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(aka: Jim'z Flix Pix) |
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(aka: Jim'z Flix Pix) |
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| Let's
All Meet Jim!:
Jim has been described as the "Siskel & Ebert" of England - In other words, he's tall, thin, and likes to eat. To understand Jim's movie reviews, you have to know a little about Jim: The Man. Born in North America sometime in the 20th Century, Jim was raised in a family of poets - his mother becoming famous for being the first person to rhyme the word "orange" in a poem while his father went on to become (as christened in Life magazine) "the voice of a generation." Jim went on to major in this stuff at college - where he even made some films (or at least watched a lot of movies). Jim: Man, Myth, Movie Reviewer. ENJOY... |
Trust me - I know movies (and Picasso)! |
The Reviews:
When Harry Met Sally (Rating: 7)
Almost everyone has seen the fake orgasm
scene and it is a very funny scene but the fact of the matter is that this
is a very funny movie. The plot is very simple, we watch Harry and
Sally meet and not like each other and then we see them meet again a few
years later and barely remember each other and then we see them meet again
a few years after that and become friends and then we see them
fall for each other. The quality of
this movie lies in the writing. The script is funny with a bit of
bite and everything fits together well.
Billy Crystal is annoyingly likable and Meg Ryan is good at being cute and anal at the same time. More romantic comedies should be like this.
I don't think I've ever not liked a Rob Reiner film. From the excellence of "This is Spinal Tap" and "Princess Bride" to the not great but better than average 'A Few Good Men' he never disappoints. "When Harry met Sally" is a fine member of this family.
This movie got a lot of good reviews and I had wanted to see it for quite awhile. What a waste. I still can't really figure out why people raved about it.
The movie follows the rise and fall of Eddie aka Dirk Diggler. He's got muscles, no acting ability, and 13 inches of talent. The problem is that I didn't really care. None of the characters inspired anything, no hatred, no warmth nothing. I really didn't care what happened to anyone.
Basically the movie took two and a half hours to tell me that a lot of people in the porn industry are shallow and that cocaine is bad for you. I think I kind of knew those things already. Some of the scenes took so long that I actually started wondering what the director is trying to tell me. The first time I watch a film I like to completely lose myself in it. I don't try to analyze how it was made until I see it a second time. Whenever I find myself analyzing a film during my first viewing it means I'm bored.
And you would think a movie about porn would have better sex scenes. "Unbearable Lightness of Being" had much better erotica. Then again, for that matter, Pokemon the Poorly Drawn Movie probably had better erotica.
Not that I have anything against Nicholas Cage doing action movies ("Face Off" was enjoyable) but it is so much better to remember in his earlier quirkier roles.
Cage plays a down and out ex-Marine who can't
get a job because of his bum leg. He stops off in the small town of Red
Rock for a beer. Because of his Texas license plates the bar owner, played
by J.T. Walsh, mistakes him for Lyle from Dallas and offers Cage a job.
It's not until he has the money in his hand does Cage realize that he has
just been hired to kill Walsh's wife. Things get even
harrier when Lyle from Dallas shows up,
played by Dennis Hopper who just seems to like playing rather zealous hitmen.
Cage's character has this deep down honesty that often makes him do stupid things but believably stupid things. You keep rooting for him and telling him to not be an idiot in the same breath.
The entire cast has been in better movies and have done better jobs of acting but still this movie worked for me.
Bad guys (with foreign accents for extra scariness) break into LAPD's evidence lock-up and steal a bunch of heroin. Since Martin Lawrence and Will Smith were the cops who confiscated the stuff in the first place they are put on the case. A key witness is Tea Leoni who sees Smith's girlfriend gunned down by the baddies. She will only talk to Smith but since he is unconscious at the time his partner Lawrence is sent to imitate him. A lot of the humor is generated by sloppy, cranky, family-man Lawrence trying to pull off being smooth, playboy Smith.
Basically a better then average cop buddy movie. The better than average centering mostly on the cast. Smith and Lawrence ad-libbed the dialogue in a lot of the scenes where it is just them and they are very good at just winding each other up. Also a plus was Tea Leoni who as the standard third wheel gets better lines than the usual "Will you two just shut up!"
The bad guys were a bit of a disappointment and the other cops are only break even. The shoot outs / fight scenes are well-done but basically this movie works best on the humor level.
Sabrina (Rating: 6.5 (original), 6 (remake))
This gets two scores since I'm reviewing both the original and the remake.
The plot is your typical romantic comedy. A servant's daughter falls in love with the younger playboy brother who doesn't knows she exists. She goes off to Europe for a few years and returns a beautiful woman. Older serious brother is worried that younger playboy brother is going to ruin everything by running off with her so he woos her...Predictable, but definitely one or two more twists than your average romantic comedy.
The strength of both movies is the female lead, Audrey Hepburn in the original and Julia Ormond in the remake. Both sparkle when in love and believably grow as characters as the movie progresses. Both are fine actresses who are believable as gawky 18 year olds and beautiful 21 year olds.
In the male parts there is a small problem, however. In the original, Humphrey Bogart is the serious older brother and William Holden is the good-looking affable playboy. In the remake Harrison Ford is Mr. Serious and Greg Kinnear is Mr. Playboy. The original works better because of the difference between Holden and Bogart. Bogey wasn't good-looking like Holden but he just had something about him. This makes it easy to believe that someone would fall for Holden first but then grow into Bogey. In the remake though, Ford is always better looking than Kinnear and you wonder why women think Kinnear is such hot stuff.
As for the updating, most of it works fairly well. Instead of Hepburn going to Paris to enter cooking school, Ormond goes to learn to become a photographer. And instead of Bogart being a Wall Street genius Ford is a corporate raider. The only thing I didn't like was the 90's habit of having to explain everything. Why Ormond's dad is a chauffer. Why Kinnear doesn't work in the family business. In the original, Holden was a playboy. No explanation needed, none given. Some people might like the added depth but I thought it slowed things down just a trifle.
Half brothers meet for the first time at their father's funeral. One is rich, secretive, and suspected of killing the father. The other is blue collar, honest, and trusting. The rich one invites the poor one to visit for the weekend so that they can get to know each other. The brothers' personalities are nothing alike but when one gets amnesia and told he is the other how can he know differently?
This movie is very unsettling. And probably the most unsettling thing is that the brothers are said by everyone in the movie to being dead ringers for each other. However, the rich brother is played by a skinny, white guy and the poor brother is played by a muscular black guy. Add in that everything is filmed in a very stark black and white and it gets really creepy.
Suture is rather slow moving in parts but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The pace adds to the feeling of unreality about everything. And the whole 'what makes a person who they are' question has always intrigued me.
This is one of those movies that is not sure what it wants to be. If I were judging it as a sci-fi film it would get about a 3. Everything that happens is so implausible that if I start I won't stop. On the criteria of an action film Armageddon might rate a 5. It is rather funny in spots so I might rate it a 6 on the comedy scale. All together it gets a 4 1/2.
An asteroid about the size of Texas is going
to smash into the earth in 18 days and destroy all life "including bacteria",
yeah right. The only way to save the planet is to drill a hole into
the core of the asteroid and drop a nuclear bomb into its heart, yeah right.
They enlist the smirking services of Bruce Willis, the world's greatest
oil driller, and his crew. They blast off in two space shuttles about
20 feet apart, yeah right. They then proceed to land on the asteroid,
yeah right. Parts of the plot are really quite painful and I'd like
to stop now.
On the other hand, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Bruce Willis, and Ben Affleck are all kind of funny and work well together on a comedic level. Oh and Liv Tyler is rather delicious.
While I am currently giving this movie a 4 1/2, I would like to append a prediction. This movie is so hokey and so over the top Hollywood that it just might become a cult 'bad' movie in ten years. I can see a college dorm lounge where one person has to drink whenever the American flag is shown and someone else has to drink every time Willis smirks and and someone else every time God is thanked etc.
Kevin Spacey plays the lead in this dystopic view of suburbia. Spacey doesn't like his job, can't talk to his daughter, and no longer has sex with his wife. He is not happy. When the threat of being laid off combines with his obsession with one of his daughter's friends he chucks his materialistic view of the world and tries to recapture a little joy. The problem is that his wife is still clinging to the materialistic world with perfectly manicured nails and he and his daughter have no common point to start a conversation from.
I like the neighbors in this film. On one side of the family is a gay couple who are the epitome of pretty yet vapid suburbia that Spacey is trying to get away from. Into his world moves the new neighbors on the other side. The father a Marine colonel representing opression and a pot-smoking son who represents anarchy.
