Reviews

Excellent work by Moore who manages to stay behind the camera most of the time and occasionally lets footage role without his often-disingenuous everyman indignation. Compared to Columbine, it's not so smug and the gotchas seem less cruel.

Bush totally deserves what this movie does to him.

I was a little impressed that Moore did treat that poor mother's grief with some dignity. When she's set upon by a smug protestor in front of the White House who is trying to appropriate the death of her son into a critique of the war, the real loss vs. someone's opinion about policy is terrible to see.

This movie could have gone on for many more hours and I wouldn't have been bothered. The look and the sensibilities of Les Triplettes de Belleville are simply perfect to me. It's got the stately-slow comic setups of a Tati film. It has a proto-industrial look reminiscent of Jeunet and Caro films that spans from the truly monumental to the most trivial detail. Some of the characters seem like refugees from a Beckett play while others are painted in gleefully unPC broad strokes.

If you're the kind of person who revels in the plot of Brazil, plays fx segments of Blade Runner again and again, have a nearly-spent VHS of Delicatessen, love David Lynch still lifes, and have the Nightmare Before Christmas characters dancing in your head, then this movie may really suit your tastes.

I must have seen too many John Huston classics, because PH fell way below my expectations. I was really eager to love this film. I wasn't bored (very often).

Angelica Huston is pretty interesting. There were a few scenes that featured great grotesque shots of the walking corpse and his family entourage. I really love Kathleen Turner, but the things she does in this film come down on the groan-inducing side of zany.

I'm glad I saw it (I'm a fan of Huston and Nicholson), but I probably won't bother seeing it again.

I was born right around the time this film was released and I live on the peninsula, so the sight of the San Francisco Bay Area 1970 in Harold and Maude was utterly astonishing to me. For me, much of the movie is like watching a ghost story.

The whole film is something of a time capsule. The charming music, the outrageous fashion, and the Maude character seem like things that could only have happened in that time and place. If a character like Maude existed today, she'd probably be on reality TV being pelted with offal or something.

The humor of H&M is wicked and mannered. I'm not sure people take the film as the class-conscious statement it must have been at the time, since these days even the poorest people in comedies seem to be living in vast apartments and driving new cars. (That is one thing I really loved about H&M - the total absence of that weird feeling I have more and more with comedies that every last thing on the set just came off the rack, out of the wrapper and was positioned just so for a product placement. It's like watching people act in the middle of Target.)

Much of the film's message was kinda lost on me. The portrayal of a rich kid vaguely probing for something to care about seemed interesting to me chiefly in the context of the 70's counterculture rather than anything emotionally involving. The opposition between Harold's mom and Maude is between a force that wants to integrate Harold into a ridiculous society of status-obsessed dopes and a `follow your bliss' approach. That underlying story became the plot of quite a lot of disposable 80's comedies, which is probably why people are sick of it.

I just didn't get Maude, though I admit that could have something to do with the limits of my imagination and experience. (I'm a Kubrick/Lang/Sternberg fan, so it could be said that I just like art to be a little more sterile and people-free than H&M).

It's a unique film that I found quite beautiful in spots and often hilarious. I dunno if I'd recommend it to very many people though. It's a pretty rarified/accidental/cult pleasure.

Fun film. It's the first time I've seen Depp do a crowd-pleasing lead. His Jack Sparrow is pretty much standard Deppian posturing which really works for me, but I was surprised to see it as the centerpiece of a Summer blockbuster. Between Scissorhands and Fear and Loathing, he always seemed to me at least as smart as the script, but in this case he pretty much soars above it and delivers his lines with a real relish for camp.

The rest of the film was sorta okay, which is saying a lot since I generally loath the work of The House of Bruckheimer. Like a lot of other 2.5 hour braindead epics, this one could have edited down for time. It's not Bergman for heaven's sake - the characters beyond Depp's and Rush's (and theirs are all style) are almost cheap cardboard cutouts. The advantage of stock characters is supposed to be economy.

The story is excellent compared to general summer fair, especially in this summer plagued by stories ripped from comics, old TV shows, reality TV, and, in Bruckheimer's other Summer film, a bunch of cop show cliches mashed together. It's not so complex a story that 2.5 hours is necessary.

