cat-that-goes-by-himself Reviews

The Wolf's Call (2019)

Grotesque gung-ho fantasy

[2/10 · 16 March 2022]

Not even of the "so bad it's good" kind. Just cringingly bad.

I have no idea how authentic the constant chatter of military lingo is, but the science sure is no better than in your average Star Wars movie.

The plot is so indigent it does not require a mere temporary suspension of disbelief, but a complete shutdown of the upper functions of the brain.

This is nothing short of an insult to intelligence.

Oxygen (2021)

More holes than plot in this cheesy movie

[3/10 · 17 July 2021]

The whole story makes no sense whatsoever. It's a litany of gratuitous plot devices, complete with a massive conspiracy apparently weaved by yet another confederacy of dunces (how hard is it to shut up someone lying helplessly tied in a glorified coffin?) and arbitrary, magical bits of technology whose sole purpose is to advance the plot (why else would anyone provide broadband Internet connection in a cryogenic pod?).

The pace of the movie is dictated by this suave-voiced Artificial Intelligence that can perform miracles or become dumb as a brick according to what titbit of information is supposed to be disclosed or withheld at a given moment.

Mélanie Laurent is a good actress and the filming is not bad, but the plot is so riddled with absurdities no actor nor settings could have looked convincing for more than a few minutes.

In This Cold Place (2017)

A true piece of art

[10/10 · 16 July 2021]

Regardless of political opinions and musical tastes, the animation is a masterpiece, pastiching a host of cartoons from the 30's to the 90's, each of them immediately recognizable yet clearly different from the original.

Three short minutes packed with creativity and talent. A real sight to behold.

The Frozen Front (2017)

Grotesque fantasies about a very serious topic

[1/10 · 13 June 2021]

The only review above 6 are obvious fakes (the guys created an account just to boost the ratings artificially). Everything is phoney about this movie.

I'm French, so the dubbing was not an issue. This French is atrociously bad, a mix of 2020 yoofspeak and stilted literary French. Besides, the actors are terrible. These amateurs spouting these uninspired, verbose and phoney lines are a painful sight to behold.

Obviously the director has no idea about small arms tactics. The action scenes are an insult to actual people who fought in this war. Everything is wrong in so many ways.

3 guys running 100 yards straight in front of an MG42, shooting the hapless and apparently blind bad guys, then running back another 100 yards ? I don't think so.

A whole platoon digging in in useless shallow foxholes, with nothing but rifles and SMGs? No mortars, no MGs, not even a sniper rifle? I don't think so.

Germans positioning their 8 cm mortars close enough to get picked off by regular M1 rifles? Sent into a rout by a gung-ho Frenchy standing in the middle of the woods, throwing a single grenade and popping a few rounds in their general direction? I don't think so.

Frankly I wonder where the guy found enough money to produce this pile of garbage.

The Dwarves of Demrel (2018)

An exercise in boredom

[3/10 · 9 June 2021]

I might have been more lenient if not for the misleading title and first minute showing a CGI dragon that has absolutely nothing to do with the story. This has "click bait" written all over.

Except for that, it's a very low budget movie with 3 dwarves wandering in a cave, doing arbitrary things, talking about any odd thing, with random events occurring out of the blue, including a rehearsed shaky cam sequence of the Blair Witch kind.

Nice costumes, decent actors but no scenario to speak of.

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)

Scandalously overrated film. The audience deserves a honest evaluation!

[1/10 · 9 February 2018]

Any movie enthusiast can see this movie is appallingly bad. So I wonder how IMDB managed to give it a 7.5 rating. This is simply inacceptable.

Just to summarize what makes this flick a disaster, like thousands of people already did:

• total betrayal of everything the Star Wars saga stood for

• indigent script full of plot holes

• terribly slow and boring pace after the 5 initial minutes

• 3 stooges humor that manages to get more annoying than Jar Jar's pathetic stunts

• wooden characters with completely inconsistent psychology (all this "young male vs. female leaders" thing is just painful to watch. This would have sounded indigent even in an obscure indie movie about harassment at work, but this lame story arc in a Star Wars movie, really?)

