Change Your Image
Mercury-4
Reviews
Waterloo (1970)
Rod Steiger didn't work for me at all
I thought this was a good movie, and could have been a great movie.
The bulk of the plot of the movie didn't do much for me. I wouldn't necessarily criticize it, I don't think it was bad, it just didn't interest me enough to get my attention.
The actual battle of Waterloo though was stunning. This occupied, I don't know how much, a little less than half of the movie, I think 40% or so. But it was incredible. I've spent years playing table-top wargames so I feel like I know how battles work. The battle was really brought to life and all of the details were very clear and vivid. The glory and the horror of battle were brought to life, more than any other battle scene I can think of off hand. There is one moment as an example (I'm going to be a little vague so this doesn't turn into a spoiler) where cavalry charges infantry which is unexpectedly formed into squares. This would be a bad position for cavalry of this era, which you know if you've studied Napoleonic warfare, but the problematic nature of it was immediately clear visually as you watched. I loved this.
But to me, the movie is ruined, or kept from greatness anyway, by Steiger. He's a great actor, but he didn't feel like Napoleon to me at all. Napoleon was an intensely charismatic man. Steiger is a -tough- man, an imposing man, but I wouldn't call him charismatic at all. And he feels very American to me.
In the Woody Allen movie Love and Death, there is a comic caricature of Napoleon. This version is flamboyant, aware of his own grandeur, believing in his own grandeur (rather like Beethoven). Although the character is comical, I think it is probably much closer to the reality of Napoleon. Closer to my image of him anyway. Ironically Napoleon's body double in that movie, who is intentionally meant to be the opposite of the real Napoleon (crude, lacking style, with a bit of a New Jersey accent), reminded me more of Steiger than Steiger did of Napoleon.
Maybe it's my image of Napoleon which is flawed, but I think considering what he did on sheer force of personality, that Napoleon would have felt like a very flamboyant person in person.
Barney's Version (2010)
I detested this movie
The main character was utterly loathsome. I didn't want to spend an hour watching him, let alone an overly-long 2 1/4 hours. There were no sympathetic characters; I hated the Paul Giamatti (an actor I hate in everything he does) character and hated all of the others for not hating him.
Dustin Hoffman redeemed this movie, his moments in it were great. But there was absolutely nothing else.
The movie was largely a plot less character study of an obnoxious character. The only real plot element was the death of the friend, Boogie. I'm not going to give away the way this element of plot is resolved, but I didn't get the point at all when I saw the movie, only when I googled it did I realize that the one scene with the airplane was resolving this plot element. Maybe if I'd read the novel it would have been more clear.
Why are we supposed to love hateful destructive characters? I don't, and never have.
Dick Tracy (1990)
This is not a good movie. But I recommend you see it.
I avoided this movie for years because it looked like it was pretty bad ... and, having just watched it, it is ... but I recommend it.
Overall it's not very good, but it has bits and pieces in it that are beautiful.
There are city-scapes, flyover shots of the city they're in, which are very good. +
The villain makeup is kind of annoying and distracting. I get what they were trying to do, capture the grotesque faces of Chester Gould's bad guys. But they just look like their faces are puffed up from some allergic reaction. -
Some of the acting is very good. It's an incredible lineup of actors. Al Pacino does decently in a fairly typical Al Pacino bellowing and gesticulating role. Not a great acting stretch but loads of fun. +
Madonna is stunning. Is she acting or playing herself? But I think she captures something in the character she created which is very unique, and stunningly bad-ass and good. The singing is good, especially at first. I got a little tired of musical numbers, but the first few really impressed me. The first especially. Madonna really showing some genuine talent. ++
Warren Beatty. I really can't stand Warren Beatty, at least since watching this movie. After seeing what they did with the villains, I expected they would at least make some nominal attempt to capture the look and personality of Dick Tracy.
Nopes. Forget that. This is Warren Beatty. He is way too good-looking to bother doing anything in a movie but walk around looking good. It probably helps a lot that Beatty produced this, so he could guide the script and ensure it didn't involve anything he could do by just being Warren Beatty. There are relationship-tension scenes with his girlfriend that acknowledge the character a little, but they are still pretty much nothing but Warren Beatty being cute and adorably boyish. --------------------------------
So while I think this is not a very good movie, I still recommend seeing it for the really good parts suffocating to death within it.
