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mflutka-1
Reviews
Shine a Light (2008)
Why?....Just....Why?
Just so everyone knows this is a concert film, not a "documentary" as they seem to be marketing it as.
What a thoroughly pointless excursion in film-making. Saw an "advance screening" on Wednesday in Chicago. A local radio station gave out free passes and the theater was only 1/3 filled but even that dwindled as folks snuck out before the credits (myself included). All I could think is "Isn't there a younger, exciting, more RELEVANT band to put all this money & effort behind?" I had no idea that the shows at the Beacon filmed for the film were a fundraiser for Bill Clinton's charity. You know the tickets were going for $2,000 a head so if you look in the crowd you see one of three types: trust fund babies, music execs/politicos, and middle-aged Stones fanatics. Or as Smithers would say "a healthy mix of the rich and the ignorant".
Now on to the performance: passable but phoned in. Mick's voice sounds terrible and his vocals are way too loud in the mix. Keith Richards and Ron Wood spend the evening looking at their fingers, and Keith forgets the words to multiple songs. Charlie Watts was awesome, though. Mick just looks silly and old prancing around stage and you can see him CLEARLY reading a teleprompter (watch as he looks down and to stage right). They definitely benefit from the stadium/arena experience where you can't notice these things. Buddy Guy shows up and blows them out of the water; showing how growing old and still rocking SHOULD be. Vintage clips sprinkled between the performances remind you that at one time they were cheeky, dynamic and relevant. Those days have passed. And a bunch of days have passed since then.
NOTE: I personally love the old Stones catalog but, seriously, how can they even muster excitement paying "Jumpin' Jack Flash" for the 10,000th time?
Poster Boy (2004)
Virtually Unbearable
Talk about misrepresentation! This movie misses on so many marks that I honestly feel sorry for those involved. The acting, editing, cinematography, "costumes", etc. YIKES! What really got my goat was the thorough incoherence of the "story". The movie's called Poster Boy and the main character bitches and moans about how he's "not the perfect son" but his big problem is giving a single phoney speech! If the movie had been about his parents grooming him to be a politico and forcing various women on him it might've made sense. But when he's a nobody at some second-tier university an they're trying to hide him how is he a Poster Boy living a lie. He mentions on several occasions how he's invisible. Boo Hoo. And what's with the political implausibility? The devil from South Carolina who's in office and running for re-election in New York? I don't think so. Oh, and how about the fact every character smokes constantly in totally inappropriate locales. I suppose this was to make them "interesting". Bleh. Of all the bad acting Izzy has to be the worst. Is she doing an impression of Ally Sheedy in Breakfast Club or what? The two gay characters which were supposedly the selling point of this fiasco have about as much sizzle as a glass of water. All in all, another sad contribution to the canon of horrible gay films. I was bamboozled by another wretched NetFlix suggestion! The end.
The Signal (2007)
The Sound of a Balloon Deflating
just came back from an "advance" screening of this film even though it seems to have been released last year. I saw a thread that described it as "The Ring meets 28 Days Later"... I would agree but add "directed by the bastard child of Quentin Tarantino and Darren Aranofsky." It started off with so much promise: clever throwback prologue, untraditional first scene, some genuine paranoia. Then it went all down hill from there. A big sloppy mess with some cringe-worthy moments but a strange attempt at being all things to all people. The cast all looked like extras from "Degrassi High" all growns up and didn't have the chops to match. Our lead gal was OK enough, but disappears for the last 2/3s of the film. The lead 'villain' is the poor man's Jeremy Sisto with the gravitas of Ryan Seacrest and what's with that lumberjack beard? Even when he was torturing a girl with pesticide he seems to be playing it for laughs. Maybe he should've since I haven't mentioned Act 2: a wonky half-hour of "Sean of the Dead" by way of John Waters? Yikes! I can't believe a producer, editor, one of the actor's mothers said "This doesn't work." This film tries to be an incisive commentary about the influence of television on people's value systems. Could've been quite timely with the elections coming up and all that, but is just a pile of mush. The last moment when he puts on the headphones actually made me slap my leg in the theater and shout "Oh come on!" And that stupid Walkman! When she put on her headphone's whilst walking OVER multiple corpses with screams in the background I pretty much gave up on this thing, and that was in the first 15 minutes. These plot-holes are acceptable in horror but the fact that everything was subpar: direction, script, acting... and the second act, GOOD GOD! Lessons learned: iPod bad, TV bad, violence bad, WalkMan good!
PS Noticed a goof (in the theater, never a good sign): She wrecks her Honda Accord into the dumpster and when the camera pans out... it's a Toyota Camry!
The Illusionist (2006)
Surprise ending?.... Not so much
Finally saw "The Illusionist" and must start by saying that I had previously seen "The Prestige" and it's nearly impossible to speak of one without mentioning the other. Anyway, The Illusionist was an acceptable movie, but not one that will stay with you beyond the first viewing. Not an awful movie, per se, but nothing felt fresh about it. Sloppy, bizarre accents from everyone in the cast (couldn't they even fake an Austrian-inflected English accent?) Ed Norton is on autopilot, Rufus Sewell yells a lot, Paul Giamatti delivers and to my surprise Jessica Biel was actually quite good. If you've heard any of Phillip Glass' music this sure won't surprise you. The whole thing just felt contrived and obvious. Actual line: "Why don't you just leave him?" "It's not that simple"... Now there's an original sentiment. The ending was obvious from about 30 minutes into it, then they spent 3 minutes with the requisite montage with all the "clues" that we missed even though it's a shock to no one that !gasp! she faked her death. Yawn. What really got my goat was that all of the "magic" was really jangly CGI that looked horrible. The one decent looking trick was the ghost thing which A) was impossible and B) the filmmaker made absolutely no attempt to explain. If he could perform an amazing illusion like that, you think he could come up with a better way of escaping the prince than spilling some fake blood and knocking some rubies off a sword. On second thought, this movie stinks. Don't even bother.