Everything combines to make a film which is flawlessly acted and unpredictable.
Shakespeare in Love (Rating: 9)
I was totally into this movie. Romeo and Juliet has never been one of my favorites but this movie wove it into a romance beautifully.
The story is that Will Shakespeare is poor
and is having writer's block. He falls for Viola who unbeknownst
to him is enamored of the theatre. She fires his muse. Meanwhie
Viola dresses up like a young boy and lands the part of Romeo in Shakespeare's
latest play, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter. As Will unravels
who is who and falls deeper in love the play gets more and more
rewritten.
I've never been a big Gwyneth Paltrow fan but she does a fine job of looking totally in love throughtout the play. Joseph Fiennes in suitably intense as Shakespeare. And there is an excellent supporting cast featuring Judi Dench, Ben Affleck, Colin Firth, and Martin Clunes.
Being that Viola is playing Romeo, when she rehearses her lines with Will he does the lines of Juliet. These scenes are superb. The wit of the play is quick and inteligent. The ending believable both in historical context and as a romantic plot.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Rating: 7)
I know that I saw this movie along time ago so some parts were familiar wheras others I had completely forgotten about. One thing I had no recall of was how funny this movihijack a New York subway train and hold it ransom for one million dollars (apparently in the 70s that was a lot of money). Walter Mathau is in charge of subway security so he has to stop them. And to stop them he has to figure out how they plan on getting away.
The movie is tense when it needs to be and is goofy in other parts and Mathau in a cops and robbers flick is odd but it all works and is very seventies. Watch it just to see how dated it is.
Take Terminator's 'machines rule the future' and mix it in with a Star Trek holodeck and you get the setting for The Matrix. Humans have lost the war with the machines and are treated as crops from which their body heat is harvested. To keep the mind active enough so that the body lives on the machines have created the Matrix which looks like earth right before the war.
A small band of humans led by Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne, who lends credibility to almost anything) have escaped from the machines. The are able to slip from matrix to bleak reality and back again. They are searching for the one who can save them. Is it Neo played by Keanu Reeves?
The first half of the movie is a bit muddled. Basically, I'd heard about the neato effects and the cool fight scenes and I wanted them to get on with it. Left too much time Keanu Reeves becomes... well, Keanu Reeves. Once it gets going though, the movie is a joy to watch. You hate the bad guys, you ooooh at the effects, you do the things a decent sci-fi action film should make you do.
On an added note I appreciated the fact that they actually seemed to give the actors enough fight training that the fight scenes weren't either cut to ribbons to fit in the stuntmen or looked just plain silly.
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (Rating: 7)
A gritty, black humored, East End of London crime flick.
Jason Fleming stars as a low-level scammer who has a talent at cards. However, when he is cheated out ot £500, 000 against his knowledge he and his friends have to come up with the cash in week. They decide to steal from some hard-core thieves. The story which ensues has the thieves hunting them, the people the thieves stole from chasing them, the people they owe chasing them and Sting as Jason Fleming's father not happy about anything.
A funny black comedy. People in flames, A kid learning how to be a thumb-breaker from hard-man/caring father Vinny Jones. The tension between Londoners and Northern types. A real cast of characters. It all adds up to a well filmed movie which made me laugh. The soundtrack added quite a bit without being too intrusive. And the ending was great, what more could you ask.
They Might Be Giants (Rating: 4)
Basically, if Neil Simon had written The Fisher King while coming off an acid trip you'd have had something similar to "They Might Be Giants".
The plot is that George C. Scott is a judge who has gone a bit bonkers and thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. A psychiatrist named Watson (Joanne Woodward) is brought in to commit him to an asylum so the evil brother can get to the family money. At first Dr. Watson is sceptical about the existence of the evil Moriarty but as things go on she and Holmes become closer and closer until it's really hard to tell just what in hell is going on.
There are some fine scenes in the movie but it gets really weird in places and the ending makes no sense at all. I'm glad I watched it because this is where the band They Might Be Giants get their name from but I'm not sure I would recommend it to a lot of people.
You wouldn't think the history of the seafaring clock could be so entertaining but it is.
The tale is told using two parallel stories. One, the life of John Harrison a carpenter and clock maker who believed he could solve the problem of deriving longitude by making a clock which could withstand the rigors of ocean travel. And two, the life of Rupert Gould who became obsessed with restoring the clocks and reviving the history of their creation.
Sailors have been able to plot latitude for
centuries, yea verily millennia, by astronomical means, longitude, however,
was a much tougher nut to crack. When, in the 18th century, the British
lost around 2,000 men because the Scilly Isles popped up out of nowhere
and smashed them to bits in a storm Queen Anne and parliament declared
a reward of £20,000 pounds to the first person to solve the
problem how to plot longitude.
Harrison reasoned that anyone can plot the time of where they are at. If they then know what time it is in Greenwich then a simple calculation can tell them their longitude. The movie charts the difficulties in making a pendulum clock which could keep accurate time during storms and battles at sea. It also charts the difficulties of actually being awarded the prize when the judges are an old-boy network of astonomers convinced that the moon is the answer and he is merely a clockmaker.
Michael Gambon is convincing as Harrison and Jeremy Irons is excellent as Rupert Gould whose obsession with the clocks and time in general cause him so many problems.
The movie has already literally become dated but somehow being set in the not-so-distant future of December 1999 doesn't hurt it.
Virtual Reality is a fact of life and its
gone black market. Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny, an ex-cop turned 'playback'
porn merchant...In the run up to the millennium he gets sent a snuff film
where a friend of his is raped and killed. It somehow ties in with the
killing of Jericho One a prominent rap artist and Fiennes's obsession with
his ex-girlfriend (played by Juliette Lewis) and rogue cops and racial
tension and the chilliastic ending of everything. With help from
a limo-driiving Angela Basset he tries to unravel what the hell is going
on.
This is basically technicolor film noir. The script is very dark and some of the scenes are extremely violent wheras Kathryn Bigelow's direction is very bright and in your face. If I had one complaint about this film it would be Fiennes. Even wearing atrocious clothes and a three-day beard he looks too clean cut to be the sleazy Lenny.
Enemy of the State (Rating: 6.5)
Will Smith plays a successful lawyer whose life is turned upside down when he is given proof of the National Security Agency murdering a prominent Senator. The fact that he doesn't even know that he has anything doesn't stop Jon Voight from bringing all the government has to offer in technology to ruin our guy Will. Through Lisa Bonet our guy Will meets Gene Hackman, security guru and general hermit. They battle the forces of evil even though they don't really like each other very much, until the end of course.
I will admit a Hackman bias up front. His great movies are great and his punch-the-clock movies are usually great escapism. He rarely takes on a really bad script unless it has "Superman" in the title. His punch-the-clock movies are almost tense and exciting, "Crimson Tide", "The Package", "Narrow Margin", "The Conversation" (in which he plays a similar role) the list goes on. This was no exception especially the first hour. Will Smith specializes in being likable which makes you root for the good guys all the more.
While the movie is a good scare into the dangers of technology and its abuses it was a bit obvious about it at times. And the big shootout is a bit over the top but all in all a fine movie.
Pretty much a waste of a good cast. De Niro just wanders around going, "sure, okay", Samuel Jackson runs out of fun new ways to say "motherfucker", Michael Keaton's cop was so two-dimensional i got a paper cut, and Bridget Fonda is cute and gets a few good lines but nothing earthshattering.
Being a Tarantino film it cries out to be compared with "Pulp Fiction" and "Resevoir Dogs". In those films almost even the bit characters were interesting and the main characters fascinating. In Jackie Brown, there are two interesting characters , Jackie Brown and her bail bondsman Max Cherry, and everyone else just kind of maunders around and complains a lot.
Not enough ever really happens to call this an action film and the plot isn't intricate enough to be a caper film and it didn't have any sort of grit to it like other Tarantino films. It sort of just got stuck somewhere in the middle and ended up being very average. Pam Grier has still got it though.
It's always hard to review a movie with a twist without giving too much away. If I say that Bruce Willis's character is actually played by a guy and you haven't seen the movie yet.... wait a second that's "Crying Game." Let me start over.