Bedtime Story (1964)
Surprisingly funny
I didn't expect much from this movie.
I saw the Steve Martin/Michael Caine remake, I tend to like Brando in movies, so I wanted to see it purely out of curiosity. The fact that it is not generally available left me guessing it was probably not a very good movie. That it was a light comedy from the sixties did not seem to bode well. And as much as I tend to like Brando in movies, I always have a vague foreboding that any of his movies will be one of the very BAD ones he made.
I found a copy on Amazon.com and added it to my wish list and kind of forgot it. One of these days, I thought, I will get around to watching it.
Then for Christmas my step-mother got it for me.
But it turned out to be region 2, so I couldn't watch it anyway.
Finally I got a region-free player (I already had three other movies that I got in a similar way that were non-region-1.) And I watched this last night.
This movie had me HOWLING, at times at least.
There is a scene towards the start. Brando's character is trying to seduce the town Burgermeister's daughter. He has managed to strip down to his underwear under rather bizarre pretenses.
Unexpectedly, her dad, the Burgermeister, walks in at just that moment.
Brando says: "Good evening sir ... I suppose you're WONDERING what I'm DOING here!" Now I know that's not funny to read. But you have to see Brando's facial expression at just that moment. It is truly hilarious.
I don't know how to describe it. It's like a mix of cunning, genius, utter stupidity and complete insanity all at the same time. If it weren't the early sixties I would say it also threw cokehead psychosis in there ... which, undoubtedly, is not the case, but it is so completely INSANE and conniving that you could throw anything in the description.
I rewound it three times and played it back and it had me howling every time.
I have seen Brando be funny in interviews (with Dick Cavett, for instance) but I thought Brando in a comedy would be painful. But this is not just good, it's great. In my opinion anyway; comedy is a funny thing.
Anyway it is not just that one scene; that one, if you see the movie, hopefully you will see what I mean. There are a number of scenes that I think are comic gold. Brando outflanking his commanding Colonel. Brando blithely explaining the facts of life to David Niven when they first meet. Brando playing the mentally-challenged young Prince.
In fact really, a lot of the best moments are, in my opinion, Brando as a comic. Which blows my mind, I tend to associate him with serious, even over-the-top-serious, roles.
My personal review then overall is that this movie has a large number of scenes that are extremely funny and if you like good comedy, are well worth going to the trouble of finding a copy and even getting a region-free player.
Now, I don't think this movie is perfect, by a long shot.
The one scene with Brando and the Burgermeister's daughter, after the great moment that impressed me so much, Brando walks out, doing calisthenics as he goes.
This to me is a lame, TV-situation-comedy kind of pratfall.
There are, similarly, some moments that feel very weak, like something on "I Love Lucy" at its worst.
Worse ... as much as I loved a lot of this movie, honestly, I think it only really holds up well about half-way through.
Somewhere around the half-way mark, I think they had basically taken advantage of the really good comedic potential of the premise. After a certain point, the really stand-out comedic moments are gone, and the movie is just developing and resolving it's plot.
I can't see how they could have got around it, the plot had to work it's way out. But it's just not funny anymore. Not -really- funny. I can't think of any really funny moments after Shirley Jones has really gotten involved in the plot.
Despite that, I still think this is a very funny movie well worth seeing, I highly recommend it, and if your sense of humor is anything like mine, you will get some good laughs about halfway through.
I can't imagine watching it that far without having the urge to see how the plot works out, so you will probably watch the second half.
Maybe you can catch up on your email while you see how it ends.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
A good movie. A very good movie. But not the 83rd best movie ever made.
I don't go to movies in the theatre very often anymore. I have a nice big-screen TV and DVD player and most of the time I watch movies like that.
So when I do go to the theatre I try to make sure it's a very good movie. The IMDb is a big part of that, I have found generally the IMDb median rating for a movie is a dependable indicator of whether I will like it or not.
So I pulled a list of movies playing at the local theatre and fed them into IMDb. Gran Torino and Benjamin Button both had very, very high ratings. Benjamin Button was slightly higher ... and it really needed to be, as I saw it was nearly three hours long. At the time it was something like the #78 highest rated movie of all time in IMDb.
I didn't even know very clearly what it was about, but to me it doesn't matter, either a movie is good or bad, whatever genre it's in.
