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Reviews
Eegah (1962)
Overrated
First off, I know this is no critically acclaimed picture, but everybody keeps telling me that this movie definitely belongs to the so-bad-it's-good-category. So I started watching "Eegah", expecting one hell of a good time and what I got was pure, unfiltered boredom. I mean talk about a letdown. Of course I wasn't expecting high class entertainment, but I WAS expecting entertainment. Now, don't get me wrong there are some funny lines, mostly uttered by Roxy's father and some scenes do squeeze a little giggle out of me, but most of the time it's just Eegah grunting to the corpses of his ancestors, Roxy shaving her father's beard, many pointless scenes with Roxy's boyfriend running around, with some random footage of snakes and other reptiles thrown in while the audience scratches their head trying to make out what the point of all that is, some horrible songs, sung by Roxy's boyfriend that come out of nowhere, have no purpose and, quite frankly make you question humankind. Now you may be thinking to yourself that that are all factors that add up into a great bad movie, but unfortunately they don't. Every scene moves way too slow and is about 5 minutes too long, at least, and I'm not even exaggerating 90% of all the scenes are total pointless and could have been cut from the film all together, even the terrible acting and extremely lame dialogue of this movie get kind of tiring after 15 minutes of that crap and some of the worst god damned editing you will ever see. It's maybe not one of the worst movies I have seen, but that still doesn't make it good. It' still a piece of crap
***SPOILERS*** And to top it all off, not only is the plot nonsensical and insulting to the intelligence of the audience, it's also a complete, flat-out rip-off of one of the most famous Fantasy-Adventure movies of all time; King Kong ***SPOILERS***
F**k this movie!
Watchmen (2009)
Brilliant movie, but not on par with the graphic novel
Watchmen is one of those films that splits the audience into those who have read the novel before seeing the movie and hated it and those who watched the movie before reading the novel and loved it. To be fair, this is very simplified, seeing as there are people who didn't read the novel and still hated it and of course there's the other way around, but there's still a big mixed opinion.
At first I was very sceptical towards this movie, because I had read the novel and was (of course) absolutely blown away by it like everyone else. When I first watched this movie I was speechless at how great Snyder enacts the intro and the simply breathtaking opening credits while the perfectly fitting "The Times they are A-Changin'" is playing in the background. Even when I'm writing about it now, I still get goosebumps and that's a testament for a great film. I consider this one of the greatest, if not THE greatest opening in a movie of all time. I was thinking to myself that this would just become better and better the longer it plays and would ultimately become one of my all time favorites. Sadly at the end it didn't hold up enough for me.
But first let's take a look at the cast. Here, almost everyone matches perfectly. Either Malin Akerman, Patrick Wilson, Jeffrey Dean Morgan or Billy Crudup, they all do their parts perfectly and look like their counterparts from the novel, but the best one of them all hast to be Jackie Earle Haley. He plays the role of Rorschach so convincingly that you just can't take your eyes off of him. The first time watching I was like "This IS Rorschach". His looks, his monotone voice, just everything about him fits brilliantly. There's only one real miscast in this film and that's Matthew Goode. Don't get me wrong his acting isn't half bad and I guess he's not that bad of an actor in general, but he seemed more like a teacher's pet who just graduated from high school to me and not like the smartest person in the world who can overwhelm Rorschach with his left little finger while catching a bullet with his right hand.
The graphic novel is often considered to be Alan Moore's masterpiece and is even on the list of Time Magazines 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, so if you haven't read it, you can imagine how much depth rests within this work of art. That's the reason why many people to this day consider it to be not screenable, but in my opinion Snyder proved them wrong. I think Eames from Inception said it best: "It's perfectly possible, it's just bloody difficult!", that describes the whole movie for me. It's a great movie in its own right, but it just isn't on par with the source material. For example, they left many supposedly unimportant things out of the movie, which however contribute much to the atmosphere of the comic book, but to give the movie some credit, there are some things that are treated better than in the novel. Like the overall ending in the Antarctic. I really didn't enjoy the rushed paste in the novel, it all seemed a little half assed (If you read the novel, I think you know what I'm talking about.). Here, they altered this part to the better, while still managing to keep the quintessence from the book.
-SPOILER COMING UP- Also, they changed the whole master plan by Ozymandias. I have to say that I don't really know how to feel about this, because on the one hand, it is a really big alteration from the source material, but on the other hand, I know that they couldn't use the "alien-plan", because that would have required to put the back story of the designing of the "alien" into the movie and that, firstly would have been extremely hard to pull off without making it a confusing mess and secondly it would have made the movie too long and that's most certainly also the reason for them leaving out such scenes like the killing of Hollis Mason, the first Rorschach bar scene or every scene of the regular people at the newsstand. -SPOILER OVER-
One thing that I just HAVE to mention, is the Action. Holy f*****g s**t this is motherf*****g awesome. Snyder already proved that he is great in doing action scenes with Dawn of the Dead and 300, but in Watchmen he takes it to a hole new level. You can literally feel every punch and kick, every bullet and hatchet, it's just beautiful. The camera-work is great too, you really feel drawn directly into the action. There's also a lot of slow motion, but never too much for you to get annoyed, or to make the action become ridiculous. It's just some of the greatest action scenes you will ever see in a motion picture and trust me that's no exaggeration.
After this big praise comes a little nitpicking, the soundtrack. I've already mentioned the ingenious use of Bob Dylan in the opening credits above, but then there's tracks like the clumsy use of "99 Luftballons" which came out of nowhere and went out of nowhere and seemed to only fur fill the purpose of getting across to the audience that this movie's set in the 80's, or the almost infamous use of "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen during a sex scene. What the hell is up with that?
