is a re-edit some four years later . On repeat viewings , the film works better . DiCaprio actually works as more effective with his character , and even Hanks becomes more interesting than just ' decent ' . |
509,455 | 453,068 | 65,492 | 7 | the odd-ball slice of life of Altman's career , but somehow it's a good deal of fun in its schizo-storytelling | Brewster McCloud was the kind of picture I could imagine having being written over many ( count many ) joints and after not getting a career going as an ornithologist ( I might add , the screenwriter only had two or three other projects produced , and nowhere near as seen as this one is in comparison ) . It's as nutty as a Clark bar : a kid with the title name ( Bud Cort , in an immediate precursor-type performance to his Harold in Harold and Maude as an awkward , shy outsider who has a some kind of desire behind his geeky exterior ) is at the task of building wings so he can fly , and he builds it in the basement / boiler room of the Houstin Astrodome . Some mysterious woman played by Sally Kellerman is , I think , killing people that seem to end up really pestering Brewster , which include a craggy Mr . Burns figure ( Stacy Keach , hilariously one-note ) , a narc , and a random dude with a chain . I'd guess she's the killer - there's a whole sub-plot , by the way , with a police investigation headed by Shaft ( no , not talking about that one , Michael Murphy plays him here , that's right ) , who's more interested in the bird dung that keeps showing up on the deceased instead of regular police work . Meanwhile , Jennifer Salt gets off on the vibes of a half-nude Brewster doing chin-ups , Shelly Duvall with over-extended eye-lashes falls for Brewster one moment and then rats on him the next , and then there's still Kellerman doing her thing thwarting off , and . . . did I mention there's a professor / narrator who seems like a mental patient with a lot of facts about fowl ? So much of this is hard to take , and towards the end it becomes very frustrating trying to put any sense to it ( how is Duvall so good at evading the police , how is that one cop such a buffoon to read Captain America while on a stake-out , why does Jennifer Salt keep popping up and giving Brewster food / orgasms , and how much symbolic " ah , I'm a blonde angel " can we take from Kellerman ? ) But then again , why bother ? Altman is after the sly humor of the quirky as opposed to real common sense , and it's in his dedication and intelligence in following through with these characters , no matter how strange or subtle or inexplicably charming or demented they are , that makes the film work up to the point that it does . And despite a sort of unsatisfying last twenty minutes with Brewster and some of the supporting characters ( the whole sex angle is a little weak and too dated for me to buy ) , there's some experimentation for the director that would probably not come again . There's a car chase , for example , through the roads of Houston , and while it's not exciting on a Bullit type of level , it's fascinating to see when the sudden twists and turns pop up , unexpectedly ( where did the little red car come from ? ) , and there's even a remarkable slow-motion shot where , as part of a theme of the film , the cars fly above their intended plane . I also liked how Altman worked in an overly Felliniesque ending , as uncomfortable a catharsis it seems to be , with the Astrodome suddenly being flooded with carnival figures , and the main characters donned in costumes and wigs and such . Brewster McCloud is a funny bird , no pun intended , of a early 70s obscurity , a film that likely got a hundredth of the public attention that MASH got , but is probably just as strong in what it wants to deliver to its eclectic audience ( albeit , personally , I think MASH is maybe Altman's most overrated ) . And it's probably the weirdest stoner movie that the director ever conceived , portentous cloud shots included ! |
510,697 | 453,068 | 100,928 | 7 | a minor work , but a very good minor work , about the complexities of a seemingly simple figure | I can't say how much of White Hunter , Black Heart is entirely fact or not . The source material is by Peter Vietrel , a screenwriter who accompanied ( and did uncredited doctoring on the African Queen ) filmmaker / adventurer John Huston to the jungles of Africa to witness more-so shooting elephants than shooting the movie . While I could assume that a lot of this is based on a true story - from other documentaries I've seen on Huston he seemed like a real " man's man " , with as much pride as ugliness , but with a true vision as an artist and powerful presence - I decided to try and look at the main character in the film as a character , not John Huston himself . It helped me like it a lot more , as more than just a ' this is what happened ' kind of film-making story , which on its own has its own merits and historical interest , but it would have been too much of a simple thing . I'm not sure what else is there , but Clint Eastwood taps into more than just a story of John Huston , but about what it is to be a headstrong head-case who somehow can be very charming and witty , yet you sometimes can't tell when he's being cruelly sarcastic or truthful , and at his worst can be a cruel s . o . b . There's also an artist in there too , though , even in the little moments when he sketches people around him quietly as he talks his usual words of ' elephant ' this and ' elephant ' that . And Eastwood , in this limited arena , creates one of his best performances , at least in the realm of not being just his simple ' bad-ass ' self . It's fairly self-conscious that it IS Huston ( and all one has to see is one movie featuring Huston in an acting performance - Chinatown the best example - to see what an indelible force he can be without even trying ) , but there are layers to the character that Eastwood gets to . There's a vulnerability to his mad quest , like when he reveals to his screenwriter accomplice Pete ( Jeff Fahey ) , " it's more than a crime , it's a sin , a sin that I can get a license for . " He's almost afraid of what he's capable of , which is perfectly masked by his love of cigars , drink , big talk , lust for women , and a matter of principle for him to punch out anyone who affronts him ( or , actually , might have it coming ) . Amid his flawed quest to kill one elephant , as if it were some secret holy grail , the film crew sits and waits , and waits , and there's a sense that Wilson can only go into darker territory with his persistence . Eastwood captures the strong intensity of an artist , who is all about the simplicity in art like with Hemingway , and compounds it as a director with a good revelation made at the end . A lot of this makes for compelling viewing , even if it is sort of a minor work , so to speak . It's not that fans of Eastwood should miss it , but it's an understandable point to make that it's not , and probably wont ever be , too widely seen ( oddly enough connecting to something Wilson's character says about not giving a damn whether or not the audience comes to see a movie he makes or not ) . It has an old fashioned vibe to it , which isn't ever a bad thing , but it's also only probing on its main character , and Eastwood doesn't really supply the actors that can rise to his level here . Fahey , for example , is only halfway convincing , and usually when he has to face the stubborn side of Wilson . Some other character actors fare a little better , like George Dzundza and Timothy Spall , but it's a little too standard and , well , " Hollywood " ( also oddly enough a point of note in the movie , where Eastwood tries to make a comment on how using the term ' Hollywood ' is something of an insult ) It actually is one of those rare Eastwood movies , like Bird , where it works stronger as a character study than as pure storytelling , which is usually Eastwood's forte . Still , I was never really disappointed in what I saw , and it casts an interesting light most of the time on a man who doesn't seem to notice what lies in his ambitions truthfully . It's a change of pace for Eastwood in a good direction , and shows what he would be capable of in even later years in doing subversions in types of films Eastwood became infamous for to start with . It also contains one of the funniest spouts of bile from a man to a woman in any movie ( when Wilson tells off the Jew-hater ) . |
510,217 | 453,068 | 365,485 | 7 | the shot where Brosnan is in the speedo walking to the pool may be cooler than any single shot from his Bond performances | And I think for that alone the Matador is worth a view , just a peek , into how something like subverting a persona can work very well . It's not even a terrific movie , per-say , so much as it is a light affair into the lonely world of killers and businessmen , who have trouble doing what they do and wind up meeting each other in dingy Mexican dives after hours . Brosnan's Julian can't be called a caricature really as he's too much of a flunkie - but a wicked flunkie all the same - and for the actor / star it's like taking the Bond figure , adding in some Bad Santa , and with a touch of Analyze This , to use some modern comparisons . But all in all , it's an original kind of performance on an idea that isn't so new : the man in a mid-life crisis , burnt-out , washed up , into excesses of drink and women . It's almost too easy , but as it is a challenge to keep fresh Brosnan rises to the challenge to make him both hilariously pathetic ( the results of his first botched job is fecal related ) and sincere in flaws . It's a good , well-rounded sort of counterpoint to everyman Kinnear and his wife played by Hope Davis , as he's also got his own past issues ( sort of a script contrivance , but it's allowable ) , as he is befriended by the subtly wacky Julien down in Mexico City . Much of the richest humor in the film comes out of the little moments of behavior , then moments when Brosnan looks as though he might trail off with his sentence , or how he goes into telling a dirty joke to " change the subject " when hearing about Kinnear's son's death . The dialog is clever without being too proud of its own cleverness , as if the filmmaker were out to make the smaller points about the characters as opposed to knock-off Tarantino slang . It starts to go into a bit familiar territory in the last act , as well as a revelation that seems to be a bit moot , but at the least there's the star and his dingy presence , giving off that air of confidence in acting like a " parody " as Julien himself calls himself late in the game . As the spy movie gets into some possible pitfalls ( more than possible , distinctly so ) , it's good to see a movie that takes on the notion of a contract-for-hire killer and to strip him down into something that's more recognizable - and friggin hilarious . |
511,002 | 453,068 | 105,323 | 7 | Longish , overrated , but watchable | Scent of the Woman has a story , but luckily ( mainly since it's not the greatest ) , it sticks to it's dialog and actors . Brief plot summary goes as this : a prep kid needs money so he takes a job looking after a blind old guy who lives in a cottage with his family . If that was it , this movie wouldn't have even gotten off the ground , but then something interesting happens : the old guy is quite the classic ( bleep ) . And this Lieutenant Colonel is played by Al Pacino in the ' bravado ' style of his abilities , his abilities being of his instincts , even if it is not at all one of his best performances . Too much of it is over-emphasis , close to being not even a complete person , even in the strongest moments . It's almost as if the Oscar to Pacino was more for his career up till then , not even for this film necessarily . Slade leads the young man ( Chris O'Donnel ) on a coming of age odyssey in NYC . If you take this part of the film ( like taking the entire 90 minutes of Tom Hanks on Cast Away island and sea ) , you have something quite intriguing at times , but the film also has some un-needed stuff left over from preppie-school message-movie land , and it doesn't work at all . Still , Pacino does what he can , and some supporting actors are good . |
510,413 | 453,068 | 810,895 | 7 | not quite as sweet as the movie , but pretty darn close - should definitely appease fans of the comic book | Hellboy : Sword of Storms is in the quality of animation no more or less the standard one might see on the average program on Adult Swim ( Cartoon Network , of course ) . Which means it's always eye-catching , if only on a kind of wacky 2-D level that is left in the dust in these days of cinema going the way of CGI . What makes Sword of Storms significant , if only in parts , is that Mignola , Del-Toro and company start to introduce a lot more surreal imagery than was seen in the first theatrical feature . Hellboy gets swept up this time in a pretty convoluted ( or just seems that way , turns out it's actually painfully simplistic in terms of the Japanese folklore played out as drama ) , with monsters and demons all under the control of a sword that if broken spells doom for the Earth . As usual he does his job well at whacking around creatures like a big turtle / lizard creature , and at the start even tackles a big beast that , until Liz - as kind of a running un-funny gag - blazes fire all over the place till the job's done - but that's not all . This time the supernatural is accentuated in the world of what is a cross between Noh theater and , well , the average Hellboy comic-book . It doesn't matter either way how much the writers and producers researched Japanese history and creatures and such ( though I'm sure they did their share ) . What matters is how effective it all is , and in the end Hellboy is also a dark comedy - how is it to see Hellboy , after spending an uncomfortable night with some unpleasant Japanese fellows , to awake to find that they're heads have been disconnected from their bodies , and are attacking him viciously ! It's even better , of course , to see the fate of the heads , pleading Hellboy to tell where their bodies lay . I also liked the little asides with the talking fox , the old lady , and of course the big-ass demons , who allow one or two quips from Hellboy as he has to tackle them any way possible . On top of the fighting heads , there's a crazy possessed researcher , which in and of itself could make an interesting issue in the comics . Only the conventions of the story ( the psychic has been seen in countless permutations of the annoying side character who's only there for moments of sudden exposition for another side character who isn't as annoying ; plus the ending with the Japanese ghosts going through a redemption moment ) drag the film really downward . Aside from that , it's from cartoony viewing , and it should appeal to anyone who's somewhat a fan , and mandatory for fans of the books ; lord knows there's only so many times we can see Hellboy in the whirlwind of samurai dreams . |
508,342 | 453,068 | 39,581 | 7 | sentimental film-noir with a superb cast | I wouldn't say The Long Night is a great film , and if anything it only peaks my interest more to see how much more classic the film it's based on is - Marcel Carne's La Jour se Leve . But for the time it ran , I was mostly glued to the screen , and got wrapped up in the plight of Henry Fonda's character Joe , and his predicament of his downfall from normalcy . It probably isn't very original , taking aside its connection with the French source ; it's about a factory worker , very nice guy , who falls in love with a woman whom , he finds out , was an orphan just like him . But one night he follows her to a bar , sees her cavorting sort of with a sleazy magician ( Vincent Price ) , and his perfect image of her is shattered , and grows only darker after he meets him ( he first tells Joe he's her father , which is a truly great scene between two huge stars of classic film ) , and when she tells him about her history with him . While I could never take my eyes off the screen , it should be said that for all of the strong craftsmanship with the picture ( it's one of the finest photographed ' noirs ' of the late 40s , especially for those stark scenes of Joe alone in his room with the whole town on the street calling for him ) and for all of the tremendous talent in front of the camera - besides Fonda and Price , who the former it's a splendid and rewarding if not best-ever performance and for the latter a triumph of playing sneaky and villainous , the girl playing Jo Ann ( Barbara Bel Geddes ) is very good - it only works up to a point . I was engrossed the most in the last twenty minutes or so , as the film revved up its pace and tempo to the " will Joe or won't Joe " beat . Before that , it's many scenes that mostly rely on the presence of the actors to uplift the material past the breezy and conventional air of the dialog . There's nothing especially " wrong " with the material , but it doesn't go anywhere aside from hitting its main points . The Long Night is something of a minor lost marvel - only recently did it come out on DVD in an OK print - and for Fonda and Price fans its a can't-miss kind of picture . Just don't go expecting anything that will change your perception of what film-noirs can go that don't go for the easy routes . |
510,434 | 453,068 | 118,111 | 7 | my least favorite of the recent Guest / Levy collaborations , which means it's still funny , sometimes ingenious | Waiting for Guffman wasn't the first Christopher Guest / Eugene Levy collaboration ( as writers I mean , it's a Guest movie all the way ) I had seen , but I think I probably would've reacted to it as I did after having seen it after Best in Show and A Mighty Wind . It's like Guest and his always inspired troupe were with a full burst of energy with their characters , even if they're all in a movie that's a little too short ( it says 84 minutes but it feels even brisker if that's possible ) and provides some characters who are funny all the time ( like Guest's flamboyantly flamboyant Corky or Levy's nerdy and ostensibly Jewish Allan Pearl or Fred Willard as Rob Albertson ) , and some who are funny only in spurts like Catherine O'Hara or Bob Balaban . It's got quirky written all over the place , but it's always endearing in it's very strange way to show these people as they are , and the characters are likable even at their most deranged and just , well , ' small-town ' . Guest plays the director of a small-town's 150th anniversary memorial play , about how a town in Missouri came to be . It's a chance really to get glimpses into the people who get the chance of a lifetime ( err , for seemingly their mundane lifetimes ) , and especially for Corky who gives prima-donna an odd name ; he almost storms off when he doesn't get the money he asks the committee for ( calling them ' bastards ' in an angry burst that's one of the funniest things I've ever seen from Guest in anything he's done ) . Then comes crunch-time for the show , as Corky has to take a part himself and Alan Pearl has to convincingly play a part he has absolutely no confidence at ( those glasses ! ) . And all the while , the ' Guffman ' of the title - ala Godot - is a near God-like figure who could make or break the perception of the production for Corky and his cast . The final revelation from this is a comic classic touch . This all being said , I didn't really get the great big belly laughs and get as sucked into the world of these oddballs ( and all done in improvisational form no less ) as I did with the other films that have the mark of Guest and / or Levy . There are some parts where I'll smile at the near whimsy of what's going on , but a line might go flat or a bit a little weak . But if it's ever on TV , I'm sure I would tune in again just for a little while , if only to see a few of the songs from the 150th anniversary show ( the ' Mars ' song a favorite ) , and for that great epilogue . |
510,101 | 453,068 | 470,765 | 7 | not as funny or enormously successful as past outings , but still worth seeing with well-earned laughs | If there's any one big problem in regards to For Your Consideration , the latest rip on a particular section of society by writer / director Christopher Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy , is that the targets aren't inherently wacky already . Don't get me wrong though , when I get the sense of what's going on in Hollywood , through the vanity and the hype and the reflection via the media , it's rather sickening , and it's never an unnecessary feat of comedic strength to try and skewer the whole society the filmmakers probably have to dwell in too ( keep in mind Michael McKean was up for an Oscar for Mighty Wind a couple years ago with Levy and Catherine O'Hara performing a song live ) . But this time it comes close to shooting fish in a barrel , so the writers , and the usual terrific ensemble performing the characters , have to go to even further eccentric lengths ( and in its own way logically so ) . It certainly doesn't backfire , but if it doesn't deliver for you as for me , don't be too surprised . Not to say it's not worth seeing once , far from it . In fact its probably got more than a few lines that might work better on repeat viewings . What's sharp is really still sharp and just odd as ever . The main thrust of the plot is around the making of " Home for Purim " ( the title alone makes me smile , at first heard I laughed hard ) , later turned to " Home for Thanksgiving " due to the studios interest / insistence on the project . Among the people involved are the director , played by Guest himself , who sometimes directs a scene with a pastrami sandwich in hand ; O'Hara , a self-conscious professional who becomes much more the former when she finds out a rumor of Oscar buzz ; Shearer as Victor Allan Miller , a stage pro who is possibly going to have to turn to commercials via his insistent agent ( Levy ) if this doesn't go too big ; Calie Webb ( Parker Posey ) , a young professional comedienne-turned-serious actress is also set afire by the ' buzz ' ; and Corey Taft ( John Michael Higgins ) , an agent or other sort like that who has to always bring up his Native American background . There's laughs that come and go with the characters , some more than others ( Ed Begley Jr , who was uproarious as the Swedish Jewish guy in Mighty Wind , is still great here as a make-up artist ) , but probably none more consistently and hilariously from Fred Willard . Just what his hair looks like or what get-up he has on as his character idiotically hosts one of those Acess Hollywood style shows , is funny ( especially the hair , which Willard of course never notices ) , and he helps elevate some moments to great heights . But there are other brilliant bits too , like when the writers of Home for Purim ( Michael McKean in full beard and Bob Balaban ) go on a Charlie Rose-type show , only where the question is overloaded for a whole minute with detail that gets them lost in what he was asking them . Or for the last chunk of the film , where through the awards buzz the sensitive Marilyn Hack ( O'Hara ) gets a botox injection and boob-job , which incites so much great comedic moments . Though what's interesting is how at times some of the comedy works best because its more natural , and other times more based on the performers . It's not the first time Guest has directed a non-mockumentary movie ( and though I've yet to see his obscure 80s film the Big Picture , it's miles ahead of Almost Heroes to be certain ) , but what's lost has to be made up through better construction of scenes . The improvisational feel is still there , but curiously an actor who usually is most dependable - Levy - is actually not as good in comparison with some of his co-stars . In terms of the comedy being natural though , it came out really best during the actually Home for Purim scenes being filmed , where Jewishness met with a kind of Bette Davis kind of film in the South . While a good deal of it , actually a lot more in comparison to the past Guest films ( even with the heap of it in Might Wind ) , is based on probably ' getting ' a lot of the Jewish jokes , the whole sense of spoofing a style of film is probably much more richer in satire than the actual behind-the-scenes moments they show . Though not to forget , it's always a killer seeing Harry Shearer in a hot-dog costume . From the way I described some of this , it sounds like a mixed review , but it isn't . For Your Consideration is a good , biting stab at an industry that takes itself way too seriously and trades in art for commercialism and the hype of an awards show . Maybe too , like with the most recent mockumentaries , it might get funnier on repeat viewings . |
510,264 | 453,068 | 109,504 | 7 | a pleasantly buoyant and personal Spike Lee film that only feels disconnected in the last act | Crooklyn has that subjective texture by someone of the New York independent school of film-making ( which means it's a cool school more often than not ) , where personal expression through the medium leads directly into , or out of , the creator's own life experiences . It's a direct approach to call it autobiography , which I would imagine it is for not just Spike Lee ( who could be seen , more or less , as the one Carmichael kid who wears big glasses and is obsessed with the Knicks ) , but Joie ( the lead Troy perhaps ? ) and Cinque ( one of the younger kids I'd suppose as the youngest Lee sibling ) , who all wrote the script . It's about a family getting by and going through the struggles of the small kind ( change the channel , turn off the TV , don't bother your sister / brother , did you steal that from him , etc ) to the larger issues ( parents arguing over money ) that many families in urban sections of the cities have to go through every day . Only here the family is sassy , rude , cool , a little square , a little hip , and very identifiable in one aspect or another in just how siblings relate , how the neighbors get on nerves ( in this case with a slight racial edge , it is a Spike Lee movie after all ) , and yet deep down lots of love all around . The Lee's inject a good deal of humor and warmth for a good of the film , even when Spike moves the scene down south where Troy ( Zelda Harris ) has to stay with relatives for a little while , and Lee takes off the widescreen anamorphic process in order to make it a consistently distorted image . This is actually quite a cool move , if at first a little uneasy , as it goes in and out sometimes of looking like its distorted and then it will look like the characters and set pieces are skinny and such ( the fate of the relative's dog , by the way , is one of the biggest , if cruelest , laughs in the whole film ) . At Crooklyn's best , there's a whole feeling to the proceedings , much like Do the Right Thing - and going back as well to the early work of Scorsese - where just a small section of New York city opens up to the viewer as being as vivid and true as possible that the lack of a usual plot doesn't matter much . Sometimes a scene might not work quite as much as another , or one of the many songs Lee lays on ( and there are many , as it's one of the best soundtracks he's presented ) overrides what could do without in the scene . But in general these are small quibbles . The biggest problem that the film has - and it's not without truth to Lee's real life - is the death of mother Carolyn . It happens as soon as Troy comes back from the south that she's in the hospital , and two scenes later she's gone . It's a sudden shift in the story that doesn't really feel as true as it could , almost as if Lee and his sibling writers don't know where to go once Troy gets back except to go towards sentimentality . It's still well-acted , particularly by Delroy Lindo , who overall gives one of his best performances to date as the struggling father of the family , but it's an odd jolt that doesn't rightly click ( especially with a bit where a funeral scene is interrupted by what looks like a dream scene involving Spike himself , sporting a big afro , as a target of Troy's ) . And yet , I wouldn't stop anyone from seeing the Crooklyn , if they want to get to see some of the less politically charged and more personal and bittersweet side of Lee , and for those who have fond memories of New York ( and TV or the Knicks ) in the 70s . |
510,056 | 453,068 | 475,084 | 7 | safer than Lost in La Mancha , though only because Tideland was finished | Getting Gilliam is a fascinating , if brief , film-student examination of what is the directing mind of Terry Gilliam , who works here on Tideland , his crazy movie - and much crazier than one might even typically expect from him . Vincenzo Natali follows along on the slightly bumpy ride of the production of the film , wedged between a production stalling on Brothers Grimm , and little by little we get pieces of what Gilliam is about as a filmmaker and just as a very humorous but focused maverick . He allows for inspiration to hit at any moment on the set , he sets the mood , good or bad ( bad only comes , not too oddly enough , the day Bush is re-elected , as he makes Brazil comparisons to present-day ) , and he's one who can sway between moods of total delight , inner peace ( laying on the ground in the dark ) , and controlled frustration at the little quirks of film-making . It's not Don Quixote , of course , so things of tragic and Biblical scale don't happen , but the little problems and little sudden peculiarities of film-making get some fine spots put on , like when Ferland gets bit on the lip by a bug or Gilliam admits what he can do when a light and a prop doll-house get in the right positions , or in the simple change in weather and its consequences . So as a countering to the very easy productions - in comparison to past Gilliam films - Natali also tries his best to probe into one of his film-making Gods ; he straps a little camera to Gilliam's head to see what it will be like to see the world through Gilliam , as he describes his style as impossible to see , " like looking at a writer contemplating before a typewriter . " It doesn't last long though , and Natali is only a little good at mimicking Gilliam's animations to tell of his troubles in creating his films , which was done better and quicker in La Mancha . But if you're a fan of Gilliam , as I am , it's a very worthwhile side-trip on the DVD for Tideland , especially to see a little moment when he trails off talking to Ferland about a book report into bashing Roland Emmerich , and even Gilliam's mother . |
510,190 | 453,068 | 401,383 | 7 | Shcnabel gets us inside the head of " locked-in syndrome " , and has an often absorbing , experimental picture | I'll have to admit , I can't go completely with how the mass opinion has been about the Diving Bell and the Butterfly , the third film by painter-turned-director Julian Shnabel . I don't think it's any towering achievement overall , and if not for the experimenting with style and mood and nuance it wouldn't connect quite as much ( even if , also arguably , Schanbel's own stylistic overhaul of the ' triumph-of-the-spirit ' biopic goes a little too much towards the end ) . But this being said , I wouldn't at all tell anyone not to go see it , especially for those who want a spike of difference in a story of true human adversity and the trials and tribulations that go with something taken always for granted - communication . It's a brave effort , and one that I would probably revisit in bits and pieces when on DVD or on TV . There is a quality of artistic perseverance that Schnabel is attempting here , and it's probably just as admirable as Jean Dominique Bauby's own personal success at freedom from his own uncontrollable prison . Bauby , an editor for French Elle , got a stroke and consequently had " locked-in " syndrome , where he could still think , remember and imagine , but had next to no physical movements . Through a system of communication by blinking , letter by letter of the alphabet , Bauby got his sanity and will to live back , and wrote a book of the film's title , where he wrote about his memories and time in the hospital . Ten days after the book released , he died . What we get right off the bat , as part of Schanbel trying out and changing to the unexpected , aside from one or two cuts to flashbacks , we don't leave Bauby's first-person POV - a fragile , out-and-in-focus view , with voice-overs of Bauby's sarcastic and impinged thoughts , and it's daring . Only when he leaves his point of view does he finally accept he needs to move on from his self-pity and thoughts of death does the point of view change ( though he goes back to Bauby's one-eyed view every now and again ) . From there , we see his recovery , not in the physical sense but in his consciousness , of visualizing all sort of things elsewhere in the world , and of his past faults ( i . e . a trip with a girlfriend to Lourdes , where his Catholicism catches up with the awkwardness of romance there ) . In the emotional sense , Schanbel and Harwood do get it right , most of the time . Some of the best scenes of the film are the ones featuring Bauby's father , played by Max von Sydow , who is also somewhat locked-in , unable to leave his apartment to see his son in the hospital . If only for a few minutes , Bergmanian sorrow drifts into the proceedings . And Schnabel has two interesting cards at his disposal : Mathieu Amalric , who even with one eye often has a talent ( if that's the word , ' soul ' might be too sentimental ) that is perfect for the part . And , Janusz Kaminski , who is up for experimenting with lighting and different lenses , and tries to keep up with Schnabel's ideas in expressing - as Herzog might put it - inner landscapes . Perhaps it's simply on a first-viewing that certain things , for me , became too baffling or repetitive . We're given surrealistic visions of a crumbling hospital , an Empress running around , glaciers , other visions that almost stretch to be too literal coming out of the book's narration via Bauby , and during these ( plus what veers to an over-the-top wavering camera leading up to Bauby's actual stroke shown while he's driving ) , one almost wants Schanbel to get back to the more heart-rending moments , of the nurse or other looking straight-on at Bauby , sometimes going into tears , at the words he comes out with letter by tragic-comic letter . But Diving Bell and the Butterfly works , at least , in putting a viewer through an experience that is inspiring , that does what many biopics only do in spurts or not at all , which is to use style to elevate substance to the level of art . My complains about the film are practically outweighed by the core emotional impulse of Bauby , who will live on now by way of his creativity and ingenuity - like his favorite book , The Count of Monte Cristo . |
