academicpc Reviews

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Disappointed!

[5/10 · 14 October 2007]

I guess it had to happen. Enough people have been telling Martin Scorsese that he's a genius enough times that he figured he had to take on a bit of "classic" literature.

Edith Wharton is great. Martin Scorsese is really great. The cast and crew of this movie are fantastic. But the flick is a lead turd.

I don't know what it is about a certain point in a great director's career when they feel like they have to deny everything they've ever found true in themselves and prove something. And this movie feels like Marty's trying to prove something.

The only good thing that came of this is that it appears Scorsese has worked whatever induced him to make this movie out of his system. Plus, he met Daniel Day Lewis who lit up the screen in The Gangs of New York.

If I didn't know that Scorsese was the director of this film, I might have liked it better. But knowing that the guy who gave us Mean Streets and Casino and Raging Bull and The Departed was responsible for this bit of Merchant-Ivory "high culture", I wasn't able to pretend it had the kind of life that you find in those other great films.

.45 (2006)

Horrible, just awful. Beware.

[2/10 · 5 March 2007]

I feel like writing Milla Jovovich a letter demanding the 1 1/4 hours I lasted through this movie refunded to me.

Imagine a director fresh out of film school who loves the movies of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, but has no talent himself. Now imagine that he gets it into his head that if he just has the actors scream and curse enough, he will make a masterpiece. Now get him addicted to crystal meth and grain alcohol, and in the final days of his addiction, let him direct a film without the use of a script.

That movie would be 10 times better than ".45", which was just horrible.

The acting was so bad that at first you'll think it's some kind of joke. The script is unbelievably stupid. One of the main characters is such a bad actor that he can't do a passable American accent, so you get this Lower East side Bowery Boys version of an American accent by a Scottish actor who does an American accent so badly that they have to write something in the script explaining that his father divorced his mother and took him away to Scotland, so he grew up with this bad accent. It has no other relationship to anything in the movie except to explain why this American tough-guy has a Scottish brogue coming through his awful American-ese.

Milla should be embarrassed. Maybe after Ultraviolet she decided she wanted to be considered a serious actress, so assumed she needed to play a role where she gets naked and does drugs and her boyfriend beats her up and everybody hollers a lot. Wow, I'm so sad for Milla. Stephen Dorff must have wanted to have the negative burned because even he's sleepwalking through the whole thing.

I'd normally recommend this movie just because you get few shots of Milla mostly naked, but it's not even worth it for that. Shame on anyone who had anything to do with this movie. The only reason it gets two stars is because I save one star for the movies that actually hurt people, like Nazi propaganda or racist films or Passion of the Christ. This is just a hair better than that.

Ring of the Nibelungs (2004 TV Movie)

whew, what a stinker!

[2/10 · 11 February 2005]

This movie was seemingly made by an amateur (in the worst sense of the word) with a big budget. The guy who plays Siefried is thisclose to doing male porn. And whoever plays "Buffy the Brunhilde" should go back to working at the Dairy Queen in Rolla, Missouri. Max von Sydow looks nauseated to be involved. He's got an expression like "wait'll I get my hands on my agent..." If you have any interest in this story, get yourself the George Solti recording of the REAL "Die Nibelungen" and a translation (unless you're German) of the libretto. Better yet, mortgage the condo and go see the actual staged opera. I guarantee the experience will blow away even the Lord of the Rings movies. Short of that, maybe try to find a copy of the Fritz Lang silent version of Die Nibelungen. It kicks dirt all over this one.

Casshern (2004)

none like it

[18 December 2004]

Whatever you think of this movie, you've never seen anything like it before. The visuals are so imaginative, on such a great scale, that it took my breath away. Comparisons to "The Matrix" are way off the mark. This movie is as far away from "The Matrix" as "The Matrix" is far away from "Star Wars". The first 15 minutes of the movie alone lays down a visionary gauntlet to the makers of science fiction cinema, knocking as lame everything that's come before (visually, at least). And this film is not lacking in soul. Think "La Jetee". And I don't want to hear any nonsense about this film being something less because it's shot with "green screen". With digital effects being used in every film coming out of Hollywood (even non-sci-fi), there's no reason to separate the cgi-soaked stuff from the painterly results seen here. Once you take that leap into machine-rendered visuals, all bets are off. The palette used here just happens to be immense, boundary-stretching, mind-blowing. In a few years, this kind of thing might be the ho-hum standard fare, but this "Casshern" will be remembered, like "Metropolis", like "2001" like other films that set a new standard for the imagination. I don't know if the version I saw was sweetened at all from the version others have commented on here, but I didn't see any cheap video-game stuff at all. A pixel is a pixel is a pixel, after all, and this movie blows the lid off. Forget plot, forget form. This is the sh*t, right here.