Reviews

I really liked this movie sixteen years ago. I was an ideal audience, partly because I built models of fighters and carriers, flew model rockets, and was eager to see lots of military hardware. But the real reason is that I was 14 years old.

This movie comprehends life at about the level of a 14-year-old. Watching it again as an adult was painful. After every visual cliche, after every scene of buffoonery (almost innumerable) I told myself it would get better, that the scenes of space flight were coming. But there was nothing but more weak dialog, trite phrases and ... even the shot framing was corny.

And that dreadful score. Bill Conti really reached a new level of inappropriateness (beyond his previous best misunderstanding of theme, style and sentiment with "For Your Eyes Only"). Here we have a movie about individualists, talented, flashy egotists. Maybe an appropriate musical representation would be an exciting solo instrument against orchestra, in other words a concerto. For no conceivable reason, however, Conti takes the theme of a very famous concerto ... and plays it with full orchestra only, minus the fireworks of the violin part. So there is no symbolism of the one against the many, just a vaguely joyous melody. And then just to make sure we know it's really Bill Conti's score, and not Pete Tchaikovsky, he changes two notes.

Conti has done some straightforwardly uplifting music (especially towards the beginning of his career), but this is simply cheap "proud and happy" music. And why "Mars, Bringer of War" by Holst in yet another film? "Finlandia" is just as universally known to musicians, and would have made more sense as "music of overcoming" (gravity, technical troubles).

The obnoxious "Foreign Man" character in the meetings was supposed to be Werner von Braun, ex-Nazi rocket-team leader. The man was a genius, and he was cunning, imaginative and by most accounts impressive. If, for lack of time, he could not be shown rounded, he could at least have been characterized as formidable, secretive, dangerous. That's just as simple.

LBJ was loquacious and persuasive, not a yeller or a whiner and not such a carnival barker in public. I dislike the man and his decisions, but why make him into a plain old jackass when he was an effective and charismatic user of people?

Surely Harris and Shepard knew this was a bad script. They make the absolute best out of the meager diet they were fed. And under such obvious direction: "Smile when the light goes across", "Look up after a second", "React with surprise" and so on, making the actors seem like puppets sometimes.

I suppose Jeff Goldblum had to take what he could get in those days, but it's still disappointing to have to sit through his gags (literally).

The wives seem to be thrown in to get females into the theater. The point their characters make didn't even need them on the screen to be made. The men could have confessed, maybe in a bar scene, to the marital woe and guilt that plagued them as a result of their chosen career. And shaved off a good half-an-hour in the process. The wives contributed almost nothing else to the story. Drag without lift.

It won for Best Editing. Could have been Most Editing. When objects fly in the movie, they are seen this way: here it comes (from the left), there it goes (to the left), here it comes (from below), there it goes (off the bottom), now it wobbles (to show how fast it's going), the dials on the instrument panel turn, then out the front window, now where did it go?, now it's coming right at you, and last just the vapor trail seen from the ground. This sequence occurs almost edit-for-edit whenever something goes more than 55mph, and it's dull.

Before I saw it again on DVD, I would have given it an 8 from my fond memories. I have to give it a 4, alongside such cinematic triumphs as "Dirty Dancing" and "Creepshow 2".

By the way, the NASA logo shown throughout was not used until the mid-60's. Am I wrong to be so bothered by that? When the movie is about NASA, I don't think so.

And as for the record: Never before have I sweated with embarrassment all the way through a movie.

Theme song was a kind of driving rock-mariachi with children singing "laa, la, la-laa, la, la, la, la, laa, la-la-laa la...vii-lla aLEGre!" But it wasn't the song as much as the rather scary panorama of a Mexican city (or rather a cheap model of one) in the throes of some holiday, complete with ferris wheel and fireworks, that most would remember about the opening of this show. (The only thing scarier on PBS was "We all live in a capital I" from Sesame Street.)

I agree with the post below that this was a nice show overall, with the cast of mostly children and teenagers alternating languages. I too learned to count to ten in Spanish from it. And I think it may have helped children in very white Protestant areas to open up to other cultures (as Sesame Street did).

Come on, you 30-35 year olds, try to think back to a day you stayed home from school with the flu and turned on PBS! This was only one of many peculiar shows in PBS reruns on weekdays in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Or maybe I was just deliriously ill.

