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Reviews
How I Spent My Summer Vacation (1967)
Terrible ending reduces this film from mediocre to just plain bad
A mediocre and somewhat tame thriller. Jack Washington a lower class dropout, just out of the army, is working as a bartender in Paris. He runs into an old flame. Five years before, he spend 4 days with her and her rich parents. Her father, Ned Pine, systematically humiliated him because he thought Jack was not socially prominent enough for his daughter. She has married and divorced and invites Jack to spend 10 days with her family on their yacht. Jack agrees in hopes of beating her father at some sport, any sport will do. But her father beats him at everything all over again.
Jack notices that Pine sometimes gets notes and phone calls from someone he is obviously afraid of. Intrigued, Jack begins compiling a dossier on Pine and his associates. None of them seem to notice this, which is one of the unbelievable parts of this movie, since he walks around the yacht writing in his notebook in plain sight. Near the end, Pine arranges to have Jack killed, but Jack escapes. At the end, he is telling his story to a man that he comes to realize is the very man that Pine was afraid of and who is an even bigger and meaner criminal than Pine. I won't say how it ends, but the ending is ridiculous and makes no sense. Nor does it tie into the main plot involving Pine.
Nearly everyone in this is miscast. The handsome and aristocratic Wagner is cast as a loser bartender and he cannot play the character believably. Moreover, the Jill St John character is so vapid and mercenary, its a mystery what he sees in her. But the movie is really ruined by the ending which makes no sense and is entirely unconnected with the rest of the plot.
Operation Amsterdam (1959)
Three Gigantic Flaws in this Movie
This movie has a premise with a lot of potential: a small group of agents has a just 14 hours to get into Amsterdam and take out all the industrial diamonds there. But the movie is ruined by three gigantic flaws.
First, it is incompetently edited. It is obvious that some key scenes were left out and as a result, the plot is hard to follow. For example, at one point the agents go off to visit the mother of one of them. The next time we see them, they are back from the visit and have a new character, Willem, with them. All we get is a one sentence explanation for who he is and why he is with them.
Second, the motivations of the various Dutch army units are baffling and never explained. Some of them help the agents while others try to kill the agents. At some points, different Dutch army units shoot at each other. We are never told why some of them are trying to kill the agents. Are they disloyal soldiers trying to help the Germans? Or do they believe that the agents are working for the Germans? Or do they think the diamonds should stay in Holland even if it is overrun by the Germans? Or do they think the Germans will fail to capture Amsterdam and, thus, it is unnecessary to take the diamonds out?
Third, a group of about a dozen Dutch civilians help the agents get diamonds out of a bank safe and blow up a oil storage facility. It is never explained who these people are. They are not the Dutch underground. That was formed only after the Germans overran Holland; but this movie is set before they'd captured Amsterdam.
Surrender, Dorothy (2005)
A great movie
This was a great movie with a good cast, all of them hitting on all cylinders. And when Dianne Keaton is at her best, well, it just doesn't get any better than that. But Tom Everett Scott, always underrated, was even better. He should be a star.
My only complaint is with one aspect of the screenplay. None of the characters ever acknowledged that the dead daughter wasn't always a good person. And neither was her mother, played by Keaton. At one point she breaks a promise she made to one character not to reveal that he had been sleeping around.
One of the other commentators said the movie had a "political agenda". That is a baffling thing to say. There was no politics at all in this movie.
Prozac Nation (2001)
not bad
Not a bad movie. Why did Miramax never release it? They have certainly released other movies in the past four years that are a lot worse than this one. Christina Ricci (as Elizabeth Wurtzel) and Michelle Williams (as her roommate) are both great. Ricci manages to make Wurtzel sympathetic, which is more than Wurtzel herself has ever been able to do in her books, all of which are self-absorbed memoirs. Most of the rest of the cast is good too, but there us a curious exception to this: All the male roles, Wurtzel's father and college boyfriends are very badly acted. Also, Ann Hechte was ridiculous as a psychiatrist. She mostly just stares expressionless at Wurtzel.
Till Human Voices Wake Us (2002)
See it for L. Joyner's acting & Helena Bonham Carter's looks
A very uneven movie. A psychiatrist (Guy Peirce) returns to his home town to bury his father. While there, he saves a would-be suicide (Helena Bonham Carter) and has a lot of flashback memories to a traumatic experience in his youth. Eventually it turns out that there's a connection between the memories and the woman he saved.
The lesson of the movie is self-forgiveness and putting the past behind you. It is rather obvious and that's one the weaknesses of the movie. Also, the characters spend a lot more time interacting with their own thoughts than they do with each other, so the movie has lots of long scenes with no dialog in which we watch a character just thinking. The most intriguing character, the father of the psychiatrist's girlfriend when he was a teenager, is barely seen.
Mainly I was left feeling frustrated, because it would have been so easy to make this into a really good movie: Have more interaction between the characters, make the plot a bit more complicated and make the moral of the story a bit less obvious.
The best acting is done by Lindley Joyner who plays the psychiatrist as a teenager. Joyner is very natural and charismatic. He could be a star. The scenes set in the present time with Peirce and Bonham Carter aren't nearly as interesting. Her character is the most sketchily written. In fact, there's almost no character there at all. I can't honestly say that she overcomes the material and fills out the character, but she doesn't drag the movie down either.
Physically, Bonham Carter looks as great as ever. They allow her to look her age for once, and she must be the best looking 35 year old in history. In one scene near the end of the movie she has no eye make-up on which I believe is unique in her career. (The scene proves that she needs no eye makeup!)
Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Marxist Symbolism Overlooked
The other commentators say that the protagonist, Antonio Ricci, is a poor man for whom we feel sympathy. This is not what the movie-makers had in mind. This is a Marxist allegory and Antonio is as much the bad guy of the movie as the hero.
When the movie opens, Antonio sits apart from the other unemployed workers because he thinks of himself as in a class better than the others. (He is the only worker in the movie who wears a fedora rather than some kind of worker's cap.) He will pay for this arrogance later. Antonio was a member of the petty bourgeoisie, with sheets on his bed and a bicycle. A financial crisis forced him to pawn one of them, so he pawned the bicycle.
The government employment agent gives him a job that requires a bicycle, even though Antonio admits he no longer has a working bicycle and there are other workers in the crowd who do. This symbolizes the government's favoritism of the bourgeoisie over the working poor. Antonio and his wife sell the sheets to redeem the bicycle, so he can take the job. The bicycle represents the means of production. A thief, wearing an old German hat, steals the bicycle. He represents the international proletariat. In stealing the means of production he is carrying out a miniature Marxist revolution.
Throughout the film we meet people who show solidarity with the working class and proper Marxist conciousness. E.g., the old man who won't "rat" on the thief and who attends a church service only so he can get a free meal. The neighbors of the thief who are prepared to perjure themselves in his defense. The crowd that gathers in sympathy when a boy falls into a river. By contrast, Antonio is concerned only when he thinks the boy might be his son. When he discovers that it is not his son, he forgets the real endangered boy and takes his son off looking for a pizza parlor.
Marx thought that the proletariat would inevitably triumph. In the context of this movie, that would mean that Antonio doesn't get the bicycle back in the end. You'll have to see the movie to find out if the movie-makers agreed with Marx about that.