Bruce Willis plays a child psychologist who is trying to help out Cole, a boy who can see the dead. Odder yet, is that often the dead don't know they're dead and Cole basically keeps freaking out whenever he runs into one. In one little scene a teenage boy walks out of Cole's bedroom, sees Cole in the hallway, and says "C'mon, I know where my dad hides his gun." As the dead kid turns to walk away we see that the back of his head has been blown off. This would've upset me when I was ten.
His mom is a very supportive South Philly single parent type but she can't help him since he won't tell her his secret. Through talking to Bruce the kid manages to work through his fear and get a little confidence. The scene when he can finally share his secret with his mom is great.
This movie has a nice twist to it near the end. My viewing partner, Oz, didn't see it coming at all and she thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I saw it coming a long way off and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. That about sums it up.
In the future thte world has been decimated by an engineered virus. The few survivor's live underground. The only way for them to try and retake the earth is to send people back through time to observe events leading up to the virus's release. Problems: they aren't very good at it and the more they do it the more unstable the observer becomes.
After proving himself a reliable observer, violent James Cole (Bruce Willis) is to be sent back to 1996 to try and find out what is meant by a garbled message about the 'Army of the 12 Monkeys'. The first attempt misfires slighlty and he lands in 1990. After being incarcerated in a mental institution he is pulled out of 1990 and placed into 1996 where with the help of his psychiatrist (Madeline Stowe) they find out that the no matter what they do the die is already cast but maybe not in the way they think.
The best part about this film is director Terry Gilliam's view of the future. The twisted, distorted dankness is completely weird and mesmerizing. Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe are both good in their respective roles but Brad Pitt is a mass of twitches and rambling tics that manages to steal most scenes. Good time travel plots are few and far between, this one hangs together great. Not 'Brazil' but then again what is? An excellent film.
An excellent film, the best thing I've seen in 1999. Matt Damon stars as, Will Hunting, an unrecognized genius who has spent his life bouncing from one abusive foster home to another. His violent tendencies and emotional defense systems are holding him back from greatness. To keep out of jail for hitting a cop he must undergo counselling.
The math professor who stumbles upon his
brilliance tries psychiatrist ofter psychiatrist but Will has read all
their books and knows all their tricks. Finally, Sean, played by Robin
Williams, is called in to have a crack. Sean has plenty of problems
of his own and is often picked apart by Will's ruthless
intuition and genius. Almost every
scene between the two of them is charged. Far and away the best parts of
the movie are the one on one conversations. Between Sean and Will, between
Will and Skylar (the rich Harvard girlfriend), between Sean and Will's
math professor, between Will and his best friend.
Everyone gives a good performance in this film. Minnie Driver is superb as the smart Harvard type who is good-looking without being Hollywood beautiful and Will's friends from the neighborhood just made me laugh.
It amazes me how someone so funny as Robin Williams can pick such doodoo comedies but excellent serious rolls.
I
must say that while in America I never got a chance to see a lot of the
2nd Doctor (Chris was hoarding his tapes back then), luckily they were
showing on cable when I moved to England and I must say that I think Troughton
may have actually passed Pertwee for 2nd place on the Doctor list.
And 'Ice Warriors' ain't a bad example of why.
The plot is reminiscent of many other Who plots. The Doctor and assistants land somewhere they didn't mean to. There is trouble going on. At first people are skeptical if this odd looking man can help. An assistant or two gets into trouble. Actors in bad costumes will affect odd voices and terrorize everyone. The Doctor, with the help of a local, figures everything out/rescues everyone. Just as people remember that they should thank him a strange grinding sound is heard and he's gone.
So why is this one better than most?
Because all the little things work. I loved what the good guys were
wearing - black and white sand painted mini-skirts as military uniforms,
brilliant. I also thought the incidental
music is some of the best I'd ever heard. The Ice Warriors costumes
were a bit weird around the mouths but I'd stack them up against Nimons
and Robots of the Tom Baker era. The misguided good guy was on the
edge of a believable nervous breakdown and the good guy who understood
where the Doctor was coming from was actually Wallace and every time he
spoke I'd wonder when Grommet would show up with the cheese, but that worked
too. And anytime Jamie hints that Victoria should wear something
a bit more revealing gets my thumbs up.
Obviously, any series missing a third of its episodes and has to make-do with still photos and audio is going to miss something but they did the best they could.
I will watch this again.
Three roommates who are fairly close friends
are going through the arduous task of finding a fourth roommate for their
flat. After a hilarious opening sequence they decide on Hugo.
He moves in and almost immediately ODs.. He leaves behind a suitcase stuffed
with money under the bed. Don't
you just hate it when that happens.
Of course the roommates decide to keep the money. This brings in the police, bad guys, and several graphic scenes of how to dispose of a corpse. Through three roommates played rather well by Chris Ecclestone, Ewan MacGregor and Carey Fox become in turns, nuts, back stabbing, front stabbing, and paranoid. There's the occasional echo of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre."
This is a pretty gripping movie. There are a few scenes which are not for the faint of heart but they are needed to show just why 'normal' (a doctor, a reporter and an accountant) folks might go round the twist. My only beefs might be the on again off again Scottish accents of Ecclestone and Fox and the fact that I could've pulled it off without going bonkers.
God what a depressing movie. Gary Oldman's directorial debut is dark both in tone (well-done) and in filming (a bit over-done). Set in London, it deals with family life on the low end of the council flats. It is violent, depressing and impressively well-acted. Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke are dead-on believable.
Ray Winstone plays a father/bully/petty thug. Kathy Burke plays his pregnant wife who is just trying to hold things together. And basically we watch this family careen out of control as members go to jail, smack each other around and fail not to do better with their lot in life than they had intended.
The best part of this movie is its happy ending because it's so obviously not one. It's merely a blip on a dark landscape.
My Favorite Martian (Rating: 3.5)
This movie can be easily divided into two distinct parts. The scenes that reference the old series and are funny make up the small part, and those scenes which will make no one laugh except an eight year who's been given lots of sugar, but even then you wouldn't want to bet on it, make up the large part.
I can't figure out why movies that are obviously aimed at kids feel the need to add a love interest. It's never well done enough to interest a parent and kids would rather see people being hit in the face with ice cream.
I thought Christopher Lloyd might bring enough wackiness to the film to make it watchable but he didn't. I suggest you stay away from this movie
Star Wars, Episode I: "The Phantom Menace" (Rating: 5)
It just didn't do it for me. Sure the effects were nice and it gave some early history to a few of the characters but after the wait I was really hoping for a bit more.
People keep trying to say that since the first set had bad acting I shouldn't complain about the acting in this one. Bullshit. I'll complain whenever I want to. I like Ewan MacGregor but apparently he was told to be young and wooden since Mark Hamill wasn't around. The Queen delivers quite a few overwrought clunkers throughout and Liam Neeson relied a lot on his neato hair. When one of the better performances is turned in by a nine year old who does car commercials you're in trouble.
Others keep raving about the cool new characters,
well Jar Jar Binks really got on my nerves. I wanted to throttle
him on more than occasion and the queen/handmaid thing was obvious from
the get-go. Darth Maul looked chilling but I never really felt like
I knew him well enough to be truly menaced by him.
And the Emperor's henchmen are basically
Japanese businessmen complete with bad accents.
On the plus side the big fight scene between Darth Maul and the Jedis (Jedia? what is the plural of Jedi?) is very well-done. And the film sounds great. The visual effects get most of the press but the sound effects during the (slightly overlong) pod race were superb. And it was nice to peek into Darth Vader's childhood and to see the seeds of doom being sewn.
Lastly, I didn't like the 'Phantom Menace' part of the title. What the hell is that about really?
This movie tries to be a mixture of horror and sci-fi action film. From a 'Hellraiser' point of view the gore scenes are well done but way two few and far between to satisfy and from an 'Alien' point of view there's just way too many body parts and avulsed eyeballs flying around. There's a fine line between shock and revulsion and this movie is on the wrong side.
Sam Neill plays the scientist/engineer whose super-techno space-bending ship (the Event Horizon) disappeared 7 years ago. Lawrence Fishburne plays the captain of the ship sent to check it out after its mysterious reappearance. No one knows where the ship has been or what happened to the crew.
Fishburne and his crew board the ship and find it haunted. Sam Neill goes from speaking scientific mumbo-jumbo to demonically possessed mumbo-jumbo. Everyone starts hallucinating. In the end only some of them get back alive but I didn't really care which ones.
Waste of a decent cast.
Breaking the Waves (Rating: 7)
Another icky movie. Wheras 'Swimming with Sharks' was a slick, smarmy, cruel type of icky, this is gritty, personal, repulsive type of icky.