So I chose Benjamin Button. I had very high expectations for it, I was really expecting to see a movie that deserved to be rated the 78th (currently 83rd) best movie ever made.
There is nothing I think is -bad- about it. The acting is all good, the story is engaging. The movie did draw me in emotionally at times.
But there was just nothing stunningly good about it. I can't think of a scene that struck me as being a GREAT scene, a scene that really moved me or amazed me or touched me.
Overall I thought the characters were good. Good, not great. The device of having him aging backwards worked, I thought, personally. I'm still not sure why, but there was something touching about watching him grow ever younger, especially as a part of the love affair which was the center of the movie. (And some of my favorite scenes were the ones in the beginning with Benjamin as a very young old man ... to me that was very humorous.) Watching the young/old Benjamin fall in love with the young Daisy was kind of wonderfully strange and touching. (Although, as another reviewer here pointed out, there was also something vaguely creepy about that, in a sort of vaguely pedophilic way.) To me it was all GOOD. Very good, quite possibly.
But I could never really call any of it GREAT. I mean if there is somebody reading this who, like me before I saw it, is trying to decide whether to see this movie or not, that's my conclusion. If you want to see a good movie, watch it. But if you really want to see a stunning, great movie, I don't think Benjamin Button is there.
I've said i don't think it's great, but I haven't really said much about why.
After I saw the movie I looked through other people's IMDb reviews and I found one which I thought hit the nail on the nail.
I don't think there is a way to link directly to an IMDb review but it was posted on 15 December 2008 and the title is "Fine-looking and well acted, but ultimately flat".
In a lot of ways I would like to just point at that review and say "I agree".
As that reviewer says, Benjamin himself is basically a very emotionally flat character. And he's utterly the heart of the movie, so as a result the movie is very unengaging. Because Benjamin has no evident emotions, one doesn't care about what happens to him.
Which is such a waste when you have Brad Pitt as an actor. I think it's a shame that Pitt has not, like Johnny Depp, insisted on roles that would give him a chance to show what he can do, because I just can't believe that somebody who could do what he did in Twelve Monkeys is not capable of genius work. But definitely, Pitt is great when he can stretch out and be wild. Exactly the opposite of Benjamin Button.
For what it's worth, I can understand a lot of why the character is the way it is. I mean I'm not going to sit here and say the film-maker is an idiot, I think I get what he was going for.
TCCOBB is, I think, intended to be a lot like Forrest Gump. Not so much a movie about the character as about the times in which he lived.
So I think Benjamin is so neutral because he's supposed to be a neutral, Forrest Gump-style observer. He's watching the times go by, and we are watching them through his eyes.
But the thing is, while I can see the logic of it, the fact remains that we wind up with an emotionally dead, unengaging movie.
But unlike FG, I don't think TCCOBB does all that great a job of making me feel like I am living through the times Benjamin is living through.
Most of the scenes feel, to me, like they could be transplanted to modern times without anything being lost.
One thing I will say in favor of the film on that point though, I loved their choices of period music. There was one moment in a restaurant during which a Stephane Grappeli/Django Reinhardt tune plays, set in the 30s I think, which I particularly liked. And the Beatles on TV.
But it did not do a great job of capturing a feeling of the times.
And in trying to do so, it sacrificed emotional engagement.
A good movie, but in my opinion, far from a great one.
I Am Legend (2007)
Flashy creature movie with no resemblance to the original
The write-up by csullaf (http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0814462/comments) titled "Extravagant wrapping around an empty box., 17 December 2007" already said most of what needed to be said about this movie, in my opinion, but I wanted to add a little bit.
As he said, I find it mind-boggling how quickly Hollywood will make a movie based on a story or earlier movie and end up with something that bears little resemblance to the original. It's the height of stupidity. The REASON people want a new version is because of the original, if you take that away, you have nothing left, do you? Which is what this movie has, as far as I'm concerned. There's just nothing there. Video-game monsters, poorly-developed characters and poorly-developed plot.
What really gets me more than anything else though ... again, as csullaf said, the changes they made, absurdly, make the title meaningless.
In the original and in earlier filmed versions, the vampires are fairly intelligent. And the main character is a legend to them, THUS THE NAME, "I am Legend".