I saw probably the entire first season and I agree the show gradually became a little stale in following years.

Of course there was the bouncy theme song with a disco vibe, that included lines like "Contact/ it's the reason/ it's the moment/ when everything happens./ Contact.../ Let's make contact." Sounds vaguely like a proposition. Making science sexy, maybe. Someone should record a club remix.

Part of the footage that played along with this (aside from a Saturn V lift-off, an arc lamp, and I think an earth-mover) was of a frog wiping spittle off its eye in slow motion. This made me gag, especially since it came right before a slobbering infant. Of all the stock footage available, they chose two cuts with saliva to illustrate the wonders of the natural world.

All in all, it was a pretty good show. I didn't care for the fictional segment ("The Bloodhound Gang"), and I was embarrassed by its theme song.

It is probably difficult to make a show like this, since the children with an interest in science probably know a lot of the basics already, yet the ones with only a passing interest are the real target audience, since the makers wanted more to instill curiosity than to inform. There is no way this show could be considered to teach with any degree of rigor. It was essentially a succession of appealing or curious images that could be easily explained, with a sort of Encyclopedia Brown show tacked on.

Sorry to pose the question, since I have to say I don't know myself. This was easily the cleverest show I have seen. And it's the only TV comedy I know that is sometimes really fascinating.

In the episode where the broadcast is jammed by the Soviets, I found that along with the funny premise and its very funny execution (the stroboscopic image, the "new mini-cam", "Uzbeks"), there was a genuinely creepy vision of media under state control.

But it would give entirely the wrong impression to suggest that the show was ever preachy, even though it belittled the socially irresponsible from time to time. It was always exuberant fun.

Just so everyone understands, this was the series made for NBC, not the original lower-budget (but very good) years, nor the following year on Cinemax, which I didn't see.

Unfortunately I haven't seen any of them in over ten years. This is one of the very few things I would own on DVD if it were available.

"Battle of the PBS Stars", "Chariots of Eggs", Guy Caballero forgetting to stay in his chair, the frightening lust of Edith Prickly, and of course "Great White North". They deserve to be preserved.

As a devotee of movies about intrigues, conspiracies and white-collar crimes that turn ugly, I was predisposed to like any story set in the glamorous-but-devious world of Swiss banking. And I like John Saxon.

But with very bad sound, clumsy credits, actors not interacting, corny music, a confusing plot (though I guessed the bad guy right away), a subplot more about middle-aged lust than romance, literal-minded camera work and a script so full of cliches there was no room for anything original, I had to give it a 3.

If you like skiing see "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". If you like bank fraud see "Shawshank Redemption". If you like conspiracies, see "Parallax View". If you like untrustworthy older people having sex, see the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair". And if you want to see all of these in one movie, this is not the one.

I think the makers of this film were trying to make some sort of cross between the plot of a Bond movie and the style of "The French Connection". If you like car chases, you should see it.

"The French Connection", I mean.

It seems misguided to talk about "ideas" in Kubrick's films. I would say he had a genius for unsettling people, often by means of perverse combinations of image and sound. If, in our understandable urge to make sense of what stands before us, we imagine a clear intention behind these combinations, then we may have ascribed ideas to the artist that he never formed or perhaps never had the patience to form.

Or the courage. Because if we are right in guessing the meanings of these juxtapositions, meaning that each image corresponds to a specific notion of Kubrick's, why would he hold back that little hint that would make us sure we had happened upon the correct interpretation? I can only think it would be intellectual cowardice, either of having one's ideas shown up as simple, or of being understood too clearly as saying something ugly. I believe the second is the more likely.

Finding the emotional sources of a work is somewhat less speculative. I sense in this film a terrible bitterness toward man and a viciousness toward man the social animal, and a yearning for insulation from others, whether through distance, time, or a return to the womb.

After much thought I give this film a 7, due to the uninvolving performances, the tasteless use of "Zarathustra" as a cheap gag, and the fact that despite the unforgettable sights and sounds, this film (despite my having read the book) did not appreciably enrich my life. Neither did "Eyes Wide Shut".