Emily Watson gives a flawless performance as Bess, a simple girl who is too tied up in 1) God and 2) her husband Jan. After Jan is seriously injured and possibly paralyzed for life he asks her to take a lover and describe her experiences to him. At first she is torn but God tells her that she must obey her husband and that if she is good he'll be saved. This leads to a downward spiral which culminates with her becoming a hooker.
The conversations she has with God are chilling and my favorite parts of the movie. Raised in a severly repressive atmosphere she actually believes that God speaks through her and that she must listen.
It is amazing how believable this movie is at potraying the amount of degradation a good person is willing to put themself through.
The Truth About Cats and Dogs (Rating: 6)
Janeane Garofalo is short veternarian with a radio talk show and low self-esteem. Uma Thurman is her tall willowy middlin'-intelligence neighbor. When Janeane gives solid radio advice to a guy and helps him make friends with a huge dog (Hank) and he asks her what she is like, she describes Uma. When he asks to meet her wacky hijinks ensue.
This movie just goes to show that a simple plot done with a bit of wit is better than gooey pap with Kevin Costner (All 'date movies' are judged against 'The Bodyguard' (and most do rather well)).
Janeane G. is quite good in this movie, being Hollywood the short squat woman isn't really that unattractive but she does pull off the confident in voice unconfident in all else schtick very well. Also nice was the way the friendship between Janeane and Uma was given more than just a cursory mention.
It's not quite '4 Weddings and a Funeral' and I prefered 'Love and other Catastroples' but for if you feel like a romantic comedy and 'Sleepless in Seattle' put you in a diabetic coma you could do a lot worse.
Stanley Kubrick hated this movie and disavowed it as one of his creations after it was released and while it wasn't that bad if I knew I was good enough to make 'Dr. Strangelove' I might do the same. On the other hand some people love this movie but I wasn't one of them.
Kirk Douglas stars as the title character who is sold into slavery and trained to fight and die in the gladiator pits of Rome. After his love interest is sold off and he thinks he'll never see her again he starts a slave revolt and threatens the core of the Empire. In the course of events he meets his squeeze again and they have a child and Roman senators climb all over themselves using the 'Spartacus' affair as political leverage.
Kirk Douglas just doesn't do it for me. As a matter of fact the only person in the cast who I really thought pulled it all together was Charles Laughton as the aging Roman schemer. The movie goes on a bit long and we all know roughly how it ends and while the battle scenes aren't bad I've seen better.
If you like Kirk Douglas rent the movie where he met Kubrick in the first place, 'Paths of Glory'.
A movie by Coppola starring a lot of actors early in there career when they were totally buff. Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio (Okay so he's never been buff), Emilio Estevez. They play a gang of greasers and one night when the two youngest get jumped they stab a South Side Soash (rich kid gang member). While hiding out from the cops Howell and Macchio witness a lot of Coppolesque sunsets and discuss Robert Frost.
I thought the movie was rather pointless. I think it was trying to show how beauty and truth can be found almost anywhere. On the other hand it looked nice but that wasn't quite enough to do it for me.
Everybody Says I Love You (Rating: 4)
Maybe I'm judging this a bit harshly because I was expecting more from Woody Allen but it just didn't do it for me.
Being someone who enjoys singing but can only hit 4 notes the idea of a musical with people who don't sing very well kind of appealed to me. The movie falls apart mainly because it doesn't work on any single genre. As a comedy it isn't especially funny, as a romance there isn't any great chemistry or emotion, and as a musical it's basically the same song sung over and over by different people who aren't much better at singing than me (Well, maybe they're a little better than that).
The movie is narrated by a daughter of a
convoluted well-off step-half-extended New York family. But you never
know her well enough as a character to really care about her slant as a
commentator on the
goings-ons. And the older Woody Allen
gets the harder it is to believe that he's the best sex that whoever has
ever had. Furthermore, (I'm on a conjunction roll don't stop me.)
I didn't really care who anybody ended up with in the end.
Jewish angst and masturbation jokes are funny, musicals are not funny.
For the first hour of this movie I kept saying to myself, "why did everyone pan this so much?" Then I found out.
All this movie needed to complete the quirky bad guy actor hall of fame was Gary Oldman speaking in a funny accent. The cast is nothing to sneeze at (Cage, Cusack, Malkovich, Rhames (I love the name 'Ving'), Buscemi) and they perform fairly decently. Colm Meaney was two dimensional but you can't win 'em all.
The first half of the movie is straightforward but well-done. A group of prisoners led by master planner Cyrus the Virus (John Malkovich) takeover a prison transport plane. Cage, ex-Army Ranger who killed a man in self-defense and got dealt a crappy lawyer, is simply trying to get home because today he is a free man. He warns people, he saves people, he hits people, things blow up, guys shoot each other, the usual.
I think it all started going wrong when twelve guys and a beat-up John Deere tractor manage to pull a cargo plane out of a ditch. It was as if the director said "this film was mildly believable. but now I'm tired of that." And if you're going to be unbelievable, then do it in Vegas. Next thing you know the plane is skidding forever, and I do mean forever, (Englebert Humperdink did two encores and kissed a woman having her 80th birthday party in the time it takes the damn plane to come to a halt) down the Vegas strip. People start dying in odd and perfunctory manners. I mean what was a gravel crusher doing in a casino? And Cusack and Meaney have a horrible cop buddy make-up scene. Bleh!
Cage fan? Rent "The Rock". Malkovich fan? Rent "In the Line of Fire". Cusack fan? Rent "Grosse Pointe Blank".
It's farce. No, it's a romantic comedy. No, it's a dance flick. No, it's a floor wax.
The movie centers on the upcoming Pan Pacific
ballroom dance championships. Our hero, Scott, has enraged the ballroom
cognoscenti, caused his mother's extreme mascara to run, captured the eye
of the dance hall ugly duckling, and lost his partner in one fell swoop
by using non-federation steps in a
rumba competion. What follows is an
enjoyable story full of romance, bad hair and Australian ballroom dancing.
What made this movie work for me was the way they were able to deftly mix over-the-top characters like Scott's mother with completely believable down to earth types like Fran (the ugly duckling who's complexion improves dramatically over the course of the film) with oddballs like Scott's taciturn and melancholy father. And while no one would ever confuse me with Donald O'staire, I must say that the dance scenes were great to watch.
While the film is predictable to a fault, I laughed a lot and it made me think of maybe taking a dance lesson or two.
The English Patient (Rating: 5.5)
I fell between the camps. This was one of those movies that spawned two camps: those who thought that it was one of the world's great love stories and that 23.9 Oscars was barely doing it justice and those who invariably spat when the film was mentioned and used phrases like 'gooey pap' every chance they got.
The main plot of Ralph Fiennes, smoldering Hungarian explorer nobility pilot guy, and his tortured love and its nefarious consequences has enough twists that I couldn't predict the ending and that means a lot to me.
If you haven't seen the movie. Count Ralph is pulled out of a downed plane, burnt beyond recognition. He claims to be an English pilot but that he can't really remember anything. He is slowly but surely dying. As the army make their way through Italy a nurse begs to be left with him as he dies. Before too long Willem Dafoe shows up with ulterior motives. He is trying to find out if this amnesiac English pilot is really Count Ralph because if he is then he was responsible for the death of many people and Willem's thumbs. This means death.
Some things that didn't work are mainly a rather perfunctory affair between Count Ralph's nurse and a Sikh demolition expert. This should have either have been dropped entirely or been given enough time to make sense. And of course every one was very clean. I suspect millions of Americans will move to North Africa shortly since everyone there wears white and no one ever gets dirty.
The love scenes and in general the affairs are fairly middle of the road. I didn't quite feel the chemistry like many others but I didn't gag either.
The Fifth Element (Rating: 6.5)
A beautiful movie. The future is very bright. Usually bright orange or bright yellow.
I loved the feel of this movie. It wasn't as good as the other two Besson movies I've seen ("La Femme Nikita" and "Leon" (reviewed on this page!!)) because the plot isn't as strong but I did think it was gorgeous. Why does Bruce Willis keep getting all these great sets to play around in?
To save life as we know it Lelu, (played by the super fine Milla Jovovich) who is the 5th element after Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water, must unarchive a few precious stones and take them to Egypt, She is helped by Ian Holm as a high Priest and Bruce Willis as a ex-Marine cabbie. The bad guys are, in order of general baddosity, a huge amorphous ball of evil roughly 1,200 kilometers in diameter, Gary Oldman with a Southern accent, and aliens with big ears.