509,460 | 453,068 | 1,036,337 | 7 | looks pretty promising ( for the CW anyway ) | Reaper caught my attention for two reasons : Kevin Smith was directing the pilot episode , and Ray Wise ( Leland from Twin Peaks , his performance on the show a milestone in TV acting ) playing the Devil . Watching the pilot it almost looked like a not totally distant cousin of Dogma , only this time a little less on the philosophical debates and more on slacker dialog and special effects ( make no mistake , Smith can direct an action sequence , least a little better , and maybe not entirely as jokey , as in Mallrats ) . Sam Oliver ( Bret Harrison , who looks sometimes like his hair , or even face , changes from scene to scene ) finds out after a horrible day at work where he magically saves his would-be crush ( Missy Peregrym ) from a mishap , gets chased by dogs , and gets payed a visit by the man downstairs in the backseat of his car . Turns out his parents made a pact with the devil that on Sam's 21st birthday his should would be claimed , and he'd have to do ol Lucifer's bidding . Whoops ! Anytime Wise pops up on screen - particularly the scene at the hockey rink , which for Smith ( who's an admitted Twin Peaks die-hard ) might be his own Black Lodge with a spotlight and random Zamboni machine included - he steals the show , even when he has to point out expository information like " don't fail me . " Meanwhile , Tyber Labine fills in the big-time slacker quota for Smith - albeit Smith didn't write the pilot it feels very much like a Smith-esquire character , maybe conventionally so - and his funniest bits come at just acting like a total ass ( " hey , think fast " as he throws a can at Sam to see if his powers will block it ) . And then , as it looks like might be the pattern on the show from here on , Sam has to fight a being from hell on earth and capture it / him ala Ghostbusters ( exactly like Ghostbusters , down to the containment system at the DMV ) . Ghost Rider the show is not , however ; it's usually witty enough to pass by any pit-falls with a premise that easily fits into the disposable CW billing . Not to put down Smith's skills at picking projects , or at the writers , though it's slightly disconcerting to see that the episodes are on the channel at all - how long it'll last is a question that should have an easy answer , which isn't much ( like many a show on the channel , the acting is just OK , as Peregrym , on first glance only , looks a bit bland , and Labine is a good but derivative take on a Jack Black dude ) . But for the time being , Reaper has the skills and humor of a cool little Tuesday night main program - it should appeal to Smith's fan-base and just to those wondering what it might be like to have Ray Wise as the devil : a proposition no one I know of could pass up to see in all glory be told . |
509,824 | 453,068 | 74,483 | 7 | not as subject-heavy or thematically engaging as the first two , still as entertaining | It's hard to call The Enforcer the best of the Dirty Harry pictures , but it isn't a disappointment at all ; the quotable lines are still there ( this time the repeatable line is " marvelous " ) , the chases , the the male-driven humor , the ( slight ) political undertones , and the notion that the hero will get his man ( men / women ) . This time Harry is partnered with a rookie female cop ( Tyne Daley , good in some scenes and in some a little aloof ) , and with the time given in the film not much is explored with this kind of idea . It's good that not too much is weighing the film down with the ' radical ' idea that a woman can be a partner with a cop from homicide , and in a way it sort of matches up with the less weight given to the plot-line involving the ' Liberation-front ' group as the film's villains . Both could've been developed more in some ways , though on the other hand at an hour and a half it makes the film tight , even when some scenes feel a little looser than they should . A highlight for me , and one of the great sequences in any Dirty Harry film , is Harry's roofs-top / alley chase of a suspicious man . The expectable 70's ' action ' music is there , but not distracting , and there are enough surprises to bring a few big laughs among the general excitement of it . The climax to the film , in a way , isn't quite as exciting , it gives what we expect and not too much more ( aside from a very unusual and cool weapon used by Harry at the bad-guys ) . While it's been a few years since I've seen the Dead Pool or Sudden Impact , this feels to be generally more of the ' Hollywood ' Dirty Harry film , with Eastwood giving no more or less than his usual , and the story having just enough meat to keep one watching . Nothing great , but nothing too shabby either . |
508,154 | 453,068 | 64,694 | 7 | on the failure of the hippies . . . featuring Pink Floyd ! | I would be interested to hear from the director , Barbet Schroeder , as to why he decided to make More his first film , and more specifically what his interest in hippies - or rather this form of the Euro-hippie paradise - and about their demise . The film is , at least , true enough to keep one interested , but in its own kind of truth it's strange , biased . It's a given heroin ( aka , " Horse " ) is awful stuff , rotten , the conclusion for many a dumb-headed drug user that sees that as the be-all-end-all , because it basically is : after that everything else stops , that becomes the life , and it's either a continuous run for more of the same or death . More starts off as something concerning a romance between a New York girl and a German man , but it becomes something else , for better or worse ( sometimes both in the same scene ) . It's basically about two " young " people , Estelle and Stefan , who meet in a city where Stefan has come as a sort of wanderer away from his home country . She's wandering too , sort of , and is maybe too friendly with a big-time pusher named Wolf . They end up on a remote island somewhere nearby and , after a somewhat daring grab for some " horse " by Estelle , they also find a pad in the form of a seemingly remoter house along the seashore . Schroeder's comment on youth and sex and drugs isn't too simplistic , which makes the film actually lucid and intelligent so many years later . It's both direct and subtle , more about the characters and then about the fact that what he's depicting could in other hands just be a propagandistic hippie-exploitation picture . Perhaps most pleasantly , and this is just a guess , Schroeder uses as inspiration the sort of long sequence from Bergman's Summer with Monika : two kids in an inexorable connection , some good some definitely not so good , set against ( too ? ) perfectly shot landscapes . On the one hand , I should mention that there are problems , some big ones in fact . The performances aren't very convincing throughout ; a few scenes strike some power or have the actors in a good connection with one another , but Klaus Grumberg overplays himself even if he is an ornery German by nature ( in that case I would've preferred Klaus Kinski in the part to make it crazier but deep enough for the subject matter ) as does Farmer to her own degree . And there's gaps of naiveté in the screenplay that keep it from being as deep as it really thinks it is . On the other hand , there are two big things going for it : Nestor Almendros , the great cinematographer ( i . e . Days of Heaven ) is DP and is a big boost for a first time director like Schroeder . Nearly every image is seen with an awesome purpose or artistry , be it a shot of the cliffs by the sea or sun or something as simple as the seemingly natural light of a room . The other thing is Pink Floyd , probably the main reason I and many others have heard of the film in the first place ( years before I knew really who Schroeder was I saw the " More " soundtrack whenever I looked up Pink Floyd albums ) . It's very good music throughout , occasionally the mind-blowing variety that gives them the reputation they deserve . Some of it , too , is a little tedious , even as it is a movie that concerns free love and lots of drugs and sometimes both at the same time . I wouldn't rank it anywhere near as high as a Meddle or Animals , certainly not Dark Side , but it too helps to elevate the subject matter another notch , particularly when one least expects it or in low tones or floating in and out of buildings as Stefan or other walks on the streets . It's almost better atmosphere than the movie itself deserves , but overall More is still worth watching as a period piece - dated , but potent , like a less ambitious but more substantial Zabriskie Point . |
510,004 | 453,068 | 424,345 | 7 | quite a memorable raunchy comedy ( most of the time ) | I'm tempted to give Clerks an even higher rating than I have here , almost out of a certain fondness for Kevin Smith being able to return to the ' Askew-universe ' and not stumble over his shoes as a filmmaker . It's not a flawless film , and when the filmmaker tries to go for some of the silly , warmer-hearted type stuff ( i . e . the go-kart scene , the Jackson 5 musical number ) and melodramatic , it doesn't really click with the rest of the film . Those parts are not necessarily bad , and are a step up from some of the cheesier scenes of Jersey Girl , but the real reason ( s ) to see the film , for fans of Smith and Clerks ( and even non-fans , though it helps to see the first film ) is for what made the first such a little iconic piece of filthy indie work . This film contains racist , sexist , outrageous-to-the-Nth-degree style comedy , but it is , for someone who does have a tendency to laugh at more politically incorrect , sexually explicit and just strange humor , probably the film to see this summer . And , of course , if you're easily offendable and all that , this might not be the film for you - this time I'm almost surprised that this didn't get into any NC-17 controversy like the first one did ( which was unjustified based on language ) . One scene kind of extends the highly charged and hysterically funny racial tension humor from the deleted Fat Albert scene from Dogma , and it becomes very funny not because there's some kind of enjoyment in what Randall is saying , but because of the lengths the jokes are taken to . It's possibly the funnest part of the film , though there are some other scenes that come close to their counterparts from the original . A LOTR / Star Wars debate is as much of an attack on the film ( s ) as it is just an attack on internet and other kinds of ' geeks ' , as the new supporting character played by Trevor Ferhman pretty much embodies , who adds at least a nice chunk of the laughs . Not to forget as well the presence of Jay & Silent Bob , the former disturbingly performing one of the funniest things I've seen all year to a specific piece of music . There is even bestiality jokes thrown into the mix , bringing the film to such a preposterous climax one can't help but grin even when it becomes ' too much ' . But a sequence like this , put alongside other scenes where ' hear-to-hearts ' come out or the previously mentioned ' moments ' , kind of act as a total contrast to the style of barbarous , witty dialog and gags Smith puts out for his talented cast . It's almost like now with Clerks 2 there are two very extreme sides , one being the mushy residue left over from Jersey Girl ( attempting to return to more Chasing Amy dramatic ground too ) , and the other being the constant slew of jokes that range from excretions and geekdom to plain sexual insecurity , not to mention drugs . Does it create as satisfyingly complete with comedy and pathos that Smith's best work has been ? Unfortunately no , however I still would probably count this as being the successful comeback that Smith was probably aiming for . It's a respectable sequel for fans and the like , and I may watch it again months from now - as was the case with the Aristocrats - just to hear the same better fed up bits again . |
511,026 | 453,068 | 1,261,843 | 7 | the basketball equivalent of Scorsese's Shine the Light - a look at the action with amazing coverage | Here's the deal with Kobe Doin ' Work : if you're just a basketball fan , let alone a Kobe Bryant fan , this is mandatory viewing . After seeing this at the Tribeca Film Festival it was clear who this document of a basketball game , not even so much a documentary , was aimed at . For example , my brother would watch this and be hooked minute one , while my wife would steer clear faster than you can say blueberry pie . Spike Lee had a goal here and he executed it masterfully , but it's not an all-around crowd-pleaser unless , as mentioned , the whole crowd digs the Lakers and Kobe Bryant and the methods and sportsmanship of basketball in general . As someone who is neutral I had a good perspective of it , enjoying it and being interested for what it was , even as I knew I might not watch it again when it comes time for its airing on ESPN . This is to basketball what Scorsese's Shine a Light did for the Rolling Stones - setting up dozens of cameras , we're given so many points of view and angles and set-ups on a straightforward 4-quarter-long basketball game between the Lakers and the Spurs . That it also gives unlimited options for editing and creating texture and speed and variance is a bonus for the interested viewer . At the same time there's another twist Lee implements that is clever : an audio commentary from Bryant ( with occasional snippets of questions or observations from Lee ) on the game , all of the decisions made in strategy and the practicality of the game , or just some of the little things that one wonders about how a player does the work on the court , the cues the player picks up from the others , the cues gaged from the opposing team , little lessons learned , mistakes , and of course goofs . On top of this , Bryant has a microphone on his jersey so we hear everything he says , from mundane to down-n-dirty leadership , throughout and even in the locker room . I was never bored by any of the action , and Lee's little flourishes of style added some verve ( and of course that typical jazz score as well placed about during the game ) but , again , it's a niche thing . The same viewer who was fascinated by Inside Man may not immediately go to Kobe Doin ' Work . And yet I can recommend it without a doubt in my mind for its intended audience , the sports geeks and guys and girls who live for basketball . It's made by a fan for the fans . For everyone else , it's a fun viewing once , with a little of the personal side of Bryant sprinkled at the end . It is what the title says , and it's damn proud of it . |
509,298 | 453,068 | 5,044 | 7 | quick and simply and funny , if not Chaplin's very best | This is the kind of shtick put up to please those paying a nickel ( or less ) ' back in the day ' when seeing this for nine minutes could amount to a decent time . What Chaplin is after here is just straight up pantomime , and this is both the strength and weakness of the short . It's great to see bits like Tramp and the man switching hats in the wind , or Tramp and the woman cavorting on the beach , or the " fighting " that ensues between him and a huge handle-bar mustached man . But it seems a little too quick , as if it was shot in a day ( or less ) and done mostly to cash in on good lighting on a beach . I chuckled throughout , don't get me wrong , though I'm sure there are better ones out there starring the Tramp . |
508,324 | 453,068 | 427,944 | 7 | a good satire with more laughs in spurts than overall | Thank You For Smoking does two things in particular - it shows it's writer / director , Jason Reitman ( son of Ivan ) , should have a good career ahead of him , with this being a promising debut ; it also shows how casting decisions do make up then crucial framework for a film like this , where its ensemble form needs the right people . The satire comes in the form of it's lead character , a lobbyist for Tobacco ( Aaron Eckhardt , one of his better performances ) , who has a crises in the midst of a reporter's investigation ( Katie Holmes ) , his own son , and in dealings with a super movie agent ( Rob Lowe , one of his very best roles ) , and even the old Marlboro man ( Sam Elliot ) . His main opponent , from the cheese-head mainstay state of Vermont , is played by William H . Macy in another key role - if there's one thing this man can play it's smarmy and antagonistic , while seeming very professional ( i . e . Fargo ) . It's with this parallel of the two sides of varying hypocrisies , of the tobacco's side and the fervent anti-tobacco side , that Reitman loads his guns , not to mention with the alcohol and tobacco sides represented as the guy's friends ( there scenes in the restaurant are some of the funniest in the film ) . If there is a problem , at least for me , with the film in the overall is that as much as a satire can be clever and have aims , it's needs to balance out its comedy with its storytelling . After the first twenty minutes of the film , which contain some really big laughs ( if not by the actors , i . e . JK Simmons , then by the cool style of Reitman's ) , it goes into its story , and becomes more or less in the realm of being entertaining , but not necessarily as funny as it should or could be . In a way this is one of those films I admire more so for having me grin at a lot of what's going on , and that the shots at the societal tennis match of the tobacco issue do work . There's nothing per-say I can say that should dissuade you from seeing it , and it could very likely become a comedy cult favorite along the lines of the Christopher Guest films ( albeit a different sort of cultural satire ) . That it's less than great though when it becomes sincere , and that the sincerity isn't as matched up with its clever side , is more of an observation than a stone-cold criticism . After all , it's hard to turn down a film that features Lowe in a kimono on a sleep-only-on-Sunday schedule . |
509,122 | 453,068 | 496,806 | 7 | simply a fun escapist heist movie | Ocean's Thirteen unfolds not in an excellent great-movie way but how subversive heist movies should - being entertaining while also showing some chutzpah on the part of the filmmaker . Although not reaching the level of tense joy of the original , it does go past the tedious self-consciousness of the second film to be , well , still self-conscious , but in that way that puts Soderbergh to task as someone who can make lots and lots of exposition into the equivalent of a great drink in a pricey bar . From the title cards to the angles that reveal even the smallest angles the characters are playing at ( or maybe are not playing at , or are again ) , to the big $ numbers over the heads of everyone in the casino in the climax , and to how he gets such Hollywood Lotharios into bad wigs and mustaches and noses , it's a minor master's class in being hip and accessible for the mall crowd while still being splendid for simple genre admirers . This time , as well , it's not so much a tale of a heist for the sake of simply putting many millions into the pockets of the thieves , but as a matter of pride ( a shake of Sinatra's hand is a point of merit for the older characters in this world , and it is sort of a world , of Las Vegas ) . Reuben ( Gould ) gets a heart attack after finding out he's been screwed over by Bank ( Pacino ) , who is some-pun-intended an insanely wealthy man who's opening a new casino Reuben was supposed to be partner on . The Ocean gang decide to strike back at him the worst - letting the house lose , big time , for all the high rollers in attendance on opening night . This time , even more than the first and second films , the heist is elaborate , maybe too elaborate ; there's a whole sub-plot devoted to Mexican factory workers who get riled up by Virgil and Turk to rise up against their bosses , despite the fact that they need to keep working to send the fake dice to the casino . Every side is covered , or almost every one , and there are no spots open in this one for romantic entanglements or much else . The element of Reuben bed-stricken is at the heart of the film , and everything else is , simply put , guilty pleasure hijinks of the subtlest kind . And , naturally , each character has their moments to shine . The aforementioned nose bit from Linus is one of the funniest gags in the whole trilogy , as obvious as it is . Don Cheadle gets to break out of his singularly English bit as Basher to go into daredevil garb to act as a pure distraction to Pacino . On the flip-side , Reiner becomes a prissy English high-roller . Some outsider running gags come in with David Paymer as a board member put into a purposeful bad luck blender . Even Pitt and Clooney get in on the fun , with Rusty donning a ridiculous get-up as a concerned seismologist . Overall , Ocean's Thirteen doesn't make for a very substantial dramatic feat , or even a very great comedy ( Bernie Mac isn't as up to snuff as in the first film , and the moments with Oprah are more touching , ironically , than anything laugh-out-loud ) , but it is in its own superficial and too-cool-for-school way a must-see . |
508,653 | 453,068 | 96,054 | 7 | Lee's sophomore effort is far from great , but it's a fine effort nonetheless | School Daze isn't something that is exclusive to those who went to all-black colleges , despite what some other commenters have said on IMDb . Coming from an average state school , there's still nothing big in the movie that comes from specifically being all-black , as there are many things like fraternities / sororities , male and female camaraderie , sex , fashion , insults , sports and rituals in general that are common to any college experience . Spike Lee captures that , when he's at his best here , very well . If you did go to an all-black college ala Lee's alma mater Moorehouse , then I'm sure it will have more relevance . But in general , Lee's made a solid , technically wild college comedy / musical / drama , with some major missteps . There are some messages thrown about in School Daze , mostly around sexism , not so much racism ( there's barely a white person to be seen in the film so it's not really an issue to deal with per-say ) , but they're all used in relativity with the story and characters , which is good . We're given Mission college , an all-black college down south , where classes are pretty much moot and everything revolves around cliques of various sorts : the Greek frat , which Half-Pint ( Spike Lee ) is trying to join , and his cousin Dap ( Fishburne ) who definitely is not and is defiant against a lot of things on campus , which nearly get him expelled . There are also the jigaboo's and the wannabes , two sets of girls on campus who are certainly opposed ( as we see , brilliantly , in one of the better musical numbers ) . While Lee's plot isn't always connected together , there's so much that works when he keeps the dialog moving along . He has a great sense of the characters , the BS that binds guys together and how the rhythm of a conversation with these 18-22 year olds goes , and about the ambivalence between the opposing sexes , leading up to the dramatic climax . Even most of the actors , close to all of them their first time in a Lee joint ( Esposito , Davis , Bill Nunn ) , are terrific when given the chance showing off how absurd and , in retrospect in life , abstract all of this becomes . What keeps it down from being a lot better - and , sadly , what makes it look a lot more like an exercise in style ( which , granted , was Lee's first movie with a budget above 100 grand and for a studio ) - are the padded musical performances , and specifically those that don't contribute anything to the story . The first sequence is dynamite as the actresses all perform in an energetic performance about the differences between the sororities . After that , it's more or less ( more for the one scene with the singer intercut with the sex ) just filler that is shot well but empty . Nevertheless , School Daze shows a filmmaker ready and hungry behind the lens to try and do things and show us bits and pieces of life that haven't been much in American movies , and at best it's riveting and entertaining . For this it's commendable , but it's also a stepping stone for Do the Right Thing . |
508,375 | 453,068 | 420,087 | 7 | Imperfect and spotty , but has more human interest and fun than most movies out now | One of the curious things I found about Robert Altman's new film of Garrison Keilor's A Prairie Home Companion was how , like in some of ( if not most of ) his other films , is the absence of dramatic or comedic expectations . There are some moments where there are minor tragedies laced in , and a few good belly laughs ( and some small ones as part of Altman's wry sense of humor ) , but it's really showing Altman having the utmost confidence in all of his actors , for better or lesser degrees , in just showing how it ' really is ' backstage and on-stage at one of these variety shows on the radio . The significance of it being the " last night " of the show on the air , and the characters reactions , is mixed in with a later event of one of the characters passing on in a back-room . There is also symbolism laced in , and sometimes this kind of drowns out the better aspects of the film , which are what is captured on stage and the few really precious performances among the many very good ones . Garrison Keilor himself stars as himself , leader , performer and storyteller of the Prairie Home Companion program , which reaches into nostalgia all abound like its right in the air at all times . And as usual there are so many bits and pieces to take from the all-star cast that some of the flaws in the film will usually be overlooked by the viewer . Meryl Streep and Lili Tomlin have great rapport together ; Woody Harrellson and John C . Reilly are quite talented together with their songs and dialog off-stage ( the song about Bad Jokes is maybe my personal favorite out of all of the songs in the movie ) ; Kevin Kline gives maybe the most genius of the performances as Guy Noir , who never goes on stage but has such an un-canny presence in and out of the situations of the characters ; even Lindsay Lohan delivers the goods in a half low-key half superb way with her talents . Other sprinkled about like the two Jones ' ( LQ and Tommy Lee ) and Virginia Madsen provide their skills for the project . And many , if not all , of the musical numbers are quite enjoyable in the folky , foot-tapping kind of way . If I do have any gripe , or gripes , with the film though it would be that it is likely to appeal more to fans of Keilor than Altman , or vice versa depending on your tolerance of the constantly , unyielding moving camera and constant use of music whether on stage or off . But there are some scenes that also just flat out didn't work for me , at least when up against the better scenes of the film . I liked the tenderness of the scenes with Streep , Tomlin and Lohan , but those were kind of left flapping around at times . Guy Noir's role had enough weight in its area , but then there is the opposing side of the angel ( or ' Dangerous Woman ' as she is billed ) played by Madsen . She kind of puts the film to a halt at times with her one-faced personality ( even if as an actress Madsen is always good ) with the overbearing symbolism of this angel - over - the - death - of - things adds something to the film that arguably just wasn't needed . While not a horrible side to the film , it is a deterrent . There is so much else going on her role just seems like a tittering fly in the ointment . And some scenes in general half to walk that Altman line of having true emotion in the behavioral connections or of not having any sense or meaning to it , at all . All these little criticisms aside , I would still recommend the picture , if not as a great film then as a very fine film for a time when there is practically nothing but the remakes and sequels in jackhammer fashion this month , where there is a simplicity and wholesomeness among these characters who are apart of a great tradition that can only hold on for so much longer in the 21st century . . . . ( EDIT ) And now following Altman's death , it's actually quite the fitting coda . |
510,612 | 453,068 | 91,757 | 7 | weird , dirty and a little crazy , just like Polanski at his best but not quite | This is one of the oddities in the career of Roman Polanski . It was a project he wanted to do for years , tried to get funding with different actors , and finally settled on Walter Matthau as Captain Red and ( relatively unknown ) Cris Campion as his bumbling long-time sidekick Frog . It's a very weird movie in a respect , which is that Polanski puts his own print on what is a big-old swashbuckler . It owes itself in spirit to the Errol Flynn pictures and other on-the-sea programmers of the 30s and 40s , and surely plot is sometimes crazy and convoluted enough to fit the bill . . . but somehow Polanski makes it work for himself , if not as one of his best . It's sometimes as dark in tone as Cul-de-sac , and other times almost as light as Oliver Twist , but it's also its own kind of movie bird , anchored by an uncharacteristically over-the-top Walter Matthau performance , some good stuffy co-stars like Damien Thomas and Ferdy Mayne , and there's a lot of action to go around the place as well . From its opening scene on ( which is , actually , a really amazing opening scene ) to the final one which sort of wraps everything around , Polanski tools around with the conventions while trying to please himself , so to speak , with the formula . I wouldn't say it would be really great for those hungry for more after the ' Caribean ' movies ( frankly , it lacks a Jack Sparrow in its midst ) , but it should appeal those who want a strange brew of art-house adventure . |
510,986 | 453,068 | 936,501 | 7 | turn off your brain for the good " good - God - do - they - expect - me - to - believe - that " Besson production | On facebook there is an event coming up I believe in June which is called " National Man Day " , which will be a day for all men everywhere to feel and act like " Men " , whatever that is . If there are any screening rooms available for this kind of created event , Taken could be a good choice as a movie to screen . It's a preposterous action movie fantasy that has a good dosage of Jason Bourne and surprisingly , and not offensively , some conservative connotations in it . Yes , conservative : where else will we get a France-is-evil tome that also includes a sex-slave trade ( which , apparently , is based on real things going on in Europe right now ) complete with deflowered girls the highest marker - yes , American girls , go to France and you will be sold into the sex trade - for Albanians or whomever the immigrants are with the can-do American government bad-ass with one step removed from Jack Bauer and a penchant for torture when it suits best . Sound not like your cup of manly kill-kick-ass tea ? Then look away and read no more . But if you're still with this , well , you know what you're in for , sort of . This is another vehicle by Luc Besson , as writer and producer , to use Paris as a backdrop for a crazy plot designed to give whoever star it is - usually Jason Statham - a run for his money for the good of the entire audience as super-violent escapist fare . The plot , with Liam Neeson's retired government agent who has a strength comparable to both Jason Bourne and Batman having to go to France after his daughter is kidnapped along with a friend , is of not much consequences as we've seen it in other molds and folds before , sometimes in sleazy packages or straight-to-video deals ( one may wonder where Chuck Norris is when you need him ) . But the plot actually becomes a little more believable , or at least acceptable , because of or in support of the presence of Liam Neeson . He's such an underrated presence today in movies , popping up when a director has the right mind to use him ( yes , he was even pretty good in Phantom Menace ) , and in this case director Morel and Besson have here an action hero who shows weariness and real conflict on his face . He's not the first person you'd think to play Brian , but he's the right person for what he can bring to the part . He's tough as nails but isn't chiseled or completely stone-cold like Daniel Craig . There's something else going on , like he's thinking and makes us think with him as he crashes through glass and kicks and punches and shoots and strangles and bamboozles dozens of gangsters and baddies . He helps make Taken something of a wonderful contradiction : believably unbelievable all the way through . You know this guy can do these things because , frankly , he just can . As my own mother , God bless her , said after seeing the movie : it gives a good enema to the brain . She meant that as a compliment , I suppose . |
509,492 | 453,068 | 342,882 | 7 | A truly fantastical experiment , more than a typical film | That the final result of the Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is not really a great movie is a given when taking into account that the style of which the Quay Brothers have gone to almost perfectionist lengths to attain is always leaping ahead in strength when compared to the dialog or the performances . The story itself is meant as a pin-point line for the Quays to relay their staggering mix of mediums . After an opera singer , Malvina , dies during a performance ( though not really ' dead ' but captured by Doctor Droz , the not-quite-Phantom of the Opera of the story ) , a mild-mannered piano tuner who is sent out to Droz's estate , but not to fix pianos . Rather , he's sent to fix an automaton , and soon discovers what is going to really happen - the staging of a crazy , other-wordily ' opera ' with Malvina , and decides he has to save her . The Quays ' choices in actors - Cesar Saracho as Felisberto ; Gottfried John as Doctor Droz ; Amira Casar as the helpless lady of the film , Malvina ; and Assumpta Sera as Droz's caretaker / sometimes seducer of Felisberto - are more based on their appearances and movements in scenes than really for ability in speech and emotion . Not that they don't have a moment or two when they get to connect with the poetic dialog ( John gets a good deal of this at times , like when he is shown plotting away with his own agenda at hand ) . But it's really seeing them , with their distinctive looks , Saracho with his bony figure cast alongside the beautiful Casar , in relation to what comes forward on screen . To say it's a feast for the eyes is an understatement , and to try and describe much of what comes out in the Quay's design could make this too revealing and long a review . Yet it's the abandon of the usual logic and going head-on into this world that earns their comparison to the likes of Cocteau : we're given a look , quite often , at the automaton and its movements , the gears and wheels churning in titled compositions , and cut against the other seamlessly stop-motion movements . But more importantly , this is set against the actors , and then with other visuals such as inexplicable stop-motion creatures like a woodcutter , or figures in the opera scenes , and if one were to watch it with the sound turned off at home it wouldn't make much of a difference with the visceral impact of it all . Their design attempts to keep the audience in this world from the moment we see Dr . Droz's castle , which is a computer-generated creation , but a much more intricate and detailed kind of set-piece , cut and chiseled in rock and steel . With many of these scenes , set against the music of Duncan and Slaski , which is as a given atmospheric and creepy , and a very unsentimental and moving ending , The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes knocks it out of the parts on technical terms , and should not disappoint the die-hard fans of the Quay brothers ' previous works . It's also of no surprise now seeing it why it's the only film that Gilliam has ever had a producer credit on that has not been one of his own directorial efforts - for the kind of mind that loves what can come about through in holding on to an idea and seeing it through in a fantastic manner , it's a marvel . Just don't try and make sense of it all though . |