• absurd plot twists and situations (killing key characters just for the thrill of it, Marry 'Leila' Poppins, the supposedly clever "warp bomb" trick, a romance under the nose of the 1st order army, really?)

• no continuity with the previous movie (all previous movie's leads and clues blatantly ignored, as if the director hadn't even bothered watching it)

• pathetically unbelieveable and hypocrite political statements (Disney production staff doesn't like the rich white men who sign their checks, really?)

• massacre of Luke Skywalker's character. This is simply an insult to intelligence, to millions of people who grew to like the character, and to Mark Hammill who was used as a pathetic sidekick and literally wiped out of the saga by a cheap CGI trick. This is disrespectful to so many people in so many ways.

My personal worst criticism actually applies to the previous movie too. Disney has turned this saga into a world of wishful thinking, while Luca's story, despite the sad failures of the prelogy, was still sticking to the basic archetypes of tales and legends.

Disney's rendition is just a world where almighty little kids can wish their problems away. Rey doesn't need training to best the best. She can also teach Solo how to repair his own ship. One does wonder why she bothers to go after Luke in the first place, except to humiliate the poor old geezer. Even the comic relief robot can beat elite stormtroopers because, well, because it would be a bummer not to be able to.

Well, what could you expect from a company that turned Notre Dame de Paris into an incoherent mess where Quasimodo happily cheers when Esmeralda marries Phoebus? These guys turn everything they touch into toxic waste.

Shame on Disney, and shame on IMDB for rigging the rating of this piece of rubbish.

Inadequate People (2010)

Cheeky, funny, touching. A very good bittersweet comedy

[8/10 · 24 October 2017]

I just spent 90 pleasant minutes watching this movie.

The characters are extremely likable, well fleshed out in several funny scenes, and the plot manages to go from silly and cheeky to somewhat more serious in the end without sounding contrived or heavy.

It somewhat reminded me of American movies of the 80' like "The unbelievable truth" or "Bagdad café". Well above your average Russian comedy, and very well made for an ultra low budget movie.

The Black Hole (2016)

Maybe not frantic enough and too smart for a blockbuster audience...

[8/10 · 25 May 2016]

I am appalled to read all the negative reviews on this movie based on its slow pace and apparently incomprehensible plot.

I actually enjoyed it a lot.

It has the nerve to let things go unexplained for an hour or so, which is a refreshing change from all the plots that seem to make sure the dumbest kid in the theater will get an answer served on a plate less than five minutes after any issue was raised.

Actually, it cannot resist the trend entirely, and serves us a contrived sort of explanation near the end, that rather ruins the poetry of it in my opinion. Oh well, I suppose that was added to calm down the producers...

As for the supposedly slow pace, I found it rather well suited to the depiction of the relationships between the characters, which is the essence of the story.

I found this movie rather touching and beautifully played, especially by the lead role who shows a promising talent.

Without the explanatory scenes, this small gem would have proudly stood the comparison with Donnie Darko.

Noah (2014)

Expensive junk

[1/10 · 11 September 2014]

Frankly I don't care much about biblical tales, but I doubt Noah had such family tantrums as this movie depicts while waiting for the flood to recede. And if he did, I doubt it would be worth showing on a screen.

If you remove the eye candy and pointless violence, the movie is just an interminable pretentious bore. Even the expensive cast cannot hide the crass mediocrity of scenario and dialogs.

Crowe and his crowd do not even remotely evoke biblical characters. They look more like your average American middle class family faced with a psychopathic killer during a prolongated power outage.

Yet another Hollywood movie aiming to maximize return on investment by grinding a potentially acceptable story into predigested junk food topped with pungent special effects and a good splatter of blood.

I am just baffled it was actually Aronofsky who directed this piece of expensive junk. Even worse a blunder than Burton and his planet of apes.

Sparks (I) (2013)

Bad, boring and not even shocking despite the sadistic plot twists

[1/10 · 14 July 2014]

There is nothing new to the plot since the Watchmen were issued some 30 years ago. Adding sadistic scenes of torture does not make it any better, except maybe for a sadistic audience.

The film looks like a bad stage play with sub par CGI added in the background. Half of the plot is actually narrated instead of shown or suggested, which is a terrible way of doing cinema.