I was expecting a straight ahead sci-fi shoot 'em up but it was actually quite a bit wackier than I expected. The DJ character got on my nerves after awhile and the guy who played the president was weak. The good guys were excellent, but the bad guys weren't really sinister enough. I'm still not really sure that big ball of evil really was and if all life was being snuffed out how was Gary Oldman going to collect? But that's okay.
I never saw "Twister" but if I had I'd give it poor marks just on the fact that it was bound to spawn a new spate of 2nd rate disaster movies. Of which this is one.
The beginning is boring and slow. The ending is slapdash. The kids and dog are 2 dimensional. And Linda Hamilton isn't buff like she was in "Terminator 2". About the only thing good about the movie was blowing up a few cool sets worth of miniatures.
A sleepy resort town in the Pacific Northwest is nestled cozily at the foot of Dante's Peak, a long dormant volcano. Volcano dudemeister Pierce Brosnan comes to town and decides she's gonna blow. When he tries to warn the townspeople his boss, a well-meaning but bottom-line oriented kind of guy, tells them not to worry. In the tradition of not wanting the tourists to be scared off by the shark, err volcano, no one is evacuated. And the mayor, Linda Hamilton, looks like an idiot for backing our boy Pierce.
A few days later when our boy Pierce finally has enough evidence to warrant a town meeting everyone gathers together in the local school so that the volcano can choose that moment to kill them easily since they're now all gathered in one place. Now follows the saving of dogs and and flying ash and four-wheel driving.
Dialogue includes, "My son was the real fool, for ever letting you go", "We only get one shot at this", and "For what it's worth, you were right." I know people who could right this without leaving the bathroom.
"Fever Pitch" is one of those books that can never be made into a movie. So they didn't. This film bears very little relation to the one of the funniest most engaging tomes on a sport's obsession; but that doesn't mean it's bad. Quite the contrary, the movie enjoyably aims itself at the little discussed portion of the book which covers being in a love triangle where the third person is the Arsenal Football Club.
The movie centers on Paul (Colin Firth) who is every kid's favorite teacher and a football fanatic. When he and the new straight-laced English teacher start having a relationship his love of football gets in the way. The scene where she is consoling him for not getting a promotion and he thinks she is consoling him because the Arsenal lost to Derby County is typical and very funny.
The movie doesn't quite capture the level of fanaticism I'd have liked but it does do a good job of juxtaposing the fanatic who can't tell if 'Life is shit because the arsenal is shit or if the arsenal is shit because life is shit' and someone who gets rarely gets passionate about anything and can't understand those who do.
A fine movie to be enjoyed by both the fanatic and anyone who has ever had to put up with one. One minute!! One minute!! One minute!!
Batman (the franchise) (Ratings: 5.5, 5, 4, 3 (are we sensing a pattern))
I figured why not review the whole bunch and get it all over with. First off, I must say that I feel bad for Michael Keaton. I and millions of others felt rather disappointed at his portrayal of the caped crusader in the opening installment of this interminable series. If we had known that Kilmer and Clooney were going to be so bad we would've been nicer to him. While I still don't think Keaton was great at least he tried to be sufficiently brooding.
I had high hopes for the first one, mainly on the strength of thinking that Tim Burton's weirdosity might translate well into making a movie look like a comic book. And there were some nice bits like the parade that Joker throws and the ensuing battle. They were very Marvelesque in look but overall the movie disappointed. Apparently Joel Schumacher (director of 3 and 4) thinks that to look like a comic book you just need to be colorful and over the top and overall his attempts sucked.
Now we go after Kilmer and Clooney. Batman is supposed to be this complex ball of barely suppressed turmoil. Val Kilmer's Batman grins like a horny frat boy; what is that about? And Clooney is downright avuncular. I expected "Now, Batgirl, you've got to finish college and, Robin, you eat your vegetables." If Tony Danza's name began with a k-sound I'd put my money on his name cropping up as the lead in (bite my fucking tongue) Batman 5.
I think it was Voltaire who said it best when he said, "As goes the villain, so goeth Batman." Except I'm pretty sure he said it in French. But that lyrical satirist knew his stuff because the villains just get weaker and weaker. Jack Nicholson was great as the Joker and B1 was subsequently the best of the bunch. DeVito wasn't great but I thought Michelle Pfeiffer was a pretty good Catwoman and B2 was kind of a break even affair. Carey was disappointing as the Riddler and I just didn't really get Jones as Two-Face and they didn't really mesh as a unit and B3 was fairly weak. Schwarznegger left me begging for the return of Otto Preminger and while I usually like Uma Thurman, she took the paycheck and ran in this one. It follows that this one was a big turkey.
I'm thinking of filing an injunction if anyone mentions another sequel. For the sake of humanity.
Leon (aka: The Professional) (Rating: 7.5)
The weaker wits among us would be tempted to title this La Femme Lolita and while there are elements of both of those movies in here that would be selling it short. The plot is simple. One day, on the way home from grocery shopping 12 year old Matilda sees Gary Oldman gunning down her drug dealing dad and the rest of her family. She wisely walks past and knocks on the door of the apartment next to hers hoping her neighbor, Leon, will answer the door. Oddly enough though and unbeknownst to her, Leon is a hit man.
Jean Reno is finely understated as the 'no kids, no women' milk-drinking hitman. Gary Oldman is basically Gary Oldman but it works in a drug-crazed, wacko, bad-guy sort of way. And for a twelve-year-old the actress playing Matilda more than holds her own.
The movie is very well-directed. I practically give a 1/2 point for one single point of view shot near the end of the film which for matters of security i can't discuss. I enjoyed the feel of this movie about as much as the plot itself. The good vs. evil, immigrant vs. local, good-bad-guy vs. bad-good-guy is all in there without hitting you over the head.
A true life story about the men who fixed the 1919 World Series. If you know baseball than you already know about the Black Sox scandal and will probably enjoy this telling of the story. If you don't know baseball it's still a good movie about who gets the shaft when things go wrong.
The cast includes John Cusack, Charlie Sheen and about every supporting actor you've ever seen. And while the acting is fine it is a story driven movie as opposed to a performance driven one. Eight Men Out is nothing fancy. In "Lone Star" (one my all time faves, see review) John Sayles carefully intertwines dozens of subplots. In "Brother From Another Planet" he does sort of a surreal sci-fi thing. This (and "Matewan" another fine Sayles pic) are straight ahead well told stories.
While the movie takes place in 1919 the point is one aimed at present day over mediazation. The people who look like good guys could be bad guys and people who look like bad guys could just be suckers. Don't believe everything the law, the press, or anybody for that matter.
101 Dalmatians (live action version) (Rating: 5)
While I wasn't sure why they exactly made this movie (Well except for the fact that Disney is simply a bunch of money-grubbing bastards like every other corporation, people just don't notice as much because the board of directors all wear those cute little mouse ears). I mean we all know that it isn't going to be as good as the animated version so why bother.
Well the one thing they got right is that it looks a lot like the animated version. Glenn Close is Cruella DeVil and I'd swear that the dumber of the two henchman actually was the brother of the guy from the cartoon. And the dalmatians looked a lot like dalmatians.
The dogs are handled well and make suitably cute faces and if you like movies where animals make cute faces then go see this but in truth I never have to see it again and if I were buying something for a kid to watch I'd get the animated version.
This is not a good movie. Mario Van
Peebles plays an android ultimate killing machine. When he starts
to get all emotional and existential during testing the army decide to
reprogram him. This kicks in his
self-protect directive so he escapes into
the jungles of South America where he learns to laugh mechanically and
walk about woodenly. When all else fails they send in prototype 2
to bring him out.
The action scenes are uninspiring. "Ooh, I will hit your jeep with a big log. And since you are shooting at me I will run away and hide in the conveniently named temple of warriors ruin, ooh!"
One of the recurring themes of the movie is that androids can't bluff. Well, they apparently can't act either. Al Gore could've added more pizzazz to the lead role. On the other hand the evil android sent to bring back Solo is so over the top that Richard Jaeckel is cursing the fact that the movie wasn't made in his lifetime.
If android killing machines are your favorite sub genre (and you've already memorized the Terminator movies) just say Van Damme not Van Peebles.
Glengarry Glen Ross (Rating: 6)
This was like reading a Jane Austen novel. Sure it's well done but all the characters annoy the shit out of me.
