Reviews

I confess horror is not a genre I gravitate to, but putting my "prejudice" aside, it looked very good and the acting seemed well done.

I liked the lighting a lot and the sound.

It might have benefited from running a title before each segment to minimize confusion.

As Dylan is often confounding in interviews and so forth so it is with this film.

A possible goof (I'm too lazy to go back and verify): Seems the dusty old guitar case that Billy the Kid finds on the train had a pickguardless guitar in it whereas Woody's guitar had a pickguard for a left-handed player.

Maher does a good job of pointing out the folly of faith without reason, but, like perhaps most what I will call rationalists, overlooks that reason without faith is just an inversion of common religious fundamentalism.

When not all the facts are in on a question (and may never be), some faith is required unless one wants a full-time "job" as an agnostic.

In any case, Maher strongly implies (especially at the end) that it is religionists who are responsible for the bulk of violence in the world, but what of official atheists such as Stalin and Mao? And all those nasty weapons were brought to us in the first place by: SCIENTISTS.

Things like this are rather lacking in integrity (from the Trivia tab): 'During the sequence set inside the Dome of the Rock, Bill Maher and his guide are approached by two men who speak in Arabic and are supposedly objecting to Maher's presence. In reality, what they are saying is "We don't normally hang out here..." and "The boss only gives us five minutes..."'

Disclosure: I am a panentheist with a "minor" in process theology.

I rate average films at 5.

The film is a "relentless" serving of fade-to-black vignettes to make a story.

Even the pastiche of outtakes at the end are relentless. In many of these, one actor enjoyed giving the camera the finger as the viewer sees again and again. OK, already. Almost funny the first time, but it becomes a stale joke.

The film description I saw beforehand spoke of the two main characters having a near-death experience. That term, to me, means, in part, out-of-body experience due to clinical death.

Instead, this part of the film was a dangerous situation they escaped from while fully conscious and never clinically dead.

I realize the film was made in only 22 days or such with a small cast and crew, little money, etc., but if meeting these challenges was some kind of test, I am afraid the film largely does not meet the challenge.

A valiant try, but still amateurish.

Milwaukee-area people will enjoy recognizing landmarks seen in the film.

Note: For me, scoring a film at 5/10 means it is an average film. I think many of the film ratings here overall, by that standard, are too high.

From _The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin

from the Interrogations of Hitler's Personal Aides_, Edited by

Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, PUBLICAFFAIRS, 2005.

"_The Hitler Book_ has since been

proved one of the best primary sources on the inner workings of the Third

Reich that we possess. It also called into question several scenes in

Downfall.

"Downfall provoked a lively debate, above all in Germany. The Swiss actor

Bruno Ganz's portrayal of a 'human' Hitler clashed with a convention

which requires him to be cast as a carpet-biting devil. Audiences saw a

worried, frightened and tearful Fuhrer; they witnessed him kiss his new

wife Eva on the mouth (The Hitler Book makes it clear that he kissed her --

like a good Austrian -- on the hand); they saw his concern for the well-

being of his secretaries; and they saw the demon too, but one mitigated

perhaps by human (rather than humane) emotions. They saw a normal

woman love him, and excuse his conduct. More shocking perhaps (but this

aroused far less outcry) the film turned a butcher like SS-Brigadefuhrer

Wilhelm Mohnke into an honourable soldier and the SS doctor Ernst

Gunther Schenck into something approaching a Hollywood hero, despite

the fact that he had carried out experiments on the prisoners in Nazi con-

centration camps....

"According to The Hitler Book a

few of the dictator's alleged tantrums never actually took place.