The fight scenes are bad, but not even laughably bad, and the acting is appalling (especially Mrs Bell and her stony face, more suited to another Z movie like "the day").

Frankly I cannot imagine people writing 10/10 reviews of this piece of junk or giving these reviews an up vote without being paid to do so.

Prometheus (I) (2012)

Expensive waste

[4/10 · 10 January 2013]

Marketing people should be paid to leave the directors alone. That would have spared us a lot of bad movies these last 10 years. I see the same degradation in the Star Wars franchise as in this Alien saga at work. Bloated special effects and anemic scripts.

I truly wonder how this heap of money could be spent on such a lame synopsis. When I watch a movie, I'm more than willing to temporarily suspend my disbelief, but at least I expect basic consistency in character psychology and plot. As many have already pointed out, here we can find neither.

What happened to Hollywood producers, I wonder. Take no risk, aim for an audience of little kids and airheads or something? What a waste of more than decent actors and director. With 1% of the budget they could have paid someone to actually write a scenario, but I guess it was deemed unimportant or even counter-productive.

I hope the producers got as much money as possible out of this, that's the only thing it can produce. No dream, no imagination, no memories. This movie-product will be forgotten in a year, leaving a few big wigs a bit richer. What a shame...

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Thank God he was a complete loony

[18 June 2011]

Aside from Crowe's brilliant performance, I would like to share a few thoughts about the meaning of this movie.

Nash was an homosexual. After WWII he was, like other brilliant men such as Turing in the UK, persecuted for that. He also came up with a theory that would threaten the hegemony of the neoclassic school of thought.

For these two reasons I can't help but feeling anger rise when faced with history as this movie rewrites it.

Nash is depicted as an harmless scatterbrain, being given the prize once his ideas have become extinct, flooded in the triumph of the post-USSR world hegemony of the economy-driven powers.

What a reassuring thought to think, really: one who refuses to abide to the new world order must have gone seriously funny in the head for quite a long time. With a sigh of relief we can go back to business. Or can we?

The Kingdom (2007)

Pure brainwash, and unbearably patronizing for the rest of the world

[1/10 · 18 June 2011]

Yet another gritty spread of crass ignorance on geopolitical issues dripping with auto-satisfaction, another propaganda movie glorifying the almighty US GI joes and another arrogant slap in the face for the rest of the world.

I wonder what historians will have to say about this kind of flicks in a few decades. I would say it's on par with the worst Stalin era movie industry had to offer. Let's hope something will have been done about average citizen education level in the mean time.

Every man and woman who was involved in the making of this movie should be ashamed, in my opinion.

Battle Los Angeles (2011)

About as exciting as watching a kid play "america's army"

[3/10 · 18 June 2011]

Looks like US marines are desperate to find new recruits. I wonder how many tons of cannon fodder this investment will yield in the near future...

The whole movie looked uncomfortably like crazy horse 2-6 little Iraqi joyride to me. One does wonder at times on which side the worse killing machines are. Kind and brotherly killing machines taking care of the nice civilians, mind you.

On the other hand, one does wonder at the absolute stupidity and evilness of the aliens. No doubt a psychologist would have a few simple things to say about that.

As Danny Elfmann put it "it's a shame that our kids are dumb but we got smart bombs, what a joyful thing now". Enjoy this movie and sleep on tight, kids.

Frontier(s) (2007)

Just a Frenchman's opinion

[3/10 · 24 February 2011]

Just for your information, the "political" contents are just as over the top and basically pointless as the rest of the movie. The first 15 minutes are, in my opinion, slapped in to appeal to the average suburb-myths-lovin French teenager, maybe luring a few New Yorkers into quoting it as a delightful *second degré* *avant-garde* *chef-d'oeuvre*. These four Bonnies and Clydes are about as realistic as the preposterous old Nazi geezer translating his own bad Von Stroheim lines we have the dubious privilege to meet a few minutes later.

Except for that, I found it like a pompous rip-off of "the house of a thousand deaths", but alas no captain Spaulding was there to save the movie :).