In fact in the earliest filmed version of this, the Vincent Price version, if I recall correctly the female character who he befriends turns out to be sort of a mutant strain of the vampires, more or less half-human and half-vampire. As a result, you really do see it from their point of view. They are the future of the human race, a new mutation (the vampires in general) and from that perspective, the main character IS in fact a monster in his own right.
That's what makes the story interesting. That's what makes it any different from a thousand cheesy monster movies or, for that matter, from a video game.
But by making the vampires super-powered video game monsters, that whole side of it is lost.
And there's nothing left but a video game.
I really have never been able to grasp how they do it, how they take an interesting story and, at some point, make the decision "let's take everything that is interesting in this story and chuck it out". I mean they couldn't just be doing it accidentally, could they? I would just like to see the meeting where they do that. Are they all doing massive amounts of cocaine so they are all in some cocaine psychosis and then they have the meeting? Maybe they can make that a mandatory special feature on the DVD for movies like this in the future. "The meeting where we decided to take everything good and chuck it out". I think that would be good cinema, I would like to see a roomful of coked-up Hollywood executives barking and howling like madmen and making completely deranged decisions. And they probably have some pretty cute secretaries.
It wouldn't be any better than the movie they end up making but it would at least be shorter.
Yôjinbô (1961)
A weird hybrid
Kind of a weird hybrid between a samurai movie, a film noir, and Mad magazine.
There is one shot in particular, towards the end where Gonji is hanging from a rope and there is a panning shot which shows his face, looking very unhappy, that reminds me very much of a Mort Drucker panel (I think it's Mort Drucker, the one who used to do the movie send-ups in the sixties and seventies).
Throughout though, the style of the film ... I have probably seen this movie a hundred times, it is one of my favorites, and I have always had that feeling that it reminded me of something, then finally tonight it came to me. The gritty, dirty, comically ugly feel of the visual style overall ... it's a dead ringer for a Mad magazine movie satire.
Hard Candy (2005)
I knew a pedophile
Not just a pedophile, but a man as dangerous and horrifying as what this movie made the main character, the photographer, out to be.
I don't want to go into the details, because frankly it is just nauseating. The person committed murder. What kills me is I had talked to this person and he put a link up to my website (there is really nothing there) and described me as a "very funny guy".
This is going to ramble a little ...
When I was young, I knew a young girl who was the third victim of the Green River Killer. When the police announced that they had determined who he was, in the 80's, I made completely sincere plans to find him and kill him. Opal Mills was a sweet girl, confused and trying to fit in and I found her completely charming in a pooh-bear way. I think I was the closest thing she had to a friend outside her family, I don't know.
Then she was dead, because of some sick b_st_rd acting out the lowest, most twisted kind of ... I don't even want to call it a fantasy, it is the most nauseating kind of nightmare I can imagine, and I can't stand to even think that there is somebody who found this somehow sexual, who could enjoy it, let alone act it out.
I couldn't get my hands on a gun. Which was just as well, the person the police said did it, didn't, and it would be twenty years before they tracked down the real killer. I'd have killed the wrong guy, if I could have gotten a gun and if I had had the whatever-it-is to go through with it.
Then this guy I met later, the one who thought I was a "very funny guy", thinking we are buddies, having no idea what I went through with Opal.
So yes this is rambling, badly. I could write this in a more linear way, but life isn't really linear, and the reality of it to me would be lost.
There are some truly evil people out there. Ted Bundy and a long list of others, destroyers, truly monsters in sheep's clothing, to whom the destruction of what is innocent and beautiful is a joy. It fills me with a rage I don't have words for and I would snuff them out like old tissue paper without a second thought.
But if I am going to let loose without censoring myself, and if in the process I am going to be honest, I have had sex with women who were too young. In one instance, I knew it to be the case. In several others, I didn't, but objectively could have found out, and legally, was obliged to. But if I am going to really be honest, if I am going to talk about pedophilia without being full of crap, I have to say it was completely consensual and with women who were certainly sexually developed and aware. I have a hard time conflating consensual sex with a seventeen-year-old with child molestation, let alone with Ted Bundy.
So what the hell am I saying. Hard Candy was a two-hour orgy of hate, directed towards people who I hate. To some extent, on that level, I liked it.
