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Reviews
PCU (1994)
I love this stupid film
A lot of people call this movie a third rate Animal House. I can't really argue with that assesment, but at the same time...I really, really love PCU. I watch it whenever it is on Comedy Central. I love the cast of the movie, I love the making fun of sacred cows like the PC movement of the mid 90's, I love that this movie gleefully embraces every cliche of the college comedy. I am a film student with film studenty tastes most of the time, but I really love this movie, and can't quite explain why.
Road to Perdition (2002)
Disappointing
Road to Perdition is very, very well made. The movie looks great, is rich in period detail. Conrad Hall's cinematography will surely get him another Oscar. Paul Newman gives a grandiose performance that could be the topper of his wonderful carreer. But...this is a severley flawed film. Tom Hanks is just miscast as a hitman, first of all. He does not seem ever actually seem to be a killer...people say he is, but we never see it. The movie should show him going out for his employer and killing a man he has never met, who has never done anything to him. But the film wants us to like him. Why can't the fillmakers let this movies morale complexities be more...complex? Hanks is likeable, and he looks sad, but we never really see that he is a killer...we need to see this for the rest of the movie to work. He is just Tom Hanks. The middle of the movie is pretty lame too. There is an old farming couple that helps Hanks and his son...I mean jees, how much lamer can you get than that? Also, this is a movie that takes itself very, very seriously. The cinematography is beautiful, as I said earlier...it also is makes the movie very stagey, and makes it hard to actually watch the film as a story. It just seems like a collection of wonderful shots, as opposed to a movie. The ending is pure cheese, and the main antagonist, Newman's son, is just too one dimensional. It's just all too perfectly wrapped up in a bow by the end. The young son of Hanks asks "was Michael Sullivan (Hanks) a decent man?" Guess what? No, the answer is no. But the movie tries to fool you into believing different. Don't let it. He is a killer, a murderer, and the movie tries to let the character off the hook for what he has done. Michael Sullivan is a character who should have been shown as more brutal, then the audience could really have a measured way of judging him. The film also should have chosen the point of view of the child, yet it really doesn't go that route. So in the end, this is a beautifully filmed piece of nothing that tries to convince you it is something more than it is. It's self important Oscar bait. It's a good film that should be seen, but it really is nothing more than that.
We Were Soldiers (2002)
This is a horrible film
We Were Soldiers drags out every cliche' in the book. Randall Wallace, the cinematic genius who wrote Pearl Harbor Braveheart and directed Leonardo DiCaprio as two characters in The Man in the Iron Mask, brings us his masterpiece. This is worse than Pearl Harbor even. Bad acting, the combat scenes were really not all that well done compared to both Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. The movie tries to be different by showing the soldiers at home before they leave for combat. Woo hoo, and for character development, we see that they have kids, cute kids who ask them questions about war. When Mel's daughter asks him what war is, he explains "sometimes bad guys do bad things and America has to stop them." Yes, I know that is not verbaitim, but it exemplifies the film's simplistic attitude. I was waiting for Mel to pick up an American flag and kill the general with it, Patriot style. Speaking of which, this film makes the Patriot look like the most subtle film ever made about warfare. Another thing that Wallace pretends to do is show both sides of the war by cutting in a couple scenes of the Vietnamese and showing that one of their killed soldiers has a girlfriend! Whaoh, that is groundbreaking cinema! Wallace shows his real attitude about showing both sides in a scene with Gibson and Chris Klein in a church. They kneel and pray, and Gibson prays for both sides. But at the end he throws in "and god, what I said about both sides...disregard that, help us kick their asses." Or something like that. I mean, what the hell? This is a movie that claims to honor the memory of the men who died in Vietnam. How exactly does it do that? By showing them get ripped apart and shot, but not by making them into flesh and blood human beings. one guy actually dies saying "at least I died for my country." How so? This is Nam, you died in a war we lost and that we should never have been involved in. And at least twice, a dying character tells a fellow soldier "tell my wife...I loved her." More ludicrous still is the scene when the photographer picks up a gun. Oh wait, it gets more ludicrous when he starts taking pictures...one of the cheesiest montages ever is supposed to display the devestation of the battle. This is a cliched, lame, poorly written and directed film that wants you to believe it is important.