Quarantine (2008)

Never could imagine Rec would inspire *so* bad a remake

[1/10 · 13 November 2009]

Oh man, this lead character became *so* annoying as soon as she started to scream hysterically. And these residents were *so* dumb. And this camera shaking was *so* painful. And the plot was *so* inconsistent. And character development was *so* lame you could not care less when anyone died. And the 'guy keeps filming' excuse for blurred, out of frame and shaky pictures got *so* stale after about half an hour.

Oh man, this was bad acting, bad scenario, unimaginative copy of cloverfield and blair witch, uninteresting and inconsistent psychology, and a complete ripoff of a pretty decent Spanish movie. And the lead actress really was terrible.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Would that be supposed to be an attempt to wake the sleepers in Metropolis?

[1/10 · 19 September 2009]

Little Quentin seems to have mastered the art of having the cake and eating it.

As usual, the pure sadistic display can be explained as a clever thought-provoking way of sending violence back into the audience's face.

Sure, Mr Tarantino. Violence is Baaad. Sadism is Baaad. It is well worth wading in it to make that point. How very brilliant.

The juvenile part of the audience may well not be clever enough to follow all the smart references to higher levels of consciousness though, but I'm confident they'll see the light one day.

Thanks for making this little world of ours a little better. You deserve a medal.

Ladybird Ladybird (1994)

Excellent movie, as heart wrenching as thought provoking

[10/10 · 13 February 2009]

Even though the scenario does simplify the mishaps of child protection system, even though I like to think the (French) child protection system in which I work strives to avoid such tragedies, I cannot help but feel a deep unease, and even a pang of guilt each time I watch this gem of a movie.

The strength of this movie is, in my opinion, to explore the limits of social welfare in such a deep and balanced way.

Yes, some families generate toxic environment for children, regardless of the individual qualities of their members. Yes, when in doubt, social workers do sometimes choose to suggest foster care to the court as the lesser of two potential evils (even though alternative solutions do exist in France, and no doubt in the UK too). Yes, motherly love is not enough in itself to insure child wellbeing. Yes, misunderstanding and fear of social workers can lead to disastrous results. Yes, social workers and courts wield the power to shatter families and lives and do make mistakes, out of lack of empathy, excessive workload, burn-out or plain incompetence.

All this and more is shown and put to the test in this movie, and no definite answers are given. That is the mark of an outstanding writer and director. Besides, I can only join in the general praise for the superb performance of the two main actors and Loach's artful camera-work.

Certainly the example shown here is extreme, but it echoes the very real pain I face in my daily work as a witness to family disorders and participant in inevitable (but hopefully only occasional) social services catastrophic blunders.

My thanks go to Ken Loach for this hearth wrenching and thought provoking movie. A movie every social worker should care to think of from time to time. I see Ladybird, Ladybird as a kind of personal safeguard. To resist the temptation to call it a day and send a quick and dirty court report to the judges. To take the time to think twice before adding this sweeping little comment that could cast a child away. And for that I am deeply grateful to you, Mister Loach.

Behind Enemy Lines (2001)

Expensive propaganda in a feeble attempt to rewrite history

[1/10 · 4 March 2008]

This masterpiece has "ordered by the propaganda department to try to justify the military operations in Serbia" written all over.

Since only little kids and absolutely ignorant people could buy the preposterous depiction of context, not much was spent on the scenario.

On the other hand, the savings fueled the eye candies mightily. So the ideological cesspit is wrapped in very expensive SFXs. The military is crass stupid, be it on the aviation or land combat side. Just kids playing war in a barn, shooting at each other with broomsticks. But with pretty good CGI.

Yum yum, pretty good food for the bastard-killed-my-buddy-so-I-ll-rip-his-balls-off-lovin' couch potatoes.

But well, if citizen of the almighty America are happy to let their movie industry project a mighty aura of arrogance, brutality, crass ignorance and stupidity, so be it.

I guess such movies could be used in a couple of centuries (along with some USSR-era fictions), as examples of information control mechanisms in imperialistic nations.

Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (1972)

A courageous political movie

[8/10 · 31 December 2007]

I agree with all that has been said about the purely technical shortcomings of this movie. However, in 1972 the numerous dark sides of the war in Algeria were subjects of massive denial. This civil war represented a terrible trauma for the country. After 50 years and the publication of some archives one can only start to grasp the atrocity of this conflict with at last some objectivity.