508,674 | 453,068 | 109,322 | 7 | moves like a good little bebop number , but only hints at what would come | At this point , I wager , Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson weren't entirely sure how their Bottle Rocket feature would turn out . As a means of getting support for it they made this short film which won over James L . Brooks at Sundance and got them a movie deal at Columbia pictures . Their plan worked . . . except that their short film had only the smallest of substance - heavy on style , of course , even in the grittiest possible for anything by Wes Anderson - and they spent more than a year or so writing and rewriting the feature until they got it to where it worked , brilliantly . So , as someone who loves the 1996 Bottle Rocket , I have to say that this one was just alright . But alright in that sense that does get you excited about a couple of things . For one thing the Wilson brothers , however airy their delivery , already have an interesting rapport going on , and certain scenes are identical to how it came out in the feature such as the robbery of the house , or of the shooting of the cans with the guns ( the Charlie Brown music is an especially funny and awesome touch ) . I also liked how they introduced the book-store into the story , how the bits and pieces of visual information were kind of " stolen " shots probably taken when no one was looking in the aisles and around the corners . It overall is something slight , but it works for a 13 minute short with a sort of abrupt ending . |
510,749 | 453,068 | 87,291 | 7 | pretty goofy and transparent homage , but it's very good for kids | Frankenweenie is Tim Burton's first live-action short film , shot for Disney in the mid-80s , and has enough imaginations to overpass some overbearing cheesiness at times . It's a sign of things to come for Burton , and the story and some of the side characters remind one of Edward Scissorhands ( no one understands this ' creation ' , and becomes an outcast despite good intentions ) . As a fable it ends on a pretty silly note , almost too much so to take . But it's got a genuine heart to it though , and it's probably a very personal work for Burton aside from being a clever homage . The beginning of the film , for example , showing a movie made by the son with the dog Sparky , seems like it's taken autobiographically from Burton's life as a kid . The story , just in the cover art on the VHS tape ( the original one , albeit a cut version ) , tells all about what needs to be known . What is then remarkable , and what makes it a lively and funny trip of a quickie for kids , is how visually creative it is . The shots taken from Frankenweenie's POV are downright charming , and the physical reactions from the neighbors to the new and improved dog almost makes the film worth seeing just for those parts . The lead boy , played by Barret Oliver , is actually quite bland for the lead and doesn't do much except sulk , or act quasi-happy , and not very well either . But his work doesn't matter in the end as much as the side characters , or the parents ( Duvall and Stern ) who are good enough for what it's worth . In the end , Frankenweenie is kind of like an expensive student short film , where a style is emerging but not fully formed , and at the same time there's real entertainment to be had . As a kid , more so than now , I watched it with more enthusiasm , but years later it's still a fun ride . |
508,269 | 453,068 | 92,076 | 7 | well , at least it's better than the remake | Which maybe might not be saying much , as the one-line summary suggests . This was the first of the series of Chainsaw films that would follow with part 3 ( Leatherface ) , and the first quasi-remake years later . And , perhaps my default , I found this to be the best out of all of them . Maybe that isn't saying much though - this is a trashy , wretched , violent mash of a horror film that injects in dark comedy that borders on being too-much of a crazy thing , while still keeping true to the delirious , paranoid nature of the first film . This time , as well , in one of Dennis Hopper's three films of 1986 , there's a star anchor that is almost not even really there to give the film any more prestige than it could have . The film's real stars are the guys who have come back to play the family again - the father , the brother , and ol ' Leatherface himself ( this time Bill Johnson not Gunnar Hanson ) . And , of course , Grandpa is there too . Now , to be sure , the film's real enjoyments are those of it being so over-the-top and outrageous horror - one gets the sense already of what the tone will be from the opening when Leatherface uses his skills on a freaked out car driving alongside . The music in this scene is harsh and strange , and sometimes even the funniest moments there on in have a dangerous quality to them . The performance of the brother , too , with his wire-hanger obsession , adds some weird interest . Invariably , to say that the story itself is as good and tense as the first one is probably not true at all . This time it's got to do with Hopper's character , out for revenge for the deaths in the first film , and a female disc-jockey caught up in the delirium of cannibals and the insane production design . So , as a film really as ' guilty pleasure ' , I'd say it was good enough for what it was meant for - lots of still crude ( even with a bigger budget ) scenes of action and attack , and an un-hinged quality that makes most of the performances work well enough . But it's also lacking that gritty , immediate post-Vietnam war feeling of ultimate dread that made the original a classic of its kind . |
510,053 | 453,068 | 412,536 | 7 | Last Year at Brideshead | Among many of the most prestigious literature selections , not to mention mini-series , Brideshead Revisited not only wasn't on my radar , I didn't even know if it would be the kind of well-regarded literature or mini-series I intended to watch . But as this newly revised picture , now a mere 136 minutes vs 10 hours , it looked interesting if only as a kind of " handsomely made " picture ( you know the kind , along the lines of Atonement for recent comparison ) . I was also intrigued by the allure of a huge , sprawling mansion here called Brideshead , as it reminded me of Alain Resnais's film Last Year at Marienbad and how memories and recollections and lost love and hope is explored in the spaces of this dark , cold region of exquisite luxury . Some of that is explored in this film , and some of it . . . isn't . It's for the most part a fairly tragic story of a young man , Charles ( Matthew Goode , charming and suave but also subtle and down-beat , a really fine turn ) , who enrolls at Oxford and meets a meek / ' fey ' guy named Sebastian , and through him he's introduced ( reluctantly in point of fact ) to Sebastian's family , including his sister Julia , and his very cold and strident mother ( Emma Thompson ) . Sebastian really wants Charles all for himself - it's a friendship that goes just a nose-hair's length into admitting homosexuality but never really goes that far despite all appearances to the contrary - but he becomes apart of the fold , and as well falling deeply in love with Julia against ' other ' wishes ( mostly the matriarch's over Charles's religion ) . There's a lot of the fragility of the bourgeois on display here , the arrogance and detachment that's shown very closely by the director for maximum effect . Unlike a Resnais he's not about to get too experimental with the camera ; he's a careful craftsman more often than not , allowing for just enough wonderment of the whole Brideshead atmosphere to really sink into how it could be a double-edged sword of perception . And as is bound to happen with material this sprawling ( at one point time jumps back 10 years , then ahead 4 years , until we kind of know where we are ) , a lot seems to be cut out . While it altogether makes a coherent and entertaining enough picture , I wonder how much more of a benefit this would make as an epic , where we are absorbed more fully with the Oxford school or Charles and Sebastian or even the parents ( who , thankfully , are played wonderfully here by cold-as-ice Thompson and fascinatingly guilt-ridden and subtle Michael Gambon ) , or how the wealth structure even works here . Indeed , I found myself not so much involved with the Charles / Sebastian stuff , even as it's fairly well-acted and well-shot enough , as I was with the themes of religion raised in the picture . This caught me off guard and hinted at something deeper being expounded upon . Yet , again , we get just tastes of what's offered more than likely in the original text , tastes that are powerful like a ' last-rites ' argument , and the tortured state of being raised from the cradle with an intense , overbearing Catholic conscience . |
509,411 | 453,068 | 420,223 | 7 | has a good mix of whimsy and pathos , an excellent Ferrell performance , if less than stellar overall | I'd recommend Stranger Than Fiction , especially if you're a fan of its stars . It also speaks to a good career ahead for first-time screenwriter Zak Helm . That it also is that old , over-used statement - the parts more entertaining than the whole - is maybe in part attributable to an inherent structural flaw in the script . After I left the movie I did think about how a person's will may be dictated or not , or what really carries that man to do what he decides to do , or if he tries to do nothing at all ( which Harold Crick , played by Will Ferrell , does to no avail ) . Because the story itself is about contrivance , their is an ever-looming air of contrivance in the script too . It's hard to explain exactly , and Helm was wise to avoid certain pit-falls , such as really giving a ' logical ' explanation to how the narrator's writing sticks into Crick's head in the first place , or that it might not just collapse once writer and ' character ' meet . But there's still some things that I found a little troublesome - for example , does the narrator dictate the little things that Crick does , or would Crick just do them anyway ? What I mean is , how much is determined by what is written or not . There is also the air of questioning where these characters are outside of their set spots in the screenplay - and Crick , albeit not without some interest is not really the kind of character I would think would make for a great subject for a book by a presumably well-renown , recluse author ( played in the best way possible in the one-note terms by Emma Thompson ) . For the sake of Crick's central change from being very calculated , precisely so , early on , to becoming a man much more based on how he wants to live his life not based rigidly on structure - even in the structure of ' little did he know ' , which is kind of amusing as a writer myself - there is that sort of contrivance anyway . Yet at the same time , individual scenes are very well written though , and given fresh life by the cast . Ferrell here , of course , is showing much more of his talents than usual , at doing much more of a grounded , every-day kind of guy who has the extraordinary happen to him . He's always convincing in the part , even in scenes that are awkward or made to really pull up more of his talents than usual . That I would still have a very slight preference for his comedy roles and skills as a satirist / performer may be just subjective , though this - plus his underrated turn in Melinda & Melinda - goes to relay how he can play genuine just as well as silly and fearlessly stupid . Hoffman , as the literature professor who helps out Crick through his crisis at points , is also very good , and their scenes together were some of my favorite in the film . Gyllenhaal works well too as the romantic side for Crick's change in self . So really , it's a worthwhile trip into what was appropriately called by one critic as ' Charlie Kaufman-lite ' , as it goes to lengths to be an original work , but at the same time one can't help but know how things will turn out in the end , if only from the immense heap of circumstance given clairvoyance , or vice versa , and that it is , in the end , a work out of Hollywood . Marc Foster's direction does go for little odd touches to add to Helm's writing , such as numbers and lines and such on screen in fast fashion to show Crick's mind working in the form of his life early on . And the watch means probably as much as the gold watch did in Pulp Fiction in the sense of what it will lead to for the character . That it doesn't feel though completely satisfying in its sort of original send-up is understandable , but partly forgivable ; it's the kind of work that gives talented actors some fun and variety , and there are at least a few truly laugh-out-loud funny moments . |
508,309 | 453,068 | 74,554 | 7 | a tragic-comedy boosted by Zero Mostel's performance , a fairly sharp script , and a tailor-made Allen character | The Front isn't on my high list of Woody Allen movies to recommend , but then he didn't write and direct it . It was directed by Martin Ritt and Walter Bernstein , very talented ( and as Ritt says , talent with something to show for it ) , and also previously black-listed . They have here fashioned a somewhat conventional tragic-comedy about the dilemma of the potential squealer in people in the entertainment world , but a squealer for gain of the committee at the time that wanted to get the names more based on the principle of it than actually having the names for a purpose . The symbol of the blacklist in the world of TV and movies made for a wretched one for anyone just remotely connected with it . And it's this that Ritt and Bernstein get at with the story of Howard Prince ( Allen ) , who acts as a ' front ' , a middle-man for a friend ( Michael Murphy ) and then his fellow writers who need to get work somehow . It soon works quite well , even a she sees alongside him a famous , clownish actor ( Zero Mostel ) getting the harshest treatment of all - and for an actor a blacklisting that will stick harder than he can imagine . There are the moments of humor that get struck up ( the concentration camp joke with the tie-in to the gas company is very funny ) , and for Allen it's definitely a part made tailor made for him , if not a whole picture as such . He is , per usual , playing a ' version ' of his character , in this case an illiterate who fumbles and lies his way into being the top listed writer Howard Prince as opposed to the indebted-to-betting cashier , and it ( naturally ) involves a woman too . This part is a little more hit or miss in believability , and inevitably leads Prince to have to be questioned before the committee , with the big question looming ' what to do . ' This has been seen in several films since , even if at the time it must've seemed like something new . On the other hand , the most tragic section of the picture comes with Mostel's character , and Mostel's performance brings out some of the best in range he has to offer , with bits of the gleeful insanity from the Producers , but a more pragmatic side too . The guy's got to work , and this is made painfully clear in the scene where the club owner wont give him the money promised . The character also has to contend with the greatest pressure of all , though more than just that . It easily raises the Front from being well done but slight to being something memorable ; it's practically unfathomable that he didn't get a nomination for best supporting actor for anything aside from one . Featuring a sweet book-ending with an opening montage with the " 50's " put to Frank Sinatra , and then an incredible ending with Prince at the questioning ( which actually shows Allen to be a really gifted actor ) , it's an even better film to see if you're after the subject matter - it's a fascinating , dark period in American history where such a term as ' Un-American ' could be used as a pathological excuse during the Cold-War . As drama and comedy , however , it is really just a good movie , no more no less , with occasional brilliance . |
510,650 | 453,068 | 95,989 | 7 | Cut it ! Cut it ! Cut it ! Save the film , strike the broad and kill the babies . | It's funny , sort of , that Return of the Killer Tomatoes actually lives up to ( err , goes to the depths of ) the original parody of schlock horror Z-grade movies it's coming from . It knows what it is in its bones , and still has a hell of a lot of fun getting to where it's going - which is almost nothing . I couldn't help but laugh through much of the flick though , especially after having seen the first one . After starting off the picture ( and reminding me for a moment of Python's Holy Grail ) with a whole other picture ( unintentionally ? ) with girls taking off their tops on a beach , we get right into it full-throttle . John Astin , usually a very professional theater actor , plays Professor Gangreen in the other wild over-the-top horror comedy of 1988 ( the other is Don Calfa in Chopper Chicks in Zombietown ) , and he's got a plan - create killer tomatoes again , but this time not REALLY tomatoes , but just regular tomatoes that can turn into killing machines Rambo style ! But the professor also makes a woman ( sexy Kara Mistal ) for himself , and she strays away with her little fuzzy tomato , or FT , and meets Anthony Stark's Chad , a worker in a tomato-sauce-less pizza parlor with his friend Matt ( George Clooney , yes , half a decade before ER if you can think back to them ) . Things then start to get a little wacky . . . Well , actually , wacky is such a little word to use . Return of the Killer Tomatoes , a movie that does not feature one real killing tomato ( though potential quasi-killers they may be , and once in a while suicidal ) , is by and large one of the funniest horror-movie parody type sequels of the 80s . It takes itself about as seriously as you might expect , which is not at all . In fact the tongue is so placed firmly in cheek , it comes out the other end during scenes when writer / director John DiBello breaks the ' fourth wall ' as the shooting of the movie ( and massive , continuous , " elaborate " product placements are put in at every turn after a while , years before the gag was used in Wayne's World ) . I probably had bigger laughs during moments like these - with some random outbursts of ninjas fighting cowboys in a diner - than I did during the first Killer Tomatoes flick . While the original still does garner points for being as audacious with its stupidity and with a smaller budget ( not that the sequel doesn't make fun of the budget at every other turn ) , the zany spirit of the first film remains strong here , and deliriously so at times . When you got the doctor's assistant of Igor looking like a wrestler , you get the idea . It's a wild and crazy ride , with a 20-something Clooney with a full head of dark hair and basically in a role that requires him just to act as himself to a much more condensed range ( i . e . ladies man , which includes a great gag involving him getting girls to go on a date with him , though saying as if he's Rob Lowe ) . Its got plenty of stuff for fans of the first flick , including the Ewok of the series with FT , who has his own sort of merchandising going towards the end too . By the way , stay through till the end of the credits - it's not just because the director's mother said so ! |
509,396 | 453,068 | 74,512 | 7 | a minor work from Hitchcock ; however good it is sad that it was his last | Family Plot is about a con-psychic , her cabbie boyfriend , another con-man / thief , and a diamond thief as his squeeze , who all come together unwittingly in a yarn surrounding a search for a son , a 10 grand reward , and some diamonds , plus lots of other small-time shenanigans . In any other hands this would be a very respectable , even near excellent feature ( or , as a TV movie , a big one for the mid 70s ) . And it is , on its own terms , a good , light thriller with a few laughs , some strong if two-dimensional characters , and solid dialog ( some of it , unlikely usually for the director improvised ) . But this director , of course , is Hitchcock , and after the flawed but monumental craftsmanship of Frenzy he falls onto material that is , frankly , not quite up to his level of sophistication and mastery of the medium Then again , maybe that's the way he wanted it , which is just as well . By this age of his mid-late 70s , he probably wanted to work on something that was only so much demanding , and could have some relaxing time while still having his total control over the production ( and at that age and after so long , he did earn the right to a few minor works , albeit after a slight slump in the late 60s ) . There's some good laughs to be had by way of Hitchcock's casting - Bruce Dern is always great , and Karen Black and William Devane and Barbara Harris put in their bits of effort too - and there's even a couple of near-brilliant scenes and flashes of the Master's style ; the cut-away from couple 1 ( Harris / Dern ) in the car following the start of the movie to the " blonde " Black walking across the road is a great little narrative leap . The climax , however ' old-hat ' it might be for some , is also sort of thrilling and with a final wink that says " hey , it's all in high spirits . " Nothing great , and almost , if you're a purist , a disappointment for the die-hard Hitchcock fan . But if you've got nothing else to do on a Saturday night , pop it in and see what it can do . |
509,120 | 453,068 | 100,594 | 7 | one of the most beautifully photographed films of the 90s , though if amazing imagery isn't lacking , plot is | I always wonder what it might be like to have a film set in a location that is explicitly specific , with this film , as example , the Sahara desert and outlining areas of North Africa , and to not have some kind of Lawrence of Arabia kind of epic story attached to it . It's a challenge for a filmmaker to attempt , and Bernardo Bertolucci did attempt it in 1990 with the Sheltering Sky , based on the book that seems to be massively popular ( though un-read by me ) . Whether he succeeded completely or not will depend on how much the viewer can take seeing characters sort of engulfed by the director and cinematographer's own adoration of the strange and bizarrely exotic locales . The story is boiled down , probably more-so than was in the Bowles novel , about a husband and wife ( Malkovich and Winger ) , and their friend ( Scott ) , who go to " travel " in North Africa . For what precisely is uncertain , but it is clear that the focal point is that of their marriage failing after years together ( both sides sleeping with others , distanced , not altogether honest in conversation ) . But this changes , of course , once Paul gets typhoid and has a fever for the middle chunk of the film . After this , when a change of events occur , The Sheltering Sky gets even more surreal and sensual then before , if still slightly obtuse in how to really relay a good story . And it's not that Bertolucci is whacked out , like with La Luna , as a storyteller per-say . He actually progresses what there is involving the characters pretty well , and Malkovich and Winger are up to the task of playing people who are sort of bourgeois malcontents who get their respective states of mind altered through their travels of the fly-ridden villages and poor towns in the Sahara region . But it seems like material , even for someone who hasn't read the book , to be more evocative as prose then as filmed , and the many customs and many little details of the villagers are left as more-so poetic aspirations than things relevant to the narrative . This all being said , The Sheltering Sky may possibly be Bertolucci's most astoundingly shot feature , with it coming right behind Goodfellas as the best cinematography of 1990 ( via the great Vittorio Storaro ) . Shot after shot looks like it could come out of a truly exquisite book , and the dedication to compositions and long shots and how a close-up can be just as meaningful cinematically as a view of the desert , is the best that Bertolucci has to offer . But then again , like with Antonioni when he's at his most scatter-shot , without characters who even subtly convey a lot , or with strong enough themes aside from the despair amid an alien environment ( to the characters ) , it becomes the textbook case of style over substance . I'd recommend it , especially to fans of the director and DP , but I can understand the dismay that fans of the book had at the adaptation , despite the convincing performances and ( as a given ) the wonder of seeing places not seen before , like the not-filmed-before-this-film location of Niger . |
508,943 | 453,068 | 360,486 | 7 | certain things - like an uncommonly bad-ass Keanu Reeves - make this better than it has any right to be | I'm not sure if Francis Lawrence is really up to par to make any kind of great movie , having now seen his first film Constantine and his mega-hit follow-up I Am Legend . But he can make a pretty entertaining spectacle of the dark and supernatural , and add a certain edge that comes most likely for those who are thirsting for it after being out of the desert of Man vs . Satan pictures . In this case John Constantine - inspired by a comic book from the 80s ( which had the hero looking like Sting and Satan looking like David Bowie ) - is a demon hunter , an exorcisor , and also a hardcore chain smoker who will probably kill himself from lung cancer before getting snuffed by some out-of-the-dark demon . He is called upon by a cop ( Rachel Weisz ) to investigate what appears to be a suicide of her sister ( twin , not too oddly enough ) but is really murder . How will Constantine find out ? How will she ? What will she be needed for ? If you don't put a whole lot of thought into some of the logistics , obviously , Constantine is a very fun movie , and chock-full of ultra hellish special effects , some keen one-liners ( " Everybody leave now . . . go to hell . " ) , and an unusually cool and on-spot performance from Keanu Reeves . While he might've given more of his somewhat limited worth for the Matrix movies , it's here that one sees him trying , and nearly succeeding , a Dirty Harry imitation in the form of a kind of Christopher Walken ala the Prophecy character . It helps since there's some very good supporting work from Weisz , Tilda Swinton as a vengeful angel , and Dijmon Honsu as a witch doctor ( Shia Lebouf appears as a driver and is probably the weakest link ) . The coup is casting Peter Stormare as Satan , however , appearing in only some make-up and a heavy ham-bone performance . So for all you looking for plenty of action with those that come from hell , this is a good flick to catch now that it's showing a lot of cable . It's fast-paced but takes its time as a story , and it has atmosphere coming out of its ears , probably the best gift that Lawrence can bestow ( he also has it in spades with I Am Legend , albeit the visual effects are actually better HERE than in the Smith vehicle ) . It would be a guilty pleasure to rank with Ghost Rider if it weren't somewhat pretty well crafted . |
509,931 | 453,068 | 87,182 | 7 | as complex as it is conflicted , and full of artistry that doesn't fully work | In a sense , I looked at David Lynch's adaptation of Dune on the outset for a while like Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus . This is the filmmaker , usually in total control of his work , putting himself out there for an elephantine production early in a career . But in this case , after having seen the film , it's perhaps not totally clear whether or not the director was compromised by either the producer or the studio . If one were to ask also of me to say if it is too long or too short I'd also be hesitant to answer . At two hours and fifteen minutes , the story feels like it's nearly three , but it isn't . This is a credit to what is done visually in the film , but there are problems afoot . Perhaps one of them is that I , unlike a good many who've written on this site about the film , have yet to read one iota of the book ( s ) . So my approach is not really through the vein of Frank Herbert's work but through Lynch who is maybe more of the reason to see the film . As it is , I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to read the book , and frankly on a first impression it's not on a short list of one I'll read anytime too soon . Because , at least for me , the story ( or perhaps , unfortunately to say a part of the storytelling aspect ) has a certain glitch to it that reminded me of the Da Vinci Code adaptation , though on a slightly different plane . " Show , don't tell " is usually the policy in writing a screenplay . But unlike that example , Lynch , up for the challenge in and of itself of the 45 million dollar production - relatable to the amount of a summer blockbuster of today - tries to add a novelistic approach to the film without necessarily being true to everything in the source . Impressions of this world are paramount for him . Many of the characters are given voice-overs for their thoughts , as they suspect , decree , wonder , and reveal feelings that could perhaps just be on their faces . And as apart of Lynch's way of abstracting in directing his actors , we're given the impression through out of oppression . All of this works , up to a point . On a first viewing maybe it IS all too much to settle into , as the importance of the little things should add up more than they do . The cast - assembled with many knowable faces in a bizarre and curious stretch from Max von Sydow to Sting to Kyle MacLachlan - do what they can , but only a few really give the goods for what they're worth in the framework of their characters . This all being said , Dune's met obvious mixed reactions for many years ( which have become even more known to me than the novel itself ) and its understandable why . This is in one respect an old-fashioned film , with ( again with Spartacus ) a Roman-epic aspect , where there are thousands of extras , lots and lots of dramatic action , and a story filled with betrayals , a need for a hero to rise up , and even a religious aspect with MacLauchlan's Paul being a ' Messiah ' to the world . There are interesting ideas floating afoot , but unfortunately some of it is lost , and maybe more if one's sort of connection to the film gets severed at some point . So , if the storytelling side of things as Lynch in adapting it attempts for one filled with powerful depictions of the forces of good and evil is likely not a success , the side of the visuals usually , for the most part , is . Even when I ironically had only a vague idea of what was going on ( perhaps due to an overload of exposition ) , I couldn't look away from what he , cinematographer Freddie Francis , 2001 production designer Anthony Masters , and even most of Barry Nolan's special effects were doing for the material . Dated in a couple of parts , this is overall another feast for Lynch fans , as certain creations and work on character ( i . e . the Baron ) are fantastic , there are dream sequences and other things done to enhance the inherent surrealism of all of this dark fantasy . To put it mildly , Dune is not a very simple film to digest in any denomination . Unlike Star Wars , there aren't any quick starship battles or bits of comic relief . But it does fit into that pantheon of science fiction films that shouldn't be tossed away completely . Here in even one of Lynch's least successful works , maybe his fault in some respects and not in others , there's a lot of brilliant and sensational moments and sights and sounds . There's something striking about how the film is presented , and sometimes how it takes off , that keeps it from not sinking into the otherwise likely situation of an epic running totally off the tracks . And as a general admirer of science fiction the writing that backs up this work from Herbert is not completely lost on me . At least for one thing about the film is certain - this is the only time on celluloid that you'll witness a knife fight between , yes , Sting and Kyle MacLauchlan . In short , DEFINITELY not for everyone . Features also other good actors , by the way , like Brad Douriff , Patrick Stewart and Jose Ferrer . |
509,793 | 453,068 | 64,940 | 7 | maybe the most mixed-bag kind of film I've seen from Fellini yet ( and I'm a big fan ) | I have to think that with a production like Satyricon , co-written and directed ( and practically ring-mastered ) by Federico Fellini , he had a couple of things he had to adhere to in what he could or couldn't show ( not sure what Italy's policies were on nudity or violence and such ) . But overall , this seems to me to be the kind of film where the director had such carte Blanche and freedom to do with whatever he wanted with the material , no one ever even tried to reel him in or ask ' does this make sense ? ' Maybe that's what makes Satyricon the flawed plum that it is , but it's sometimes a slog getting through it . It's a shame to say things as pat about Fellini Satyricon like ' it's meandering ' or ' it loses cohesion ' or ' I asked ' who is that character again ' too much ' , but they pretty much do apply , even if you are a really big fan of the movie . In a sense I am too , but not exactly at the same time . In the purely visual sense , it's what the word spectacular really comes closest to in terms of personal Roman epics . Surreal or bizarre or debauchery comes to mind as well , but really if this was a silent film ( and it comes to mind a couple of times that Fellini would have risen to the likes of Lang or even Eisenstein if he had been making films in the silent era ) , it would be in my top ten of all time . Through one of the great Italian master cinematographers , Giuseppe Rutono , Fellini glides and pirouettes and makes his Roman epic with the mad ideas and persistence to not back away from keeping the vision consistent . At the least , Fellini never makes it a drag to look at , and his production values - the designs and mix of real locations with expansive Cinecitta sets , usage of colors , costumes , props ( including severed limbs and heads ) , and adding to this Nino Rota & company's strange musical accompaniments - are just as superb , if not even more extravagant , than those for his previous color film Juliet of the Spirits . If the visuals and the look and style of the film help make this world of Rome where there's no real authority and sex and power is up for grabs , the actual substance then has to be taken into account . I understand too what Fellini was after , in terms of not just the period of Rome at the time ( I'm not sure totally when , but in the apparent absence of senators and the republic ) , but also in the sexual and political revolutions going on across the world . There's madness in every direction , just as , at least seemingly , in real life . But what Fellini is lacking is a portal for the viewer to really latch onto with this travelogue of Encolpio ( Martin Potter ) , who starts off with a slave , loses him , tries to find him , but ends up with a friend Ascylito . There's big fights while slaves themselves on a boat , decadent romps with ladies , more fights - to the point of them being gladiatorial - and only brief moments where Fellini lets the viewer take a rest from all the large pomp and circumstance . There's a lot of energy to many scenes , sexually charged in fact , and the first half of the film flows really well . Yet after a while , the narrative thread - or what may be left of it can't be made this loose for too long before not feeling as satisfactory as the images surrounding it . In a sense , I realize , this film could even make a comparison with Antonioni's Zabriskie Point as two films from Italian directors who take on the complete abandonment of morals and social order and relish ( and sometimes recoil ) in the thought of it actually taking place . If neither director is totally successful , it's no wonder why the term Carte-Blanche and wild auteur filmmaker only once in a while mix excellently . |
