Change Your Image
Dries Gevaert
Reviews
Scene: Stone Cold (1997)
Very strong acting. Really nice.
(may contain some plot spoilers)
After reading the book on which this movie is based on ("Laarzen voor de Doden" in Dutch, I don't know the English title), I decided to watch this movie anyway (although it was almost midnight). The book was very good and so was the movie, but the problem with reading books before seeing the movie is that while reading the book, you form your own ideas about how the characters and locations look like and feel like. As a director, it's really hard to satisfy everybody who read the book this way.
The story is nice and very realistic. A young boy (he calls himself Link, you don't know his real name) runs away from home because of problems with his stephfather and ends up on the streets because he can't find a job. He gets to know the life on the streets with help of his new friend Ginge (named Ginger in the book), but then Ginge and some other homeless disappear, and you see they always had contact with the same guy (who calls himself Shelter) just before they disappeared. The book is told from two perspectives: Link and Shelter.
The movie only tells about Link, probably because otherwise it would be too complicated, but acting and directing are done so well you can see Shelter is doing something he shouldn't and that he's a psycho from the moment you look at him. Although there were some unnecessary scenes (like when he takes a little kid's ball at the playground), some wrong locations (Links first sleeping place, where he loses his watch, should be right across the train station), and the beggar scene with Gail that was way too long, there isn't much to say about the directing. Great camerawork too, but I'll talk about that later on. The movie was probably filmed in open air without any figurants (just people passing by who were being asked not to look at the camera but to keep walking), and that gives the movie a very realistic tint.
The first thing I noticed after seeing the movie was that the actors were really good. Although I imagined them totally different, they were really convincing. The guy who played Link was magnificent, he really got every detail right (even Links nagging voice), he reacted the way Link would react and was really good with the camera. He attracts attention only when he needs to, and I think the director and cameramen saw that. They help him by doing the same thing: only attracting the attention to the right things and movements at the right time. Because the camera is moving a lot, it gives to movie a smooth feeling, about the same feeling you get with the book. Really nice. The other actors are good too, with just one minor casting mistake: the one that plays the guy who rents Link the room. He acts like he is Rambo or Terminator or something, and that's kinda ridiculous.
In general, the movie reflects the feeling of the book very good and has a lot of great points. If you're in the mood for a good psychological drama, with a little local touch (the accent and the locations), you should see this movie. 9/10
The Last Supper (1995)
Great but horrible.
(contains plot spoilers)
I really don't know what to say about this movie. It's very extreme in both ways: sometimes extremely funny, while other scenes are extremely boring and useless. It's a very nice story, but then again there are some things in the story that are completely unnecessary (like the love between Paulie and the Jew. Etcetera. The first half hour is very good and deserves a 10 out of 10, but other parts are just so bad that they deserve no points at all. Very strange.
The main story of this movie is great: a group of young people invite someone over to dinner on sundays, but one night the guest seems to have some fascists ideas and gets killed more or less accidently. The group is convinced by the black guy that they did a good thing (he said that maybe this guy had become the second Hitler if they hadn't killed him) and they decide to invite people with extreme opinions every sunday. If they can't convince him to change his mind, they'll kill him. Of course this leads to a lot of problems inside the group. Some things in the story aren't worked out very well (like the kidnapping of the girl Jenny and what it has to to with the group) and some things don't matter at all, but in general it's a great idea and a nice story.
I can't talk about acting unless I talk about the characters first. The characters are one of the bad things in this movie: they constantly change their minds and are all developed in totally different ways. This is probably caused by a minor directing fault: you don't really know how much time passes when the director decides to speed the story up a bit. According to the images and the weather about three or four months have passed (at least I thought), but according to the bodies in the garden it's only 10 weeks.
So you don't know very much about what happened in between and what could have changed the characters, you can only see that they have changed. This way it looks like they've gone totally mental, when the director could have slowed down things a bit and thus could have created psychological depht instead of an almost psychopatic change of mind (example: [de zwarte]). It's also quite unrealistic that the person who didn't want to do it at all the first time they talked about inviting someone over every sunday becomes one of the most fanatic "killers", and it's certainly unrealistic that she changes her mind again later on.
As an actor it's of course very hard to play these characters. Cameron Diaz is quite convincing, the one with the broken arm however, was just plain irritating. Because there are so many actors on screen at the same time it's hard to focus on individual acting, and all I can say is that near the end, the actors seem to have less and less fun and are just trying to get this over with.
But of course this is a comedy, and you normally rate a comedy on how much fun you had. The first half hour was very funny and had original jokes with a good level. Not like Jim Carrey pulling faces, but the type of humor that leaves you rolling on the floor without attracting all of your attention so you can still focus on the story (Example: the group discussing while Jude is trying to pull a knife out of a murdered guest). You see this in a lot of quality comedy's and it's nice to see it in an American movie instead of the usual tasteless sex jokes like in Deuce Bigalow or Me, Myself & Irene...