But my god ... at some level, watching this two-hour orgy of torture, part of me really had to ask, who is the sick person here? Why is a two-hour orgy of hate and sexual torture, and -enjoying- it, somehow OK as long as we can all agree that it is the right victim undergoing it? I mean, there is nothing in this movie but sexual torture. The only thing that seems to justify it is that we all agree that it is the right victim.
I have let myself be a little disjointed in writing this ... I don't have simple opinions about it, I find parts of me both admiring and horrified by it. I don't know a glib, handy way of reconciling the two.
All I can really say is, while part of me liked this movie, a part of me had to cry b__sh_t. This is a sick orgy of torture with a very confused justification. I don't walk away from it feeling like there is a real underlying justification of trying to protect the innocent. It's clear that in making the movie, they tried as hard as possible to blur the line between a sick murdering pedophile, and somebody who is not but has obviously crossed a line, as much as they were capable of. The Jeff character is, obviously, presented as innocently as possible at first, then progressively revealed as being a sick murdering bastard. And why? To justify the orgy of hatred and torture directed towards him.
So where is the sick sexually-maladjusted monster here?
The Last Wave (1977)
Magic in practice
While to most people watching the movie, this will be of little interest, but out of the many hundreds of movies dealing with magic and the occult in one form or another, this one is probably the best in many ways.
From The Golem to The Craft the subject seems to be of endless interest to the movie industry. The majority of movies which touch on it in any way do so childishly (for example "Witchboard", a true piece of utter garbage in every way) either taking the transcendental elements as cheap excuses for cheesy special effects or cardboard cutout villians (cf "Warlock"). More frequently the subject comes up in an hysterical religious context (in the various Revelations-oriented movies, the antichrist is inevitably an advocate of some kind of new-age style practice). Rarely, a movie seems to show at least some passing experience with magic as it is practiced in real life, but the presentation of the occult in such movies can at best be described as allegorical and not literal, or symbolic, or ... just not quite right.
I watched this movie again after many years tonight. I had seen it before on VHS; it is a dark, moody piece, and after watching it on DVD, I would say if you have any intention to watch this movie, watch it on DVD, don't watch it on VHS.
The darkness and moodiness are overpowering in VHS but in DVD the movie takes on a very different tone. I think Weir pushed the dark aspects intentionally for style, but when the movie is converted to the lower color medium of VHS this goes over the edge. DVD brings the movie to life again and I saw it differently.
Anyway, seeing it as if for the first time, I realized that the treatment of magic is extremely good in this movie. It's difficult to go into all the reasons why, I don't care to take the time to do so.
For anybody who's curious, anyway, if you want to see what it is like in real life, this movie is just very right on countless levels.
And for anybody who isn't, you really wasted a lot of time reading to this point.
Was tun, wenn's brennt? (2001)
It was the fire extinguisher that did it, in the end
I found myself really enjoying this movie, at first. In fact I was living in Germany in 87-88, exactly the period the flashback part is set in.
I found myself enjoying this movie at first, it brought back memories. The portrayal of terrorists in a kind of situation comedy light didn't strike me as strange at first.
It was when they made a bomb out of a fire extinguisher that what I was watching finally struck me. Shortly before I came to Germany, just a couple of weeks before, somebody blew up a bomb made out of a fire extinguisher at the American PX in Frankfurt. It was basically an attempt to kill people at random. I don't remember how succesful it was.
The politics of the group that did it was mostly as confused and futile as that of the characters in the movie. Ostensibly communists but far from being anything resembling real communists.
Somehow after that this movie palled for me. I just couldn't get into watching killers portrayed as lovable but basically good-hearted knuckelheads with hearts of gold.
Ran (1985)
A thought about the ending, to mr_sboub
I know comments aren't supposed to comment about other comments ... this isn't meant to be a thread but I found mr_sboub's thought interesting and it was running through my head while I watched Ran tonight.
Saburo's death was predictable, and perhaps (as you seem to say) gratuitous. In a way this is certainly true, Kurosawa embraces the tragic, maybe to excess. (The only "happy ending" I can think of in a Kurosawa film is Yojimbo).
There is an interesting parallel though, which adds depth to Saburo's death.
The snipers are an afterthought. Jiro orders them out, then basically forgets all about them. He is already high-tailing it to the castle when they catch up to their target (actually, I think he might be on the verge of seppuku at that point, I don't remember).