511,064 | 453,068 | 299,977 | 7 | If you suspend all disbelief you'll like it , maybe even love it , despite some confusion in the film's structure | Hero , translated here in the states as Ying xiong , is the kind of film that must've seemed either one of the great post-modern epics for their country ( called " Our Land " the film tells us ) , or a flamboyant , ultra-dramatized version of the true events . At the least , Hero is helmed by a talented painter of the canvas , Zhang Yimou ( responsible for the classic Raise the Red Lantern , a film about repression in Chinese society ) , who in-between and sometimes during the highly stylized ( in the new Crouching Tiger movement of getting the characters flying high in the air as they fight ) , gives splendorous colors and landscapes , faces , settings , and moods . Along with cinematographer Christopher Doyle , at the least Hero aspires to a technical mastery , and it does work most of the time . By keeping the story in a tale of legend amid what was based in truth , the characters can believably be suited in the palettes Yimou puts them in . What gets the film down , for me at least , is that it's not entirely comprehensible on a first viewing . It may help it to some that it's dense and achieving a level of wonder in the non-linear structure , sometimes I didn't know who was dead and who wasn't , and perhaps in the Rashomon sense it was effective . But to lose track of the story when the technical side is trying to be moving , by default , creates style over substance . This isn't helped by the practically emotionless Jet Li as the " nameless " one , and with a constant use by the director of slow-motion in the fight scenes . The supporting cast gets put to some good use , which includes such Chinese film heavy-weights like Maggie Cheung , Donnie Yen , and Zhang Ziyi ( the actor who played Broken Sword , Tony Leung , may have been the best out of them from my perspective ) . And by the end , the story thrusts them into the reign of the tragedy , and it almost becomes like another character , one that isn't completely honed as it should've or could've been . When I walked out of the theater I knew that despite not being all in tune with the story ( as it moved around I knew where it was going and not at the same time - a few scenes did make me start to lose interest until the next fight scene came ) Hero asks to be seen more than once ( maybe both times of cable , no ? ) . On the level of the pure imagination , the film aspires to something it reaches , and it is in and of itself an epic . I just don't think it is a great one . The string sections by Itzhak Perlman are a nice touch , by the way . |
508,300 | 453,068 | 404,802 | 7 | not too surprising it's an HBO film , but a good one nonetheless , with a terrific lead in Moll | I had a vague idea of who Bettie Page was , partly due to her appearance in the very wee days of Playboy ( apparently , when she got her photo taken of her and her Santa hat , just that , she didn't know what the mag was ) . The movie , co-written and directed by American Psycho's Mary Harron , fleshes out the key parts of her life well enough . A southern belle of a church goer has some bad experiences and leaves them behind to seek better times in New York City , where she gets into modeling , and from there a lot more . Soon , she becomes the underground pin-up sensation , with bondage the obvious ( and " notorious " of the title ) trait attributed to her . The actress Gretchen Moll portrays her , and gets down the spirit of this woman about as well as she could , which is really a lot of the success of the film . She's not a simplistic character , even if at times her ideas of morality are questionable ( " well , Adam and Eve were naked , weren't they ? " she comments a couple of times ) . Apparently , the filmmakers leave out the later years of Page's life and leave off with her in a kind of redemptive period , leaving behind the photo shoots for Jesus . In all , the Notrious Bettie Page is not much more than a kind of usual bio-pic presented by HBO films , albeit this time with the stamina for a feature-film release . The best scenes that Harron captures are Page in her " questionable " positions , getting photos of her in over-the-top poses and starring in ridiculous films of whips and chains and leather uniforms . This adds a much needed comic relief to the film's otherwise usual nature . It's not that the story behind it is uninteresting , which involves the government's investigation into the ' smut ' that came out of such photos and underground magazines . But there isn't much time given to explore more of what is merely hinted at , with Page and her complexities or her relationships or to sex and the fifties . It's all given a really neat black and white look and sometimes it seemed as if Harron was progressing some of the black and white photos to be tinted more as it went along . It's a watchable view if you're not too knowledgeable of Bette Page , and probably for fans too . |
510,062 | 453,068 | 416,449 | 7 | one of the most elaborate , yet shallow exercises in 21st century epic style you'll see this year | 300 comes way of Frank Miller , the ultra-famed comic book artist and author ( behind the neo-noir Sin City ) , and Zack Snyder , who brought us the remake of Dawn of the Dead ( not a shame nor not a necessity from the original ) , and it's what movie audiences probably salivate for when it comes to action epics from a time period dozens of centuries ago . But because it's Frank Miller , and he's never one to skimp on being garish , gory and a tad shallow with his take on certain topics , be they 40s pulp-fiction clichés or Batman or a Spartan battle like here , it's the farthest thing from naturalism . Snyder knows this , and decides to go for broke , albeit extremely faithful to the source material ( and I say this having not read this graphic novel but having read other Miller works ) , and it becomes another case of a comic-book getting pumped up like some kind of wild cinematic toy , in this case probably with steroids . But to say that it pretty much becomes style over substance would be too easy , because the problems that come up in the film are not just in the substance , but also in what starts to hit the viewer over the head . Not that there aren't a good many memorable , bloody and exciting images that could only come from the fed up mind of Miller , but there is still the all-too basic qualities to the substance too . I know I shouldn't make too much of an issue with something like substance in a film that supposes right away what its audience is : men , more than women ( although I wouldn't count them out as fans entirely ) into seeing men be MEN , warriors out for the kind of glory that comes with legends . The basic legend for the battle of 300 is that there were about 300 Spartans , led by Leonidas ( Gerald Butler ) , who was the ambitious king who decided to take on the king of Persia , who claimed to be a God , instead of submitting Sparta to the rule of the Persian empire , and with it going through extremely brawny moves to not stop till the last Spartan laid to rest . More or less that , anyway , as Miller throws in certain , or make that extreme , ' peculiarities ' with both sides . The Spartans , for example , consult an oracle , who is some girl that contorts around like she's in an emo music video , and there's a deformed hunchback-outcast , who turns on the Spartans and tries to bandwagon with the mega-pierced , sexual-maniacal ' heathens ' that are seen as the Persians . The Persians , by the way , may not have the greatest / most blood-thirsty of warriors , but they do have ninjas with masks , and a rhino , a deformed-barbaric homunculus , and a few " clumsy " elephants . Plus , that king / God , who's ultimate shame is that he's proved by his own people to not be a God , I guess , by Leonidas's last throw of a spear . So , as one might gather , there is a lot of ' things ' going on in 300 , though as far as stuff with historical pertinence , not so much . There's a fairly predictable and straightforward sub-plot with Leonidas's wife ( Lena Heady ) back in Sparta having to put up with a traitor in her midsts , though one she succumbs to partially . But for the most part , we're submerged into characters who redefine what it means to be ' one-dimensional ' , and while the acting is never actually all that bad , even from the usually barking Butler , the words Miller gives them don't do much to make it sound anything more than , well , a comic-book . Which is OK in bits and pieces , until the feeling of being practically detached from reality wears thin , including getting inundated with narration , lifted by Snyder likely from all those narration boxes one sees all the time ( and somehow seemed to work better in Sin City ) and during some of the BIGGEST dramatic action sequences . It may sound like the substance is a bit too much to bear and that I , as part of the audience , took it all too seriously . This is not exactly the case , really , as the storytelling in and of itself is fairly strong and worthwhile to tell - it's just that not taking it seriously makes it enjoyable in the shallowest ways possible . This is sort of amped up to 11 by how Snyder puts all of this together technically . It's another stepping stone for the world of combining CGI and live-action , where blood and body parts and heads roll off in a disgustingly enthralling way , and where environments are almost TOO dark & / or lush . There are actually very great images as well , unexpected ones , like when we see some of these walking abstractions of violence and mayhem from the Persians , or some kind of goat-man during the Persian's strange orgy scene . Even the battle scenes , sometimes , are worthy of the best parts of Braveheart and Gladiator . Yet sometimes there is too much , as with the narration , of pushing the boundaries with the style - slow-motion , for example , gets about of the attention for all of the battle & / or anything remotely action related in the film , and Snyder's tactic with his DP and editor is to speed up for a moment , then slow down , speed up , slow down , over and over during a battle scene . It comes very close to completely abusing the usage of 32fps in action , for no good reason no less . All this aside , I'm still glad I saw 300 , at least the one time on a gigantic IMAX screen where the contorted camera angles , machismo-rousing moments , and the epic sweep of a production done in such a weird way made it a fun , gory trip . And yet , it doesn't inspire to go back to it more than once , and its pleasures , however in a guilty way ( I couldn't help but getting a kick out of the dead-pan manner of some shots and exchanges between the characters ) , are brief and not very lasting . |
508,803 | 453,068 | 490,234 | 7 | not everything works , but when it does it's some riveting , tragic stuff | One of the big achievements of Un Secret which must be noted is that the director , Claude Miller , doesn't entirely sympathize with his characters or make them out to be all completely good Jews . They're not . This is a film concerning the holocaust that doesn't just make a blanket statement like " Nazis = Bad " . No , there were Jews who were in denial , and tried to cloud over the horrible fact that was upon all of Europe , and indeed it's when the film takes its most dissecting view at the flaws of these characters that the veneer is stripped away of completely innocent people being swept up in the maelstrom . While Miller obviously acknowledges and shows the horror of anti-semitism in France ( one brief scene in a classroom showing Night and Fog is especially startling ) and of the rise of Hitler , he puts his eye on the Grinberg family and what really happened between François Grimbert's parents ( name changed when he was a kid ) before and during World War 2 . Miller's approach with Un Secret is a tricky one structurally , and it doesn't quite find it's footing until a third of the way into the film . He tries to find a back-and-forth-and-back form of dealing with three periods of time : 1930s , 1950s / 1960s and 1985 when everybody is older and it turns to black and white ( an opposite touch that works , for a moment ) , and it's only effective in about the first five minutes . I became wary of those sudden jumps to the 1985 portion of the film , where we see an old Maxime Nathan Grinberg ( Patrick Bruel ) grieving over the loss of his dog and his son trying to find him , and found it didn't strike anywhere near as well as the 50s scenes . On top of this , after all of the film has ended , that huge chunk of the film with the focus on that first marriage of Grinberg's with Hannah and his very obvious but eventually-acted-on infatuation with Tania ( very sexy Cecile de France ) was far more effective dramatically and tonally than anything else in the film . This is not to say Un Secret doesn't cast a very fascinating look into this particular boy's lack of perspective and of his father's determination to compete on a physical level with the Germans , to almost " be " one in a perfectionist sense athletically , and how this one secret is part of scarred memory , attachment to one's faith and religion and who they are , and love and lust . The cast is generally excellent , with Bruel , De France and Sagnier delivering work with nuance and exquisite , painful emotions that resonate from one into the next scene ( Sagnier is so good she gets us to feel repulsed , or at least taken completely aback , by what she does while in hiding ) . And the moods of joy and despair in a Jewish family circa 1930s and 1940s - and the subsequent self-imposed shame of people in Europe even after the war ended - is captured with some real power and accuracy . But Miller also can't completely fix together his narrative ; he feels the need to jump around as if it will create a really intriguing rhythm , where if he stepped back and told it without sudden jumps or surreal bits like the " brother " in the boy's bedroom at night the film would benefit . There is also a lack of a real resolution ; the 1985 scene just didn't cut it for me as far as an unspoken father / son thing , and despite it sounding conventional a confrontation of the boy to his parents might have brought something more interesting than the uneven subtlety of the ending . A lot of this is so hearth-breaking in its true dimensions and probing of the subject that the only real disappointment is how it doesn't fell . . . complete with itself . |
509,902 | 453,068 | 43,018 | 7 | works OK as a melodrama , sometimes better than OK , but it's still a Bunuel film | Even as a " minor " work , I was a little surprised to find out that Luis Bunuel didn't care very much for the experience or final product of Susana ( aka Devil in the Flesh ) . It is , I'll admit , not something I would rush out to tell my fellow Bunuel friends to see ; part of that is practical , since it's only available on a VHS from the mid-80s and isn't in great condition even if found , but the other part is that it takes a real fan to appreciate it as a Bunuel film . Like Robinson Crusoe to an extent , though I think here more-so , it relies a bit for the audience member to understand what it is that attracted the great surrealist to the project . Temptation , pure and simple : this is at its best a story that allowed for the filmmaker to bask in a long-favored pastime , which was ticking off the uptight religious fanatics and purists who couldn't stand to see any kind of sensuality on the screen . Sure , it definitely pales in comparison to the desire and temptation on parade and blasting at 11 in Un Chien Andalou or Viridiana . That's because Bunuel is keeping it on the down-low , which has its advantages and sort of disadvantages . On its own Susana is simply a melodrama , a story of this girl Susana ( beautiful and talented if two-note Rosita Quintana ) who escapes in one of those fun Bunuelian twists from a mental asylum to wind up on a rainy night in the care of a pretty religious farmhouse . She fits in with the chores and such , but also does her best to tempt the prudish on the farm ( when she's asked to cover up she does , until no one's looking relatively ) , but winds up in a real pickle when tempting the wrong man . And , on its own terms , it's a pretty decent melodrama . Some good performances , a few very good scenes of dialog and tension , but also on the scale of a very good soap opera all the same . I can see where Bunuel might have had some tension during the making ; it feels and is a studio production , and as such he had to stay well within the limitations of the subject matter and low-budget . But it is worth seeing because it is still a Bunuel picture , with moments like that scene at night where the two men look on , tongues practically dangling out of their mouths , watching as Susana simply brushes her hair in silhouette , or a few moments where the twisted humor ratchets up a notch or too ( it's rare , but worth it , if only in the unintended or just dated " scandalous " nature of the content ) . It's safe stuff coming from the director of the Phantom of Liberty , but it's not at all a bad movie either . |
508,304 | 453,068 | 66,026 | 7 | clever in some ways , with a formidable cast , but it doesn't hold up as well for me as others | I have to credit Robert Altman's breakthrough film MASH for at least one thing - it's one of the few films from the 70's to look at those in war not as overly anxious and gung-ho military types , but average shlubs working a particular kind of job . In this world of the military medical sidelines , where soldiers get the help they need after battle , the camaraderie is never too false , and the cast assembled is the first prime example of Altman's policy of casting being 80 % of the job . The film is put together in a piece-meal kind of way , with about as loose a plot as dialog construction , where the sense of humor from the main male characters ( i . e . Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland ) is the kind of juvenile , sarcastic humor associated with its time . This is likely the kind of film that John Landis must have seen at least a few times before making Animal House . But the problem for me , aside from the film's strength in breaking conventions and having such a varied cast ( Sally Kellerman and Robert Duvall in the same movie , not to mention Tom Skerritt and Bud Cort ) , is in it working as a comedy . As a comedy in and of itself its just , well , alright . The humor and jokes in the film are a big step above the television show's lot that followed in the 70's ( then again , I'm not a fan of the show anyway ) , but the attitudes of the characters , and the little understated bits that happen , miss marks of satire I would've liked to have seen . There's some of the human comedy that Altman's obviously been influenced by Renoir to showcase , yet I wasn't laughing at it as much as paying attention to what the conversations were going on . It's a kind of high-brow / low-brow concoction that has its moments , and then does not at the same time . Perhaps I was expecting a little more than I ended up getting from the Golden Palm winneing , smash-hit film that jump-started the prolific director's career . And it is a good movie , no argument about that , and it has been created and performed enough skill and enjoyment that marks as important for all the actors involved . I just don't think it's a masterpiece . |
509,843 | 453,068 | 1,175,491 | 7 | Bush's " Greatest Hits " | Some will say - actually a lot have said - that Oliver Stone's new film on the public history of George W . Bush , the man and the 43rd President , will be slanted or with scenes that show the clear bias of the filmmaker . What happens in W . is that it is and it isn't a sign of bias . Unlike with Nixon , who was a complex man and could be treated in a different way , Bush is actually fairly straightforward as a person , as a leader , as a son , as a ' rehabilitated ' servant of the Lord . The portrayal of Bush is , actually , is not unfair , but in the process it shows the George W . Bush to be exactly what he is to any and all audiences , and this makes it more interesting and ( somewhat more ) challenging . If you feel like Bush should be impeached and / or ' taken out ' for all of the atrocities upon atrocities he with his administration has committed in the past eight years , you'll think it's not enough shown in the film . If you're on the other side of the coin , whoever you might be , it's kind of cruel and lampoon-like . To me , it's a finely stated psychological horror story with gallows-humor . Does this mean that W . is a great film ? No , it's not . Stone indulges from time to time in the kind of stylistic choices that veer close to being a TV movie - nowhere near as much or as sappy as the Hallmark-channel spread World Trade Center , but with a couple of obvious music choices - and the criticism put on the movie that there's nothing really new that those reasonably informed about Bush's past and his first term is not completely unwarranted . But , again , there is the expectation going in that this will be the be-all-end-all of lambasting , or on the flip-side that it's too soon an analysis of a man still ( not too arguably ) crippling the country away in his last months in office . What Stone has done , occasionally brilliantly , is compile a Greatest-Hits of Bush trivia and scenes that are either spot-on to how they likely played out or are based very accurately on what is at the date known about what happened behind closed doors with Bush and Cheney and Rove and company . On top of this is a story of , in a famous-movie comparison , what would happen if Fredo Corleone got the chance to be a mob boss while his disapproving father was still alive and smarter brother got more respect ( it's not beyond comprehension to hear the echo of " I can run things , I'm smart ! " from Godfather 2 in certain scenes with George and his father ) . While this could possibly fall into , as just a movie , into cliché , Stone and his casting director have , not entirely without coincidence , compiled the best casted Stone picture since 1995's Nixon . Josh Brolin is clearly now on the A-list following last year's mix and match of thrillers ( Grindhouse , American Gangster , No Country ) , and his performance solidifies his reputation as an actor so convincing and in touch with the not-quite transformation of George W . Bush that he makes him , if not entirely sympathetic , understandable and human and not some complete villain . There's also a gallery of who's-who in the acting pool : James Cromwell , Richard Dreyfuss ( exceptional ) , Jeffrey Wright , Ellen Burstyn , Thandie Newton , Toby Young , even Rob Corddry from the Daily Show , all of them are spectacular in their parts , adding interest to scenes that require presence , strength , and from time to time nuance and care in finding that line between playing a character and parody ( which , actually , Newton verges into a few times ) . It's also been said that W . is actually a funny movie , maybe one of Stone's few outright comedies . The trailer and the TV commercials have made this to look so , and I laughed a bunch of times at them in that context since they were in skit-format . In the context of the film , where the weight of very current history and wars still being waged and blunder and horror accumulating , a lot of the humor is either by a quick goof or what comes off like , as said , gallows humor . This could in fact be a crazy American Bunuel picture if it weren't true ; it's the kind of dark bourgeois horror-comedy in a sense that you laugh almost out of exasperation , but at the same time stuff one might find funny out of context ( i . e . choking on a pretzel ) is treated with an amount of actual gravitas . It's not that I couldn't see how it's maybe too simple a task to show a lot of what we already know - the power-hungry conflict in the administration , the Bush / Bush Jr conflict , the dangerous change-up from all alcohol to all Jesus - but at the same time it's revealed in the best kind of pop-melodrama , as a serious story of a man who is , in all actually , not at all complicated . It won't be a popular movie by any stretch , but it took some guts to present it as such . |
509,708 | 453,068 | 74,650 | 7 | obviously repetitive , but it has its moments , primarily as an act of rhythmic poetry | They talk so fast that you need ears like a super-hawk to really decipher what they're getting at , but it's this speed at going about selling goods that interest Werner Herzog so much . He's said in interviews that it's almost like " the poetry of capitalism " , as these high-stakes auctioneers , selling off cattle within a matter of seconds , are in a unique little world unto themselves and their small audience , mostly full of small town yokels and Amish . This doesn't make his documentary on them particularly exceptional , however , as it's a little too long and a little much without a lot of human interest ; we don't know who most of these ultra-fast talkers are . It is , however , quite funny at times to see them go this fast , perhaps in a sort of detached way ( then again , how can one who's never been to a cattle auction know anything about what it's like to see mouths go at a mile a minute ) . It's great to see when he's interviewing one guy and he starts explaining how he auctions , and at first in regular speed soon as a sort of reflex goes off into his ultra-fast speaking voice . I also liked getting into the groove of the competition , as it were , seeing how despite it being still at lighting speed with numbers and calls it can be understood which ones are the slower ones . Although Herzog fares a lot better using the auctioneer in his fiction film Stroszek - Scott McKain is the one featured in the scene where Stroszek's items are sold off in an immediacy that is purely staggering and , as it's so unexpected following the pace of that film , is one of the most hilarious scenes of the 70s in cinema - it's a fine little portrait of a group that is somewhat representative of the fun that's missing in more run of the mill acts of commerce . You're not going to see this kind of auction at an art gallery in midtown New York , only in a Herzog film . |
508,214 | 453,068 | 442,933 | 7 | an unlikely epic blockbuster done in CGI meant for 3D ; it's brutal and fun | Robert Zemeckis and his Imagemovers team and CGI people and ' motion-capture ' folks have turned out another following the Polar Express in 2004 : once again the technique of a fully realized animated feature wrapped around real-actors performing only animated over . It's a little like a mix-and-match method of Who Framed Roger Rabbit , only this time with Toontown completely bleeding over LA . Speaking of bleeding over , Beowulf is not the kind of movie that will work well for the wee kiddies , the ones who maybe just have gotten a taste of Lord of the Rings ; despite the PG-13 , had it been animated by someone else like Ralph Bakshi , it would definitely get an R . While not on the same level of relentless video-game violence of 300 , Beowulf does contend to bring in a similar contingent of an audience , while also likely alienating many who might have loved the original epic poem in the murky middle-English text . Transformed into a tale of a flawed monster killer who keeps on reminding us over and over " I-AM-BEOWULF ! " as he ascends into a position of total power as a living legend , Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman leave it more as a director's film , making little moments of nuance and strength in the epic action-movie sort of way . To be fair , Beowulf isn't very complex , which is just as well for many of the people who will go see it . There's also not much intended humor either , albeit somewhere in the similar ballpark of unintended laughs as 300 ( if , perhaps , with a slightly better filmmaker at the helm ) . Story : Beowulf ( Winstone , who's voice is about as commanding as imaginable ) is called by a Danish king ( Hopkins ) to slay Grendel , a man-monster living in a mountain , who comes down to demolish all the people in his path based on noise vibrations that tick him off . He does slay the beast , and when Grendel's mother finds out , she goes also on a rampage of some slaughter . When Beowulf goes to confront her , he knocks her up ( and why not when it's portrayed by a consistently nude Angelina Jolie ) , and she bears a son ( not quite ) unbeknownst to him . Then his son is born as a dragon , who also as Beowulf is an old king ravages the town . Take 3 ! Inbetween this there isn't much else story , save for a tiff between Beowulf and Malkovich's character , and some allusions to adultery in the King's marriage to the Queen ( color us shocked ) . The reason to watch the film isn't for it's poetry in language , anyway , but for the rip-roaring sensationalism of the piece visually , as a kind of pop-art throwback to both folklore and video-games of the present . Luckily , Zemeckis has gotten rid of the " dead-eyes " syndrome that plagued the Polar Express . It doesn't mean from time to time the characters come off a little wooden , even if it is behind layers and layers of silicon detail . What works best is seeing Zemeckis and his technical team make it as something of a marvel : when watching the shot where it pulls back all the way through the village , through the woods , and to the mountain and cave where Grendel groans in agony , the shot and the audio of the dissipating banging and singing in the King's hall makes as much of a stand-out as anything in Zemeckis's arsenal . Add to this the imagination in the fantasy elements : Grendel is one of the great creations in the realm of computer animation , right up there with Gollum and the new-and-improved Yoda ; he's an abomination , with no skin and lots of deformities all very close up in 3-D , but there's a very real human quality to him too , tortured and retarded , led on by the ( as a contrast ) slick , golden , and attractive mother . Then back to the dragon in the climax , who is a combination of all three , and even if somehow the dragon doesn't quite work as well as Grendel , it comes close . As a piece of drama , it leans towards the silly and pompous , including a five-minute fight sequence where the animators avoid an R with the dreaded shot of Beowulf's crotch . As a piece of skillfully controlled work of eye-popping maneuvering , it almost completely makes up for the flaws in the material . It's a must-see in the sense that you should see it on a big screen , with the glasses , and as close as possible . How it is with flesh and blood characters is just so-so . |
510,804 | 453,068 | 74,777 | 7 | veers towards being TOO subtle and stuffy , but remains a good view into coldness of 1930s Hollywood | For a little while as I watched the Last Tycoon , I thought I could understand what the critics said of this film when it first came out ( the majority of them I mean ) . The screenplay , written by Harold Pinter from what is supposedly a much richer ( albeit incomplete ) text from F . Scott Fitzgerald , stages many scenes like how one would see on a theater stage , with only one or two little directional differences with Elia Kazan's take on the material . This , plus its slightly ' dry ' style ( i . e . very little musical score , limited camera movement , performances kept without much , if at all , improvisation ) , makes things seem almost too much in the realm of the naturalistic , of drama kept to a minimum of interaction . But as the film went along like this , I started to notice something : the sort of coldness , almost a loneliness , with the character of Monroe Stahr , is what actually makes a lot of the movie work for all its intents and purposes . It has the veneer of being a little distanced , of not having the full driving force of drama and comedy ( although it does have both of those in bits and pieces , more as little familial or romantic drama or one-line throwaways ) like an 8 or the Player with dealing in the problems of a professional in the film industry . But because of Stahr's method of practices , of being as Mitchum's character describes " like a priest or a rabbi , ' this is how it will be ' " , when he's told ' no ' it shatters him . As a film about loss , and the very calculated realization that his code in business spills over into the personal , the Last Tycoon does work . Maybe not very well , but work it does , as storytelling and as a character piece . Sure , it might not be De Niro's best , but he does deliver subtle like it's as second nature as breathing ( kind of a twist on his other 1976 character , Travis Bickle , whom he played subtle but also crazy , where as here it's subtle and empty ) , and he's got plenty of backup . There was some critical flack for the actress Ingrid Boutling , playing the nearly obscure object of Monroe's desire-cum-demand , but she too is better than she was given credit for , at least within the range she's allowed to work in ( which , granted , isn't as much as one might think , but she's seen not as a fully-fleshed person but as someone with hints of a reality she needs and a fantasy world of movies she doesn't ) . Then there's Nicholson , showing up in the final reels for a couple of amazing scenes sparring with De Niro , barely ever raising voices for a low-key one-on-one as a movie exec and communist writer organizer . Not to forget Mitchum , in maybe his last good performance , and Theresa Russell in also an underrated turn as a woman grown up way past her years . Did I mention Jeanne Moreau ? She's Moreau , that's about it , playing a completely self-absorbed star for all its one dimension is worth . Only Tony Curtis , with his libido problems isn't par for the course , and Donald Pleasance has a shaky ( if darkly funny ) scene as a scorned writer . Does the Last Tycoon have some problems as feeling like compelling historical drama ? Sure . But does it somehow get into the atmosphere of its character in the context of his profession , revealing all that's absent for him every day coming home to his Asian butler ? Absolutely . It's a mix and match that will disappoint some , and for those who want to take the chance on a somewhat forgotten 70s film - Kazan's last and Spiegel's final ego-tickler - might be even more impressed than I was . |