If producer Bruckheimer has a signature shot it's either 1) that much overused A-Team stunt explosion in the middle ground while a person is catapulted away from it in the fore, arms and legs kicking, or 2) special effect shots THAT NEVER END. In almost any Bruckheimer film there is an effect or stunt that makes you say `wow' and you want to see it again, like the melting heads in Raiders of the Lost Arc once did. With Bruckheimer you can count on seeing that effect over and over and over again during the course of the film until every drop of techno magic is drained.

The shot of the undead pirates walking on the ocean floor was great. It is exactly the sort of imaginative storytelling that has been lacking in many recent blockbuster films.

Thank god someone finally made a film that gets a laugh out of uptight white people colliding with black pop culture. I hope this starts a trend cuz the potential for this kind of joke is limitless.

I hope Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy get together again and make an honest effort to be actually FUNNY once more before they die (Bowfinger was a nice try). They should invite Michael Palin along too.

Occasionally Hearts and Minds comes over as too obvious and aggressive, as in the shockingly unflattering edits of glib, racist Americans piled one on top of another and the literal link the director draws between football and war. (Then again, I'm 31 years old and just don't know how open such racism was then, but the cuts from bigot to bigot are just brutal and perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part to assume that the director was unfair.) Also, it seems the communist NLF did no wrong that was worth putting in the film. Instead the director concentrated on eloquent nationalist sentiments. I happen to agree entirely with the assessment of the war shown in the film, but even with my sympathies it's hard not to notice that this film that concentrates so brilliantly on the suffering of real people before an evil policy focuses almost solely on the crimes of the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. But maybe that was someone else's film to make and, at that moment in time, the director probably felt that there was enough coverage of NLF as just plain evil people. It's a small gripe about such a mammoth film. Documentary is not Truth, no retelling of an event ever is. Hearts and Minds is an unapologetically partisan film and is so much the better for being honest about it.

I'm `oriental' myself. Well, `oriental' enough that I know all those slurs and dismissive comments would have applied to my family and me. It was absolutely eerie for me to see people from Gen. Westmorland down to Americans watching parades on Main St. who had nothing but contempt for the people that to this day many swear the US was trying to save.

I'm not sure how many times I've ever seen the victim of bombing express himself outside of this film and that's sad. How many people were bombed in the last century? Millions certainly. In the US we've become so accustomed to hearing that our foreign policy requires almost annual bombings somewhere on earth. Particularly during the Clinton years, punishing through air strikes became so routine that it barely merited news coverage. These attacks may not be as indiscriminate as they used to be, but how many people in our history did that one anguished man speak for as he wept about his family and his home?

The sheer carnage on display in Hearts and Minds made the whole war film genre seem perversely sentimental to me. It's seldom helpful to hold up fiction to docu-footage, but, in this case, any number of moments from Hearts and Minds makes otherwise impressive films like Apocalypse Now! and Platoon seem like acts of bad taste.

This movie kinda killed the whole Star Wars thing for me. I remember actually being disturbed that I was bored thirty-minutes into the film. Being bored was pretty much the last thing I expected.

Aside from the ambitious animation, everything seemed diminished. The Force went from being a limitless potential that some people were in tune with to something you test for like AIDS, pregnancy or allergies. Hammy characters like Vader and Han Solo (or even Leia's inexplicable haughty phase) gave way to one of the blandest casts I've ever seen in any film not by Antonioni. The brittle American Graffiti/jet engine aesthetic of the ships in the first films is gone in favor of glossy-plastic ships that dissolve into explosions. The clumsily abrupt scenes separated by wipes were replaced by interminable sequences of clunky dialogue. I never thought that there would be a step down from Ewoks, but there's Jar Jar.

I think this film exterminated much of the devoted Star Wars fanbase in the same way that Voyager thinned the ranks of Star Trek fans. I went to see Nemesis recently and couldn't help but notice that there weren't throngs of people who had been camped out in Starfleet uniforms awaiting the opening. Ditto with Attack of the Clones - the population of costumed campers had dwindled to almost nothing. (Now they're all wearing Lord or the Rings outfits and designing Matrix fansites - Lucas pretty much lost them, which, despite what he says, has to matter to someone who built an empire on merchandising to exactly those people.) Another indication of this falling off is the degree to which the new films have failed to penetrate the wider culture. You can still quote Darth Vader and people know what you're talking about. Say `use the force, Luke' and almost anyone on earth knows what you mean. Does anyone quote the Phantom Menace? Ever? The only reference to the Phantom Menace that I think pretty much anyone could get is Jar Jar Binks, universally understood to be an unwelcome annoyance.

