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Reviews
To Catch a Smuggler (2012)
Fake
When the drug sniffing dog picks out a box at the JFK international mail distribution center it is the only box with no shipping address label on it. Staged. Fake.
Quiz Show (1994)
Way overrated
I think narrative films about real events should be judged against the drama of the underlying factual story. I find reading about the real story more interesting than watching this movie and I am not into reading much. It is always sad when someone ruins a great story with potential by making a poor movie because then it is impossible for someone else to redo it. This film is an argument for why actors should act, not direct. As other critics have pointed out, this film lacks intensity. The real characters were more interesting than the make believe ones in the movie. I guess truth is stranger, and more entertaining, than fiction.
Exhibit A (2019)
Thought provoking and entertaining
Almost as good as The Confession Tapes. You will want to plea bargain even if innocent if charged with a crime after watching this
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
Heavy handed and self indulgent.
The music becomes grating and overbearing as does Herzog's voice which is way paste its sell date but he is too in love with his own voice to hear that. What a waste of an opportunity. Get rid of the "scientists". Why are they in the cave getting in the way of filming the subject matter? They have to be there this one hour the are allowed to film?
I wanted to experience the paintings with light approximating the moving torches that the cave painters carried. Instead we get all these concentrated bright spots from flashlight like head lamps from all these annoying scientists ruining every shot. i watched this in 2D. Someone should have told Herzog that if he had just properly and sparingly used the lights that he had we could have gotten an adequate sense of the 3 D of the cave walls from the shadows, as the film fleetingly does, if the light had moved consistently with the camera. He needed a real cinematographer with some brains and visualization ability like the cave painters had 30,000 years ago.
As is all too typical, even for Victorian era architecture and furnishings, claimed in the name of science or preservation, but really to boost their importance, people with degrees always want to exclude others without the same degree from seeing things they are preserving. Why did the curator need to be there breathing on everything? Was this a condition of permission to film. She could have explained what we were seeing in voice over later and yielded her breathing damage time to the film crew but she wanted her face in the film. I thought having a boom mic operator was a waste too as was stopping the filming for a room tone type audio recording. This seem to be filmed and lit without any imagination or planning as if it was just any ol' location. Obviously the play of darkness and light coming only from moving torches influenced the way the animals were depicted. Even the scientists present, literally, and some in the future could have learned something from this if it had been lit and filmed to reproduce the way it was experienced by the cave painters.
I'll take Herzog at his work that filming access may never be granted again and give him 1 star for squandering the privilege and preventing someone more capable from doing it. As a doc filmmaker over 60 I also feel embarrassed at the thought of being associated with him for that. He needs to retire now.
Modern Family (2009)
No, you aren't the only one who doesn't think this show is funny
I have only seen one episode, thank god. No, you aren't the only one who doesn't think this show is funny. You also aren't the only gay man offended by the stupid gay stereotypes. Not all gay men are scaredy cats. The only stereotype I saw broken was the fat gay man. They should be really modern and include a skinny lesbian. Both gay guys were afraid to stand up for themselves. Good West Side Story reference though, it still did not come off funny. That about says it all. No, they insist I drag this out! no pun intended. Obviously the episode was unmemorable or it would be easy to have ten sentences. Or even more, since apparently they cannot count. How many more do you need?
The Wise Kids (2011)
Torturously slow moving film with extremely amateur cinematography and physically painful audio
I saw this film today at Frameline in San Francisco. I grew up in Tennessee and my grandfather was a Baptist preacher, but unless you were a fundamentalist/devout churchgoer I doubt you will get moved by anything in this film.
I have a new theory that my enjoyment of a film shown at Frameline is inversely proportional to how much the director in their introduction compliments the audience on how great a city San Francisco is. If a film is good it needs no introduction and they should be done away with at festivals so there is more time for Q & A.
The camera/lens combo they usually used had a shallow depth of field and what should have been in focus was either often not in focus and or the focus puller was slow to focus. Often they focused on a different actor than I wanted to focus on at the time. Frustrating. This footage should all be scraped and they should start over. Should have just used a different lens with deep depth of field if they were not skilled enough to do it right. They were trying to be too artistic but did not know what they were doing.
The casting was terrible and the acting was almost always very bad too. There were only 2 or 3 actors that were any good. There were way too many characters in the film, and it made no sense to do that with a small budget. I could not keep up with who was who and did not even care to. The congregation was the most diverse one imaginable for the gay characters to be so closeted. They did not look like people who would be married to each other. I could not figure out what the message was any way the lead who is questioning his attraction to men was still making out with is wife, drunk or not. I had no empathy for these characters. They were not believable in my world. You don't go off to NYC form South Carolina as a youth and come back unchanged. This film had a multitude drawn out scenes of unimportant events that 99.999999% of editors would have cut out because they did not advance the storyline. the 91 minutes seemed more like three hours. I kept looking for the progress bar at the bottom of the screen (like on Youtube) hoping to see that it was almost over.
Apparently the budget for this film was no budget and they could not only not afford lights but could not afford a bounce card either. Looks terrible. Under lit not by choice apparently but because they didn't know, despite obviously shooting it in digital. I have never seen outdoor vegetation rendered in such unrealistic looking colors. I doubt they had a budget for color correction and boy did they need it. This film looked like they messed up the camera settings on everything they shot. Overexposed shots and underexposed shots were the norm. The audio is hard to understand cause it was not miked properly and they did not de-ess the voices so be prepared for very harsh on the ears audio. Poorly edited, poorly shot. The director was one of the lead actors and he should stick to acting. Film-making involves a completely different and huge set of skills and he does not have any of them except maybe, maybe a little promise in scriptwriting, but he needs to let someone else have final cut. Why is it everybody thinks they are a filmmaker just like everybody thinks they are an architect.
Everyone I talked to about this film afterwards (all women) thought it was as painfully slow as I did. The audience I was in had several of those people that will laugh at anything, ugh, which made it all the more unbearable. Simpletons love this film. Everything was so predictable except the ending which was non-existent.
Latter Days (2003)
The script is not totally polished.
The script is not totally polished. Steve Sandvoss does the best acting in this, and is the main reason to watch. He was believable in all but the snow scene. The dialog sound quality is poor for a professional film/video. I think they tried to use lavalieres most of the time as they seem to be taped under the shirts. Maybe should have just hired some competent/anal retentive boom operators. The fact that it was shot video instead of on film did not bother me. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a very small part in this. Jacqueline Bisset did not do it for me. Her demeanor did not fit her lines. So much for hiring an old pro. I think they were going for a straight Anna Madrigal.