"But such scenes provide spectacular cinema and necessarily made their

way into Bernd Eichinger's Oscar-nominated 2005 film Downfall. An eloquent example of this is the alleged tantrum that was caused by Fegelein's

treachery. The cinema-goer hears Hitler, beside himself with fury, bellowing 'Treachery!', 'Fegelein! Fegelein! Fegelein!', and the script emphasizes, 'Each time Hitler beats the table with his fist. His face is so red that

it is fit to explode.' In reality Hitler had to be told by Gunsche, the Battle

Commander of the Government District, to hand his brother-in-law over

to the court martial. Other scenes in the film are either pure invention or

stem from unreliable witnesses. The last visit of Speer's was clearly less

emotional than its depiction in the film; and the secretary Traudl Junge was

not, as is shown in the film, saved by a boy but raped many times and was

for several months the 'personal prisoner' of a high-ranking officer in

Soviet intelligence. Time and again the chronology of the film fails to

match historical reality...."

H'wood is in it for the money, not in it for fidelity to what really happened.

Yes, it's a good film for drama and all, and I liked it, but I like even more fidelity to history.

Capote vs. _Capote_ By Phil Gibbons

About a year ago, in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the publication of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, his journalistic account of a murder and its aftermath that he called a "non-fiction novel," I began to do some research on the book and its author. I read just about everything published on Capote's life and work, talked to some of the participants in the saga of the Clutter family murder and...

Unlike In Cold Blood, Capote is very much a work of fiction, with a plot dependent on incidents that were created for the film. The movie focuses on Capote's inner struggle as he wrestles with writing a "great" work of literature. In the film, he comes to realize that for his work to succeed, he must manipulate, exploit and deceive the two murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.

Capote's ambivalence about Smith and Hickock and the agonizing turmoil it wreaks on his life is the major plot line throughout the film. Several scenes dramatize his willingness to intercede on behalf of the killers. After their conviction, Capote is depicted as hiring lawyers to represent them in their appeals, angering his newly befriended law enforcement source, Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent Alvin Dewey. When Smith goes on a hunger strike to try to die before facing the hangman, Capote spoons him baby food through the bars of his cell, telling him that he still must live so that Capote can reveal to the world that he is not a "monster." Capote's real motive, according to the film, is to keep Smith alive as a continued source of material for his epic.

The filmmakers explain Capote's presence on death row with a scene in which he gives "Warden Krutch" a $10,000 cash payoff, which gains the writer unprecedented access to his two protagonists.

Capote is shown spending months bonding with Smith, all the while hoping to get Smith to describe what happened and how he felt on the night of the crime. The film concludes with the hanging of Smith and Hickock, and a note stating that Capote never completed another book; the film suggests that the process was so personally scarring that it irretrievably shattered Capote as an artist.

There is nothing in Gerald Clarke's book Capote: A Biography, on which the film is based, that claims that Capote attempted to secure legal representation for Smith and Hickock. Nor is this assertion included in any other nonfiction account that I have seen. Duane West, the county prosecutor at the time, told me that the initial appeal was handled by attorneys appointed and paid for by the state of Kansas. Subsequent appeals were taken up by members of the Kansas Legal Aid Society of the state bar association after they were contacted by Dick Hickock, a fact mentioned in In Cold Blood itself.

Capote's extended prison sojourns in the film are likewise fictionalized. In five years, Capote personally visited his subjects no more than half a dozen times, though he did correspond with Hickock and Smith on a weekly basis. He placed a great value on access to information, but was less interested in dealing with the defendants as people. The baby food scene and other death row confrontations were likewise invented.

While the film's Warden Krutch is an utterly venal and corrupt bureaucrat, the real-life Warden Sherman Crouse denied Capote access to death row because prison regulations restricted contact to immediate family and legal counsel. To overcome this, Capote retained the well-connected law firm of Saffels & Hope, who, at Capote's request, approached the governor of the state and worked out a deal.

While an unattributed comment in Clarke's biography suggests that money changed hands, there's no evidence that it went to the warden. Charles McAtee, the recently deceased former department head of Kansas State penal institutions, described Crouse to me as a principled individual who remained in his position despite terminal cancer, determined not to leave the onerous task of executing Hickock and Smith (and two other inmates) to his successor.

...