508,771 | 453,068 | 67,185 | 7 | a romantic black comedy of the most light-hearted / sinister psychological ideals | I wouldn't say I really clicked into Harold and Maude entirely on a first viewing - maybe I may never will . It almost has something to it at times that I found a bit unique for that un-trustworthy brand of cinema known as the romantic comedy . It's not the last time it's happened , but what I found fascinating about the psychological interest the character of Harold ( Bud Cort , dead-pan to the point of inertia sometimes ) , is that we see really what is going on inside Harold's head in the midst of the actual scene as it's playing out , subjectivity in the guise of objective , cold shooting . The best example ( s ) can be found when he tries to commit suicide - more than once as it were . It's actually kind of manipulative , and if you've ever known someone or even been a survivor of suicide it might be very off-putting to see it put on such bizarre display here . But it adds to the perverse fun of the picture to see that hopelessness is really the only thing from keeping these fantasies going on as Harold's head-strong , perpetually bourgeois mother ( Vivian Pickles , a perfectly one-track performance ) , keeps trying to set him up with women . . . or else it's off to the army . It's a creative cinematic trick , though it might have even worked itself greater in a short film , or even as an actual novel where Harold ( and Maude for that matter ) could be revealed even more with their psychological insides and emotional bearings and depths . So in a sense Harold and Maude only sometimes gets under the surface . But said surface ends up making for the kind of unusual movie that doesn't give ' unusual ' a bad name at all . It was the second feature directed by Hal Ashby , and his acute sense of the visual with the purity of either eccentric / bottled-up people , or just stiff rich folks , is uncanny . His strengths at keeping Colin Higgins rocky , predictably unpredictable screenplay in check is also a plus . Yet Harold and Maude , for all of its successes at making some uproarious comedic moments as Harold keeps himself systematically detached not just from his mother , psychiatrist , and crazy army-lifer uncle , but from the proposed ladies as well ( there is one , the last one , who is an actress who actually ' gets ' what Harold is doing with a Kari-Kiri ritual , is maybe the funniest of all ) , doesn't do as much as I thought it might in really getting underneath this young man and old woman . There's an interesting split of the two sides of life - despair and joy - that make up the sort of existential mishaps both characters get into , and likely draw one another to each other as mutual funeral crashers . If only it wasn't so quirky all the time - sometimes too much whimsy can backfire . Still , the bit of unease I felt from the film's mis-fires in its broad strokes at black comedy ( my least favorite being the one with Harold , the uncle , and Maude as a " protester " on the rocky cliffs ) , there was enough that was attained by the actors to make it worthwhile and at least worth one viewing . In fact , I'd say I would watch this again just for Ruth Gordon , who we learn just from one quick shot ( a tattoo on her arm , don't miss it ) about why perhaps she is who she is at this age , and it's maybe too quick yet crucial to understanding who she is . She is , on the surface , a kind of overly bright , near-crazy fire-fly burning on into that crossroads of 79 into 80 . She also is a wonderful contrast to Cort , who along with his dead-pan qualities down pat , can also have fun too in doing his weird little suicidal moments ( I loved the bit in the bathtub ) , or when he has to get more emotional revealing his first brush with death . In the end , I'm reminded of a line from Scorsese's the Departed : ' death is easy - life is much harder ' . We may never know if Harold becomes joyful , especially with such a sad ending that ends up coming , but there is a slight skip to his step as he plays the banjo , which is a kind of catharsis from seeing this glimpse into the lives of these two ' made-for-each-other ' characters . Harold and Maude , with its sweet and puffy folk songs by Cat Stevens , and fine cinematography and editing , is a very good effort at stretching what is expected out of the dreaded ' rom-com ' , by giving something completely different and still sticking to a template of love conquering all . . . in a manner of speaking . Not Ashby's best , but far from his worst either . |
508,776 | 453,068 | 82,601 | 7 | a more than decent soap-opera with bits of uproarious ' making-movie ' comedy | Fall Guy is advertised on the front of the recently released DVD as " a comedy from the director of Battle Royale " . That last part is true , but it's not entirely a comedy . I was expecting that , and in the first fifteen minutes it is that , incredibly and with total personality-laden hilarity as a Japanese movie star , Ginshiro ( Morio Kazama ) is a prototypical ego-maniac who is furious that there's stalling on building a gigantic staircase for an action sequence and then proceeds to get drunk and complain about not having enough screaming fans . Up to this point it is a comedy . . . and then it suddenly starts to unfold deeper , and we meet the characters Konatsu ( Keiko Matsuzaka ) , Ginshiro's presumed love interest and father of her unborn child , and Yasu ( Mitsuru Kirata ) , a close friend and would-be low-level stuntman who may be the father of Konatsu's baby by " default " , and it becomes a soap opera . To say soap opera isn't really to decry it , as one might imagine ' soap opera ' to be something already to be wary of . It isn't quite melodrama , though it edges it in some fiery scenes ( my favorite was an explosive bit where Yasu rebels from this existential conundrum of doing a non-death-proof stunt down the stairs ) , and a lot of it surrounds taking care of an unborn baby , marrying someone who might not be the right one and a shady ex-lover who is obsessed with his scenes being cut from the current martial arts movie . So it's all stuff you could possibly catch on daytime TV . The difference is , thankfully , director Fukasaku casts his actors based on impressive personality , on lots of intense emotional power , and he interweaves the personal love story with an absorbing look at the making of Japanese martial arts movies ; just watching Yasu in the montage of doing various stunts for 5 to 10 thousand Yen is funny but also a small love letter for the movies . It's also topped off , I should add , with a climax that has been building for about half of the movie and pays off , incredibly , and is in a way a better climax than some of the rest of the movie deserves . In a way a director like Fukasaku , a seasoned veteran probably not too unlike the director character in the film directing the film within Fall Guy , is needed to imbue the screenplay with real dramatic force and a sense of how to slip in those wonderful bits of comedy . At the least , if you love Japanese cinema , it's worth watching once . At best , it's fun romantic pulp . |
510,290 | 453,068 | 94,663 | 7 | not one of the best of the " serious " Woody Allen films , but it's still underrated , with superb acting | Another Woman demonstrates Woody Allen at going , perhaps even further than Interiors ( and we know how far he went with that ) , into his Ingmar Bergman homage realm of drama . Of course , this is never a bad thing if done right ; Bergman was the " Mack Daddy " of dramatists in dealing with the human psyche , fragile human relationships , and the disintegration & / or deconstruction of the human condition involving intellectually cool but emotionally crippled folk . In this case Allen has a character that might fit in well with Bergman , or even with one of the old Swedish playwrights Bergman loved so : Marion Post ( Rowlands ) , a philosophy professor on leave to write a book , who started off her relationship with Ken ( Holm ) as an affair he was having with his wife , who had cancer . There's more infidelity to come in the story , and more past ghosts as well ( revealed , also in Bergmanian fashion , as a dream with the visions of the past on a stage in a theater ) . But Marion , left to her herself during the day at home , finds that the next door psychiatrist's office is within ear's reach , and she can hear everything being said - notably by a fragile case , played by Mia Farrow - and it becomes a private obsession which triggers a whole host of new feelings , or an awareness of the wasteland that's formed around her and within her . So , yeah , deep stuff . And to be sure there is a good load of Allen's usual notices of the soul stripped away under the garnish of the upper-middle class bourgeois of New York . And , as always , Rowlands is terrific in digging under the skin of this character , giving her so much revelation to the audience , even ( and especially ) when she's just listening to the conversations which may or may not be taking place next door . But there's almost a line Allen crosses here that starts to blur the line - as the argument often goes with Tarantino and his films - of homage and ' rip-off ' . As I said , there's material here that does come from Allen's creativity in branching out as a dramatist , of taking a deeper glance at people he usually skewers comically in farce or satire . But the style , filled with narration that feels like it would work better in a novel than in a film , starts to make the style feel clunky , leading up to that somewhat predictable climax with Holm and , subsequently in a sense , Hackman . This isn't to say it's a good , solid drama that tries to pierce the empty spaces of a person like Marion who has loads of intelligence but a confused spirit , tarnished by her affairs and loves lost and her rocky past with her father and brother . And with Sven Nykvist around as DP it's hard not to get a few memorable shots in there . It's just short of a ( possible ) masterpiece is probably the only complaint . |
509,964 | 453,068 | 985,699 | 7 | solid storytelling , almost like a heist movie , minus emotional attachment | Bryan Singer's latest film , Valkyrie , is a step-up from what was a long ' slog ' of a movie-going experience like Superman Returns . His direction here is more in line with the X-Men franchise , oddly enough for a movie about Nazi's scheming to kill Hitler . He has what amounts to a well-oiled machine via Christopher MacQuarrie's script , and his cast assembled is a gallery of who's who in British film ( yes , British people playing Nazis , without German accents , as well as Tom Cruise with his Tom Cruise accent ) . If only one felt a stronger bond with some of these characters like Cruise and Bill Nighy and Kenneth Branaugh play , there might really be something special about what amounts to a great idea carried out to the extent of great failure . If you haven't seen Tom Cruise's character , Col . Stauffenberg , explain it in one sentence in countless commercials and trailers , here's what the plot amounts to : a small group of completely fed-up Nazis plot to kill Hitler and implement operation Valkyrie which , in effect , will put the " right " Nazis back in power and end the war by negotiating an end to battle with the allies . This is the premise , and it is executed in a not so strange way much like the plot of a heist movie . We see the masterminds ( Branaugh , Stamp , etc ) , bring in Stauffenberg to use his expertize and hatred of what's become with Germany as a means to pull off their plot . They also bring in some other possible ' friendlies ' to their cause who will have various odd-job type tasks ( i . e . Eddie Izzard's officer will make sure the phone lines are down from Hitler's operation station after the bomb goes off ) , and everything has to be planned and operated to the last T . But , of course , as in a heist movie , we know that things wont turn out very well , or as well as anyone might like . Matter of fact , considering that instead of robbing a bank or jewels that it's taking out Hitler and his regime and implementing emergency procedures throughout Europe , it is what we expect it to be : a glorious try at something unattainable . What does make the movie fascinating is the execution of suspense as in any good conspiracy thriller ( watching the tension during the first war-room meeting Hitler has with his men and as Stauffenberg awaits confirmation to set off the bomb is intense ) , and the striking quality of the performances . The actors all do good work - even Cruise who has the double burden of acting with one eye ( or a crazy lazy / fake eye ) most of the time - this in spite of or despite the fact that they're not given much in way of motivation aside from the obvious . I liked seeing the character of Stauffenberg go through the motions of executing the complex plot , but there's not much there for me to care about the human being . This may not be the case for some , and if so all the better . This really is , to Singer's credit , one of those real WW2 movies with strong men played by terrific actors that . . . is not really great . In the right frame of mind it could , however , hit just the right spot . Valkyrie is slick , efficient storytelling . |
511,028 | 453,068 | 967,945 | 7 | an example of performances making the biggest difference | The Merry Gentlemen has the makings , and perhaps even the trappings , of a predictable neo-noir involving a hit-man ( Michael Keaton ) , a detective ( Bastounes ) and the woman that they're both eying ( Kelly MacDonald ) , and the elements of crime floating all about . But Keaton brings to the table as a first-time director an absolutely unbreakable grasp of what makes the scene ( s ) work from an actor's stand-point . Ironically for an actor who usually makes his mark in movies as someone with a lot of nervous energy or something that makes him quirky or mysterious ( i . e . Batman / Bruce Wayne , Beetlejuice , Jackie Brown ) , here he's subdued , almost like Alain Deleon in Melville's movies . He doesn't say much , but when he does you listen , especially as his character Logan has pneumonia or carries a Christmas tree . On his own end Keaton's got his character covered wonderfully . That leaves the other two , and one other actor that should be noted . MacDonald is quickly becoming an example of a perfect character actress . It's hard for me to see her becoming a full-blown A-list star , even a decade or more after she hit the scene in her debut in Trainspotting , but when she comes into a role , usually in the supporting variety ( most recently No Country for Old Men and Choke ) you feel her presence incredibly . She's so vulnerable and adorable , so keen on how her character should be in every moment , as someone who's fragile , been messed with by her husband , but wants to have her space while at the same time being friendly to both the lonely hit-man and the desperate cop . It's hard for me to see a flaw in her performance , and maybe helps elevate things another notch or two . Ditto for Bastounes , one of those actors you swear you've seen somewhere else but actually has only been in one ( or none ) features before this . He , too , makes a mark playing off both MacDonald like at the restaurant or Keaton in a pivotal scene at the tailor . There's another actor I should also credit , though at the moment I forget his name : he plays MacDonald's character's husband , and he appears out of the darkness in a scene , a recovering abuser with a newfound Jesus addiction who tries to win back his wife's heart as she holds a knife to him . It's one of the best , creepiest dramatic scenes I've yet seen this year . And while I praise his and the other principles performances , the rest of the film around them is . . . well , good , watchable , though nothing wholly remarkable . At times Keaton is still finding his footing with style , keeping some shots engaging and others just doing a big pan or reveal where it wouldn't be necessary . It's competent work , though , and I would hope to see something else from him ; at the least he reveals himself such a fantastic director of his fellow actors ( not least of which himself , though as Eastwood shows that's easier done than said ) that he may have found a new calling . It's an A-grade acting job amid a decent little B-movie . |
510,446 | 453,068 | 113,819 | 7 | a trifle in Woody Allen's career , but a good and amusing one all the same | I don't think Woody Allen was aiming very high with Mighty Aphrodite , and it's just as well that his targets are lowered onto one of the most " light " comedies ever made about a prostitute and a sports writer , with a Greek chorus in tow . You know the Greek chorus , chiming in at those moments when drama might need a little heightening , and if needed adding some unintentional humor to the process of a story like Antigone ( actually , it's not a very funny story , but besides the point ) . Woody Allen combines with a fair amount of his usual wit a film that plays upon the big moral quandaries that are juxtaposed by a it's own built-in audience within the story ; occasionally , one of the Greek chorus members ( F . Murray Abraham especially , in one of his funniest roles ) comes directly to Woody's character telling him ' what are you doing ? ' in a scene of near-classic Woody-nervousness comedy . It almost leans on becoming a little too goofy to deal with , as the story itself should have enough weight on its own to go without a sidebar of fantasy . But it does help garner some big laughs ; where else will you see Zeus with his answering machine on ? Woody Allen plays the aforementioned sports writer , who's married to a preoccupied art curator ( Helena Bonham Carter ) , and together with her has an adopted son . He starts to get curious about where his son originally came from , as he seems very bright and an above average kid even at the age of five . After some prodding and searching , he comes upon the mother : Leslie , aka Linda St . James , aka Lucy C ( Mira Sorvino , in a somewhat deserving Oscar turn ) . A prostitute and sometimes porno actress , she soon goes under Woody's character as a new woman , breaking away - slowly and with some trouble with her " business manager " - into a normal life . Although Allen does go to some lengths to make Linda , and even Carter's character , pretty well-rounded characters , he himself sort of stays in a narrow role as either the usual Woody nebbish with many a quick wisecrack ( i . e . first meeting Linda at her apartment , surrounded by a screwing pig clock and cacti with genitalia , and his run-in with her ' manager ' at a seedy bar ) , or as the surrogate match-maker for Linda to go on with a new life with a new man . A lot of this leads to funny scenes , not least of which surrounding what is in the subtext rather sad , of the situation of how she gave up her son for adoption and that it's never said outright what the truth is about Woody showing up to her , and there's somehow through what is potentially troublesome material some laugh-out-loud scenes . A scene that is meant , conventionally , just for character development like at the race track where Linda bets on the " Eager Beaver " is a riot , as well as the arranging of the first date with her and Michael Rappaport's dim-witted farmer / boxer . And Allen even attempts for a wallop of whimsy at the end when irony is piled up high , and everyone is seen , simply put , being in a level of bliss with their respective lot in life . If it isn't totally focused as a better Woody Allen picture , it may be because it works a little better when around the Allen / Sorvino connection , as opposed to the whole side-story involving him and his wife , which could be picked out from any random Woody Allen movie ( and not necessarily a very involving side-story either ) . There's a good few laughs , a couple of brilliant zingers , and better than average performances turned in . Like Bullets Over Broadway it's a successful attempt at presenting dramatic subject matter in a light-hearted fashion , if not as deep or layered as the former . |
510,760 | 453,068 | 1,155,056 | 7 | the plot isn't what works - it's all about actors , timing , awkward pauses , realistic dialog | I Love You , Man may feel like another Apatow company production , but it's mostly because some of its " stock " company players ( I put quotes as it's both a loose term and just about right ) like Paul Rudd and Jason Siegel . They give the air of using the screenplay as the easiest of diving boards into just shooting-the-hell-of-it with one another as two friends . Rudd plays a guy about to get married and is embarrassed to find out , from all those around him more than anything , that he doesn't have many , or really any , true friends . He meets Siegel at an open house for Lou Ferrigno ( he's a real estate agent and Ferrigno fills the oddball cameo choice , it's a great choice though ) , and the two hit it off as a " bromance " develops . It's this " bromance " that makes I Love You , Man a little interesting as a double-edged romantic comedy . It's already about Rudd and his to-be played by Rashida Jones , their little moments of fun and their arguments too ( there's a cute running gag involving Rudd's imitations of the band Rush sounding like an Irishman ) , but then it's also got plenty of innuendo to this being really about the guys , how Siegel gets attached to Rudd in that way that surely isn't gay but is more than just casual acquaintance stuff ( see his " investment " plan unfold ) . But truth be told it's not even this that makes I Love You , Man so funny . Rudd and Siegel are simply funny guys , but naturally so ; there's a new trend to put a somewhat straight face on gross out gags in these movies , Apatow or its spin-off groups ( one can equate it to the good rip-offs of Tarantino in the 90s to a certain extent ) , and it works very well here . It's like a sweet blending of Curb Your Enthusiasm awkwardness ( if , of course , nowhere near the genius of that , especially with story ) and some of the low-brow Adam Sandler stuff and joyfully useless banter and non-jock male bonding . It's not any better or lessor than recent stuff from Siegel and Rudd ; you could watch this with either Forgetting Sarah Marshall or Role Models and be satisfied about the same . Again , plot is not at all the strong suit , but if you just want some cleverly obvious comedy dialog it's a good detour . At the least , we get one of the funniest lines of the year , or just in years , near the very end : " I love you . . . Broseph Goebbels ! " |
508,495 | 453,068 | 74,829 | 7 | somehow straddles the line between being legitimately good and just bad-good Italian sex-horror flick | I don't know how I could explain that I like Werewolf Woman . It doesn't work logically as a movie , but does one go into a movie that's about a schizo who craves the company of men and then kills them at the instant they try and have their way with her expecting great art ? It's a little like a rougher , more sexed-up cut of Cronenberg's Rabies , only here the dead or injured don't come back to life . This time it's Annik Borel , instead of Marilyn Chambers , as the perplexed anti-heroine of the story . The catch with her is that she has werewolf ancestry in her blood , and after a cruel rape ( which we may or may not see on screen , I can't remember ) she goes on a killing spree . The dubbing is bad , but maybe deliberately so ; Leone didn't have dialog so bad that it made the voice-over actors cringe as they said some of their lines . And sometimes the director and crew get creative with blood and various colors : there's a shot when Daniella , after attacking a nurse whom she's snuck into the car with , gets out of the now crashed vehicle , and the first shot seen looks as though there's blood everywhere , though it's mostly just the seats and a jacket . For a moment or two , Werewolf Woman carries artistry ( not to mention during a particularly steamy sex scene as Daniella watches with hungry , jealous eyes of a friend getting it on with a friend ) . When all is said and done , Werewolf Woman does teeter between a hot and exciting half-farce half-serious / pretentious drama on a woman's descent into madness and murder , and it doesn't amount to any kind of ' statement ' except that , um , crazy women with a disease passed down through the generations can't be stomped out so all men with penises have to pay . Yeah , that's it . But even with the laughs that are had - including a bit when Daniella is in the hospital bed and an over-affectionate nymph comes in trying to have her way with the taut were-woman that probably inspired the P Wagon scene in Kill Bill 1 - it's not a badly made film at all , which adds to the appeal . It's not some stupid movie put together in very cheap soft-core ways . If there is any strength to the best sex scenes it's that they seem actually erotic and not as some tedious pornographic exercise ala Porno Holocaust . And , relative to other cheesy horror flicks of the 70s ( the Italian horror 70s ) , Annik Borel isn't too shabby an actress , with a quality reminiscent of Sondra Locke from Clint Eastwood's films ( only , perhaps , a better actress ! ) She adds just that little bit of fun and danger to a part that needs it to sustain its tone wavering between exploitation and sincere horror . So watch it under a full-moon , make sure you're tied to the bed ( without any crazies around to untie the knots ) , and keep all sexual organs on stand-by - Werewolf Woman is a bite ! |
508,553 | 453,068 | 87,003 | 7 | Funny look at odd characters but with lots of heart | Woody Allen does not have his best film here , but it ranks up there as being a very fine straightforward romantic comedy . He's got a sharp script for most of his cast , even as his nebbish-sort of usual character , in the form of Danny Rose , is more limited this time around . I also thought some of the material with the mobsters and the Italians were a little undercooked . But it makes for a lot of good solid laughs most of the way through , like when we see Danny's disastrous work via a hypnotist ( " if she never wakes up , I'll take you out to lunch , do you like Chinese ? " ) And there's also Mia Farrow , who is in a different role this time around , with a tough-as-nails kind of gal who only so often lets her guard down . She's the most ' alive ' character of the bunch . Woody plays Danny Rose , who is a manager in the cheap theatrics who finds with Joe ( Nick Apollo Forte , a great big shlub character played well by Forte ) a once famous singer who wants to make a comeback , and Rose to help him out by showing his girlfriend the biggest show yet . But when things get dangerous with said mob ( it's actually very funny seeing the accusation that Danny sent white roses just by his name being Rose ) . It ends up being technically accomplished , though not as strong as Willis's other work , and is amusing but not very memorable . But if you have nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon , it makes for some good times . |
507,848 | 453,068 | 417,148 | 7 | like any other line of product , you get what you pay for , more or less | Snakes on a Plane has been written and written about online , with the " buzz " forming around not just the idea of such a B-movie conceit of the title explaining the whole crux of the horror and suspense of the picture , but Samuel L . Jackson's part in it . Maybe , however , such hype almost can come back to bite , no pun intended , on the audience at large . Maybe that's why I didn't find Snakes on a Plane tremendously successful , because as with any product that's more of that , unpretentiously so , than art , I just went in without expecting too much . David R . Ellis , the director , does after some build-up in the first half hour that's a little too typical ( after all , a lot of these passengers aren't the plane shouldn't really be considered characters so much as snake bait with very predictable caricatures ) , finally make good on the promise of the title . These scenes in the main chunk of the picture , where we get both live and CGI snakes , of many shapes and sizes ( I had a good laugh when the 22-foot long Python did his / her work ) , is very entertaining to the extent it serves . This is basically the best part to turn off your mind in B-movie fashion and just let the expected / un-expected bits do their work . But then there is , as mentioned , a little of a drawback to such a movie that is set-up for the camp crowd like a bubble-gum pop-star would be set-up for MTV . Too many months now , for example , I've known of the much anticipated use of the mother-f-er line in the film by Jackson , and when it does finally come up in the movie it's almost anti-climactic ( and , in all honesty , the only time I've found the actor's usage of that certain big-gun curse word is in Pulp Fiction ) . His work in the movie is very dependable with the rest of the ensemble , as almost every convention or cliché with characters & / or scenes of this type are filled in by mostly professionals ; one or two do get annoying ( Keenan Thompson anyone ? ) So , at the end of Snakes on a Plane , hearing a hip-hop theme song put to it over the end credits , after seeing multiple counts of ( creative ) deaths and other mayhem , plus a level of logic that's barely countered by a snake expert character , I had my fun . It's not a great B-movie , but it should make the rounds of becoming ' cult ' level even as it's already meant to be so by the filmmakers - almost blatantly so . |
509,106 | 453,068 | 74,851 | 7 | visually a real trip . emotionally something else | Nicholas Roeg is a little tricky at times when it comes to narrative . Sometimes he experiments with it excellently ( Bad Timing ) , and other times he slightly dulls the senses in an experimental kind of way ( Dont Look Now ) . The Man Who Fell to Earth seems to be told mostly in a linear fashion , and there seems to be something of a story going on , but . . . I never felt it completely click . Maybe that is part of Roeg's point with the material , to create a kind of alienation that the alien , no pun intended , feels whilst gathering up the billions he needs to get supplies back to his home planet . But something just doesn't feel like it goes the way it should , even when things are fascinating in a scene , maybe even brilliant , and the actors do end up trying their best along with Roeg's knack at capturing a mood in a specific , strange but bewildering way . It isn't totally clear where the plot could be headed , aside from the usual oblivion of the protagonist to the wretched TV , excess of alcohol , and some drugs to boot . Which is fine as a route of a plot . But it's perhaps that there doesn't seem to be a sharper satirical stabbing motion being made in the context of the story , of what Bowie's " man " is doing on Earth , except in bits and pieces . Perhaps he's a reflection of how some of us act right here on our planet , or that there's even a sorrow to the state of affairs with Thomas Newton , who is sensitive , sometimes weak , and at least a little unnerving in his detachment via the almighty dollar . Maybe there are some valid points made in connection with the suffering of a human being , in what it does to his soul the longer they're on some strange planet , by way of a horrible and dehumanizing marketplace . But the way it's presented , to once again pop up a word that gets tossed like a beach ball at a concert , in a pretentious manner . Or , to amend that with another tired cliché : the parts are better than the sum or the whole . I did enjoy very much just looking at the Man Who Fell to Earth , with some scenes , some shots , some transitions , some jabs at " real " cinema , displaying Roeg's natural gifts as an auteur at the peak of his powers . Just seeing that New York skyline , for instance , is a minor thrill , or in the cutbacks Newton has to his old world . Hell , even the sex scenes , much lauded in some of the more negative reviews , have a certain messy charm to them . And who doesn't love seeing Rip Torn as some smart but dangerous scientist who moves on from a penchant for young students in the sack to Newton's possible rocket-ship ? Seeing scenes with Bowie and Rip Torn are , indeed , exciting in their indescribable link ( Bowie , of course , so fits into Newton it's hard to figure anyone else in the part ) . I even loved the quirky , old rock and roll / jazz type of music Roeg used , when the first assumption would be Bowie would glam-rock the whole place up . If there's anything that keeps the Man Who Fell to Earth from being a truly spectacular cult item though , if only for this reviewer , it's a certain mood overall to the piece , an uncertainty as to what to do with everything in the book and how to make it so unusual a piece of science fiction that its own alienation could potentially affect the viewer in unexpected ways . It's got guts to go where it does , to be sure , but it's a tough journey along the way , with romance , wonderment of the unknown , mental deconstruction , and corporate fables all entwined . Whatever you have to say about it there's nothing else like it . |