This is why I think shooting this movie in 1972 was a courageous and meaningful achievement. 35 years later, some first-hand account of former enlisted soldiers tend to confirm the most gruesome elements of this fiction.

An American Haunting (2005)

potatohead audience missed the point yet again

[10/10 · 19 December 2007]

MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD. YOU'LL BE WARNED!

I'm afraid to understand how such a fine movie got such little recognition. After browsing through the reviews I found most of the good ratings were simply based on its fear value or the cuteness of the gorgeous teen heroin.

Let's spill the beans right away: this is *not* a ghost movie. This is a perfect graphic metaphor of the incestuous family disguised as a ghost story.

Courtney Solomon is IMHO a genius doomed by the thickness of his audience. 99% of the reviewers completely missed the point of "dungeons & dragons" being a good-humored stylization of an actual D&D game among friends. Now that Solomon shows masterfully how versatile a director he can be, the audience whines about lack of blood, explicit sex, green vomit, revolving necks or whatever.

At the first level, this is indeed a beautiful horror movie. Beautiful actors deliver great performances without ever overdoing it. Half-tone lighting and slow, wide camera movements create an oppressive atmosphere. Very efficient editing creates a seamless story.

Now if one focuses to the point the movie tries to make, one can pick up every single textbook clue about the domination of an abusive father over his family, the massive denial of the other family members, the rigidity of intra-familial rules opposed to the blatant breaking of common law and ethics, the over-protectiveness toward the victim. The broken doll actually gives away the plot less than 5 minutes into the movie. If that were not enough, the mother pouring herself a drink to find the courage of letting an abusive father pick up her daughter is a perfect illustration of the massive denial of reality that occurs in such situations, and the terrible pain and confusion it causes.

Of course supernatural scenes are not "that" scary. They are meant to show graphically the distress and terror of the characters, not to scare the audience directly! What we see is basically a teenage girl re-enacting over and over the trauma of having been raped by her father, and other family members trapped in an enclosed familial system (of which the wolf is a symbol) which unleashes boundless, animal violence as soon as anybody tries to escape it.

Yet the strength of the movie is to drench us in this suffocating, seemingly endless situation of confusion between love and sexual desire, affection and violence, lucidity and denial, only to gather all the elements together in a couple of minutes which are, in my honest opinion, the only ones that should cause fear and revulsion in the whole movie.

What the movie does is give us an idea of what an incestuous family must endure, as a whole as well as for each of its members. This is all achieved with a clinical precision, and just enough emphasis on the "horror flick" disguise to shock us with the final 2 minutes. The word 'incest' itself is never said out loud but the images scream it all along.

Of course ghost stories never happened. But incests do every single day.

Thanks so much for this little gem, Mr Solomon. I can't wait to see your next movie.

The Descent (2005)

Not bad, but nothing worth turning your brains upside down

[5/10 · 16 December 2007]

What decided me to add my 2 cents to the 900+ reviews is the wave of comments of the mystical kind on this flick.

I guess quite a lot among us got the bit about the story being a metaphor for the main character's inner turmoil/angst/self-destructive grief/whatever. Is this a reason to worship this movie? To scrape the bottom of the barrel looking for oh-so subtle and clever clues sown by the genius director among out of focus background objects? I don't think so.

The psycho babble around this flick reminds me of the M. Night Shyamalan's hordes of zealots trying to enlighten the rest of the world about obsessive compulsive disorder seen as God's own secret weapon against hydrophobic aliens.

Come on, the gals in this movie are awfully two-dimensional, and their psychology looks more like variations on a guy's idealization of the fighting girl archetype. They are hardly anything but pretty cannon fodder (assuming G.I. Jane is your style). Frankly the director himself said that replacing the half dozen chicks with so many dudes would not have dramatically altered the plot.

But hey, that's just what you'd expect from a decent B movie. And, taken as such, The Descent is more than watchable. The actresses do a pretty good job portraying individuals torn between civilized habits and animal survival instinct. The big budget is not put to waste, although IMHO a cheaper production would not have hurt the movie much (and maybe allowed to shoot a couple more for the same price!). The old tricks are all out of the exploitation bag for our greatest pleasure.