This is very very similar to the burning of the peasant village earlier in the movie. Hidetora orders a peasant village burned, for completely stupid reasons. He is quickly talked out of it ... but nobody ever thinks to cancel the order. Later, somebody mentions ... "hey, do you smell something?". There is no further explanation of this line ... it is the peasant village, burning. They forgot.
This is Kurosawa humor, very very dark humor.
Personally, I think the shooting of Saburo was intentionally a parallel to this earlier moment. Seen that way, Hidetora is definitely getting a karma moment.
His (Hidetora's) own death, I agree, is kind of just thrown in there, but if you see the link between his crimes and Saburo's death, and that Saburo's death lead to his, it makes a little more sense.
Dark dark humor indeed.
Abomination: The Evilmaker II (2003)
Amazingly bad
Bad beyond description. There is absolutely nothing good about this movie, from the incoherent script to the abominable acting, the idiotic special effects.
They have a little 'outtakes'/documentary/whatever section at the end which was dull but less dull than the movie. The shame is, the lead actress struck me, from that part, as having real potential. It's somehow a comment on how truly bad the movie is that it could be directed so poorly that the actors are less interesting in the movie than in the outtakes.
Vampire Clan (2002)
Surprisingly good
I don't know what I expected with this one, probably a cheap low-budget exploitation horror movie with a lot of gore.
I was very surprised and liked this. It is somewhat documentary in feel, but overall I thought the story flowed well. I found the mini-cult very believable and watching these people slip into it was fascinating to me.
Crazy as Hell (2002)
Not as good as it could have been
Eric LaSalle as the Devil was excellent, one of the best Devils in any movie. And the movie had some strong points, some nice creepy developments and some interesting characters.
*** SPOILER ALERT ALARUM ALARUM ***
What really killed me was the amount of transparent 'borrowing' in the movie taken from similar films. "I know who I am!" taken straight from Angel Heart, the lead character turns out to have been dead all along (Sixth Sense and now The Others), and loads taken from Jacob's Ladder.
I mean movies in a genre are going to borrow from each other, but the scenes in question were just too transparently the same as the ones they were borrowing from.
Also dragging this down was the main character himself, who to me was just too unbelievable. He is supposed to be some kind of fundamentally bad person but his arrogance is just too overdone and I was left with no sense of either sympathy for him, or genuinely disliking him as a bad guy.
He was just annoying.
Poor overall. If you want to sit through the drecky parts to see a very very good Satan, don't say I didn't warn you about the other parts.
Joshua (2002)
Much better than I expected
I usually don't like religious movies, I find them heavy-handed, preachy, and fairly poorly done in general. I thought this one was excellently done though, the insights of the Joshua character struck me as genuinely meaningful and profound. Other than a few embarrassing stereotypes I thought the writing was good and most of the acting. Very nice work by F Murray Abraham and very convincing work by the Joshua actor.
The Rules of Attraction (2002)
Brilliant
To me a movie is about textures.
I see people talk about the message of a movie, the meaning the motive the social value. Movies like 'Life as a House' that affirm our already existing pompous self-images. Robin Williams movies that bore you to death but you know there's something Good and Noble and True there that you're supposed to get like eating your vegetables. Ron Howard movies or things like 'Lovely and Amazing' where the heavy-handed Message might have just as well skipped the movie and given a lecture.
And in all that something is lost. The power of cinema to change comes only after the magic of cinema has done it's work; worked that strange dark sorcery that only comes when the film takes you over by it's art.
I can't think of a thing to say about this movie. The film is loaded with messages for those who can hack seeing how shallow we really are. But whether you can hack it or not, whether you can see it or not, this is one of the most brilliant movies you will probably ever see in your life. Not because the message is better or worse. It doesn't matter what one does, only how well one does it. In cinema these are questions of visual impact, emotional resonance, virtual reality, tempo, texture, music and dialogue. And the way they can all work together to become greater than the sum of their parts.
You will never see a better movie than this. The dark sorcery that movies work is perfect here.
Into the Night (1985)
A classic
This is one of those movies that I find myself surprised that they were never better-known or better liked.
Not a deep movie really, or a movie with any real message as such at all, I watch this about the same way I watched James Bond movies when I was a kid. Not as an action movie necessarily (I find 'action movies' dead boring for the most part) but something close to that. I mean, I watch it for the fun of watching it, not to ponder deeply the human condition.