508,402 | 453,068 | 443,701 | 7 | not quite as fantastic as the series at its best , and nowhere near as bad as most critics say | To be upfront , I didn't think the first X-Files movie - Fight the Future - was any kind of great movie , and at best was a very good bridge between two seasons of the show back in 1998 ( very good in that if you're a fan you'll still want to check out the movie repeatedly when it comes on TV , oddly enough ) . So my expectations for the sequel-cum-addendum to the end of the series , a kind of reprieve for those who screamed bloody murder over the lack of a worthy closure , weren't very high despite being a big fan of the show at its peak best ( i . e . early-late 90s ) . Luckily , my expectations were exceeded just a bit ; when it's at its best , I Want to Believe reaches those classic , twisty , dark and noirish and fing weird depths that Carter's creation could reach . This is , in actuality , mostly in the central plotting , which works in cool detective-movie mode as Fox and Scully ( Duchovney and Anderson ) are called back to action , more or less , following the disappearances of some FBI agents . When Carter and co-writer Spotnitz stick to this strange story of Euro body and / or organ snatchers , and their crazy experiments that verge between Silence of the Lambs and 50s B-movie with their methods , the movie works very well , pulling in scenes of thrills and suspense and done with some great verve for chases and snooping around and , finally , wallowing in the horror in the operating room . It's also cast well , with Billy Connelly going for a not-quite camp performance as a pedophile ex-priest who sees visions ( or maybe not , who knows ) , and leads Mulder and Scully and the FBI along to who knows what . It's when Carter and company try and go for more " messagy " ground that it gets slightly shakier . It's not too hard to see the connection of the title itself with what essentially Carter's themes are here , which is believing in higher powers or , at the least , oneself to do something of value . Stem cells are a big part of the movie , and we even get a jokey bit thrown in with a close-up of George W . Bush and J Edgar Hoovers ' portraits in the FBI hallway with the theme music briefly chimes in . This subplot , with Scully pushing against all odds to cure a boy's seemingly incurable ailment , is nowhere near as interesting as that of the main plot , which is juicy and pulpy and at the least is never really boring ( if , sadly , not always with great dialog or delivery from the likes of Peet or Xzibit ) . Luckily , Duchovney and Anderson still got the goods in inhabiting their quintessential characters , and it moves a lot faster and with enough gusto to even keep some non-fans alert and ready for more . This all said , it's definitely just enough worthy for recommendation , and not much more . You'll never see it on a top 10 list , and some might even call it total crap . For me , it's another , possibly final , chapter in the saga of Mulder and Scully , and it works just fine . |
509,546 | 453,068 | 768,212 | 7 | imaginative entertainment with some trippy images and a very good , ET-style heart | The Last Mimzy doesn't pander needlessly to its core audience , but at the same time it also has a good accomplishment in that it also has an appeal to adults , or at least those that have passed that age of adolescence and look back on childhood with levels of nostalgia and relief that it's over . It delights as well as gives special meaning to putting a level of belief in what is unknown at a time when the rest of the world relies on hard facts and rigid control of personality . It also puts ET to a certain test : can the little creature from another world that needs to get home kind of story hold up to quasi ( actually precise ) psychedelia ? Pink Floyd shirts and Roger Waters aside , this may even have a secret appeal to stoners just as much as your little boy or girl at the movie theater , who will obviously see it in a different life , that of light , efficient irreverence and lots of neat special effects . ' Mimzy ' tells the story of a boy and a girl , Noah and Emma , both at least under the age of 10 but old enough to be articulate enough as well as appropriately secretive in the fantasy they hold paramount , who come upon a strange rock from the ocean . In it lies a bunch of fragments , and , oddly enough , a stuffed , fluffy , cute bunny named Mimzy , who Emma takes as her most important possession . Noah meanwhile becomes transfixed with the new powers that soon come to him via these rocks : he can hear the smallest insect , and is transfixed by obscure designs . This strikes up the attention of his parents as well as his science teacher ( Rainn Wilson ) , who also knows of the symbols Noah makes up . But after a power outage - it also happens to be a generator that Noah conjures - gets the attention of the government , not sure what exactly is going on . Emma has a problem , however , in that Mimzy , her closest confidant and " teacher " is dying and needs to get back home . That's the basic story , anyway , as there are little ins and outs as the story goes on , including a great product placement for Sprite , and a montage-free example of each child's new abilities . Some of this may be a little preposterous , even goofy , but Bob Shaye and his team bypass the obvious but still perilous pit-falls for filmmakers investing themselves into children's movies . No truly stupid gags , nothing with bodily excretions , none of that really , and if anything the humor , of a little wild and over-the-top in variety ( some of which I was laughing at alone while the other kids were silent ) , is innocent and sort of knowing of the split of imagination between children and adults . The two kids are also very good at playing their parts , with Wryn as Emma very adept at being vulnerable and smart , and O'Neil being almost too close to looking like the boy Elliot in ET , however not without his own strengths . Shaye sometimes lets his control slip in just simple things like cinematography or making a fitting enough ending ( too many futuristic hippies me thinks ) , and the goofiness does teeter on becoming a little too much . But I responded more to how the power of taking a long repeated idea , of kids becoming changed by outside forces in a very real world , and there being a sort of little twist to it all . It's not just about making friends and gaining in some alien intelligence , but in figuring the significance of the future , however weird it might be . It's definitely the finest children's movie , non-animated , to come out so far in 2007 . |
508,271 | 453,068 | 492,506 | 7 | a delight for linguists and fans of words , not bad for everyone else | Crossword puzzles , and the many people who make them popular , are the focus in Wordplay , including the editor of the NY Times puzzle ( the most notorious of them in the USA ) , celebrities and politicians , and the general public obsessed with them . As a documentary Wordplay is good , not great , film-making about its subject with a couple of montages and interlocking scenes that are weak . But the subject matter , and usually how its presented , sparks a fine interest even in a non-crossword puzzle player like myself . As words are all that we have to work with in communication and just everyday discourse , it's also attached here to the idea of testing , of competition , and how different and varying crosswords can get . Like the documentary Spellbound from a few years back , the director is also after the kind of irony of making such an isolated experience of finishing a puzzle into an event with hundreds of players once a year with friendships and acquaintances - a social event as much as a match-up . Many parts are amusing as well ; we get interviews from Jon Stewart , Bill Clinton , Bob Dole , and the editor of NY Times Crossword himself , Will Shortz , and they all give some insightful , funny little bits of interest into making the puzzles and playing them . But for the most part we're into the mind-set of several key players , real people whom will all come together for the tournament in Jaunary . What makes all of this work , and what actually makes crossword puzzles become good enough for cinema , is watching smart people , un-cluttered for the most part with problems , who can focus all of their attentions on this one activity , to the point of obsessive compulsive behavior . It's really fun , in a nerdy way , trying to guess some of these words ( or rather watching them guessing the words ) along with the players . And the way the puzzles are created sparks a little interest too , as it's one of those parts of life I myself could never , ever accomplish . Worth a look , though probably more so for fans of the activity . |
508,589 | 453,068 | 366,292 | 7 | takes a while to get going , and nothing groundbreaking , but it's scary | Takashi Miike , in 2003 , decided to take on two very different projects , one Gozu , which was maybe the greatest surrealist-yakuza movie ever made , and One Missed Call , a commercial project ( or rather , not as ' art-house ' or X-rated for the main cineplex theaters , at least in Japan ) for teen fans of the ' grudge ' type of horror movie . In all fairness in seeing this film , I have not seen many , or even a few , of these kinds of 21st century ghost stories with the ante upped on gore and things that suddenly spring up out of the darkness . This being said , it was an admirable effort from a filmmaker who's still experimenting even when he's making something for the ' kids ' ( the theatrical trailer shows this , as it advertises for teens and junior high schoolers to come see the movie ) . The premise is as follows : teenagers start receiving cell phone calls - from themselves . Soon after , they die , based on what is heard of in the voice message of the person saying something , screaming , and that's that . At first it seems like it's just suicides , but Yumi ( Kou Shibasaki ) thinks something else is up , something much darker . When the secret starts to reveal itself , there's more to the picture than just a simple ' grudge ' . There's a family-history element to One Missed Call that Miike properly exploits more in the second half of the film , and it's by this point that it turns into a ( properly ) ghoulish spectacle . Although Miike does stop for a moment to make a comment on media hoopla over supernatural occurrences with the TV show that turns Yumi and her friend into fodder for ' specialists ' , including something like a zen-master or something , he's doing nothing more than helming a story of spirits from the dead - and very scorned dead - going back after the living . His main set-piece in a dilapidated warehouse / hospital is maybe the strongest for pure chills , as Yumi goes through the halls and doesn't see the ghost crawling up on the ceiling behind her . There's even an almost tongue-in-cheek , yet tender , scene involving a green corpse who may or may not be Yumi's mother . But aside from this , there are other good moments of the kind of horror that made Audition the classic that it is , and an ending that puts a very bleak twist on the whole story ( and a " it was you all along " kind of connotation that reeks of being lifted from other movies ) . It's nothing much of a great horror film though , because despite the possible interest in the more horrific side to the story , the one involving child abuse , is not given much clarity - save for a scene in a classroom - until the last twenty minutes of the movie , where lots of emotion spurred on from the actual cell phone ring tone comes out . This being said , it's a recommendable effort for its main genre fans , a very worthy knock-off that is , oddly enough , soon to be another of the many , many , many other American knock-offs of the Ju-On type craze in Japan . It might have even better production design and effects ( and for a movie from this director it has quite the nifty lot of both ) , but I doubt it will have half of the ingenuity of Miike . |
509,781 | 453,068 | 963,178 | 7 | fairly smart and intriguing , but wouldn't be as powerful without that set piece . . . | Tom Twyker picks his projects with an eye for something that will bring him in on something really significant , even if it's just ( or maybe because of ) one sequence . Previously we saw his adaptation of Perfume which had that incredibly strange and erotica and absurd climax with the orgy in the arena . This time we get a gigantic shoot-out set-piece at the Guggenheim museum in New York . What leads up to this exactly I wont say , not because I would be too spoiling but because it's almost inconsequential . From the lead-up to this , which is just suspenseful enough , all the way through the execution of all of these rounds fired off , hundreds and hundreds of bullets in the walls of one of the most well-renown museums in the world , Twyker makes such a remarkable sequence that it stands up to some of the best I've seen in years . If nothing else , it can be counted as an equal ( only this time with a straight face ) with Clive Owen's previous vehicle Shoot em Up . As for the rest of the movie . . . it's good , but not totally altogether remarkable . It's an unraveling-conspiracy story where a whole network of international bankers are using tons of money in under-the-table arms deals with some " nefarious " elements . This also leads to things like assassinations , and with determined and ragged Interpol agent Louis Salinger ( Owen ) and a Manattan DA ( Watts ) on the trail . Some of it you have to pay attention to closely - it's one of those not-really spy like thrillers - but at least it pays off in some satisfying conventional ways . Twyker can handle suspense pretty well , as well as having a couple of strong leads and a couple of notable supporting players like Armin Mueller-Stahl . We get wrapped up in this story of corruption and worldwide espionage , even up until an ending that is average in its bittersweet tenacity . But at the same time it doesn't really stay with the viewer - that is unless you're affected by the recent disasters going on in Wall Street . But if nothing else , truly , all you movie fans out there , just watch the film for that Guggenheim scene . It is , for lack of a worse or better cliché , a knock-your-socks-off sequence . |
509,439 | 453,068 | 44,916 | 7 | Hawks and Grant and Rogers and Monroe - good , not great , " youth " comedy | It's been hard for me so far in viewing the bulk of what's considered Howard Hawks ' best work ( i . e . Big Sleep , Rio Bravo , His Girl Friday ) to be disappointed . Monkey Business is no disappointment , either , but it is kind of lacking in being a really great story or with truly memorable characters . It's a solid comedy , with a couple of intriguing points raised , and only left so much cooked , about truthfulness in marriage and the wackiness and total inhibition in childhood . It even has a screwball set-up , if not quite the overall pay-off : Cary Grant plays a chemist developing a new substance meant to not only stop aging , but to reverse it and make the person young again . He's unlucky for a while , until an industrious young chimpanzee escapes the cage , mixes and matches just the right chemicals ( because , eyes roll , the chimp knows just right ) , and dumps it in the water cooler . From then on Grant and wife Ginger Rogers keep taking what they think is the right mixture , which it isn't , with a chaser of " bitter " water . Can you say " wackiness ensues ! " loud enough with exclamation ? Yes and no . Yes , Grant immediately gets a " poodle " hair-cut and rides around ridiculously stunning and bubble-headed Marilyn Monroe around in a young-person's car , speeding and crashing . Yes , Rogers wants to dance and dance despite her poor husband ( who can only see without glasses with that youth juice working full-tilt ) , and goes maniacal with it . And yes , the climax - which is , arguably , the real howler of the movie and one of the funniest set-pieces of Hawks ' comedies - features Grant in ridiculously racist Indian garb scalping the man he thinks kissed his wife once . But then again , there's some scenes where it's just the typical plot moving along , and with some scenes of the screwball and just plain cutesy variety becoming a little grating . When Rogers finds the baby after waking up , thinking it's her dear husband , she panics and takes him / her back to the laboratory to see if she can give it a nap and re-emerge her brilliant husband . It's all too silly , and also distracts from that otherwise amazing finale . Maybe it's a case of Hawks ' motto - three good scenes , no bad ones - being taken to a somewhat logical conclusion : no bad scenes , just OK ones . It's standard fun that isn't very ambitious , and relies heavily on its two stars , who are , thankfully , very well-suited in their parts . |
508,705 | 453,068 | 486,585 | 7 | not quite long enough to really dig into it all , but as a term-paper-type look , it's not bad , and even funny | How do I talk about a film where I can't even mention its title in this review ( in the IMDb comments the word of the title of this film cannot be put in , unless in the form of fck or sht ) ? I can talk mostly then about how the filmmakers go around the use of the word fck . Fck is the word that gets everyone's ear up , and depending on the context or meaning behind it can get some people riled up enough to do something about it - like reporting to the FCC on violations if done on TV or radio . The hypocrisies and oddities are of course on display , like with the now legendary George Carlin ' Dirty Words ' case where the one and only person to report that the segment played on the radio was wrong was on the Decency board in the 70s . Or , of course , Lenny Bruce , who also had a fight that he ended up losing miserably , however much he paved the way for everyone else in his field . There's also a good segment done on the f word in politics and religion , even in poetry ( I'll have to look through Ulysses now to see where it's at ) . But even with the laughs that are obvious to come with such a given for scandalous material , including various movie clips featuring said word ( Pulp Fiction , Punch-Drunk Love , South Park , Scarface ) , and even with the Presidential utterances and sound-bytes of the word ( Nixon's the most obvious yet still unnerving ) , and even with some of the interviewees really giving some food for fing thought on the subject ( Billy Connolly is arguably the funniest , with HST being low-key and observant , and Allen Keyes and Pat Boone delivering very straight-laced answers ) with the two-side arguments , there doesn't seem quite enough here to be totally satisfying . In fact , the structure , however hokey and joyful in its wicked little ways , has to start delivering on more interesting grounds . Maybe it's just me , but by around the 100th time one's heard the word in such a span of several minutes , the word has already lost all of its power ( albeit given context by a scene of coitus on a music stage , a very controversial story at the time , among others ) , and there should be even more dirt available , aside from the usual historical asides . For example , I would've liked to have seen more on the F-word in music ( where's the MC5 when you need em ? ) , or the section of children , which should be a topic that could at least cover a lot more of the film , especially since the filmmakers obviously want to leave it as something of a climax . . . so to speak . Yet , if you want a successfully shallow , goofy take on the subject that might raise some eyebrows and just be another night watching a DVD for others ( who knows if the record setting 800 times is just another night at the bar for some guys ) , it's worth the rental . I'm glad the filmmakers took the equal-time interviews for those who are in it all-not that it occasionally preaches to the choir - and that the bases covered are given enough coverage to get a full understanding of how such an infamous word can become even more so in the 21st century , under a government that has raised the ante on the conservative agenda within the free speech guidelines , and that the censorship ends up spreading to other areas as well . Bleep , I say . |
507,867 | 453,068 | 117,737 | 7 | Bertolucci's Portrait of the Virgin at 19 | Stealing Beauty is a character piece , not so much ever really driven by plot , and which makes it a particularly European-flavored entry in the Bernardo Bertolucci cannon of films he's made . This shouldn't be a surprise ; the guy's been making them this way for most of his career , save for when he can't not have some semblance of a story ( i . e . 1900 and Last Emperor , which were epics ) . It's got some purely luscious cinematography - thanks , in part , to the equally luscious and vibrant locations out in these Tuscan fields and villas and vineyards and homes , all secluded like in an over-elaborate dream - and some brilliant moments , though in the end it's almost something of a minor work for the director . The most admirable aspect is that he's able , in short , to make a contemporary movie that doesn't feel stuck in time . It's a 90's movie , with a hot-young-talent in her first role ( I think it's her first ) , Liv Tyler , and in a way it works that she's not all that great in the part . Her awkwardness , her moments of sadness over her character's loss of her mother and the confusion over who her father really is , and the girlish and nearly overrated conundrum of still being a virgin , works to her ability as a ' first-timer ' , so to speak . And , luckily , she's surrounded by much better actors , people like Jeremy Irons who has a presence that is immense and cool even when bed-ridden for much of the film ( thankfully it doesn't turn out how I originally thought the set-up would be with him wooing Tyler ) , and Rachel Weisz in one of her early roles as a woman who has reasonable suspicion her self-absorbed American husband is a lying / cheating louse . There are others as well , like the one who plays the old Frenchman ( I forget his name ) , who's incredible as the old crank who can't bear to be where he's at . If it does feel like a minor work , as I mentioned , it's that Bertolucci - working from his original concept with a screenwriter - doesn't give very much depth to the situation , or to some of the characters , until a little more than halfway through the movie . For a while it feels like a shallow enterprise , the kind of " will she or won't she " attitude towards sex that should be above him . But at some point there's something that opens up a little bit , then a little more , and all the while as Tyler's Lucy becomes more aware of what matters the central conceit starts to become less and less like some big hurdle and something more natural . As well as this , Bertolucci does litter his film , which is uncharacteristically good in the present setting ( he blends musical choices very well , from alternative rock to old R & B and classical and jazz ) and has a couple of really tremendous scenes . The bit at the party where Tyler and a possible-father dance and the dancers all choreographed and strange come in , it's enthralling . Fans of the director should check it out , as should for those of the actors , but this being said it's almost kind of a light work . Lacking really hardcore dramatic tension , it's mostly predicated on a 19-year old girl's quasi-coming-of-age . Which is interesting , up to a point . |
509,769 | 453,068 | 79,302 | 7 | a fun trifle from Mr . De Palma that takes advantage of inexperience | The bulk of the crew on Brian De Palma's Home Movies were his college students , but if you asked me where it looks it the most it's hard to say . De Palma decided to make it a challenge in as much that he thrusted these kids ( one of whom Mark Romanek ) into their first real foray into film-making , but he also lessened some of the possible stress on the situation in two ways : he took some of the same freewheeling , seemingly improvisational approach that he took with his early satires ( the great Hi , Mom and the decent Greetings ) , and he also made it a silly comedy based around his obsessions and personal history . It's a send-up of self-made stardom , adultery , male dominant control , and the craftiness in the craft of film-making , and it's very funny . But to say how funny it is or why would have to reveal too much of the plot , which I'd rather leave open ended for those who might find this in their local video store's obscure picks . All I'll say is that Kirk Douglas plays the Maestro ( introduced by a hilarious lot of egotistical opening titles ) , teaching a class about how he faltered in getting a young man , Dennis Bird ( Keith Gordon ) to move on from being just an " extra " in his life to being the star of his own making . Gordon's Dennis is the youngest in the Bird family , which includes an adulterous doctor father , a weepy and half-crazy ( and half all-for-attention ) mother , and a brother , James ( the scene stealing meat-head played by Gerrit Graham with the same tenacity as in Phantom of Paradise ) , who teaches a summer class on Spartanism to a bunch of impressionable youths . He's also getting engaged to Kristina ( always gorgeous Nancy Allen ) , but there's some trouble and friction in their possible " socio-economic contract " . Meanwhile , Dennis meets the Maestro while acting as a Peeping Tom up in a tree , and becomes an amateur filmmaker . Now , as this all sounds , it's a little stuck together in cheap style and rough edges , which adds to its charm . It's made almost as if De Palma knows it's something of a fluke , and just wants to get his students as enthusiastic as possible about the process ; it wouldn't be as much fun having them on , for example , Casualtues of War . And as one of De Palma's experimental comedies , it provides for the director , through a better than expected script from his pupils , to express some of his nuttiest scenes , including some scenes where Kristina has to unleash the " rabbit " , and the running gag with Gordon dressed in black face and an afro sneaking around at night . It's not anywhere near a great comedy , but for what De Palma was after it's a success . In short , it's a low-key hoot , and De Palma fans looking for some ridiculous and crazy gags and character development won't be disappointed . |
507,985 | 453,068 | 106,029 | 7 | three filmed plays with equal amounts of character insight , good acting , and run-of-the-mill moments | Three half-hour episodes were produced , two from David Lynch as director and Barry Gifford as writer , one from some random guy , James Signorelli , I never heard of ( though , according to IMDb , directed an Elvira movie , and surprisingly helmed Easy Money ) , each set in a hotel room in a particular year in time : The first segment , Tricks , set in 1969 , is a story of a man ( Harry Dean Stanton ) right about to get some from a stoned prostitute , who gets visited at that moment by an old white-bearded friend with some dark past history . The acting is good all around , particularly from Stanton during a monologue about his first sexual encounter . But it also doesn't really lead much anywhere , even through touches of Lynch's usual twists ( the appearance of the ' friend ' , the final twist that does cleverly wrap around old relationship ties ) . It also tries to be funny , and it isn't , which makes it a little awkward when the subtle wit doesn't work . ( ) The second segment , Getting Rid of Robby , set in 1992 , is like some slightly sleazier , less witty episode of Sex and the City ( if you can imagine that ) , with very lame would-be-clever dialog , and the only redeeming aspect being Griffin Dunne playing a man who's breaking up with a woman who usually ' takes care ' of him when he comes by during business trips . Not sure why it was here , even if Badalamenti puts in a groovy jazz song over material that isn't worth it ; it's not necessarily a horrible short , but it has no real entertainment value except for people who can't distinguish fake-feminist-trash from quality product , and it is a significant drop in comparison to the other two shorts . ( ) Blackout , 1937 - Probably the closest that Lynch has come to doing full-on Bergman , via Gifford's script , by ding very simply shot but emotionally complex character studying . Crispin Glover plays a small-town guy who stays in the same hotel room from the other two shorts with his love , played by Alicia Witt , who's sort of slow and affected mind-wise , but has a lot to say about Chinese fish and seeing things like their future children . Witt has a look like the classic Bergman actresses , and the dialog even goes further than Bergman , maybe back to Ibsen , in capturing the tense but always powerfully human tradition of characters who are disconnected from one another , but wanting to be close as possible , through revelations in behavior and stark details . Glover , in a rare instance , plays a guy who is the straight character ( straight as possible anyway ) . In the Barry Lyndon-esquire candle-lit lighting , Lynch makes this all so spare that it seems like the farthest thing removed from an quagmire like Inland Empire . But in its own way , Lynch is experimenting just as much in getting inside the nature of a character's psychology , and it's refreshing to see him let the actors find their own beats in the performances . ( ) |
509,341 | 453,068 | 60,304 | 7 | If you can't afford LSD , try colour TV . | It's strange to see a work by a filmmaker that is a lesser one , but made during his prime . It's like watching a Godard that speaks to his future films - the much lesser ones - while still holding onto the quality of his work at the time . It came after Masculin / Feminine , a very good work , made during Made in USA ( unseen by me ) and before Week End , possibly Godard's quintessential attack / satire on culture and film-making . With 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her , we get a character who you might think at first is like the Anna Karina character in My Life to Live . She seems to sell herself for sex , but also just lives her life the way she wants it to . But it's really sort of three different strands going on concurrently - there's a pretty coherent look at a mother and wife , Juliette ( Marina Vlady , often as dead-pan as Godard can get her to be ) , who sometimes takes cares of her kids , sometimes just goes out to shop and socialize , and sometimes has absolutely passionless sex for money . The second strand almost comes as being like a pseudo-documentary - or a satire on one perhaps - where Godard has his ladies , Juliette and several others throughout , who break the ' 4th wall ' and talk right to the camera about their own state of mind and being and such . The third strand has Godard himself , in a perpetual whispering tone ( to get our attention , of course ) about the usual socio - political - philosophical - moral - cinematic - why - is - the - sky - blue narration that accompanies many a Godard film . And all of this , of course , with some of the most breathtaking cinematography I've seen in any of his work - there are close-ups that , as repetitious as they might've been , really did work . Like with the coffee - we see the coffee and the bubbles , and the colors swirling , while the narration keeps on going . There's even a very self-conscious moment where the camera blurs , the narration mentions blurred perspective , then when things come into ' focus ' on both ends . In fact , this is not only one of the most self-conscious of all of Godard's work , but one of the most self-conscious films I might have ever seen . Not that this is an immediate negative , and in this framework Godard's intentions , aside from giving a good kick in the nuts to conventions and what the usual even means in typical words and descriptions of ' things ' much less with cinema . There's almost a sense of consciousness expansion he's after in this self-consciousness too , which is par for the course for a Godard film . And it's also loaded to the gills with bright primary colors ( this was continued into Week End , though with that in much greater , striking effect ) , and product placements galore ; it always gives one a grin to see his great love / hate relationship with items from mass marketing and produce . And , of course , those title cards . But what ends up lacking from the film for me , and why I would only consider it a good Godard film as opposed to a masterpiece , is that I get a lot more fulfillment watching Godard's work when he just loses all abandon of common plot-sense , and just makes almost an video essay with plenty of semantics , a loose story , and an eye for locations and people and scenery and products and all sorts of things that show him being instinctively good with the camera . . . BUT , that it's also entertaining . It's not that 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her isn't never quite interesting , but the fulfillment I got out of it was more of being so familiar with his work that I could get a kick out of things I could already expect in the changes of form and moments of contemplative narration , not really out of any emotional connection though to anything with anyone in the film . Juliette , unlike Karina's Nana ( who , by the way , as a tongue-in-cheek in-joke appears in a pop-art style photo on a wall in one scene right from that movie ) , is at least 70 % of the time not really a character in the usual sense : if anything she's more of a mouthpiece , a kind of figure for Godard to put forward his ideas of feminist / radical thinking , done in a manner of voice and inflection that is always the same , rarely shifting . Maybe that's part of the point , and by the end we may know more than two or three things - especially about what she's thinking and attitudes on gender and the whys and why nots of just living and existence - but emotions are almost null & void in this world . In the meantime , as Godard maybe knows he doesn't have enough of a story with her ' real ' character , when not talking to the camera , as a wife and mother , he shifts attention at times to random moments with other women , like one who talks to the camera about her banal existence ( " I walk , climb , see a movie twice a month , etc " ) , or with a sort of touchy sexual discussion in a bar . The focus actually is never too grounded for Godard , which is partly what I mean about this film hinting at the descent his films would go to in the 80s and 90s ( at least from my point of view ) . It's not JUST about women , it's almost about everything - drugs , culture , TV , politics , war ( Vietnam especially , quite the topical philanthropic satirist he was ) , automobiles ( a funny bit happens with a red car too ) , literature , morality , and all that and a bag of 60's-era Godard chips . It's worth checking out , I suppose , especially in widescreen , but not as something to see right away if getting into the director's work - I think if I had seen this as my third or fourth Godard film I might've disliked it even more . As apart of a stretch of films , I respect it and am involved , but compared to the others it's not as successful in terms of it really connecting more than it does . |