The choreography of the final saber duel was really wonderful (even though Darth Maul dies standing there like an idiot while Obi-wan flips over him and stabs him in a move that doesn't seem much more impressive than any of the other moves that Maul previously shrugged off.) Even so, when I think back on 1999 sci-fi fun, The Phantom Menace pretty much sucks compared to The Matrix and the video game Half-Life. Actually, now that I think about, playing Jedi Knight II is much more fun than watching PM. Also, the console flight-sim based on PM was mediocre.

NOTE: Of course it was the forth-highest grossing film in history. It's Star Wars! There are tens of millions of us that HAD to see the extension of the movies that were the most influential franchise of our childhood and changed Hollywood. If Titanic II is ever made by Cameron and the latest teen stars, it would bring in a similar (but probably not nearly as huge) tidal wave of people that had to see for themselves if the magic cotton candy of their teens could come again. Lucas could have made the Phantom Menace ten times worse than it is and it still would have had an opening weekend that set records.

I admire some of Soderbergh's films - The Limey especially. I went into Ocean's 11 having heard that it wasn't much more than a celebrity parade dressed up with a heist plot and some nice camera work. It probably should have ended with the homage to The Right Stuff where the gang seems to evaporate in front of the Vegas fountain. Packing the expensive talent into a pointless epilogue drained most of the goodwill I had left for the film.

Some of the things I hated were - the lighting of Julia Roberts in her first scene was … bad. Why give her a mongo upper-lip shadow? Farting away the whole `Pitt is mad at Clooney for making the job personal' with a single line was … okay I guess, since I really didn't care about the subplot at that point. It's a good thing electronic components can just bounce back from an EMP.

On the other hand, the script did stay ahead of any expectations I had as far as the particulars of the heist (which was kept vague anyway - when the film was over, I couldn't say where the vault was in relation to the casino floor or the surveillance room, whereas I could draw you a map of the heists in Rififi, Asphalt Jungle, Topkapi or The Red Circle). I loved Eliot Gould. Andy Garcia was beamed in from a better movie - all of the other actors are winking at the camera and striking poses in their gloriously outlandish outfits. I love and admire long takes, but I do occasionally get a caffeine kick out of editing that looks like it was snipped from footage taken by a swarm of bees. With all the rumors around right now about remaking some of the most unique accomplishments in film history, I really appreciate the fact that Soderbergh decided to breath some life and style into what was a `meh' title.

Ocean's is like People magazine getting stuffed into a decent Bond film. Nothing wrong with that.

The movie itself didn't really interest me. It struck me as something I might see on the Discovery Channel and watch for about 10 minutes before getting bored. Lotsa expensive hardware, lotsa snippets of scholars saying very broad things, lotsa costume reenactments, lotsa graphics to make a point and lotsa repetitive footage. Not my thing, but I could see how someone else would be vastly entertained and moved.

I found the 3D effect to be very dull. The preview that played right before the film was for the Young Black Stallion and it really made use of the IMAX theatre. The image was truly monumental, I saw fabulous amounts of detail and the sound was not only real, but godlike in its strength. I was absolutely transfixed by the images of a syrupy kid's film.

Then I put the 3D goggles on and the gigantic screen image seemed about six inches across. It really dwarfed the experience for me. There were several scenes on board the research vessel where crowds of people and endless rooms really did feel 3D. I remember being astounded by the immediacy of the sight and sound of one of the Russian crewman playing a guitar. However, most of the film is about a murky, shaggy shape at the bottom of the sea. Compared to the texture of Bill Paxton's face, a hairy dark shape with some subs buzzing around is not that fascinating to see in 3D.

I kept fighting the urge to bat away all the bubbles and random sea gunk that were always floating around in the foreground. Dunno if that's a good thing.

The play is kinda tedious. There aren't any really engaging characters, the plot is a collection of gross-out moments from Roman drama, the verse is completely forgettable and basically everything about the play indicates that it's an early, uninspired piece. It's okay compared to The Comedy or Errors, but interesting mostly as a curiosity for students of Shakespeare. I've always been baffled by it. Is it a grisly comedy (like the humor of the Evil Dead films) loaded with scholarly references? Or is someone supposed to take this stuff seriously as high (grosser-than-gross-but-nonetheless-high) drama? I've read some compelling arguments for either side.