But it is far from a truly shallow movie either if you take, for instance, the Rambo movies or Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies as the yardstick for an action movie. The Ed Okin character is very sympathetic to me, and probably to a lot of people who have worked in the same kind of career field. His problems before Diane drops out of the sky on him are absurd, but not exactly farcical. His smirking supervisor, grooming him for the layoff. His obviously-alienated and ... alien ... wife. Everything pat, perfect, smooth and WRONG and he can't quite get his teeth into WHY.
Most of the movie from there is action. I find myself clicking on Jeff Goldblum's dazed cool the way I used to click on James Bond's cool when I was a kid. Personally I think he's brilliant in this, although admittedly, it's hard to argue that walking through a movie in a daze qualifies as brilliant acting. It's a judgement call, personally I think he walks through the movie in a daze brilliantly.
The balance of the horrific, the exciting and the comical in the action sequences really works, for me. For the most part I find the use of farce in action and horror to be a copout. In fact I hate most of John Landis' other movies, and to me that is one of the most annoying things about most of them. The comedic element undermines the intensity of the action, and the action ruins any real chance at comedy.
In Into the Night though, the dramatic element is developed first, given a higher priority, just enough to leave the sense of it as being for real, instead of coming off as this week's most tasteless joke.
The brilliant cast probably helps. David Bowie and Carl Perkins for instance manage to really carry off being both funny and convincingly deadly at the same time.
But all that really doesn't capture it, doesn't capture why I like this movie, why this is one of those movies that I rewatch at least every couple of months. It isn't really what the movie does, so much as how well it does it.
Again, the (in my opinion) great acting is a lot of it. The perfect integration of the soundtrack with the action, and close to that the flawless tempo, the timing, the beat of the movie. The visual power of the lonely southern california night scenes.
!!!! POSSIBLE SPOILER !!!!
To me there is just something thrillingly inspired about the whole thing. The truly eerie scene where Goldblum talks the Savak agent into shooting himself, the moment of mutual understanding just before he shoots himself. "Why can't I sleep?" BANG.
***
I dunno. The movie is not a deep message movie. But it is just so impeccably done ... to me, a classic of the cinematic art.
Lovely & Amazing (2001)
Real, but not interesting
Stanley Kubrick's line, to me, sums my impression of this movie up completely.
It was real, but it wasn't interesting.
In all fairness, all of the lead actresses in the movie engaged me at one point or another, at least briefly. But the integral thing about their characters was that they were shallow, and remained shallow at the end.
Which is real, there are certainly people in the world who are shallow and remain shallow.
But it isn't especially interesting.
Dagon (2001)
Probably the best treatment of Lovecraft onscreen yet
I don't know if I consider Dagon a great movie, but I came expecting a lot less and was pleasantly surprised.
I grew up reading Lovecraft and for the most part, movies taken from Lovecraft's books have been horrible, -really- horrible. In fact the "Lovecraft" movie seems to have devolved into a genre, a very strange genre having no apparent resemblance to the books themselves. The "Charles Dexter Ward" character is always an uber-geek. (Why? Where do they get that? Is it because the "Dexter" in the name is a geek-souding name?) The plot line is always the same, is dumb, and has no resemblance to Lovecraft's plots. Etc. I try to just laugh these movies off, but to me it is sometimes downright infuriating.
Lovecraft was not a great writer, but he was a very good writer with an ability to evoke a very strange and chilling sense of the alien, the otherworldly, a stark xenophobic horror. Dagon did a better job than most at capturing that horror.
Life as a House (2001)
The Prodigal Son Returns. Again ...
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Really this story revolves around the alienated teenage son of the main character, Kevin Kline. Basically a retelling of "The Prodigal Son", like all such retellings it carries a pointed lesson on how important it is to be normal and respect your parents. Although arguably it is the story of George Monroe (Kline), all of the action, if you really look at it, revolves around Sam (the son, Hayden Christensen).
In this particular retelling, the message is clear. Sam must reject homosexuality, which leads to drugs and suicidal tendencies, and embrace the suburban middle-class values of his parents in order to be saved from the road to Perdition that he is clearly on. This happens within about three days as a result of his father yelling at him and generally doing the tough-love thing, leaving Sam transformed into a healthy specimen, doing hard work with his hands and wearing plaid shirts and only slightly less clean-scrubbed than Wally Cleaver. Probably that's all these crazy kids nowadays need, a little tough love, huh?