I gave the similar but less impressive "Silent Running" a 4. "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie", a truly ambiguous picture that does not prompt or hint to the viewer, I gave an 8, despite muddy sound, no music, unpleasant characters, uninteresting set decoration and poor formal organization. Art that does not address life is only artifice, really no more than a curiosity.

It reassures me of the existence of a shared human nature that so many people grow so much meaning out of Kubrick's rocky soil.

Beyond mentioning that this workmanlike version will surely see many years of duty in junior-high English classes, I have to point out a glaring mistake in the music.

The tragic march that plays over the scenes at the barricades was not written by Basil Polidouros (as though one could be unsure), but by Hector Berlioz. Nothing new in using and abusing the classics as mood music, of course, but the choice of this piece is completely muddle-headed. It is the first movement of the Funereal and Triumphal Symphony (Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale, if you want to go shopping), which was commissioned by the French government to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Paris riots of 1830, and thus falls well outside the time of our story.

If "temp track" music was needed, there is no shortage of orchestral music from all times and climes that has yet to be drained of its original meaning by being thrust into a movie. But out of all the possibilities why would someone choose from the tiny handful of works that were written about that different, much later set of barricades, also thrown up by angry Parisian youths? Because it's French? I hope the producer hands out thinking caps next time.

As for the acting, Neeson does a convincing job as a quiet and troubled Jean, Thurman is far better here than I have seen her elsewhere, Danes irritates more than slightly and Rush is positively magnetic in his coldness.

I gave it a 7 (scant).

This is typical big-budget Hollywood fare. Moody characters, moody lighting, moody music. The unrelieved moodiness lets you know that serious things are happening. But it does not set out to depress: in fact, everything looks quite attractive, whether animal, vegetable and mineral. The script aims for a high moral tone and a low intellectual one. A perfect combination to lasso dollars.

I cannot fathom how Willis went from "Breakfast of Champions", an outstanding performance of an excellent script, to this mumbling of dialog that does not matter.

Overall, I found it very scary ... that people liked it.

I found this movie too cute. The characters are brightly colored but not especially complex. It's nothing more than nihilistic comedy, albeit done with amazing skill. The movies that deserve ratings of 9 and 10 engage more of the range of our emotions than this does. This shortcoming probably has to do with the somewhat eager camera and lighting that put every scene at the same emotional distance from the viewer.

Frequent violence and cursing do not have to be objectionable in a film, but here they often seem wanton or voyeuristic.

Perhaps rather than "cute" I should say "deft" or "neat" or "pat". At any rate, this is not on a par with The Godfather, and I gave it a 7.

This is a good-looking movie. Let's get that out of the way. The character actors are very good (including Derek Jacobi, thrown in perhaps for associations with "I, Claudius"?). Crowe is good enough, although he isn't given a lot to work with, meaning he doesn't have very interesting lines. The Hans Zimmer score is predictably derivative: Holst, Orff and now Dead Can Dance -- things that go thump-thump-ahh-ahh. But the "atmospheric" style seems to be in vogue at the moment. It really interfered with my enjoyment, though. The historical accuracy was wildly varied: pedantic details of the manmade environment peeked out from wholly unrealistic scenes. You can hire consultants to reproduce period textiles, but not period sensibilities. The writer and director have to find those in reading some of the plentiful sources that have come down to us from Rome. I wonder how much time they devoted to hearing the voices of ancient Romans before staging their big computer crowd scenes. Spartacus took up some serious issues, even though it was quite corny. This is just a revenge tale with exquisite production values. 6/10

Yes, this is a decent movie, but it is essentially a meditation on the consequences of a decision made very early in the film. I thought it dragged in places. Dern's performance is intense but ultimately not really true to life. That may be due more to the repetitive script than to any limitation of his. I wanted to see him changing more, reacting to more situations. I think I enjoyed it as a curiosity, as showing another facet of the "Easy Rider"/"Billy Jack" sort of sensibility, but not purely as science fiction. There were episodes of Doctor Who that made me think harder. And it comes nowhere close to the brilliance of Blade Runner. I would say neither does it belong in the same class as 2001, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, or Brazil (if that's sci-fi). 5 out of 10. I hope my dad doesn't read this. He loves this movie, and he didn't even mind the Joan Baez songs. The DVD transfer is good, with no additional features. There was a "making of" which they could have thrown into the bargain.