The plot of this movie is sparse but the acting and patter are brilliant. So much so that they drive me nuts. Why do they drive me nuts. Because it centers around real estate salesman. Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris and Alan Arkin play hard-sell time-share/swamp land salesman. Kevin Spacey plays their office manager. The dialogue is either smarmily believable sales pitches or the agents yelling "fuck you"s at each other in pressure-filled arguments.
If this movie were more enjoyable it would be excellent. But the fact of the matter it just agitated me more than anything. My viewing partner sprouted a headache and had to leave the room and I can't say I blame her. I can easily understand why certain people would love this movie and I can just as easily understand why certain people would hate this movie.
Lot of tension here. Lot of tension. A fine adaptation of Arthur Miller's play, (did I mention that it was tense?)
The movie takes place during the Salem witch
trials. It pits Winona Ryder as the conniving accuser against Daniel
Day Lewis as the honorable man who is paying for his one big mistake.
After a group of girls are caught dancing in the woods they are questioned
by the local minister. They pass the blame onto Tituba a slave girl.
She in turn passes it onto the first person she can think of. At
first the girls want to blame Ryder as she was the ringleader but she cows
them into submission. And then the blaming
really begins.
Among the accused is Lewis' wife. Lewis bonked Ryder once but then went back to his wife. Now he has to save his wife from hanging but the only way of doing that is to convince the witch hunters who follow a logic all there own.
Both Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder give good performances but Paul Schofield as the head judge was superb. An excellent portrayal of rational fanaticism. As a whole this movie was wonderfully acted.
"The Crucible" covers why we need to blame and why we need to be believed. And what happens when both go wrong.
I just don't get it. I've heard this mentioned as part of the John Ford canon and a friend of mine displayed open shock at the fact I hadn't seen such a classic and the cable guide gave it four stars and I just didn't get it. If there's an aficionado of the western out there please write and explain the fascination of this movie to me.
The general plot is that a band of marauding Commanches slaughter a homesteading family and cart off the youngest daughter, blue dolly and all. John Wayne, plays the slaughtered family's uncle. He and the slaughtered's adopted son/ young buck side-kick track the nogoodnik Commanches for 5 years searching for the lost daughter.
Basically, that's it. They search. Some people help them and some people double-cross them and there's a subplot about the girl the side-kick left behind getting involved with the mailman who always carries a guitar. But primarily they just wander around while John Wayne verbally abuses his adopted nephew.
In a movie like this the central thing is the relationship between the big guy and the sidekick. And in my opinion it didn't work. If someone is a stern bastard throughout the audience likes hints that maybe underneath he's okay. Otherwise when the big change comes everyone goes, "what the hell brought that on?" I want to know what the hell brought that on.
If you find yourself dying for a western, rent "Paint Your Wagon" or "Rio Bravo."
Swimming With Sharks (Rating: 8)
This movie is icky. It was listed in the cable guide as 'a black comedy.' "Heathers" is a black comedy, "Delicatessen" is a black comedy. This movie is just plain icky. Let me just say this... "paper cut scene." Nothing comedic about that.
Kevin Spacey plays this Hollywood big shot type who mentally humiliates, degrades and robs of all dignity his interns year after year. Each intern takes it because they know that at the end of the year they'll get his blessing which in turn automatically leads to a great job. We follow the descent of one intern from gung-ho idealist to an unbalanced shell with ideas of revenge.
The denigration that dished out is appallingly believable. And the revenge is completely repulsive and yet you can't not watch. Spacey is thoroughably hateable, but he makes you understand why. It has been quite a while since something riveted me to the screen like this did.
"Swimming With Sharks" should have a warning like amusement park rides 'small children, those prone to nausea or those with a heart condition are strongly urged not to watch this movie.'
Oh, and did I mention the icky twist at the end? I needed a rest when this movie was over.
Fled
(Rating: 5.5)
Lawrence Fishburne is in this movie and
I like him a lot. He's believable as a coke dealer, he's believable
doing Shakespeare. If Fishburne, Crackhead of Venice were to be released
I’d go see it. So I was predisposed to liking this movie. Stephen
(I'm better than Billy but not as good as Alec) Baldwin is in this movie.
Damn it annoys me how he never fully opens his eyes. So I was predisposed
to disliking this movie.
The general story line is that hacker Baldwin is put on a chain gang with hardened criminals, he gets into a fight with Fishburne and as punishment they are chained together. Then during gunfire they have nothing to do with several guards are killed and they escape. Well, the police are after them for killing guards and it looks like Baldwin hacked into some Cuban mafia dude's network so a sinister looking Wayne Newtonesque hit man is after them and the district attorney's office wants to get Baldwin to testify. Chase scenes galore.
Basically, the good guys are decent but the bad guys are ho-hum, which makes for a dead average movie. The hitman is boring, the mafia boss is 2 dimensional, and the bastard cop is predictable. Alan Rickman would've helped this movie immensely.
In the end the movie is a 5 + 1 for Fishburne – ½ for its stupid little mistakes. Little things drive me crazy in movies. Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum talks to alien targeting systems using a Macintosh and I can't get one to understand an IBM? The baddies in The Rock were holding San Francisco hostage and trying to extort $30 mil from the U.S. government and the government won't cough up the money? C’mon!! they could've paid that off with McDonaldland coupons and still bought a six pack of F-14s after lunch. In Fled they talk about how the Ducati 916 is such a bitchin’ cycle and then they can't outrun a Mercedes on a straight-away? And they fit enough info onto a single floppy to bring the underworld of Miami to its knees and yet it takes me 29 disks to load MicroFocus Cobol onto my hardrive? Sheesh!
Paul Newman plays a luckless construction worker who's a decent sort of guy. Bad divorce, can't win a lawsuit over his bum knee, a crush on an unattainable Melanie Griffith, regular loser at poker, the works. And then his truck gets a flat. But he still has time to befriend his landlady, Jessica Tandy. Sort of as if George Bailey had had a lot of small things go wrong instead of one big one.
He runs into his kid who he hasn’t spoken to in years and finds out that he has 2 grandkids. He gives his kid a job, his grandkid (the good one) a stopwatch, Melanie Griffith some self-esteem, his ex-wife’s husband a snowblower, his lawyer his leg back. The works.
This is basically a date movie. But surprisingly enough a good one. I admit that being in the same genre with "The Bodyguard" and "She's The One" helps its rating but it had some nice quirky lines and the ending wasn't what I’d call predictable so I enjoyed it.
L.A. Confidential (Rating: 8.5)
This is not a buddy movie. It definitely not a pro cop movie. This is what detective movies are supposed to be, hard hitting and unpredictable.
The strength of this movie are the good guys. The squeaky clean college boy who snitches in the name of honesty. The violent ends-justifies-the-means realist. The cop who is a bit too tied in with the tabloids. All of them coming in at different angles and are trying to tie up the loose ends in what looks like an open and shut case.
The man who became a cop because his father was a boozing wife beater/child abuser is a character we've all seen before but Russell Crowe's performance is the way that character is meant to be portrayed. He constantly looks like he is holding in so much that he is going to explode into a ball of violence. Kevin Spacey and Guy Pearce head up the rest of the cast which is quite good.
The movie has the look and feel of L.A. of years ago. The direction is crisp and occasionally shocking. The story, from a James Ellroy novel, is complex without being confusing. I wish more cop movies were like this one.
Set in Sheffield, England which is roughly analogous to America's rust belt, this movie is about making do and by not letting your job determine your outlook as much as your worth.
The story is simple, a group of laid off factory workers who feel worthless because a lot of their ideas of what it is to be a man is wrapped up in being a money earner/bread winner. After the Chippendale dancers come through town they decide that stripping would be a quick couple of bucks. Of course, a few wacky scenes ensue. The group practicing in the queue for the dole, watching "Flashdance" together etc. But they also touch on a few serious notes, looking on people as objects, awkward domestic situations, and unemployment in general.
The movie goes a bit heavy on the emasculation of each of the characters early on, one is losing custody of his son because he can't afford support, one hasn't told his wife that he was made redundant 6 months ago, one is impotent, one tries to commit suicide, etc. After it gets rolling, though, it is a joy to watch. The funny bits are genuinely humorous and the touching bits are well-done and not at all cloying. Completely atypical and thoroughly enjoyable.
Yet another Mike Leigh movie. This one about a family and their friends and their problems. A synopsis of this movie doesn't do it justice. A father who buys a lunch wagon, a mother with an annoying laugh, two daughters, one obnoxious the other a plumber, they all just muddle through and bounce off odd friends and acquaintances.