Fortunately Sam has Jena to seduce him in the shower and slowly deprogram him back into heterosexual normality, the great turning point being when he cries out "I'M NOT GAY!" and has a premature ejaculation. HE'S CURED!
Immediately after that is when he starts blow-drying his hair, stops wearing makeup and starts wearing the plaid shirts and really getting into the carpentry thing.
Comic Book Villains (2002)
Brilliant and deranged
I found this to be one of the funniest dark comedies I have seen in a long time. To me the plot and the characters all rolled naturally and convincingly. It is an inevitable facet of black comedy that it tends to work off caricatures, movies like any of David Lynch's or things like Barton Fink, etc. The dynamic depends on showing up the subtle madness that we see around us every day. What made this movie work especially well for me was that the characters were all convincing, all in their way sympathetic. I could relate to all of them, which made the final descent into madness that much more fun. They didn't have to quite be caricatures to make the completely insane decisions they made convincing.
Left Behind (2000)
Avoid this movie AVOID AVOID AVOID
I rented this movie, thinking it might make for an interesting science fiction movie.
Where to start? The worst script I have ever heard, completely unbelievable characters, no special effects to speak of (well, the air attack at the beginning was half-way good), on and on. This movie had absolutely no quality of any sort. I made it half way through and tore the movie out of my VCR. Terrible script, terrible dialogue, mediocre filming, horrible acting.
It was like a movie made by aliens, made by someone who had no actual experience of real life. Like watching a parody of real life, or something. Awful.
If you want to make a contribution to the cause of religion or something, send a donation to your local church. Don't see this movie. Charity does not necessarily involve self-torture.
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Brilliant and traumatic.
This is a brilliant and beautiful film. The story, the emotional impact of the characters, the filming, the impeccable acting, the music all combine to create a completely engrossing and artistically admirable film.
I walked out of the theater more depressed than I have ever been in my life. 'Traumatic' wouldn't be an understatement.
If you ask me if this was a good movie, I would say yes, a brilliant movie. If you asked me if I recommend seeing it, I would have to say no.
I appreciate artistic honesty. But if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't see this one.
Six Ways to Sunday (1997)
Good movie.
A very good movie about a talented young man who crosses ethnic and social barriers to become a success in a family owned-business.
This is the kind of movie which reaffirms my faith in America. It goes to show how hard work, dedication, and a few unresolved psychoses can still be the ticket which takes a young man from relative obscurity and a dead-end life to a successful and rewarding career.
Mission to Mars (2000)
Remake of '2001'
I enjoyed the movie, as a special-effects animation.
What other people have mentioned, and what killed me completely, was the degree to which this was essentially a direct ripoff of '2001'. I clicked on it earlier, I guess, than other people did, so all through the movie I was seeing nothing but a piece by piece reproduction of '2001' but with year 2000 special effects and a Brian DePalma take on the characters.
The long centrifuge scene was where it hit me. What was the point? And I started trying to figure out how they did it, and decided they must have essentially done it the same way that Kubrick did the similar scene in '2001'. ...very similar.
Kubrick had integrated the scene very smoothly (Poole jogging) in a way which established mood, characters, and defined the sense of the whole Mission to Jupiter sequence. DePalma, obviously, admired the scene and wanted to 'do his own'. Which he did, but the only purpose the scene served was to be 'DePalma's version'. It's like watching a little kid drawing pictures of his favorite comic-book or video-game heroes; it's cute but it serves no purpose and is definitely not original. The best you can say is that they're -as- good as the original.
The center of the action is ... an enigmatic stone structure which is waiting for human beings to find it and indicate that they have advanced to the point of space travel. Wait, am I talking about MTM or 2001? I forget.
The resolution is ... a human is taken by the aliens to an enigmatic evolution to a higher level in a dazzling special effects sequence. Wait, which one am I talking about?
You get the idea.
It's an uncredited remake. Like 'Fistful of Dollars' to 'Yojimbo'. Or more like 'Last Man Standing', inasmuch as it is a lame pastiche of cliches with nothing to recommend it which wasn't done better in the original.
My advice? Rent '2001' on DVD and see it again.