Julie Taymor's movie suggests to me that it probably was written to laughed at. I don't think you could ask for a better Titus and Tamora. The rest of the cast is excellent as well. The all brought a lot of gravity and seriousness to their roles, properly pumped and glowering. It's all very professional work, but it kinda bored me after a while. There is a lot of Titus that is just hard core gore and chest beating silliness, and yet the whole cast is in Masterpiece Theater mode.

The art direction and cinematography was a pleasant diversion. On the up side, the film has a unique look about it. It is one of the most successful attempts at staging Shakespeare I've ever seen on film. The hodge-podge of the mid-century and Roman aesthetic did a lot of move the scenery back in time while keeping the set anchored by things anyone could recognize like military uniforms, expensive suits, and limos. After all, authentic Roman sets and costumes in a play written by a 16th Englishman (who wasn't bothered by anachronisms himself) wouldn't be any truer to the spirit of the piece. (However, some outfits were so Brit-pop 80's that I felt depressingly old for thinking they looked cool.)

On the down side, sometimes the art direction completely swamped everything else and I've seen this stuff before. Also, there weren't any sets that looked like people actually used them to live in or debate in or eat in. Everything, from the costumes to the biggest set pieces, looked like something built just to look good and for people to strut around in. Maybe it's deliberate. Taymor is nodding at the pure theatricality of Titus - working with the fact that these are not even remotely believable characters in a drama that has almost no naturalistic details. Maybe the film Titus is like those fashion shows where impossibly odd looking women strut down runways wearing outfits that have no practical function.

On the whole, I kinda enjoyed the film. I'm happy to watch smart people take on Shakespeare's least interesting play. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't already curious about the idea of seeing a flashy version of Titus Andronicus or someone whose taste tended towards noisy, stylistized films like Run Lola Run or Jean Jeunet's stuff.

…what was up with Alan Cummings playing Saturnius like a satanic Pee Wee Herman (big chair and all)?

Arsenal seems to be a direct challenge to idea that films are intended to be digested in one sitting. Apparently even Sergei Eisenstein had a tough time making sense of the narrative of some of Dovzhenko's work. Arsenal's narrative only emerges if you concentrate on what you've seeing - comprehending and reassembling the puzzle of the images and movements that Dovzhenko has arranged to create causal and symbolic associations. Dovzhenko's camera is like the eye of God, taking in a half dozen settings, all of them connected though disparate in space and time. Dovzhenko also is perfectly comfortable inserting the fantastic (a talking horse or a faith in communism that deflects bullets) into his retelling of a historical event. I watched the film several times before the plot was clear to me.

I'd recommend this film to anyone who wants to see a whole different approach to story telling. There are many great images and some of the acting is very good (the way Semyon Svashenko glances with disgust at one of the Ukrainian nationalists and slowly reaches out to touch his ribbon, feeling it's lightness, is an example), but there is no easy way of getting past Dovzhenko's style. You have to want to figure out this film. Dovzhenko's narrative technique is as unique as Robert Altman or Tsai Ming-Liang.

This was a blind buy used DVD. It totally killed a nice buzz I had going when I hit play.

It's bubble-headed comedy, but it's um. squalid. The plot is ZANY!, but the characters do things to each other that are so petty and disturbed and conveniently contrived I ultimately found it depressing to watch.

Maybe the box lead me to expect something more than an uneven, goofy caper film. (I know, I know, the quotes on the box & the Academy Award nomination mean nothing.)

Picking up the dvd of Friedkin's THE FRENCH CONNECTION in 2002 is probably a weird experience for a lot of people. It's got Gene Hackman on the cover wielding a gun with an expression that says he's about to shoot someone full of holes. It is a cop film and it does have car chases, but the almost everything else about the film defies the expectations that audiences now have of the genre. It's like watching LOGAN'S RUN, SOLARIS or ZARDOZ. After STAR WARS, the whole idea of an intellectually or philosophically ambitious sci-fi movie practically vanished. I don't like ZARDOZ or care much for LOGAN'S RUN, but the point is that after growing up on sentimental fantasy epics like Star Wars, the very idea of people trying to be daring in sci-fi seems suspect.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION suffers from a similar dissonance with a lot of people who find the film lacks plot and excitement. Police dramas, and especially television cop shows, are massively plot driven where THE FRENCH CONNECTION is a character driven. Where most action films follow a McGuffin, wind up for a heist or propel themselves towards a final shootout, THE FRENCH CONNECTION is designed so that all these things are secondary to observing Popeye Doyle's wrath. The drama is watching his bullying, his indifference to almost anything or anyone but his job beating and killing people. Assassin on the run? Drive right through everything in your path. Frog trying to give you the slip? Walk right up to him (even if you haven't anything to charge him with). Time to arrest him? Shoot everything that moves. There is no arc or maturing of his character and at the end of the film he simply charges into a fetid darkness shooting at shadows. It's a tremendously grim finish (which is underscored by the subsequent role call of characters where the cops are punished and the drug dealers get off).

