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clovenhoof
Reviews
Risky Business (2011)
Terrible concept, tragic waste of what Wilson has to offer
Brett Wilson was consistently the most interesting of the (Canadian) Dragons, and his shocking departure from the Den created the opportunity for him to be involved with something insightful and unique. Unfortunately, this isn't it. Risky Business is promoted as a show designed to introduce real people to the world of venture capital, to eliminate the mystique around this kind of investing, and to get ordinary people involved in making investments. Sadly, it fails on every front.
Brett basically serves as the host of a really bad game show. The contestant couple is brought in, and two "ventures" are put before them. They are asked to invest their money -- between $10K and $20K -- in one of them, and Brett backs the other (for the same amount). They come back at the end of 30 days and see who made or lost more money.
There are three main drawbacks with the show.
The first is that it completely discards its greatest asset -- Brett. He does absolutely nothing that couldn't have been done by Robbie the Robot. He offers no opinions, no insight, and makes no decisions. The personality we got to know on Dragon's Den is completely absent.
The second is the ventures are, often, a complete joke, far removed from anything one would consider "an investment". One example was the pool player who would take the couple's $10K, and find an opponent to play a challenge match for the same stake. The player would take $2000 of any winnings. Given that no opponent was yet lined up, there is no way to conclude that she had a better than 50% chance of winning her match. This wasn't a venture, it was just a bet, and a stupid one at that. They would have a better return by going into a casino and plopping their money down on red at the roulette table.
Another common example is "I'm going to buy a bunch of widgets, fix them up, and sell them for a lot more money than I paid for them." Typically, the venturer acquires the widgets, sells some of them, and makes some profit for the investor. But any real investment agreement would take into account the fact that the venturer retains property bought with the investors' money, and they'd get some credit for that. The show doesn't allow for that, which completely does a disservice to the idea that this is anything like "real" investing.
Finally, the show's half-hour format doesn't allow for any kind of in-depth discussion of what these ventures are or how they work. Most of them are pretty interesting. Even the one about the pool player had some real potential, and a look into the life of a "professional pool player" would have been informative and interesting. But no. There was virtually nothing.
This show really could have been something, particularly if they had given the show an hour. Let Brett get personally involved in the venture he was backing to improve their chances (and maybe make some efforts to sabotage the one he wasn't), and the result could have been real dynamite. But instead, it's just roadkill.
It's like Mr. Wonderful's giant boot came down from the sky and squashed him, before he even got started....
Rent-a-Goalie (2006)
Oh my God.
Okay, those of you south of the 49th, don't bother. Unless you're in North Dakota, Minnesota, or Buffalo. You're all honorary Canadians, so you might get it....
It's rude, it's crude, and based on the first episode, it's incredibly funny.
Cake is kinda like Ed, from that t.v. show -- but instead of a lawyer running a bowling alley, Cake runs a goalie-rental service out of a cappuccino bar, when he's not fighting with the boss's daughter.
It loses points for being based in Toronto. At least, I assume it's based in Toronto. It certainly could be. And THAT is enough to lose it points.
Sitcoms aren't really the kinds of shows one can describe -- it's like Cheers, except it's R-rated, and since most of the characters are goalies, they are NUTS!!!!
Ken Park (2002)
There's no there there
To truly evaluate Ken Park fairly, I think you have to treat the explicit scenes as a red herring. Try to imagine the movie as R-rated instead of NC-17, with none of the nude scenes showing anything below the waist. Then, what do you have?
In my view, nothing. It's just not a movie. We get a bunch of character sketches with very little narrative. Of the characters, most are thoroughly unpleasant, many of the rest border on being useless wastes of skin, a couple are inoffensive, and only two are worth caring about.
So is it a movie? It's in the same league as the Andy Warhol product of the late 60's and early 70's, Heat, Trash, Flesh and the like. If those are movies, then so is this. In my view, the only extent to which they could be called movies was the extent to which they showed a side of life that hadn't been shown before. Ken Park doesn't do that -- Clark himself has been there, done that. The only thing that hasn't been shown before is these actors' genitalia, and that doesn't make it a movie. (Though it might make it porn...)
Larry Clark has certainly had his moments. Kids was an eye-opener, a wake up call to any parents with the courage to watch it. Another Day in Paradise showed us another side of life's seedy underbelly, in the context of a compelling storyline. Bully is where he started to lose it, ditching story and adding verite in what looked like a misguided sense of movie-making priorities. Ken Park goes several more steps in that direction.
It's too bad, because there was a movie here to be made, with more focus on Claude and Shawn, and way less of pretty much everybody else -- a story of two kids who survive the minefield of dysfunctional suburban life that their friends don't, ending at the same place: with them wondering if they are better off than Ken Park.
"So who the hell are you to tell him how he should make his movies?" Ken Park is undeniably "art", in some form or another, and obviously Clark has the right as an artist to do what he wants, and as an artist, he owes his audience nothing. But when the form is presented as a movie, and is being discussed on the Internet MOVIE Database, I think we have to judge it within the context of certain boundaries. Narrative isn't essential, but if there isn't narrative, there should be something there to compensate for its absence, something that has some meaning for the viewer. So I wonder -- what was Clark thinking? Was it his intention to use the explicit nudity as the substitute? Does that mean he actually set out to make porn, and accidentally ended up with something validly artistic? Hmmm...
In any case, as a movie, it is a failure.
Band of Brothers (2001)
Television's finest hour
There are no big stars -- it's a mostly English cast with a few Americans in some key roles -- and it doesn't break any new t.v. ground like, for example, All in the Family, or MASH, or Hill Street Blues or even the Sopranos. Alot of what happens is fairly predictable -- after all, it's war, and we know who wins (those of us outside the U.S., anyway -- nudge nudge, wink wink). It is, however, one of the finest productions ever made for television, if not *the* finest.
Anybody who considers Saving Private Ryan to be a great movie really needs to see Band of Brothers. It's what Private Ryan wished it could be.
Minority Report (2002)
$100 million FX and a two-bit screenplay
As great as it is to see a good-looking movie (even if their world doesn't include the colour yellow), why can't the A-flight directors give us a story we haven't seen a dozen times before, and a problem with a solution so obvious that a reasonably bright eight year old can figure it out? ("But Daddy, why isn't it enough that they just STOP the person from killing?")
While they're at it, maybe they could give us a reason to care about the main character other than "because it's played by Tom Cruise".
So what we have is a darn-fine looking movie (though nowhere near the level of, say, the Matrix or Dark City), with a so-so story that contains exactly one nifty little turn. The rest is recycled cheese.