An op-ed by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal (11/4/05) invoked Capote as an example of a nonjudgmental film ... He bolsters his case with dubious evidence: "Early in the film, Capote becomes absorbed with the lives of the accused murderers, especially Perry Smith, whose undoubted intelligence and troubled early years seem to resemble his own. He tries to secure better lawyers for them. And indeed through these interventions, Capote produces stays of execution for years, partly out of sympathy but also to give him more time to collect material for his book." Describing the film in the New York Review of Books (11/17/05), Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that "the film focuses on the . . . five-year period during which the killers, assisted at first by Capote, found better lawyers, made appeals and won stays of execution." Mendelsohn bought into the film's premise that Capote was ambivalent, initially helpful to the murderers but ultimately eager to have them done in to pave his way to stardom. He accurately cited a 1965 letter from Capote, quoted in Clarke's biography, in which he say he's "keeping his fingers crossed" that all appeals will be denied and that the execution will swiftly ensue. But Mendelsohn failed to mention that Capote expressed exactly the same sentiments in published letters written two years earlier Mendelsohn also ascribed Capote's addiction issues to the grueling creative process involved with In Cold Blood. In reality, Capote's alcohol and prescription drug intake was at a serious level before, during and after the composition of In Cold Blood.

...

_Extra!_, March/April 2006, www.fair.org

There's so much booze being guzzled in this movie that it's a wonder the characters don't all just pass out.

Instead, they are by turns alternately drunk and sober.

Hercules was such a nice demigod.

This actor is not bad at it tho I like the late Steve Reeves better.

Vote: 3

[where 5 = avg., 10 = perfect]

In an opening scene to _Ridicule_, we get to see a presumably actual penis pee presumably actual pee, unconsenting golden shower-style!

We also get to see men wear lipstick!

Those French!

I love, 'em!

We also see a woman who's rather too beautiful to convincingly play a 1700's female science nerd on a quest to invent the diving suit.

But she needed to be pretty or the film's hero would not have taken a love interest in her.

I must say I did enjoy this nice period piece all in all, however. I vote 7.

Off to buy some lipstick! (As soon as I pee.)

I found the film to be largely annoying except for the Brazilian countryside shots.

It didn't come together for me until the end where the woman is tearfully writing the boy a farewell letter and you finally get her innermost thoughts.

A generally enjoyable film, but why would a good-looking woman in a bar pick up and sleep w/a guy who fell in a bog, has been wearing the same clothes since, and who has a broken nose?

I guess so the film can have a sex scene (not that I don't like to see naked women as much as the next guy)...

When a film presents itself as realistic, I am one of those people who wants believability.

The young girl, presumably a virgin, in this film seemed a little too self-assured (even experienced) when it came to lovemaking (or even sensually kissing car windows that separate her from her not-as-yet(!) lover) to me.

She also seemed way too emotionally cold for someone so young unless she'd been taking lessons from her A-hole brother.

In short, this "young girl's" behavior was that of an experienced and cynical older woman.

It's interesting that according to the voting breakdown for this film on this d-base that women seemed to like it more than men. Do these women identify with coldness/indifference?

(By the way, me-finds the voted ratings of films on this d-base to err on the side of generosity. I would encourage voters to be a little more judicious with their enthusiasm!)

I give this film a neutral vote of 5.

Even though this film would understandably be considered juvenile by many (and I very much enjoyed it as a child), I still, as a middle-aged adult, like it very much. (I can't say this for many other things I liked as a child.)

If one watches it with "fairy tale" in mind, that goes a long way in preventing adult over-criticism.

One of the movie books (Maltin) says it is "occasionally atmospheric." I definitely agree.

Also, it has a pretty musical theme that repeats.

A favorite film of mine.

--Mark M Racine, WI, US(A)

This is my all-time favorite movie. It deals with death very poetically and imaginatively. Cocteau's simple special effects are brilliant. I also think the film subtly hints at truths about Reality as all great art does. I would like to see more films that have the feel this one does. Let me know if there are any. Thanks.

--Mark M