Another jarring thing about THE FRENCH CONNECTION is it's documentary-like attention to detail. The events of the film are based on two real cops who handled a case that was plundered for the details that inform the plot and the police procedural scenes. Like Altman's mix of reality and art in NASHVILLE, Friedkin mixes in real locations, real cops, real traffic jams/accidents and tried to base almost every scene on some real event. The result is a snapshot of New York in decay. It's the post-Moses New York where landlords burned down their buildings to collect the insurance rather than bother renting them. In 2002, this doesn't really come across because corrupt police dramas in gritty neighborhoods are a cliché. A decade of COPS and untold thousands of B-movie dramas (`He's a Cop on the Edge!') have gone a long way towards defanging the sight of a racist cop beating the snot out of a black man over a handful of drugs. The whole emphasis on realism, the idea that the filmmaker is trying to show what's interesting about a certain place and time, is an almost bizarre idea in an age when `seeing something new' almost always refers to a new innovation in CGI effects.

It's still an extraordinary film, though one has to meet it halfway since the genre is so diminished. Hackman's performance is pretty much universally praised for good reason. He makes an amoral, loathsome, dangerous jerk eminently watchable. Fernando Rey is up there with Laughton and Mifune for me - when he's on screen he's interesting. It's a film made by extremely ambitious and creative young men. Some of these shots would simply never happen today. The insurance people would never sanction the mayhem and the NYPD would never cooperate on a film about a thug with a shield.

It's obvious why it beat A CLOCKWORK ORANGE incidentally. As perfect a film as CLOCKWORK is, it's a cerebral, shocking, stylish, and unique film. Best Picture doesn't go to films that far ahead of the pack. THE FRENCH CONNECTION was a topical genre picture with a great performance and some very well realized artistic ambitions.

The strongest aspects of the films are a stellar comic performance by Peter Ustinov, another classic Dassin jewel heist and the glorious use of location. The rest of the cast is rather stiff and they're given a lot of lines that are supposed to come off as zany and outrageous, but don't really work. Maximilian Schell is okay and Robert Morley takes his arch banker-gone-mad thing a bit far, but the weirdest performance is the one given by Melina Mercouri. There are at least a dozen scenes where her character's horny purring is supposed to be setting the audience and cast ablaze while keeping the plot running. It's creepy somehow. If this lacquered matron can't get Ustinov all hot and bothered enough to drag her on a couch towards him, the gang won't know if he's up to the job.

It's hardly a classic except in bits and pieces. The power of the heist scene is obvious enough considering how many times it's been imitated. If I had to think of another heist as good, the first thing that springs to mind is Dassin's Riffifi (a film that has perfect acting and cinematography to go along with its heist). Ustinov is so completely into his role that I swear the rest of the cast improves just by acting around him. The time-capsule glimpse at Istanbul in the 1960's is a lot of fun.

When Topkapi isn't being a good film, it's at least weirdly bad.

I really enjoyed some of Buffalo Bill and the Indians. The first half hour of the film is Altman doing what he does best, the camera wanders around a fully-realized world built from the ground up and peopled by Altman. The overlapping dialogue is great and the casting looks perfect. I think the film peaks with the scene where Bill and Annie Oakley are target practicing - Altman weaves together firearms, sex, showbusiness and relationships into a pretty funny scene.

Then the Indians show up. Sitting Bull and William Halsey are portrayed as noble, mysterious and aloof. The movie spirals into a series of events where they confound the smarmy Bill Cody over and over. The last hour of the movie requires Newman to act more and more flustered by Sitting Bull until he has a really cringeworthy breakdown in front of a ghostly Sitting Bull. Maybe there was more fresh drama in watching a white profiteer abase himself before noble Injuns in 1976. It's hard for me believe that anyone but the most hardcore sentimentalist will find the drama between Cody and Bull interesting.

Anyway, there's stuff for hardcore Altman fans to watch for. Newman is initially impressive in his role and then sputters. The pageants and attention to details that Altman excels at are well done. Ultimately the themes of showbiz and history wilt before the rambling blah of the noble savage.