bryanlord Reviews

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

Believe it

[2 August 2011]

The best movies often start with several strikes against them. I'm thinking of starting a list: Top Ten Movies That Should Have Sucked But So Didn't. This movie will be on it. The only reason I saw it at all was that we had a teenager girl around the house at the time it came out. Look at the facts: It's based on a Disneyland ride. The "babe" is a scrawny, sneering plastic surgery nightmare. There are pirates in it---the kiss of death (along with hot air balloons). Those factors would normally be enough to sink any movie, but not this one.

Depp is magnificent---worth the price of admission all by himself. He's created one of the most memorable and quirky characters in movie history in Captain Jack Sparrow. Rush is magnificent, too. His snarling, insouciant West-of-England salty dog is the distillation of every such pirate in every such movie since Treasure Island. (Their sword fight, by the way, is one of the best in any movie any time.) Bloom holds his own without intruding, and so does Knightley, I grudgingly admit, although I couldn't get past those swollen lips with the thigh fat squirted into them with a hypodermic needle. Why don't they just tattoo a mouth on their face and be done with it? Unless you hate fun or get creeped out by ghoulishness (and I'm not talking about Knightley this time), you will like this movie.

Alice in Wonderland (I) (2010)

Wonder how this got made

[2/10 · 13 September 2010]

This is the worst movie of its kind I've seen since "Howard the Duck", which was a better movie because the duck was nice. Take your kids to see this if you hate your kids and want to ruin the book for them if they ever read it. These people have no feeling for children and no respect for literature. The "Alice" books are supposed to be whimsical, not creepy. There is no such thing as "the Jabberwocky". It's "the Jabberwock", as anyone who took the trouble to so much as look in the book could have told these sick-minded idiots. They even managed to make the beautiful but woefully miscast Anne Hathaway look like crap. I can't wait for the sequel. Money-grubbing decadents.

District 9 (2009)

Good...yup, just "good"

[7/10 · 26 August 2009]

I read a lot of reviews before burning our gift certificates to see this movie on the big screen. It looked like people either loved it or hated it; post-teen gamers and sci-fi lovers thought it was lame, and film buffs loved it. I had to see for myself, and now I know what was up with the reviews. If you want a CG extravaganza a la or "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" or even "Starship Troopers", forget it. If you want the rich sci-fi texture of "Aliens" or "Blade Runner", you'll be disappointed. But if you want a fun good-vs-evil thrill ride like "T2" or "Total Recall" (with a modern cinema twist), it's worth a few bucks for the in-theater experience.

Mind you, it's way more "indie" than any of those movies, but it's an indie movie with mind-blowing CG. The story and the sci-fi do not bear close examination, but the CG does. The trailers do not mislead in that respect. The lead actor is terrific, too.

I came to the movie half expecting it to be social allegory, what with the South African shanty town and legacy of apartheid and all, but they left that alone and let the movie speak for itself. They were smart enough not to be at all preachy with it, which would indeed have made it suck. My only complaint is the same complaint I have about all movies I like: it was about an hour too short.

Alexander (2004)

Alexander the Gay?

[2/10 · 29 October 2006]

First, I have to get this off my chest: How the hell can it be June in 4th Century B.C. Babylon?

Whew. That's better. Anyway, that should have been sufficient warning, but no, I stayed, and all too soon my perverted appetite for bad movies kicked in. I wish I'd had court-ordered unnecessary eye surgery under local anaesthetic instead of having watched this. Better memories.

I was prepared to accept the whole Greek thing with the love between men, I really was, what with Achilles and the begenitalled statuary and the American Puritanical prudishness and all, but I was not prepared to sit through what felt like six hours of spycam at a gay Hollywood cast party. I know where to go for that sort of film if I want it. I don't.

Prurient excess aside, to portray Alexander as a modern queer is laughable anachronism. Who knows what he really did? But he certainly must have been a bad-ass warrior with a lust for life and for combat that would seem almost insane to us, and not the gloopy, moody drama queen this movie makes of him. You can't command an army, much less an empire, by force of angst. Stone's Alexander is a silly caricature of perhaps the greatest general the world has ever seen.

I didn't want this review to be about the homosexuality thing. The movie stinks enough in other ways to rate a scathing pan, but blame Stone, not me. This movie is nothing more in the final analysis than a slap-dash apology for the gay-rights movement.

A History of Violence (2005)

Be bored, be very bored.

[2/10 · 29 October 2006]

A snail-like pace with sudden but ho-humly predictable violence. Puzzling sex. A darling little blonde girl. Cronenberg channeling M. Night while M. Night is on acid dreaming he's Tarantino making a stag film on a farm. What a mess. Even I smelled pigs.