But the point of this movie, and for that matter all the Leigh movies I've seen to date, seems to be 1) There is just as much weirdness in normal looking lives as in odd looking ones. 2) Coping beats the hell out of denial. A friend who tries to start his own restaurant is not good at coping and pays for it. The father is stuck in a boring kitchen job and though not exactly successful his coping mechanisms at least leave him happy at the end.
The performances were excellent. The annoying daughter is made easy to sympathize with. The mother and father do the stupid stuff parents do that annoy their offspring. Everything feels very true.
This movie had a plethora of clunkers. There are dead bodies everywhere, everybody is either bleeding or splattered with blood, and the plane is going down. At this point the president's daughter steps forward, puts her hand on Harrison Ford's shoulder and says, "Everything'll be okay, Daddy." Sheeesh.
The action sequences weren't bad but they weren't riveting either. I keep comparing this to director Wolfgang Petersen's other presidential nailbiter, "In the Line of Fire," and it doesn't fare that well. Oldman, who I usually like, isn't especially intimidating whereas John Malkovitch really creeps me out.
The little touches in this movie all fall flat. The football game, the president's family, Glenn Close as Veep, they just don't do it for me. Harrison Ford does throw a nice salute though.
This was a suspenseful, tensely directed movie with a very disappointing ending. Basically, I'm giving the first 90 minutes a 6 1/2 and the last ten minutes a 3.
Michael Douglas plays a super rich CEO whose flighty little brother gives a subscription to a company that's puts you in a game. Of course, after he signs up and takes all the tests, weird shit starts going down. The next thing you know he (and the viewer) have no idea what to believe. Is this a game or are they ripping me off? Is that man a salesman, an actor, or a gamesmaster?
Sean Penn isn't in it much but he does have one fine screaming, paranoia scene. Penn is very good at acting at the top of his lungs, I must say. Unger was fine as the love interest/ rip-off artist/ innocent bystander. And there is a an great scene where Douglas breaks into the game company's headquarters and finds almost everybody he has seen in the last week sitting together in a cafeteria.
I loved not knowing who was who or what was what. The problems came along with the implausible and yet predictable ending. Too bad, I was really enjoying up until then.
Another Mike Leigh film, and while it wasn't "Secrets and Lies" it was pretty damn good. Centering on two women who were college flatmates, the story is told by cutting in flashbacks into a weekend visit.
In college both leads were seriously dysfunctional, one extremely aggressive and the other painfully meek. When one visits the other for a weekend in London they 'coincidentally' run into several people they knew at university. I can't figure out why the coincidences don't bother me but they don't.
The different transformations are the heart of the movie, some now lead normal lives, some can't quite cope, some sell real estate, but in them all you can easily recognize their college attitudes and problems.
Extremely awkward in a good and sometimes humorous way, sometimes serious way.
Coming out of the theatre I was thinking about giving this movie a 5 1/2 but after I thought about it for awhile I gave it a 5. Now that I'm writing a review I'm grading it down again.
Zemeckis directs it a bit too big but that is the least of my complaints. The first is the improbability of the White House preacher being one of the world's most influential people. And being played by Matt McConnaughydjkhf (sp?) doesn't help either. Wooden.
On the up side I liked some of the ideas pitting science vs. faith. And Jodie Foster is pretty good as usual. I would not minding reading the book but I never have to see the movie again.
Oz (my better half) panned the movie, gave it a 1/2, and won't stop complaining about it. I wish she'd get her own soap box.
Secrets and Lies (Rating: 9.5)
Most movies that feature a fair amount of improvved dialogue are either very good or very bad. Luckily this one is in the first category.
After the death of her adoptive mother, a black women decides to find her birth mother. After finding her, the least of the problems is that her mother is white. Of much more import is who knows, who can never know, and who might tell. And of those who know or don't know what secrets do they have?
This movie doesn't try to explain things to you. Many scenes start out without any explanation and you must think and wait before figuring out what is going to happen next. The movie is about as predictable as life. This is one of the things that makes it so believable.
I also loved haw people's professions clued you in on things. The optician helps people see things more clearly, the portrait photographer puts a nice face on things etc.
Blue in the Face (Rating: 6.5)
Apparently the makers of "Smoke" had a few dollars and a few days left over so they churned out this little ditty of a movie. Basically a series of vignettes dealing with Brooklyn and its peoples. No real plot but a lot of interesting ramblings and so on. Pretty funny at times.
Mostly Harvey Keitel but also showing up are Lou Reed, Michael J. Fox, Rupaul, Jim Jarmusch, Rosanne, Madonna etc. basically anybody who was around. Enjoyable but better seen as an addendum to "Smoke" than a full movie in its own right.
"Speed 2" looked stupider than the original, and people warned me that "Batman 4" was the worst of the series and "Con Air" didn't exactly look like the be all and end all so I was just about ready to write off the summer as pure doodoo but then I won free tickets to MIB.
Tommy Lee Jones plays an agent of the force that monitors alien activity on earth. He recruits Will Smith to be his partner and the two of them save the world. Pretty simple, but also a lot of fun. It's icky and goofy and lots of laser shooting and stuff. No extra watts on the human condition but it doesn't insult you either.
High points, excellent puppet work for some of the aliens. Their explanations of stuff, i.e. New York blackout, Weekly World News, Elvis etc. Not so high point, a very perfunctory sendoff to a main character at the end.
Expect a sequel.
Love and Other Catastrophes (Rating: 6.5)
The scenario is your basic two college roommates searching for love, better classes, and a renter. Nothing to set the world on fire but the movie is nicely done and not all that predictable. (Okay, I knew how one roommate would end up but the other one could have gone either way.)
One roommate (Mia) is a lesbian with the greatest girlfriend in the world. Mia's problem is that she can't stand commitment. This is paralleled in the subplot of switching majors. The other roommate (Alice) has standards that are too high. She is looking for a totally honest, left-handed guy who is into the same movies This is paralleled in the subplot of never finishing her thesis because it's never quite right.
The dialogue was witty enough to keep me interested and only got the least bit preachy once and that character was drunk so maybe they're supposed to be like that. I liked the unchangeability of some of the characters, one never spoke, one always wore black, one was always anxious, etc. You'd think this was stupid but it works. My only real beefs about the film are that everyone is very pretty, much prettier than the average schmoe when I went to college and the opening credits are annoying.
I'm hoping this is a standard Australian movie because it is definitely a notch above the standard American movie.
Too much shooting and not enough goofy fight scenes. Jackie Chan excels at choreographing fight scenes and acting endearingly goofy. Not very much of either happened in this movie. It is one of the early ones in his series of Hong Kong police films. He infiltrates a mainland gang thought to be smuggling drugs. The woman was good though not good enough for me to remember her name. See "First Strike" or "Rumble in the Bronx" instead.
Cary Grant plays this ne'er-do-well playboy who falls in love and marries conservative Joan Fontaine. He can't quite stop lying and gambling and when he gets really deeply into debt his partner dies under suspicious circumstances. His wife fears that he killed his partner and is now after her. Regardless of whether he did it or not he Grant's character is basically a very annoying pathological liar. Doesn't stand the test of time. See "Rear Window" instead.
The Professional: Golgo 13 (Rating: 2.5)
Japanimation. The animation isn't bad but the rest of this movie is. You follow a hit man who refuses to show emotion through a meandering plot as he shoots people and beds women with no pubic hair. See "Akira" instead.
Waiting for Guffman (Rating: 7.5)
What a nice little movie. Spinal Tap and SCTV get together to do a gentle send-up of small town theater. Though not as wondrous a work as "This is Spinal Tap" it has enough memorable scenes that I would gladly watch it again.
The story of Corky St. Clair (Nigel Tufnel aka Christopher Guest), a dancer/ choreographer who couldn't make it on Broadway and ends up teaching drama in Blain, Missouri. For Blain's 150th anniversary he attempts to put on the be all and end all of patriotic plays, tracing the town from when it was settled by people who thought they were in California at the time, through its becoming the footstool capitol of the world, and up to the pre-Roswell UFO sighting. Rumor has it that a Broadway talent scout named Guffman is coming to see the play.
The characters all get close to over the top but still remind us of people we know. The Jewish dentist who plays the lead (His grandfather starred in Dybbuk, Schmybbuk, Just Give Me Some Ham) thinks he is Johnny Carson. The travel agents (who have never left town) know that they are extremely talented. The gum chewing Dairy Queen scooper understands Corky.