The crew started out with a great, but they ran out of ideas at the end and that way the movie loses its rhythm. Some bad acting and lousy characters without any depth or realistic development add to the feeling that you saw an amateur movie. But anyways it was good fun and it's a source of discussion (what would YOU do when you would sit in front of Hitler with a knife in your hand?). Go see this movie. 7/10
MASH (1970)
A Holiday at the Front.
This movie is quite funny, quite emotional, quite dirty, quite bloody, quite original, etc. All these little bits, combined with great acting, smooth and clean directing and the special atmosphere make this an exceptionally good movie. They're in Korea reanimating dead people, but still they enjoy their time, they try to relax a little, and I like that. Although I don't really see surgeons 3 miles from the front line acting like they're on holiday, but that's a little exaggerated of course. I can imagine that people at the front need a lot of humor to forget their fears.
Also exceptionally for a war movie is that the characters are no stereotypes, they have feelings, their mind evolves through the movie (like Hotlips, she really changed a lot: from the strict bitchy army officer to a woman who wants to seize the day). Try to find that in Rambo.
There's just one thing that bothers me about this movie: there isn't a real story going through the whole movie. Yes, there are some little stories, like the fights between Burns and the other surgeons. but they disappear after a while. The movie feels like you're watching the pilot episode of a TV series without a cliffhanger.
But that's a detail of course. I watched the movie and enjoyed myself very good, and that's what counts.
9/10
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
This will psychologically kill you.
Whow. Most horror movies don't scare me, mostly because you just get scared for one moment (like when someone's walking into a dark hallway and the killer jumps in front of him), and because those movies are very often just one big cliché. But this really scared the s**t out of me. This is not jumping in front of someone and stabbing him, this is psychologically killing someone. Here's how you do that: First, scare the victims with some weird voodoo stuff they'd rather don't want to have anything to do with. Then torture them by taking away something they really need, their sleep for example, scare them so hard they live the whole day in fear of the night. And ultimately, literally scare them to death by letting them now there's no escape. They'll surely gonna go totally insane, and maybe they might kill themselves. If they don't you'll do it.`
Finally an original concept in a movie, I haven't seen that for a long time. It's too bad that the geniuses who came up with this idea didn't get a bigger budget... Actually, it isn't, because being suck a low budget movie adds to the realism of this movie (it's supposed to be found footage so it's gotta be crappy). There's no other way of making this movie. It's great, and I think it's too bad that some people can't see that. They'll probably walk into the theater or the video store think they're gonna be amused (that's what most people think after 3 Screams, 2 Last Summers and dozens of other copies). But this is the type of movie that is made to crawl under your skin and eat you slowly from the inside out.
Another thing that those people probably didn't like is that you don't know half the story. EVERY Hollywood movie has a complete story with a beginning, an ending and stuff happening in the middle, and the viewer sees everything. This movie is in fact not a movie, as the makers try to tell you that it's just a bunch of found footage put together. And of course the camera's not always running, so there's no continuous story. Which leaves you with some big holes to fill after the movie. One solution is the website that caused the hype when the movie was in theaters and which made me go hire the movie. But it doesn't answer all of your questions, in fact it just adds to the mystery of the whole thing.
Acting. That would be nice in this movie, some people who could put down a credible personage (not someone famous, that would be real stupid, someone who is unknown and took acting classes). I think Heather is about the only one who really made me think that this was real (and that is what the movie is about, right?). Josh and Mikey overact most of the time. I noticed that if you watch the actors closely the movie seems less scary, probably because you see that they're just acting.
The atmosphere created by the people who made this (actors, editors, directors, marketing guys and webmasters) is great, it crawls under your skin and makes the movie scare the hell out of you. That atmosphere is what made this 100,000 $ movie a million dollar blockbuster. Since there was no directing at all (the directors just sent the actors in the woods with their equipment and the script), s****y acting in some scenes, some dumb things in the story (map, runaway) and an empty feeling at the end, I rate this movie a 9/10
Me, Myself & Irene (2000)
The usual tasteless kiddy jokes.
This is another tasteless movie from the three most tasteless guys in the galaxy: Bobby Farelly, Peter Farelly and Jim Carrey. I really can't understand why the hell I ever went to see this movie: I saw the story (if you can call it a story) in the trailer, I've seen the jokes in all other Jim Carrey films and I surely didn't go for the acting. Anyway, this is just another stinker comedy that doesn't deserve your attention and I'm not gonna wast any more comments on it. 3/10
La vie est un long fleuve tranquille (1988)
Yuk.
This could have been done WAY better. This is the story: Two babies are switched at birth, one from an upper middleclass family and one from a lower class family, because of a jealous nurse. Twelve years later the mystery is discovered and the upper class family buys their kid back. This lame plot isn't worked out at all, and some minor storylines are just forgotten near the end. By the way, what the hell was the meaning of the very last scene ???? There are some serious things wrong with this movie.