510,479 | 453,068 | 1,045,670 | 7 | interesting slice of life , or rather slices of a life , on a naturally happy person in a strange world | In Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky he has a protagonist who I would classify , more or less , as plucky , a naturally happy person - occasionally , maybe , verging on " is-she-high " happy - who is the way she is with anyone she meets . This doesn't always provide very good results , though usually it gives Poppy a surfeit of friends , the sometimes lover , and some good times . The question is also posed to this character : Are you really happy ? Who can really say about anyone , which may be the more intellectual point for Leigh , but thankfully it doesn't take this deep thought about true human happiness to find Happy-Go-Lucky amusing an interesting . To be clear , it's not a film I would side with a lot of critics on - who , at the moment , are pouring on the accolades and praise like it's a masterpiece . Maybe it may be for some , but at the same time I find it just " good " , I would recommend it very much as a fun and flavorful rental . I know women like this , and if you do too it may provide a nice smile on your face seeing a person like Poppy in her " lifestyle " as a school-teacher , chatter with other girlfriends , ( uintentional ) flirter , and even a possible flamenco dancer . It does help that Hawkins makes Poppy believable , which is tricky since she's a character who could be in the wrong hands a " character " , too much to believe . And , perhaps , she may be ; in one scene it comes close to being too weird and random a thing as she goes up to a rambling homeless person at night and tries to converse with him , but Hawkins makes it oddly touching . Why she does this is not entirely clear , but it is who she is . What is a little less clear , perhaps , is how the driving instructor ( Eddie Marsan , very talented as evidence just by here ) keeps his job for so long ! In the only part of Leigh's film that comes closest to avian a plot , Poppy's bike is stolen at the start of the film and so she must get a driver's license to drive . She takes lessons from an angry sod ( as the Brits would say ) , who sees about to burst in every lesson . Eventually , as the climax of the picture , he does , and there's a level of emotional honesty that is kind of cleansing . It provides a possibly obvious but nevertheless captivating counterpoint to Poppy's natural state of being : she's not being the way she is to get at the instructor , but to soften the situation , or more-so just how he is naturally , too , as a person who can't chill . Watching those scenes it seems like " things " happen , but that's not entirely Leigh's point with the picture or in showing this character in her walk of life . After a little while early in the picture when one gets over wondering of a real plot or whatever takes shape ( which it won't , not in the usual way anyway ) , one can settle in with the character . Or not , as case may be , or maybe as well love her to pieces . Certainly Hawkins makes it a very watchable affair , with a sweet smile and adorable way of making Poppy seem alive and warm , even if , sometimes , we might wonder if it's a cover for something else . If I do return to Happy-Go-Lucky it won't be because it's entirely a great film , which it isn't , but to experience this woman again , to be in her company , as she wears on one after an initial " too-chipper " impression . Sometimes people need happy people around , and Happy-Go-Lucky has that person . |
510,847 | 453,068 | 751,089 | 7 | do the hokey pokey . . . | Chinga isn't one of the very best episodes from the X-Files , but as a piece co-written as the only one by Stephen King , it gives more than few obvious but quite entertaining moments . It's all predicated on something that has been in other King works - the girl who is more than a little ' off ' . This time , however , her anger and hatred gets channeled - or just put into place - through a doll that was discovered by her ( viciously made dead ) father . It's also another in the crop of about 85-90 % of King's work taking place in Maine , where Scully gets involved while - as she repeats to many - on vacation . The episode is basically for King fans like a short story not made into some overlong movie but a 45 minute film with lots of style trying to mingle with the very ( not always necessarily ) sly dialog and , of course , lots of violence . In fact this might be one of the more violent ones in nature , as the special doll sometimes goes on cue based on the girl , or through a song " Do the hokey pokey " , which in and of itself is kind of hokey too . Lots of harsh deaths involving clawing eyes out and ends met by witchcraft of some sort . While there aren't any scenes ala Child's Play with the doll running around doing the murders , there's still something sort of missing from other episodes that Chris Carter as co-writer doesn't quite get into it . If not for King's involvement it might've fared even less . But as it is I was glad I saw it , even out of order from watching all of the episodes now season to season , and there's some dry funny moments involving Mulder back at FBI headquarters with his theories and endless time to kill ( I loved the little pencil gag at the end ) . Worth it for fans of the author , if only for the tongue-in-cheek bits , though X-Files fans thinking his name might mean brilliance might be disappointed . |
510,447 | 453,068 | 389,557 | 7 | lots of Nazi resistance-fighting intrigue , an ideal cast , good but bulky thriller | Paul Verhoven isn't ever known so much for subtlety as a director , and Black Book doesn't really make any big steps to change that . It is , unlike his films from the past dozen or so years , not intentionally sleazy or overridden with lots of gruesome carnage . There's even a sense that he's probably quite passionate about making a film loaded with gripping history and lots of ' cinematic ' characters ( not totally real , not totally fake either ) . But it's also one where melodrama reigns over real incisive dramatic skills , and unlike the recently re-released Army of Shadows there's almost an exhausting quality to the twists and turns , the core being more about direct audience manipulation as opposed to more subdued theatrics . Not that this is the worst thing a director like Verhoven can do , and Black Book is loaded with the kind of entertaining goodies that other directors would shy away from . That it's not a great film - like it might think it is - is hard to ignore . Carice Van Houten puts in a breakthrough performance ( breakthrough in that it calls for some greater things for her in Hollywood ) as a Jewish woman who loses her family during a shooting via the Nazis . She joins up with the resistance , and her part in it will be , primarily , to sleep with enemy to get information . A little implausible ? Not quite , as it's supposedly based on true events ( whether it was a Jewish woman sleeping with the enemy or just in the little details of the Dutch resistance is up for argument ) , and soon the story unfolds in double-crosses and criss-crosses where you're never too sure after a while ( and after the war ends ) who's really a good guy or not , as for the most part few are . In general , Verhoven puts these double crosses - which end up making the film slightly bulkier than it needs to be - as a cynical but poignant point about loss of trust and all morals in times of war coming to a head . Rachel " Ellis " Stein ( Van Houten ) also falls into what the script entails , of her falling in love with the main commanding officer she has to sleep with , which is rather circumspect in logical terms . But then again , after a while , looking at Black Book , ironically for it's veneer being that of an old-fashioned good versus evil story , things become subversive for a reason . The resistance itself , for example , is quite corruptible even with its higher ideals of eradicating all of the Nazis ( the ugly side of which personified in the character of the portly Franken , who originally killed Rachel's family ) , and even have a double side to dealing with the Jewish people ; does one value a Dutchman over a Jew becomes one of the central questions for the resistance fighters . And throughout Verhoven is on top of his game directing scenes strongly , with just what is needed for each scene , however convoluted , and the performances usually right on the money ( The Lives of Others ' Sebastian Koch is a believable Nazi turncoat ) . It is , more often than not , a satisfying entry in the filmmaker's career , and even a return to form after running out of steam with his big Hollywood sci-fi productions . That it's also quite shallow , and with more than one or two really ridiculous scenes ( one scenes subtext might be ' is that a gun popping under the bed , or are you just happy to see me ? ' ) , is maybe to be expected considering the track record of the filmmaker . |
510,673 | 453,068 | 421,715 | 7 | A story of a man's life , told backwards , with both lots of good and some not-so-good at all | David Fincher is a truly gifted storyteller , probably one of the most talented and inspired that have come from that much hallowed age-group of early 1960s born American filmmakers ( i . e . Soderbergh , Tarantino , Linklater ) that rose to prominence in the 1990s with their groundbreaking work . It's a shame then that one year after directing a picture like Zodiac , where with a 157 minute running time ( almost the same as this film ) not a minute was wasted , he should have a film like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button : filled with so much promise , delivering in some brilliant bits , it's overloaded with a particular storytelling device that flat out doesn't work and doesn't help mask what also doesn't work in the actual story itself . I say this admiring this picture , admiring Fincher's work , the cinematographer immensely , the make-up artists and especially the visual fx crew ( who , by leaps and bounds , should get the Oscar this year if it means much in those circles ) , in criticizing it heavily . This is one of those pictures one wants to work wonderfully so much that its bloated length is the cause of a central problem : the script . While not entirely the fault of co-adapter of Fitzgerald's story as a quasi-remake of Forrest Gump ( the similarities are many , too many for here to note ) , the framing device used to wrap the story of Benjamin Button around - his story told from a diary he wrote read by his daughter ( I'll get to that later ) to her mother Daisy , who lies dying in a hospital bed in the middle of an oncoming hurricane ( also get to this later ) - is relentless and pointlessly repetitive . Imagine how annoying it would have been if Winona Ryder's old-lady version of her character from Edward Scissorhands kept popping up to tell the story and you'll get the idea of how it a ) just is mundanely acted overwrought by Blanchett and Ormond , and b ) it doesn't progress the story save for one or two of the flash-forwards . And as for the actual story of Benjamin Button , born on the night of the end of World War 1 as a baby aged 90 years old and aging backwards until he's a little boy with old-man dementia and Alzheimer's ? It is , as you watch it , pretty entertaining , at best engrossing , and provides the viewer with so many rich ideas that are only followed upon a couple of times . Button lives a fairly uncomplicated life for someone who should be , by the look of the trailer , to have something extraordinary happen : he becomes a sailor when he turns 17 , he sails the world bit , befriends and has an affair with a Brit ( Swinton ) , does some minor combat duty in the Navy in WW2 , and then has an on-off again relationship with Daisy , and then that is mostly the rest of the picture . Like in Forrest Gump , to make a quick comparison , Button has some of that whimsical fortune put upon him , brought on by a slightly sad circumstance : instead of Gump becoming a shrimp boat captain by a promise of a dead war-buddy , Button is abandoned by a father who runs a big Button-making corporation ( Button's Buttons , cute , huh ? ) , to which Benjamin is the sole heir . Only , we don't see him work at the factory , he sells it at one point for extra cash , and it doesn't have much prominence in the story . Maybe Roth or Fincher or whomever thought buttons wouldn't be very interesting to the story . But , hey , why not try it ? This is a case where the parts are better than the whole , if not greater . Some sequences are brilliant , really wonderful , like Benjamin's explanation of all the clockwork-type of events that lead up to one of those life-changing accidents for Daisy , or when we see Benjamin walk for the first time , or even just simple things like bits of montages . It also goes without saying it's a technical marvel , as mentioned , and is gorgeous to look at - just as , I should add , it's two stars , who give very good performances ( albeit not as good as Jesse James or Bob Dylan last year respectively ) , as people who have to cope with aging with each other , and have to grapple with death and the lingering sense of oncoming loss that leads to a decision of the way through the picture that should be better handled , but isn't . The way I'm describing it , from the daughter ' twist ' that shouldn't be one at all and is handled like one of those mean contrivances in movies that is unbecoming of a production like this let alone Fincher's , or the Katrina angle ( which I wager was Brad Pitt's idea , noble but out of place ) , or just little things in the story that don't work , you'd think I would rate this lower . But it is a kind of flawed marvel , a work of mainstream movie art that is tainted by an excess of unnecessary storytelling in a film that requires that it be strong throughout . It takes a lot of guts to pull off a picture like this , and I'm glad Fincher made it . That it's not something I'd watch ever again from start to finish goes without saying . |
509,699 | 453,068 | 465,602 | 7 | the ' Snakes on a Plane ' of the year , which goes without saying it won't hit everyone like a bullet in the , erm , everywhere , but to fans it's aces | You know if you'll want to see Shoot ' Em Up by the trailers alone , and probably by some word of mouth , which is probably how it works for ' cult ' films that somehow get left behind despite high box office expectations . Maybe it needs to start slowly in building the audience , because those that see it will like it a lot - like myself - in the guiltiest of guilty pleasure ways possible . Shoot ' Em Up is a tasteless bonanza of excess gun battles , lots of them , in circumstances that cram as many clichés into a big cement mixer , then once put into a solid charged with explosives and let loose into the theater . Sound cheesy ? You haven't heard the dialog yet ! " What's the difference between a gun and a wife ? You can put a silencer on a gun . " Just crude work there , but crudeness can work to a big advantage if it's as self-conscious as possible , and Michael Davis has made such a flick for the audience as to laugh at every illogical escape attempt and outrageous kill from star Clive Owen that by the time the first big action sequence ( which is less than five minutes in , which includes such things as riding on an oil slick and shooting rapid-fire to Nirvana's song " Breed " , among other things that happen then ) you'll know what you're in for . The premise is right out of a grindhouse movie , and in fact might have faired a chance at being included as a double-feature ; Owen is Mr . Smith , a mystery man who has as much power with guns and ammo as he has hatred for , well , quite an arbitrary and petty though understandable thing ( i . e . people who don't turn on their blinkers , mothers who threaten to spank their kids in public , and criminals who rob fast food joints with gangrene feet and piercings ) , and comes across a woman giving birth to a baby . After making the delivery in a send up that rings chillingly and totally uproariously from a similarly visceral scene in Children of Men ( minus the shooting of the umbilical chord , almost for no reason aside for a laugh ) , the mother dies from gun-shot ( naturally ) , and Smith goes to investigate further with the aid of lactating prostitute ( that's right ) Monica Belluci . The foe : ex profiler Paul Giamatti , who has a yarmulke that is never explained and a family at home he never seems to ever see despite it being the kids birthday . Then as the mystery of the baby , and other babies and dead mothers , come to light there's intrigue with a senator , an arms deal , and enough violence ( about 75 % of the film , easily ) to keep the story going along as almost being like a series of MacGuffins . But there is some element of depth , perhaps , the whole gun-trade deal that does seem to make it more significant in substance than last years Snakes on a Plane , which was concept delivered completely through attitude , pizazz , and often perfectly corny humor . Then again , who's paying attention to all of the specifics about what happened with what cover-up or what scandal or who the guns are going to , when there's a spectacular parachute gun battle as Owen and various nefarious guys duke it out ( maybe the best in the whole film as far as comedy and pure adrenaline go , which is saying something ) , and then as he gets to the ground an aerial shot sees the dozen or so people he killed while in free-fall . And the actors are all game , even if one of them ( Monica Bellucci ) is there as simple eye-candy in a one-note performance ; one might almost wonder why there isn't a couple more lactating jokes after her ' style ' is introduced . Quite honestly , I know that it should be something really deranged to enjoy otherwise serious actors like Clive Owen and Paul Giamiatti in roles like these but . . . damn it all if they aren't some really fun parts that they tackle like they're going for Oscar gold ! Owen goes for a turn similar to that of his part in Sin City , only here with more idiosyncrasies , and a much more lethal disposition - not to mention a hilarious running gag involving carrots . And Giamatti , who veers into the danger of making it both too over-the-top and nearly too dead serious for the character's good , usually makes his scenes to chew all the way to the core ; Smith might be the bad-ass , but Hertz is a cold-blooded , wickedly joking mind-fer , and his tone is one that makes it sublimely goofy and rotten to the core . It's probably just as enjoyable as his best work in American Splendor and Sideways , and for certain genre fans it'll be a Godsend . Very fine for a matinée , or very late at night as an excuse to stay up , Shoot ' Em Up is cinematic cotton candy flavored with hot-fudge and tossed down with a super-Cinnabon shake . You won't gain much at all intellectually from it , but who goes to see Shoot ' Em Up for philosophy ( aside from , well , shoot-em-up philosophy ) ? |
510,533 | 453,068 | 55,572 | 7 | A good , not great , early Godard - a film with earnest , sweet qualities in youth | A Woman is a Woman was described by Godard as his " first real movie " . While Breathless to him may have seemed like a ill-born experiment ( he said of it that it didn't turn out like he expected ) , this film displays his skills as a filmmaker that would later bloom out with My Life to Live , Contempt , Band of Outsiders , and Alphaville . This may not be as good as those , and perhaps it shows Godard , like with Fellini , as an artist who would evolve with the more experience with the techniques and actors . As it is , however , this film is , much of the time , a jubilant , tongue-in-cheek " musical-comedy-tragedy " about a stripper ( Anna Karina , looking and acting as she usually does - gorgeously ) who has that feeling kicking in to pound out a tot . His boyfriend Emile ( Brialy ) is reluctant , and thinks it's stupid to rush into it . Their mutual friend Alfred Lubitch , ho-ho , ( played by Belmondo in a performance that makes me want to look back to see if he was so bad as I though it Breathless ) would be happy to oblige , if he could find a connection of love somewhere . This story , much like with the story of three friends planning to rob a house in Band of Outsiders , is just the beat the actors and the directors sing and dance to . Meanwhile , the film takes of its own life-force as the filmmaker takes on a kind of criticism on the genres he's participating in , loading it with in-jokes . Sometimes the in-jokes can be a little irksome , as can be the actors portrayals in spots . There is so much irony , so much fun , so much delight in being able to make such a widescreen piece like this that they sometimes forget what it is they're doing . Perhaps I have not seen enough of , or at least comparable to , the kinds of 50's musical-comedies that Godard must have eaten up like gummy bears . But it is clear to me that he , along with his actors Karina , Brialy , Belmondo , relish in their youth in this film without completely over-doing it . The literary / movie references are funny in most spots , the music by Michael Legrand is used by Godard with a touch of genius on both ends . And just when you think , like I did the first time I watched Breathless , that it might get surprisingly boring , it bounces back to get the viewer's attention with some unusual joke or song or element to catch you off guard . Any way you look at it , A Woman is a Woman is an essential piece of the French new-wave oeuvre , even if for me it was imperfect . |
510,591 | 453,068 | 82,934 | 7 | is it a remake or just another version of Cain's text ? you decide | I say that one-line statement having yet to read James M . Cain's original ( short ) book , or the 1946 film starring John Garfield and Lana Turner . So I have now seen the Postman Always Rings Twice directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange twice now , and see it on its own terms without much to really compare it to . Perhaps my perceptions could change once I see the older Hollywood film ( even though Luchino Visconti's own version of the book , Ossessione , is one of his masterpieces ) , but for the moment this is a fairly competent , sometimes exciting , and usually sensual story of lust , murder , thick plots and a few tight twists and turns . Nicholson's Frank Chambers is a sort of blue-collar wanderer who wanders into the life of Cora ( Lange , rarely been sexier ) , who is married to a gregarious , overbearing lug , Papadakis ( John Colicos , perfect in a character-actor bit ) , who with his wife run a little restaurant . Chambers works his way into not just Papadakis's good graces as a worker , but Cora's undergarments as well , so to speak . Soon a plot thickens between the two lovers over what to do with the other . Right out of the best film-noir , there's quite a sequence that spins as their scheme unfolds , which includes money as well as each other . That everything doesn't go quite to plan makes this film both captivating and cool , while sometimes frustrating . Here Rafelson has his cast really locked in place like it can't go wrong . Nicholson as a street-wise tough guy who falls for a woman with whom there's immediate , sexual magnetism , but also has some flaws that come with the package - almost too easy for him but not a bad performance . Lange brings some dimension to a character that could be either a real prize or a true femme fatale . And character actors like Michael Lerner ( only better in Barton Fink ) and even featuring Angelica Huston in an early performance , add some good weight to the cast . The sex scenes years later are still enticing , and the ending is a true whopper that is part of the story's best catharsis , though in its own formula still tragic . If then it doesn't feel really as successful as the best noir of the 40s and 50s its almost hard to say . Sometimes scenes kinds of come and go , and the flow of the story sometimes gets jammed up after the midway mark goes by . It turns more into a domestic drama than something more exciting in the suspenseful turns early on . Just when Rafelson has his crew working to put life into some scenes , a few are a little flat in comparison . Still , even if you have seen the original 40s takes on Cain's novel , it's never less than interesting what goes on thanks to the nature of the story . It's a look at very flawed , psychologically cruxed people who attempt at happiness in ways that change them for worse and for better ( possibly more the former ) . Occasionally the sex could be in danger of veering off the more stylish side of the lust in the 40s noirs into soft-core land , but it's balanced out by its general professionalism and the acting randing from so-so-to-better-than-average . It's a like it or hate it film . |
509,493 | 453,068 | 473,107 | 7 | gives a good , cliff-notes analysis of the many facets of Wal-Mart | Wal-Mart : The High Cost of Low Price , is a somewhat valiant attempt by Robert Greenwald to put into a coherent picture what it is that makes Wal-Mart such an overbearing presence as a conglomeration and ultimate capitalist ( or maybe more likely fascist ) entity . It goes something like this : the independent businesses that serve at the pleasure of small towns can't keep up with the competition that a HUGE Wal-Mart imposes and closes down ; the same towns , in the subsidizing that goes on , end up losing out on what makes a town a town , and it even encroaches into education ( schools shut down ) ; the employees work for crap wages , get no real medical insurance or health-care , and there is discrimination as well as no real care for what the wages should be as opposed to cheating the workers of overtime pay ; the international impact , workers in factories in China and Wal-Mart employees in Germany ; and finally the impact of the consumer's safety within security camera sight in the parking lots . In shot , Greenwald's expose is meant to be a bitter , bi-partisan pill to swallow ( albeit some conservatives , of course , will look at what Wal-Mart represents , as did the Republican National Convention which invited the CEO to speak ) for anyone interested in what may be dangerous about something as immense a profit-machine as Wal-Mart . Through all of this , Greenwald gets usually impassioned testimonies from past workers , small-town farmers and store owners that had to close up and look elsewhere for money , and even those who succeeded in stopping Wal-Mart coming into town . His stylistic tactics might be a little less gripping as the people he gets on camera ; his editing taste is pretty simplistic as a documentary filmmaker , and unlike other documentaries he's made his taste in music choices are a little emotionally over-bearing or too manipulative for the moment meant to be caught . There is also something that is sort of lacking in the documentary which is a more incisive look at why the consumer gives Wal-Mart so much business . Is it truly the low prices ? I think it's something a little more complex , and it is maybe wisely kept to a subtle level given how much Greeenwald gets in 97 minutes : there is a comfort factor , something almost meant to condition the consumer , with a Wal-Mart . Who needs to go to this place and that place and the other in a town to get everything done , when a Wal-Mart has everything needed , from groceries to auto work and hardware ? It's a level of complacency that isn't always totally comforting , however , as those who've been victims of crimes in the parking lots would say ( and just in 2005 alone ) , or those in other countries who work slave wages for said comforts at home . Bottom-line , this Wal-Mart documentary doesn't present many things that most informed about what the corporation is all about won't already know ( certain things , like the subsidizing and its full effects , or the environmental damage , are fresh and appropriately critical ) , but it does act as a meaningful portrait of the truths that the ads would never live up to , and if anything contradicts everything in a typical Wal-Mart ad . What it lacks in anything striking visually it compensates with its relatable human drama on the levels that should matter to Wal-Mart , but never will . |
509,673 | 453,068 | 109,592 | 7 | has awesome moments of horror and bizarre humor , the rest of it . . . | Cemetery Man is the kind of horror flick I know I SHOULD like a lot more than I do . It certainly is clever with a premise that doesn't give a whole lot to think of will happen : a ' cemetery man ' Francesco ( Rupert Everett , a surprise casting choice but one that works ) and his assistant Gnaghi ( played by a very strange actor François Hadji-Lazaro ) , shoot the dead as they arise from the graves . They're not quite zombies , per-say , in that they don't eat flesh and turn those that have been eaten into zombies ( well , actually , they do bite , but you don't get infected apparently ) . It's almost a ho-hum kind of deal , as the dead come crawling and walking into Francesco's home , and without batting an eyelash he shoots them in the head . This is , until , he meets a woman who does the whole ' turns his life upside down ' trick , and after sleeping with him a grave , and getting bitten , and thought by him to be dead and then shot , though not dead , he goes into inner turmoil . There's a lot more things that happen here , and some of it rather strange and delirious ( perhaps my favorite bit is with the fat assistant growing attached to a young girl's un-dead severed head , which he keeps in a television until her father - the mayor - hears her and gets subsequently attacked by her ) . But here and there it's almost kind of . . . dull , that is until you can feel yourself saying " oh , this is getting even weirder now than before , if that's possible . " I'll give the director points for that , for keeping some of the bizarre humor going along , such as Francesco's freak-out at the hospital ( not very outlandish , more like a simple shots fired at one or the other while demanding to know why some guy copycatted his crimes ) . And sometimes he even rises to the crazy operatic levels of horror that his contemporaries of the 70s and 80s had going on . But at the same time , knowing that a good deal of the movie is awesome and even original as it looks at a guy's psychological and moral disintegration ( to kill the living , as bad as killing the dead , hmm ) , it also doesn't make sense a good portion of the time , as a lot of Italian horror tends to lean towards . Particularly the ending , which I won't reveal aside from being very similar perhaps to the ending of the St . Elsewhere TV series , is a head scratcher and meant to get the audience talking long after the movie ends . While it's a lot of fun , and with a ( anti ) hero to root for , and with a sidekick that's truly an oddity , I'm not sure it's worth the kind of discussion many cult fans use to discuss the likes of Fight Club and Donnie Darko . It's not very complicated , it just thinks it is . |
510,019 | 453,068 | 197,521 | 7 | I used to think this was it - not one of the best , but a cool prototype anyway | Oh when Americans first pillaged foreign product for big mainstream gains . With Godzilla , King of the Monsters ! we see the beginning of a franchise in all its fractured , cheesy glory . After finally seeing the original Japanese version , Gojira , I also went back to the American version too , which I had seen when I was younger . The impression left by the Americanized version isn't very large , but when compared to the CGI 98 Godzilla at the time - I saw the first around the same time as they played the old ones over and over to build up publicity - it's a spring chicken , err , radioactive lizard to be exact . Seeing how its cut together here again , I'm a little surprised of how noticeable it all is with Burr in the scenes , but I don't mind terribly much ( I can always think , well , it could be worse . . . it could be one of the Godzilla movies from the late 60s that time forgot ) . Ultimately , what makes the movie exciting and dumb fun are the attack sequences , especially Godzilla's destruction of Tokyo . Also , as a kid , there's something very effective with the black and white , as it almost comes off as being darker than the other color-film Godzilla movies of the early 60s ; one can see the ash all rising around , and a shot or two looks like it could've been lifted from the old newsreels following the end of WW2 . Actually , Godzilla is , originally and with ' best intentions ' , an allegory for nuclear destruction . The American version doesn't stress this nearly as much as Gojira , and what is cut out now gets felt on a repeat viewing . But I could think of worse things to do on a Sunday afternoon . |
508,769 | 453,068 | 117,438 | 7 | a well-knit and taut thriller with some liabilities | I wouldn't stop watching Ransom when I saw it recently on TV , not necessarily because it was an ultra-gripping thriller - even as it comes close to being that - but because I wanted to see what would happen in the story next . By turns the story is really only plausible in mostly ' movie-logic ' , but in the veneer of this being something that could actually happen . I'm not sure if ransom cases happen this way , where the father of the child changes his mind and takes away the ransom to make into a bounty on the kidnapper's head . But it makes for a pretty neat contrivance that is unfortunately surrounded by a couple of others that are pretty glaringly insipid . If there is one reason aside from the hit and miss storyline , it's the acting , with Gibson being his conflicted hero role of the father , who just wants his son back as his only need . Sinise , playing the villain , is a little less believable but does what he can in a villain role . He's really quite nuts , in fact , as he hides it with his veneer of professionalism - it's " his " show , he tells his underlings-in-crime ( including Lili Taylor and Liev Schreiber ) - and will stop at nothing to get HIS money from a guy , as he says , " pays up " . Sometimes there are great scenes even when Sinise isn't really as good at playing this kind of role as he is playing a conflicted good guy himself ( or shattered OK guy ) like in Forrest Gump . One I really liked a lot was when Gibson had to drive to drop off the money the first time , and as Sinise follows him he goes on and on talking through his walkie-talkie , with a dead-pan infliction on the voice about the film the Time Machine and how it relates to him and Gibson's character . It's not the usual thing I would see in a movie like this . The scene that follows this though , when Gibson suddenly realizes what's ' really ' up with these guys - that they won't pay up - due to Wahlberg's character's folly ( should've remembered an address ) , is a little more typical with helicopters over a setting like a coal-workers area , with the music pumping hard and fast . It's interesting to see a director like Ron Howard working from one very good scene to just a standard one , but then again Howard's better with actors and characterization than he is at doing highly-charged action set-pieces ( see the DaVinci Code for more details ) . What drives Ransom to be a better fare than it could've been , and why I kept on watching , was it had a solid cast ( aside from Gibson in his determined and headstrong role where he goes through a big change , there's Russo as the upside-down mother of the kid and Delroy Lindo who might be the best of the group as the main hostage negotiator-type person behind the scenes ) . What we end up with is a film that isn't totally satisfying , but has many emotionally charged scenes and moments that do connect , like the aftermath with Sinise and his " partners " after the first bothced attempt to get the money . Or , more crucially , the final phone call between Gibson and Sinsise - the " GIVE ME BACK MY SON " scene - that does really stretch the bounds to get manipulative with the audience . So , the problem then ? Logistics really ( and this is why I have a spoiler warning up ) : why would Sinise go back to Gibson's HOUSE , as opposed to somewhere else like his office ? Wouldn't he think his son - whom he got back to him via killing off his underlings and calling it in - would be there and might recognize his voice at least ? It's a really iffy bit that sets up the ultra-violent climax that I irked me . That being said , it's worth checking out Ransom to see , at least two-thirds of the time , how to do a professional type of thriller where psychology is meant to take as much precedence as the suspense . We get a good shot of that , if maybe a little too slick for it's own good . |