The best jokes are the ones that go unsaid. The fact that no one suspects that an effeminent choreographer from New York might be gay or the eight people who sound like a full orchestra are what, in the end, made this movie for me.
I saw this for free and I'm still going to complain. It is a one gag movie and not even Bill Murray can keep up one gag for 90 minutes and Carey is not Murray. I have seen Jim Carey be funny but every gag just goes on to long until I just became wearied by it all.
I guess the saving grace of this movie is that it's probably a as for 10 year olds. I'm completely baffled as to why this is making 35 million dollars.
Go rent "Ace Ventura."
I was slightly wary of seeing this movie. I feared it might degenerate into Casey's Shadow, Bad News Bears, Little Miss Marker, Mathauesque crusty old guy/ little kid schtick. On the other hand I am drawn to movies shot in Czech. I went for it and it was the right call.
Jan Sverek plays a wolfish cellist who is down on his luck after being thrown out of the Philharmonic and reduced to playing funerals. To get out of debt he agrees to marry a Russian woman. She immediately escapes to West Germany leaving him with her child, who speaks no Czech.
This movie is so understated. The antithesis of schmaltzy Hollywood emotionalism. No one screams when they are angry or sobs when they are sad. The director simply relies on the actors to do their job and they do. Another key directorial point that most directors of children can't direct children. The vast majority of kids are shitty at delivering lines, but if you leave a camera on them long enough they can give you some great facial expressions. Sverek (Jiri) has the kid speak very little and still show a lot.
I loved the Czech in-jokes of running into the good cop bad cop interrogators at the anti-Communist rally and being demoted for something incredibly inane but then being proud of your demotion.
A gentle well-done movie.
This is billed as an overcoming adversity movie, which it is, but it is more of a being driven into adversity movie.
In the beginning we see David Helfgott as an adult wandering in the rain. Then we are taken back to his childhood where his father was THE force in his life. A domineering man who keeps his entire family on a tight leash. In his teen years David shows much talent is offered the chance to study abroad. His father opposes this and when David summons all his nerve and defies him, the father excommunicates him from the family. At school we see him have a nervous breakdown. Then we meet him as an adult in an asylum and we follow him through his struggle to have some sort of control over his life.
While the speech patterns of David as an adult are simply mesmerizing the best acting performance is given by Noah Taylor who plays David as a teen. It is in this period that we see the actual breakdown. The father is well acted, though he didn't seem to age very much.
Overall, this movie is about control. Kind of frightening in its way.
A movie that made me ask a lot of questions even though I know I will never be able to answer them. Another sign of a good movie is that I really wonder will the future bring for the characters. This movie did that. Is the boy better off?
The general plot line of this movie is a mentally handicapped man who was in the state asylum for killing two people is released because he is no longer seen as a danger to society. He returns to his hometown where he makes friends with a small boy and his mother. The mother is dating a good old boy, violent, alcoholic type. The question is who will have more control over the kids destiny. The gentle giant who has been labelled a 'violent idiot' or the violent boyfriend (played well by singer Dwight Yoakam and reminiscent of alcoholics we probably all have met).
Billy Bob Thornton is excellent. The kid and mother are fine. John Ritter actually was more than adequate as the homosexual stuck in a small town. Jim Jarmusch has a cameo. But the beauty of this movie is the script. "We're going to be a family. My family." Dwight Yoakam states ominously. There is almost an eloquence to the simplistic believability of the dialogue.
This movie is dark. This movie made me laugh at things I should not laugh at. It doesn't say "just say no" it says "if you start the system will never let you stop". The movie takes place in a 24 hour period which starts with Tupac Shakur's girlfriend overdosing. His woman in the hospital Tupac convinces his friend Tim Roth that they should get their shit together and enter a rehab program.
What ensues is being sent from callous paper-shuffler to well-meaning but powerless paper-shuffler to frustrated paper-shuffler to clueless paper-shuffler in search of a Medicaid card. Medicaid cards are the holy grail of the movie. While the crosstown frustration builds they start getting chased by the cops who think they offed a drug dealer and then they start getting chased by drug lords who think they've stolen the dead dealer's stash. And every time something bad happens then they need just one more hit.
The scene where two guys who will probably be dead in 48 hours are talking about how cooking up in aluminum leads to alzheimer's is so believably macabre I was stunned.
Tupac Shakur plays the resigned stoic with good comic timing and Tim Roth is twitchy as hell but as an addict it works.
Fierce Creatures (Rating: 5.5)
The cast from "A Fish Called Wanda" is reassembled in this farce about the world's richest and most ruthless businessman acquiring a zoo and giving it to John Cleeese to run. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a displaced executive who comes to work at the zoo because, well, I guess she likes animals or something. Kline plays the ruthless businessdude's annoying offspring who wants to have sponsor's fund the zoo. Palin is the longwinded know-it-all zoo keeper.
While short on plot and long on Jamie Lee Curtis leaning into the camera, the movie is goofy enough to satisfy. The gratuitous sponsorships in a movie about gratuitous sponsorships (Bruce Springsteen's turtle?) get a laugh or two. Cleese, Curtis, and Klein are fun to watch and work well together. Palin's character simply got on my nerves, however. This is a movie that has enough adult farce and enough zookeeper's in giant bee costumes that if you are forced to take an 8 year old to a movie both parties might come out smiling.
Six Degrees of Separation (Rating: 8.5)
A black guy about 20 knocks on the door of a wealthy couples 5th avenue penthouse. He is bleeding and claims to have been mugged and that he knew that they lived here because he goes to Harvard with their kids. They clean him up and he repays their hospitality by cooking dinner, waxing eloquently about his thesis on "The Catcher in the Rye", and promising them parts in the movie version of Cats. For, you see he is Sidney Poitier's son.
Or is he??? And did he steal anything or for that matter do anything wrong at all?
A very good movie, Stockard Channing and Will Smith are excellent together. And I was as interested in how the story was told as much as the story itself. It was unfolded brilliantly.
A movie about phoniness in its many guises.
Jackie Chan's First Strike (Rating: 6.5)
Standard Jackie. Poorly dubbed, funny situations, scanty plot, hilarious facial expressions, unbelievable stunts, thoroughly enjoyable. This is the fourth in his 'Jackie of the Hong Kong Police Force' movies. The plot is simplistic but the truth of the matter is that aside from being a martial arts master and a premier stunt man, he is a decent comic actor. Occasionally, I wonder how he would have done on the silent screen.
And, oh yeah, in this one you get to see his butt.
The People vs. Larry Flynt (Rating: 7)
Well acted. Both Harrelsons turn in good performances, Crispin Glover is weird in the right sort of way, as usual. I couldn't tell if Courtney Love is a good actress because she basically plays herself but she fits the role well.
If I had a beef about the film it would be that it is basically Hollywood's take on a living persons autobiography. So I got the feeling that this is a soft version of a soft version of what actually happened.
In the end, however, the movie is good enough that you root for the little guy without feeling manipulated. But then again the little guy is up against Jerry Falwell which makes for a good story.
Rating
System:
I rate on a ten point scale but I always
hate when people tell you the scale without giving you any reference points.
Some people think a 6 is above average and is a complement to the film,
others feel that a 6 is what you give Richard Jaeckel movies and is meant
as an insult.
Therefore I am giving a little reference guide you can use. I do not believe that there is such a thing as a perfect movie. For my purposes a ten doesn't mean perfect just that it's in the highest category of what i would like to see. My ratings definitely reflect my taste. A movie such as Evil Dead, which is considered to be part of the canon of horror movies, would probably only get a 7 1/2 on my scale because horror is not my favorite genre. For that reason I've tried to give a wide range of movies in my guide.
10) Dr. Strangelove, Spinal Tap
9) Fargo, Brazil
8) Witness for the Prosecution,
Empire Strikes Back
7) Babe, Die Hard
6) High Noon,
5) Lightning Jack (a more average
movie was never made)
4) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
3) Devil's Brigade, Gumball
Rally
2) Cannonball Run II
1) Survival Zone
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this page are not
necessarily those of the editors (i.e., me). In fact, I make it a point
to never agree with what Jim (aka: Jim) has to say - I find it safer that
way. Oh sure, he might have directed some films, but did he ask me to be
in any of them?!? NO! I mean, how can you trust his judgment after that?
I could have been a star!!! No, I'm not bitter - the scars have healed
- all is forgiven...
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