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Reviews
The World According to Garp (1982)
Just a god-awful mess
Who the heck is responsible for this terrible mangling of one of my favorite books? This is just terrible. terrible acting, terrible script. The story isn't even close to its old self - and what were they thinking? Robin Williams, for Gosh's sake! This really defies description. Don't see this. Seriously, don't. Not even for laughs. Especially not if you're a fan of the book. This might just be the worst movie adaptation ever - everything is disjointed and scrambled - the characters which are important in order to understand the sequence of events are seriously marginalized, and every potentially interesting location from the book has been changed (example: Vienna - New York) into something profoundly uninteresting.
For those who haven't read the book - it's basically a fictional biography about a writer growing up, exploring his writing and so on. His mother writes an autobiography which is hailed (despite her protests) as a sort of feminist manifesto. The book is well-written, engaging, and long. Its prose is simply beautiful.
This movie, on the other hand, is about Robin Williams once again telling us to seize the day.
Constantine (2005)
Nothing left...
OK, do it like this: Take one blond ex-punk rocker Englishman who's a magician, usually spending his time in a comic where critique against current society and "realistic" portrayal of occultism is the norm, and who is of the opinion that heaven and hell are just as bad - a bunch of w*nkers. Do well past ten years of dissecting the mind of said Englishman, creating a wonderful plethora of great stories, characters and depth.
Then, make this Englishman an American, dark-haired yuppie, played by what might be considered the worst actor ever (whose only real claim to fame was to star in one of the most overrated wannabe-deep action flick trilogies of all time). Place him in New York, and remove all elements of social critique, make sure all occultism is portrayed in as daft a light as possible. Make him WANT to go to heaven. remove all interesting characters, and transform the remaining ones beyond all recognition. Oh, and rewrite his entire personal history, since someone didn't like the years of hard work done by the original authors.
This is what you will end up with. A mindless, mind-numbing kinda-action-flick, incapable of stirring even the least bit of intelligent thought. The most profound thought I had during the entire film can be summed up like this: "Whoa. Nice effects, dude".
Not that it's a bad thought. I just expected more from the movie version of one of my absolute favorite comics.
Anyways, if one completely disregard any connections to an actual comic book, ignoring the title and the names of some characters - well, then one might think of this as "kind of a decent action-flick". Not great, not really mediocre (compare with the complete drivel that is "Daredvil").
In short summary - This is not Hellblazer. This is not John Constantine. This is an action flick who needed the popularity boost of the comic-book readers. No more, no less. See it for what it is, and you might just enjoy it. And for (insert deity)'s sake - go read the comic.
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National Treasure (2004)
Disappointment
I guess I shouldn't be surprised - This is a Hollywood production, after all. The incredibly bad dialog, the childish "codes" (which weren't codes, they were ciphers), the scrambled facts... Well, I guess I am just not a part of the target audience.
This is "The DaVinci Code", with a REALLY bad script and a disregard for history and fact which actually surpasses said book.
The movie was, all in all, not even a decent adventure movie. The symbology was scrambled, the facts were scrambled - the only reason to give it anything but the weakest grade is that it's vaguely amusing to hear the nonsense and be able to comment on it... Even Nicholas Cage wasn't able to save this one.
Good riddance. Go read the DaVinci Code, or even better, something with actual facts in it - and perhaps a plausible story.