I just got done watching it. As always when I see a movie this bad, I'm trying to figure out why it sucked so much. Casting, mostly. Harris is just too much the nice guy to lower effectively, and Hurt is downright funny as a Philadelphia gangster. And poor Viggo; I was so happy for him when he got Aragorn, but they don't seem to know what to do with him now. His sleepy, relaxed personality has to be good for something, but not this. I'm trying not to give spoilers. The kids don't look like their parents or each other, either.

Nah, not the casting. The screenplay. Puppet-show character development, transparently contrived conflict resolved with a bang of one kind or another every time, long stretches of slack where there should have been tension, unanswered questions we don't even care about. I mean, what was wrong with the truck after all? What day of the week was it? How did the math test go? Don't waste time on this one, short as it may be. It's not even funny/bad.

You Are So Beautiful (2005)

Drama? I think not.

[4 April 2006]

I can't rate this film because I saw only about the first half of it on a flight back from Paris. What I saw I loved.

Comedy doesn't travel well. I'm an American, dyed in the wool, and I normally find French comedy annoying--self-conscious and stilted. This movie, however, is funny, and I give most of the credit to Michel Blanc. He is subtly hilarious as the single-minded rube trying to replace his dead wife-cum-farmhand-cum-cook-cum-housekeeper the way you or I might try to replace a pair of comfortable old shoes with new ones. He just can't make the clerk understand.

I like hard comedy--vicious satire, outrageous parody, clever wordplay--and this movie is none of those. It could hardly be more conventional. The plot is that of a TV sitcom episode, and the script is studied and tame. Still, I laughed out loud every few minutes, and taking into account jet lag and nicotine deprivation, that's saying something.

The Sum of All Fears (2002)

Comes up a little short

[6/10 · 6 November 2002]

First the good stuff:

Affleck was adequate, you might even say "good", as the young Jack Ryan. He and Harrison Ford share that ability to seem not as dumb as they look. And the Anne-Archer-as-a-girl girl can wear an evening gown with the best of them. It's nice to see a pretty one getting some work for a change instead of the usual androgenoid or ho-bag or director's girlfriend/niece.

The effects were excellent--I couldn't tell most of the time--not at all like the cartoon tigers in "Gladiator", for instance.

Freeman was perfectly charming and understated.

The script was snappy, witty and hard-nosed.

There were Backfire bombers! (Sorry--they're my favorite strike plane.)

Now the not-so-good stuff:

It was an hour too short. All that build-up with the surprisingly unconventional structure, and they throw it all away by rushing through the last quarter of the movie. It was like driving three days to see the Grand Canyon and then looking at it without getting out of the car. I've always supposed that one of the hardest things when you're making a movie is to know what you've got. These guys didn't. Maybe they were trying for tempo.

Two stars out of four. Two-and-a-half if you like half-stars.

The Sweetest Thing (2002)

U2 Should Sue.

[1/10 · 30 August 2002]

This is the worst movie I've ever seen. That distinction used to belong to Bo Derek's "Tarzan," and maybe that tells you something.

The writer, Nancy Whatsername, is the hot and skinny Italian-looking gal on Ben Stein's Money. I watch the show to see her. The star is Cameron Diaz, who was about the only woman in the world who would have had a chance of making me unfaithful to my wife--she used to make me crazy with desire. (She was great in "The Mask," and good in "Best Friend's Wedding.") It didn't help. This so-called movie is a cascade of disgusting semen-slathered nonsense. It's not funny, not even over-the-top sophomorically funny like "Mary" was. It's under-the-bottom sleazy and dead-lesbian serious. And they sing.

One good thing came out of my watching the first forty-five minutes of this crap before I took it back to Blockbuster and actually got my money back--I don't like Diaz anymore. Have you seen her dance?

Signs (2002)

What do you get when you mix celluloid and chloroform?

[2/10 · 19 August 2002]

The movie "Signs." To be fair, the line between hypnotic and soporific is a fine one (and Shyamalan drifted dangerously close to it in "Unbreakable") but "Signs" is set deep in the Land of Nod. It tried to weave a spell, but it knitted an Afghan. Let's hope this film is just the inevitable clinker in any genius's career, and that "Sixth Sense" was not a fluke. I, myself, intend to give M. Night-baby one more chance, but only because "Sixth Sense" was so very good, and because he's bucking the Spielbergian slide-show formula.

If you don't go see this one, you won't be missing a thing but nonpareils. If you must see it, rent it, but don't come crying to me to get your money back. It's that bad. It's not even so bad it's funny. It's just slow and obvious and improbable and sketchy. It reminds me of the teleplays of the 50's, with one set, one camera, a cast of several, and radio-era special effects that happen offscreen. But don't think that it's good in the way that those old-time adaptations could be good, and don't think that it consciously harks back to them (though that may be what it was trying for). If "Signs" had been adapted from a play, that play would have sucked out loud, too.