510,677 | 453,068 | 94,291 | 7 | I create nothing . I own . | Wall Street is at the least a pretty convincing take on an era , a time that may or may not seem to be caught in that near-decadent time capsule of the mid 80s when the President still had part of the country in the mind-set that business was booming , big-time . Oliver Stone , in taking cues from his ( late ) father , also a stockbroker , took on this insular , mammoth system using story and characters that are not , unfortunately , as powerful as the actors in cast . I'd say though it's probably one of the director's most accessible pictures , where the information is in your face and as clear as day . It's even absorbing , to a fault , for someone like myself who was too too young to know what was going on in the insider trading scandal ( s ) around this period . The sense of corruption is always in the air somewhere in Wall Street , and towards the last third it gets amplified , and it leaves the characters in the end ( the two main male leads I mean ) with nothing good going for either of them . It's the kind of world where one side eats the other , and then back on the other again . Not that Stone's points in the script , which isn't one of his best , don't give some good signals at times . He has a fine premise - an ambitious kid , Fox ( Charlie Sheen in his innocent-turned-hot-headed form here ) , in a stuffy firm tries to bag an ' elephant ' , Mr . Gordon Gecko ( Michael Douglas ) , who has more money and connection than any ten middle class people might have . Soon , through various dealings working his way up , Fox gets Gecko's attention - and in its own twisted form trust - and also gets rich , very rich . But at what cost becomes the real question , as Fox's father ( Martin Sheen , a surprise cast choice for a real life father / son turn but still excellent here ) might lose everything he's worked for at a little airline company . The filmmaker here , perhaps in reflection of his subject matter , makes his film in a slick fashion , but not in the wild and sensational style of his best work ; here he's a little restrained , but in a good way nevertheless . There's even a multiple screen scene where a deal is shown from various angles , in four places in the same frame . As for character and the like , it's really up to the actors here to fill in the gaps . And the gaps , for me anyway , were that the script felt a little weighed down by predictability . Gecko is a character that could ( or at least should ) be seen through within the first few scenes . The seductive power of this to Fox isn't unconvincing , though it becomes a little trickier when an undercooked romantic sub-plot is thrown in with Darryl Hannah's two-side playing dame . But to say that the actor's end up filling the gaps is almost a compliment to Stone . Maybe he knew that he needed people who could make these conventional asides real and affecting to an extent , and it's a credit to Michael Douglas that he makes it one of his towering performances as an actor . He's ultra-slick , even cool in his sort of dastardly way , and there are at least three scenes he plays in that are always striking where it's hot ( the famous ' greed is good ' speech , the scene where Sheen confronts him about the airline stock betrayal , and the final scene in Central Park ) . Sheen , as well , delivers the goods here , and is especially noteworthy in scenes with his father . If there are some expected things in the story , and there are , the ending at least leaves things with a bittersweet note of interest . And Stone does raise some good questions about how morality , if anything of it , can work its way into the world of Free Trade where the sky can't even be considered the limit anymore . It's not as powerful a punch as say JFK or Born on the Fourth of July or NBK , but in its own right it holds its own as a very good piece of cautionary drama . ( strong ) |
510,764 | 453,068 | 1,372,710 | 7 | nifty but not very memorable extra / short-doc on Hollis Mason's " Under the Hood " | Like with the DVD release of the Dark Knight , though this time much earlier to coincide with the theatrical release , DC put together this short documentary as a companion piece cum extra to the " source " of the film , which itself is a take-off on the in-between chapters of the Watchmen book . Hollis Mason , the original Nite Owl in Watchmen , writes an autobiography chronicling the history of the costumed heroes that are a big deal in the 40s , then becoming less of a " fad " in the 1950s and then being outlawed , all with the prose of who was originally a NYC police officer . It's a series of interviews doen in faux 1970 style TV ( even includes a few " vintage " commercials , one of the three actually quite funny ) , with an interviewer who gets the actors playing the characters to improvise ( or maybe it's all written , I can see that very well being the case as well ) on the subjects posed and raised . It's fun to watch and a little clever , but is mostly a cookie - it's got not much else really substantial out of it unless you have read the book . Certain characters pop up that are not in Snyder's theatrical cut of Watchmen ( i . e . Captain Metropolis ) , and it doesn't run too long to over-stay its welcome . This said , the other little ' goodies ' presented by Snyder and company - the other fake news segments on the likes of Dr . Manhattan that appeared online - were better . |
509,429 | 453,068 | 949,815 | 7 | If you haven't seen Rickles's stand-up , you don't know the art of the comic-insult | John Landis's new documentary on Don Rickles , Mr . Warmth : The Don Rickles Project , works best when focused squarely on its star attraction . Every so often Landis gets distracted in telling ( or rather showing other people like Bob Newhart ) go on about the glory days of a mob-run Las Vegas , and it starts to loose a little of its focus . And every so often he takes a misstep with the editing . But since comedy is Landis's strong-suit as a director , anyway , it's fitting that his film works best when his subject is given the full-treatment , either in clips of his performances , his old Johnny Carson appearances , or with some of his adulators telling it like it is : he's one of the funniest stand-up comics of his time . And still today he kiss : watching him completely skewer every single race and both sexes in a Vegas audience is dynamite ( sometimes you just wait for him to drop his microphone in ironic disgust ) . Just hearing the man tell stories , or talk about his wonderful ( and wonderfully Jewish ) mother , or doing lovingly stupid imitations of his wife ( the tongue is what clicks it ) , is entertaining . He's a man who takes his fame completely in stride , but not for granted . He tells of a cruel prank done on the set of Run Silent Run Deep involving him and Clark Gable ; he goes overboard as host of the Tonight Show by breaking Carson's box or whatever , and Carson goes right next-door to the set of Rickles's show , where after he apologizes he says " ladies and gentlemen , Johnny Carson ! " And then the testimonies themselves bring up laughs ( Sarah Silverman comments how Rickles taught her what black people were like living secluded in New Hampshire ) , even if it's just repeating old Rickles lines . His is a very precise shtick where finding the line and only going across it so much is like an art - you don't want to make it into a totally sensationalist exercise , but the audience still has to have a good time at not only others ' expenses , but their own . It's a kind of all-inclusive comedy , be it the schmuck who's 300 pounds and with a dopey wife , or the president , or , of course most brilliantly , Dean Martin . It's not exactly a great documentary , but it's a fine showcase , and the kind of remembrance for one of those old kings of comedy that haven't yet kicked the bucket , like ( unfortunately ) so many in show-biz have in recent years . |
509,880 | 453,068 | 425,661 | 7 | ah ah , Azuki beans , I love them | What a strangely wonderful , if sometimes slight and bulky , big-budget fantasy this is . Takashi Miike had already proved , by the time he got to The Great Yokhai War , that he could dip into other films aside from his supposed niche of the crime / yakuza genre ( Visitor Q and Andromedia showed this , the former great the latter lesser ) . But here Miike , in his first and only co-screen writing credit no less , proves that he can deliver the goods on a post-modern soup of mythical fantasy conventions , and with it boatload of CGI , creature-effects and make-up , and an epic battle that is more like a " festival " than something out of Lord of the Rings . The comparisons can be made far and wide , to be sure , and the most obvious to jump on would be Miyazaki , for the seemingly unique mixture of kids-as-big-heroes , power-hungry sorcerers looking for the energy of the earth as the main source , machinery as the greatest evil , and many bizarrely defined , flamboyantly designed creatures ( or Yokai of the title ) . But there can also be comparisons made to Star Wars , especially to the Gungan battle in TPM , and to the whole power-play between good and evil with similar forces . Or to anime like Samurai 7 . Or , of course , to Henson's films . And through all of these comparisons , and even through the flaws or over-reaching moments , it's Miike all the way with the sensibilities of effects and characters . Here , Ryunosuke Kamiki plays Tadashi , the prototypical kid who starts out sort of gullible and sensitive to things in the world , but will become the hero in a world going into darkness . The darkness is from an evil sorcerer , who gets his energy from all of the rage and wretched vibes in the human world , and who is also starting to put to death the spirits and other creatures , the Yokhai , into a fire that sends them into gigantic robots that have only one mission - to destroy and kill anything in their paths . Tadashi gets as pumped up to fight Sato the sorcerer as the Yokai once Sato's main minion and cohort , Agi ( Kill Bill's Chiaki Kuriyama , another great villainies ) steals Tadashi's little furry companion , a Sunekosuri . Soon , things come to a head , in a climax that brings to mind many other fantasy films and stories , but can only be contained , up to a point , by Miike and his crew . I would probably recommend The Great Yokai War for kids , but in the forward note that it's not some watered down fantasy in American circles . This has creatures galore , including a one-eyed umbrella stand , and a walking , talking wall , not to mention a turtle , a fire serpent , and a woman who became cursed by Sato . So the variety is on high on that end , and one might almost feel like the creatures and effects - which grows to unfathomable heights when the " festival " hits with the Yokai reaching hundreds of miles in scope . But there's also a sense of fantasy being strong in both the light and the dark , and Sunekosuri becomes perhaps the greatest emotional tool at Miike's disposal ( and not just because it's cuteness squared ) ; where else to get an audience riled up than over a little furry ball of fury , who ends up in a tragic battle with Tadashi in robot form ? Yet through all of this , the sense of anarchy that can be found in the brightest spots of Miike's career is here as well , which distinguishes it from its animated , Muppet and sci-fi counterparts . There's the bizarre humor as usual , including a song dedicated to Akuzi beans at a crucial moment in the climax , and more than a few flights of fancy with the creatures and fight scenes ( I loved , for example , the guy with the big blue head who has to make it smaller , or the anxious turtle-Yokai ) . The biggest danger with Miike's access to bigger special effects and computer wizardry , which he flirts with , is overkill on this end . He's got everything down , I'm sure , with storyboards , and he creates some memorable impressions with some compositions ( one of them is when all is said and done , and Tadashi and the ' other ' human character are in the middle of the Tokyo rubble in an overhead shot ) , but the CGI is sometimes a little unconvincing with the robots , and the interplay skirts on being TOO flamboyant , and some visuals , like the overlay of the Yokai spreading the word about the big festival on the map , just seem weak and pat . I almost wondered if Miike might dip into ( bad ) Spy Kids territory , quite frankly . But this liability aside , The Great Yokai War provides more than a share of excitement , goofy thrills , and innocent melodrama that came with many of the best childhood fantasies . It owes a lot to cinema , as well as traditional Japanese folklore , but the screws are always turning even in its most ludicrous and veeringly confusing beats . It's not the filmmaker at his very best , but working in experimentation in a commercial medium ends up working to his advantage . It's got a neat little message , and lots of cool adventure . |
509,536 | 453,068 | 362,227 | 7 | a good piece of humanist comedy , nothing more , nothing less | The Terminal is sort of like a a Frank Capra tale spun into 21st century America , with it a sort of divide between the naive innocence of ordinary men , and the cynicism of the outside world . It also is akin to E . T . as being about an outsider who comes into a strange situation , gets befriended , but in reality is really all on his own on his quest . There is a sweetness to the film that works well , even when all plausibility at times goes right out the window in return to try and make shamelessly entertaining product . Steven Spielberg here has a film that is meant , in a way , as THE film for airline movies , as it can be geared for kids and adults , though like airplanes its not always the best experience . Tom Hanks is genuine for a lot of the performance , and at least a little fascinating , as Viktor Navorski , a refugee from a country made up for the sake of the film ( though , apparently , his accent is for real ) . He's stuck in the airport , not able to leave into New York City or back to war-torn home . So , he sticks around , he meets the janitor , he runs into a emotionally weary flight attendant ( Catherine Zeta-Jones , not the best she's done but cute enough ) , and gets to become familiar company around the huge terminal . It's a huge place , with adversiting that almost makes it like a insular Times Square . During this Viktor goes from befriending the workers , to befriending the attendant , which leads to some romantic interest - or maybe not . Who knows with Viktor's true intentions to stick around for his chance to get into New York City . The reason he ends up telling is , actually , one of the most touching moments in the film , maybe even in the better of Spielberg films . This isn't , however , overall anything great in the filmmaker's cannon . Maybe not a ' minor ' work , but it's often with too much whimsey . Or maybe not ; it is a film that is meant as a crowd-pleaser , or a heartwarmer , but at times isn't too sure how to balance between some of the believability the script needs at times ( i . e . why is the focus sometimes squarely on Navorski , when its a security station meant to focus on everyone at the airport ) . The visual styling is impressive , with some cool camera sweeps and tracks in the immense set . But it doesn't add up to anything that marks it as a great film . It also doesn't hold up as well as Spielberg's other films on repeat viewings ; on a first go-around it is sheerly entertainment , but once seen again certain scenes bring out some groans . It might be even more enlightening or fun for kids , as it is on that sort of E . T . level . And Hanks ' performance , which only shows some dimension towards the last twenty minutes , is good enough , though could've been more . I guess in short I'm saying that the Terminal is reccomendable , especially as a ' date ' movie of sorts , though I wouldn't say to start off with it as the first Spielberg ever . That being said , Kumar Palau ( the janitor character , also a Wes Anderson regular ) , is the best thing about the movie . |
510,359 | 453,068 | 993,789 | 7 | a big book of a film with some invention and strong acting that is too long | I got to hand it to the filmmaker , Arnaud Desplechin , at least on one significant point : A Christmas Tale is like a big book faithfully adapted to the screen , only in this case non-existent , and it has that wonderful if imperfect feeling of surrounding oneself with the world and atmosphere and attitudes of a family where the dysfunction runs deep and clear , emphasizing Tolstoy's classic " no one unhappy family is the same " credo . His film is also sometimes a big melodrama , folded around a cancer story not unlike a more serious ( yet sometimes lighter version of ) The Royal Tenenbaums , and centered so firmly around the family around that crazy but loving-despite-everything time of Christmas you'd swear Desplechin watch the first hour of Fanny & Alexander too many times to count . At the same time A Christmas Tale is very much a French film , is attitude and approach to narrative and occasionally nearing that dreaded P-word ( pretentious ) in being 2 hours of incidents and confrontations and little details and twists . A lot happens with the Vuillard family over a few days , but in it uncovers a whole can of worms involving a banished son ( Mathieu Amalric , who thankfully is maybe the centerpiece of the ensemble in terms of being the black sheep like Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married ) , a depressed daughter ( Anne Consigny who , despite being effective in a one-note performance , is also so shrill and cold as a character it's hard to feel anything for her , at all , despite her plight of losing her older brother as a child ) , and a cousin who has loved his cousin's wife ever since he got him , Ivan , the youngest Vuillard brother , to hook up with her so many years ago . Meanwhile , the mother ( Catherine Deneuve , who may not exactly be a great actress but is the greatest living female French star which carries a lot of weight as a true beauty ) , has cancer , possibly terminal , unless a donor comes forward . So there's a lot here to work with - maybe , perhaps , arguably too much , though it's almost a credit to the director that I can't say exactly what ( little things , for example , like the Christmas Eve sex scene are deliberately paced but for good reason ) , and he laces everything with a curious jazz score throughout , sometimes to great effect and sometimes not . But , at the least , it's wonderful to see so many good actors in one place , particularly Amalric who is quickly becoming a truly fantastic talent with a lot of range in the work I've seen him in - one day he's a subdued intelligence man in Munich , next he's paralyzed except for one eye-blinking in Diving Bell , and even a 007 villain - and here goes further in a scene stealing performance ( one such scene is his toast at the Christmas dinner , a scene actually shocking and hilarious and sad all in a thirty-second split ) . He and Deneuve and the underrated Jean-Paul Roussillon as the husband of Junon almost make me want to rate the movie higher . But alas , it is what it is : a very strong take on a familiar subject - crazy and light and dark and tragic and unnerving times with a family at Christmas - and standing it on its head , while also the things I mention above . Did I mention it's French ? |
508,510 | 453,068 | 79,073 | 7 | definitely not the best nor the worst in Stoker adaptations ; Langella makes up a lot of the appeal | Frank Langella - that's almost all I might need to say to get you interested in watching this 524th adaptation of Bram Stoker's quintessential vampire novel . He doesn't have the Euro-creepiness of Bela Lugosi ( nor the eyebrows ) , and Christopher Lee is by many accounts the definitive Dracula , but Langella is something a little more subtle , more menacing with his seductive calm . That might sound contradictory but just keep an eye on this man's face , his eyes that just kind of twitch if a little alerted , and a voice that cuts through any BS and can reel in lady Van Helsing or lady Seward for a passionate tryst in the guise of a typical blood sucking ( yes , it should be the other way around but for Langella it is not ) . If for nothing else , in as with Frost / Nixon a role he originated in recreating on Broadway , he's the reason to see the movie . John Badham's film , by the way , is by no means disreputable or a bad movie . It's actually pretty cool with its period production design and spot-on casting of supporting actors Laurence Olivier ( as , of course , Abe Van Helsing ) and Donald Pleasance . The only real complaint I might have about the production is that . . . it kind of lacks soul or that certain " umph " ( " umph " I should add is hard to describe , though the difference distinctly between this and Coppola or Browning's versions is just that ) to make it really a classic or something worth telling someone to seek out right away . Badham creates some cool atmospheric touches , and unlike the Lugosi 32 Dracula this one at least has a halfway decent bat to use for special effects . There's even a dated but absorbing scene between Dracula and Lucy that had chills running down my spine at how it was directed with the red spiral vortex or whatever behind them . Perhaps it's also in another comparison not entirely as impressive : in 1979 Werner Herzog released Nosferatu , an imperfect but nonetheless major work of an artist channeling his own style through a much-told story of the vampire and those that try to kill it before it kills and / or turns more female victims . When stacking up the two it's clear that Badham is the more conventional choice . However , if it's all that's available at the video store , it's not at all something to turn down . In fact if you're a die-hard Dracula fan or looking for a less obvious / tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the Count on film ( or as least obvious as it can be without it being a Jim Jarmusch film ) this might be just what you're looking for . It's classy and well-acted , just not carrying that certain artistic push to make it something more . |
509,184 | 453,068 | 1,135,487 | 7 | a throwback to very good " light " Hollywood Hitchcock , with virtues and vices ( mostly virtues ) | We need more filmmakers like Tony Gilroy in Hollywood right now . Coming off of his debut feature Michael Clayton , after years of working on stuff like the Bourne movies , to his second film Duplicity , he's marked some strong territory as a guy who can work with top-shelf A-list talent and put them in material that is mature just enough to make it safe for the 30 + year olds to see it and not think their intelligence is being wasted . His films provide such a wealth of juicy scenes of dialog and plots that make us think about what the characters will do next as opposed to just spoon-feeding along the conventions . And even if Duplicity is not quite as excellent as his first film ( and suffice to say it's got a couple of things that make it tick ) it's still a marker of fine entertainment . At the least , it makes for a strong matinée viewing , if one were to rate it such . Like one of those features from the 40s or 50s from Hitchcock where he would place Cary Grant and ( insert blonde bombshell here ) , Duplicity relies on its stars , and sometimes its dependable character actor supporting players , to make it more about watching them and how they go about the material as opposed to the real specifics of what to worry in the plot itself . Hitchcock wasn't worried about what was really in the " secret " formula since he knew , maybe rightfully so , that the audience doesn't really care either . When will Grant and Kelly have that kiss ? It's certainly a lot more fun trying to explain how well Clive Owen and Julia Roberts fit into this classic Hollywood couple mold ( not to mention since it's their second time on-screen following the more theater-based Closer ) and play off one another than describing how " one is a MI6 and the other CIA and their operatives in these corporate firms and one might be making a toaster oven or yada yada and they both do A and B and . . . " So yeah , basically Duplicity is about conning and about not believing what the other person is saying , but at the same time Gilroy toys around with the idea of people who are stuck in a world where by proxy they can't trust one another but get each other so well who the other is at the same time . The characters Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti play - who , by the way , share one of the funniest and most awesome opening credits sequences I've seen in years - are playing checkers in their corporate one-oneupmanship games , but it's Roberts and Owen that are playing chess which is a little brainier but trickier at the same time . One might criticize that there's almost too much of this back-and-forth guessing and curiously trying to figure out what the other is saying about something . But if done right in a film it can be fun to watch just to see what move or motive or revelation will come next . And Gilroy has casted these two stars so perfectly that you can lose yourself in these scenes where they keep playing the same guessing games ( some dialog deliberately repeated ) . This helps especially when the actual plot becomes a little silly , and particularly when it's revealed in the last ten minutes what the big TWIST has occurred . It won't do any good to explain what it is , but suffice to say it's a little too convenient to put into exposition , and it's been done before . In a script that is otherwise sharp and clever and dramatically pleasing in construction and character Gilroy falls back on a couple of tired devices towards the end . It comes dangerously close , as Ebert pointed out , to saying simply " who cares ? " But , thankfully , Duplicity does , for at least roughly in total of the running time , give us characters to care about and go along for the ride with and so have this sheer joy of an A-list movie that tries to be about the guessing game and cons and covert operations and the nature of this whole thing Gilroy's dealing with . And the last shot , thankfully , tries to put a good coda on everything that's happened . It's a glossy , breezy time in usually the best way . |
509,262 | 453,068 | 901,485 | 7 | both slyly self-aware and an enjoyably serious movie about ill-fated bourgeois | At this point in Claude Chabrol's career one might expect him to cut loose and do something just totally crazy and not to give a hoot about his consistent style as a director . A Girl Cut in Two , for better or worse , is still disciplined and carefully constructed and directed , and maybe because of this once in a while suffers from not wavering in its approach ; it's kind of like That Almost Obscure Object of Desire . But within its set terms the film is enjoyable and even has a kind of biting underlying wit to the proceedings . I would think this film might appeal more to the middle or lower class as opposed to upper class and wealthy as the former can perhaps relish in this tumultuous love life of this weather girl Gabrielle ( very beautiful Ludivine Sagnier , kind of a prettier Chloe Sevigny ) and the classic " turning the men's worlds upside down " formula . As for fans of Chabrol , and this goes without saying it's not a great film , it's a sign that , like Woody Allen , he isn't going anywhere and still has some ideas kicking around . It's about the effect Gabrielle has on a man twice her age , novelist Charles Saint-Denis ( Francois Berleand in a quietly powerful and thoughtful performance ) , and a spoiled and possibly emotionally combustible guy more her age , Paul ( Benoit Magimel , very good in that his performance is narrowed to being this creepy person ) . She really is head over heels for the older man , who sadly is also ( happily ) married to his wife of many years , while Paul does all but wave a sign saying " pick me , I'm free , pick me " ( with the line " I get what I always want " crossed out save for when he's drunk ) . It's like a double Catch 22 situation , leading up to a marriage , a murder , and other occurrences . Chabrol presents all of this in what appears to be a straightforward style , which usually suits him best , and within this comes out the moral complexities . This could be enough for a decent movie , if maybe a little slight in the mostly bourgeois atmosphere , but Chabrol heaps on some social commentary to boot : it's not just Paul but also Charles that put up a kind of front of complacency that is hard to crack for Gabrielle . It's slightly playful , mostly harsh , but always controlled satire , not of the laugh-out-loud kind but where one might chuckle or raise an eyebrow at a plot point or scene of specific acting . It's an interesting approach which isn't entirely effective but never makes it boring . A Girl Cut in Two is acted just as it should ( Caroline Silhol particularly gives a deliciously icy performance as Paul's mother ) , and is written and directed with a knowledge of its audience . |
510,647 | 453,068 | 478,209 | 7 | a good subjective approach to the many strands and off-shoots of an under-looked genre of music | Actually , to say that heavy-metal music is just a genre of music is almost insulting in some circles . As someone who's too eclectic to really be solely a metal-head , but has been in the realm of the metal world to see how it goes , I can empathize with Sam Dunn's main intention with the documentary ; this music should not be seen as just some goofy , crude , offensive , or dangerous off-shoot of old-time rock n roll ( not that the last one doesn't apply in one or two cases ) . It's to show how personal this music , and how this ' way of life ' can be for a person , and how it affects personality but not necessarily in the perceived negative light . Dunn , of course , has his head totally together , which is how he can go head-to-head with metal legends & / or notorious sorts like Tony Iommi , Bruce Dickinson , Lemmy , Alice Cooper , Dee Snider , Dio and Rob Zombie ( Geddy Lee is also among the big known interviewees , though it's strange to see him here when he's not really ' metal ' , at least in league with these guys ) . But through him and his collaborators , he is able to get inside not just the off-shoots and specifics of the world of heavy-metal . The look , the style , the attitude , the controversies both domestic ( i . e . Dee Snider's battle with Tipper Gore ) and foreign ( a superlatively done look at the Norwegian black-metal scene , which is both tense and hilarious ) , the women bands in the world , and how it helps some people really get better on with life either to hear it or play it or , of course , both . Dunn's look is good if , by necessity perhaps too , too brief , as he at one point lists a kind of heavy-metal family tree of sorts - all too quickly to really see every single one - and barely scratches the surface in the 96 minute running time . Maybe there is only so much that can be covered in a feature-length film , but the subject matter serves to be even more looked into ; VH1 had also done a heavy-metal documentary , and it lasted four hours . On the other hand , Dunn and his people actually do get some material here that is more precious , and more enlightening . The juxtaposition of the ' true believers ' and horrors in Norways black-death-metal scene with a band like Slayer , who are bad to the bone and have fans who go toe limit , is interesting . It's the kind of documentary that really does work for that it's worth , but not enough of a good thing is explored for fans . Non-fans may get just enough that they can handle , a mix of the basic facts and key points ( i . e . the coining of the term ' metal ' , the roots in the blues , the devil horns , and a look at outrageous album covers ) . It's good subjective film-making , though edging a little much on trying to get enough history along with the personal history . |
508,622 | 453,068 | 120,838 | 7 | not quite prime-cut Larry David material , but enjoyable all the same | Although it's been a long time since I've seen Sour Grapes , the experience of seeing it - preferably alongside another Seinfeld fan - was fairly pleasant , in that biting Larry David tone . This was the only time David wrote and directed a film , and it does show that he's trying to work through telling a total story within the framework of a feature all the way through . But somehow it's quite an entertaining piece of quietly ( or not so quietly ) deranged satire on envy , sexual frustration , and the condition of a principle of something . The premise is simple - two good friends go out to Las Vegas to gamble , one friend asks the other for a quarter for a slot machine , and via the quarter in the slot machine the guy wins a helluva lot of money . By the friend with the original quarter's estimation , a part of that change is his , but the friend now says that it isn't . A likely Seinfeld sub-plot is stretched out so that the ideas are given a little breathing room , even if one recognizes that , perhaps , it would be a masterpiece if it were simply a Seinfeld episode , or more appropriately a Curb Your Enthusiasm with even more acidic humor and total unease thrown at the situation . Around the premise , David also tosses in a supporting character who has one of his testicles removed - the wrong one by the doctor , who is one of the friends - and despite his now high voice ( ho-ho ) he seeks out some payback . That's one of the clearest big gags , as obvious as it is , is the moment when the ' testicle-man ' , as one might be tempted to describe him , is told by the doctor that the wrong one was taken out during surgery , to his immediate fainted response in a cut-away . On top of this , David experiments with some stupid sex humor ( not that there wasn't at least a little later on on CYE , eg Jeff's mother's ass at a stoplight ) , like with Bierko's character in the self-humiliation of not being able to , um , ' service ' himself in a certain way , under the stress of the tear in the friendship . As mentioned , none of this really makes for the kind of classic comedy one might expect , or crave , from maybe one of the only geniuses ( yeah , I said it ) working in comedy today . But as almost something of a fluke , it does its job well . |
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