What else could have we asked for? A bit of originality perhaps? No? That'll be only 5 stars for you, then.

My advice: relax and enjoy your primal claustrophobia. And find another cause to boil your brain over :).

A Sound of Thunder (2005)

Was somebody actually paid to write that inept scenario?

[1/10 · 16 December 2007]

This movie left me wondering how so many people (actors, technical staff, promotion, whatever) actually spent time and efforts working on something that should not have passed the most basic scenario preliminary review.

What with these guys wasting enough money to fund 3 or 4 mainstream B movies working on such an indigent basic concept, I can't help but scream in frustration. Any 7 years old could have handled the time paradox better than these inept paperback writers.

So listen up, you stupids:

1) how do you expect the audience to care about characters when we are told very explicitly and barely 10 minutes after the sh*t started to hit the fan that they will all be resurrected as if by magic in the end?

2) how dare you expect us to forget everything that has been written in even the lamest stories about time travel, like a bunch of people traveling over and over at the exact same time & space coordinates without ever meeting copies of themselves - *except* when the scenarist needs the trick to finish the story?

3) where in hell did the inhabitants of the mega-city go? Time waves leave only registered actors in place or something?

4) The flick is supposed to be all about suspense, and yet the incredibly stupid scenario shuffles the cards at random every 10 minutes or so. In order for the suspense to build up, we need to imagine what could happen next. Sending one "time wave" after the other just flushes the result of the previous 10 minutes down the drain, you see?

5) time travel limited to a safari business on a planet wide scale? Please, pull two neurons together. What was acceptable in Bradbury's very short story becomes an insult to the most obliging viewer's intelligence when stretched into a one hour and a half story.

All this crap could have been watchable, would the actors have treated it with the contempt it deserved. Instead of that we are served one first grade helping of plain, uninspired acting if I ever saw one. No trace of humor (intentional or not) whatsoever. Only the usual black guy doing his 9 to 5 comic relief job (and getting killed first, what a coincidence).

With all the CGI and material there was potential for a more than acceptable movie. I mean, there are quite a few little gems out there that were put together with a couple of computers and a few tons of plywood, fabric and ketchup. Many people complain about CGI and effects. I think they have cost a packet compared to a lot of other movies, only they were, as the rest, horribly over-used and utterly wasted. As was wasted the talent of a couple of very decent actors, by the way.

About every part of this thing has 'waste' written all over. That is what really pisses me off.

Snakehead Terror (2004 TV Movie)

For the sake of TRON and Babylon 5, stop it, Bruce !

[2/10 · 14 December 2007]

Err... Well... Frankly this flick is bad, even for a B movie. Not enough humor (intentional or not), a sad lack of imagination, terribly hollow characters and very uninspired acting. Not bad enough to be unintentionally funny, either.

For the rest, you get what you could expect from an animal terror movie with low budget and an emphasis on quantity over quality.

The only good moment was when a couple of teenage girls started wading in fish entrails using a combination of ax and shotgun while the male supporting character barely managed to avoid his genitals being turned into fish food.

Had the survival of the fittest theory applied, the fish would have won. Maybe this was a political movie after all ?

I found it sad to see Boxleitner spouting one uninspired line after the other with a slightly hesitant half smile. I'll go and re-watch a few Babylon 5 key episodes to wash away this disappointment.

As for animal attack movies of the fishy kind, I recommend frankenfish instead.

Frankenfish (2004 TV Movie)

A very decent B movie

[5/10 · 14 December 2007]

Oh come on you whiners, grow up ! This movie has a big B written all over. What is the point comparing it to first rate blockbusters ? If one takes it for what it really is, one gets a hour and a half of very decent entertainment.

So instead of stating the obvious (cheesy script, second-rate acting, low budget sfx, etc), I'll try to summarize what made this flick worth watching IMHO:

• a bunch of picturesque bayou weirdos (especially the white rasta crack-head and shell-shocked viet vet)

• pretty good creature design and animation

• a couple of imaginative death scenes

• amusing means of getting rid of the nasty critters

• as it has been already pointed out, black heroes

• a pace that (barely, but still) allows the action to stay ahead of plot inconsistencies

• decent comic relief character

• good lighting and general image quality

All in all, a very decent B movie.