All in all it was a great movie and I neither find it to be a masterpiece nor a total bomb, but it really is an incredible comic adaptation. Maybe not on the same level as the novel, but that's something very hard to pull off, seeing as how acclaimed it is. You should definitely check it out and find out on which side you're gonna be...
The Good Son (1993)
A guilty pleasure
Okay, whole plot in one sentence; Macaulay Culkin plays a psychopath who mentally tortures Elijah Wood. Now, if this was a recent movie it would be a much more believable film, seeing that Elijah Wood (let's face it here) mostly plays wussies and Macaulay Culkin, well... looks like a psychopath. But this movie came out in 1993, thus Elijah was about twelve and Culkin about 13 years old (even though he still looks like he's going to put his hands on his cheeks and deliver an over the top scream at any moment throughout the whole film), so you can imagine how that works. "It doesn't", I would say if it didn't, but it strangely does.
Now, don't get me wrong, I was never really frightened by Culkin in this movie, but firstly whoever expects of someone to make Macaulay Culkin look bad ass, has a big freaking faith in mankind and secondly Joseph Ruben manages to make him at least a little intimidating throughout most of the movie (you have to give him credit for that, whoever that guy is) and by most of the movie I mean roughly the first half. But I think that's because of the human nature. Man, at some point had to realize that this guy who threatened to pull down his loincloth all the time was just a plastic puppet, made by big Hollywood corporations to make money. In other words; at some point in the movie that varies from human to human Macaulay Culkin stops looking intimidating and just starts to annoy the f**k out of you, until you just want to strangle him to death. And you know why? Because you CAN! For granted if you showed this movie to a six-year-old, he will most likely get scared, but anyone older than eleven is just too much. I mean what would you do if Macaulay Culkin just came over to your house trying to play sick games with you? That's right! You would give him a punch in his god damned face and that would most certainly shut him up for good. So, I'm sorry for talking about Culkin for so long but it just has got to be addressed what a miscast this is. Giving a boy who's one and only strength is to look cutesy in front of the camera a role in which he has to do anything BUT looking cutesy in front of the camera is something that should be reconsidered before you wake up after a long night with various contract assignments nobody can remember and you notice it's too late.
So how about that Elijah Wood guy? I heard he was in this movie too! Well he is and he is our main hero. The whole story is told from his point of view (which left many people to think that in fact Macaulay Culkin was the good son and Wood just changed the story to his advantage, although the writer never confirmed it and there would be some plot holes if this was the case) and he's pretty good in his role. He's not great, but he sure as hell is not bad. He's supposed to be the innocent one, who gets drawn into the s**t Culkin produces, but oddly enough he has his psycho moments too. I won't spoil it for you, but you will definitely know which scenes I mean once you get there. He is kind of shallow, but you still care for him. Nothing more to say than a nice main character, but nothing more.
Okay, now on to the story. I can imagine that writer and great novelist Ian McEwan did not have the face of Richie Rich in mind when he wrote the script, so I guess he did a great job. The ones who screwed it up in that part were the filmmakers. This could have been a real gripping and horrifying movie, but instead they just went up to the first hobo they saw on the highway who did not have a shotgun with him. I think Ian deserved better, because he couldn't have known that the cigarette would be smoked by every momma's dream Culkin and would become my wallpaper for the next five years.
So anyway, the story itself had real great potential, mainly the ending is really good and it actually did translate well to film, but it has some things to it that stand in the way for a real coherent movie experience. For what it is you get a good, entertaining movie, that's neither too short nor too long and that's while not being gripping throughout the whole movie partially really intense. I'd say give it a watch!
28 Days Later... (2002)
A terrible movie by a great director
I really can't see how people can actually say that the movie's "one of the best of its genre". It starts off okay and builds up a lot of tension throughout the first half of the movie, for example I found the encounter with the infected priest pretty good and the scene in which the "zombies" if you will, chase the main heroes up the stairway was kinda intense too, but nothing about it was really scaring me at any point and that is, in my opinion a K.O. argument for a horror movie, except maybe if the premise and overall plot is good. And in 28 Days later it isn't.
To be fair, this is "just" a zombie movie and I can imagine that it is pretty hard to come up with an original, inspired plot for that genre, but in the first half of the movie, everything that happens you have seen in any shitty zombie movie before. I mean don't get me wrong - it's not a terrible story, but it's nothing special. It's just okay. And "okay" can sometimes be much worse than "terrible". Not only the story, but also the characters are very shallow. Literally no one in this film, I can recall having a personality and thus the very predictable romance isn't very captivating as well.
But that all changes about 60 minutes into the movie, because then the movie decides to become a character study all of the sudden. And you know what? It failed and I might even go on and say that the second half is the worst part about the film and therefore ruins the entire movie. If you wanna see a character study of these people you could as well just study the social behavior of brooms during mating season.
Another really big problem is the camera. Again in the first half it wasn't anything Oscar-worthy, but it never stood out in a negative way. Now in the second half either the cameraman had a seizure or (and that's the more likely theory) they just stopped giving a damn. It's even worse than in Quantum of Solace or Transformers. I just couldn't figure out what was going on on the screen.
So if it hadn't been for the last 50 minutes I'd say give it a watch, but I literally have rarely seen a film that degrades so much the longer you're watching. If you want to watch a good recent zombie film you should check out Dawn of the Dead (2004), (REC), or 21 Weeks Later which is the much better sequel to 21 Days Later. So do yourself a favour and avoid this movie, it is not even worth the time opening the DVD case of it.