Acting isn't very good either, but it isn't bad. Benoît Magimel, the kid who plays Maurice, did some nice things, and Jean-Brice Van Keer was good too. But then again, some other people didn't act at all: Daniel Gelin (the doctor), Patric Bouchitey (the priest), ...
Mostly I don't say anything about the music, but this time it really beats everything. HORRIBLE! TASTELESS! OFF-KEY! Unbelievable
Of course there are some good things about this movie, especially how the two families are brought into screen and how one family falls apart when someone from the other family comes to live with them. But in general, this is a huge stinker. 4/10
Final Destination (2000)
Very promising start but a horrible ending.
(cointains some plot spoilers)
Having read a lot of promising reviews here and on other sites, I walked into the theater expecting some sort of Scream-ish movie, but with a story and good acting (despite the unknown actors). But it didn't really turn out the way I though it would. The first scenes, with the unbelievably realistic air crash (vision) and the sudden explosion of the plane (in real life) were magnificent. No one could have done it better. But the problem was to find original "accidents" that will happen to the survivors, and that's where the movie loses its rhythm.
The first one with the water was nice and very original, but the rest of the movie was just cliché after cliché. The writers seemed to like the story they found, with the dumb coincidences and the "plan of death" stuff, and decided to keep re-using that idea till the end of the movie. Special effects and coincidences would do the rest. But the special effects didn't do nothing. All I noticed were some horribly irritating electricity wires flying across the screen. And despite all the coincidences, who by the way make the movie very unrealistic, the movie stays a little predictable.
The first 15 minutes were great, the last 15 minutes sucked reeeally hard. It's just a bunch of things happening without a story: Alex escapes death for like 20 times, talks to himself about death not going to get him and stuff, and the last moment he realizes what everybody in the theater had already figured out (PLOT SPOILER:) he hadn't changed seats and it isn't his turn after all (while he had escaped death for 20 times, that doesn't make any sense) and so he runs to Clears house where things keep going wrong. The director must have said "From this point, f**k the story, let's just have some more electricity, bad luck and everybody doing stupid things nobody else would do in their place." If the movie had been longer like this I surely would have walked out of the theater. My God.
For some dumb reason, (PLOT SPOILER:) everyone survives the car that blew up and nothing happens for some months, until they go to Paris BY PLANE (40 of their friends died in an air crash and they just survived it, and a few months later they travel by plane? Hahahahahaha!) and suddenly death seems to remember them and things start to go wrong again.
The air crash and the first killing were great and certainly deserve a 10/10, but in the end its just such a horrible mess. 6/10
Quick Change (1990)
Nice for TV
This movie is, combined with some popcorn and a coke, perfect for an enjoyable TV evening. But I wouldn't recommend watching this movie on the big screen, because the irritating character Loomis, played by Randy Quaid, will attract too much attention. I noticed how everytime Quaid said something (mostly while nodding his head hysterically or while jumping around) my eyes focused on something else than the TV, and it's hard to focus on something else when all you can see is the big screen in front of you. I know the character needs to be like that but it still irritates me.
Bill Murray however acts almost perfect. He has to play, as usual, the guy who makes sarcastic remarks or who acts like nothing has happened when everything goes wrong, and he's so damn good at it. Geena Davis has a crappy part, with a character that almost constantly changes her opinion, but she still manages to make something out of it.
There's nothing specific to say about directing or music or whatever, those are the quite-good-but-nothing-special-type of things that make this movie perfect for TV.
7/10
The Witches (1990)
Buy the book
Oh my god.
I know how hard it is to put a book on the big screen, but they really failed on this one. First of all, the casting is TERRIBLE (the characters don't even come close to those in the book, and the kid could at least be cute...), and second, the grandma plays like she followed a "Learn to act in 30 minutes" class. Rowan Atkinson and Angelica Huston are certainly not in their best roles either, but at least they don't screw up hugely like the rest of the cast.
Jim Henson himself is about the only one who has done something good here: the mouse puppets are very good, and the directing and camera are quite good too.
The story. The book is really nice, I read it and enjoyed it (although it's a kids book) but the movie makes the worst scenes longer and the best scenes shorter. What I'm also noticing is that everything is quite detailed and slow in the beginning and fast and disorderly near the end. Maybe some stupid deadline caused this, but anyway it gives a weird effect when you review the movie.
Conclusion: buy the book, it's way better than the movie. As usual.
4/10
American Beauty (1999)
Almost perfect.
Really great movie, especially thanks to the almost perfect acting by Kevin Spacey and the smooth, clear directing. Maybe Annette Bening does overact a little, but it doesn't affect the fascinating story... Magnificent... 10/10