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Reviews
Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
A very poor unnecessary remake .......
AS a kid I read Agatha Christie mysteries and was never really impressed by Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, her most famous 'detectives'. They were always encountering random murders in English countryside and in the most extraordinary of places. They were always quickly solved, using their mysterious deductive prowess. And all this was done without access to records, plodding legwork, fingerprint analysis, laboratory backup or autopsies and always in record time. Often, the murders took place in unusual circumstances and exotic locations. Poirot of course, relied on his little gray cells for his extraordinary deductions which were unfailingly correct.
I saw DEATH ON THE NILE (2022) before seeing MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017) both directed by Kenneth Branagh who also plays Poirot. Both films are extremely narcissistic and self-indulgent, and are a new low in the long series of remakes of Poirot films. It is also a new low for Mr. Branagh who is an intelligent and talented man. His mustache is so ridiculous, so completely fake and so distracting that it deserves a character of its own.
Marry this to the absurdity of the how Poirot manages to solve the murder of a shyster and crooked art dealer played by Johnny Depp traveling on the train. He did this while trapped in a snowdrift in Yugoslavia with no access to a telephone, telegraph, newspapers, books, medical records etc. All he has apparently is the marvelous little Wikipedia embedded in his little gray brain cells. I marvel how Poirot brings together all the passengers on the train at the finale, to provide them the solution to the murder just before they are rescued. I am not a fan of either Agatha Christie or the unctuous little Poirot. But at least the previous depictions by David Suchet and Peter Ustinov I saw in previous iterations of the Orient Express were tolerable and even mildly entertaining. No such luck with this latest effort - this Branagh version is odious and unlikeable.
Red Sparrow (2018)
Complicated plot line with somewhat abrupt transitions....
The major problems with this espionage film is that the actors are too well known to film buffs and the director did not do a good job with scene transitions and editing.. Jennifer Lawrence was the highest paid actress when this film was made and like Jeremy Irons and Charlotte Rampling, she has a certain image in cinema because of previous roles. Unfortunately, for viewers like me, it interferes with depiction of a character.
Jennifer Lawrence rather dispassionate depiction of a Russian agent is actually very good, but my image of an all-American gal gets in the way of enjoying the film. Ditto for Irons and Rampling, two very British actors. It would have been better to cast lesser well-known European actors for greater authenticity. Pairing a star actress with an unknown and uncharismatic unknown male actor was a mistake. Moreover, there is absolutely no tension or chemistry between Dominika and Nate, the two lead characters. The sex scene on the sofa is clumsy and badly done.
The director did not do a very good job of providing smooth transitions between scenes, making the narrative less than ideal. It is an interesting and complex plot that could have been better unfolded. A much tighter script would increase the tension as the film is too long and unnecessarily complicated. It does need a much better editing job, especially at the end where the unexpected ending is not not well done. I was disappointed overall in this film.
Reunion in France (1942)
One of the worst casting choices for a WW2 movie
Joan Crawford was right when she said ""Oh God. If there is an afterlife and I am to be punished for my sins, this is one of the pictures they'll make me see over and over again. John Wayne and I both went down for the count, not just because of a silly script but because we were so mismatched. Get John out of the saddle, and you've got trouble."
American movies made the best of wartime restrictions in movie making in the 1940s but this film's casting and dialogue is inexcusable. Two all-American stars for a movie set in Paris, with Joan Crawford playing a highborn French mademoiselle and John Wayne's cornpone lines about Wilkes Barre and mashed potatoes, are a toxic and laughable brew. The story line is tedious but fairly decent, though it would have been better to cast unknown actors.
It strains credulity to have John Wayne who crashed his bomber in France, and Joan Crawford speaking in perfect American English to French people, the Gestapo and German generals. How does an American flyer in the RAF communicate so fluently with the French and Germans? Very sloppy with low production value.
Oppenheimer (2023)
A Classic or just Hollywood Hype?
The Manhattan Project and the man who headed it to create the atomic bomb that eventually destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a compelling story. The background in OPPENHEIMER is the revolutionary physics of the 20th century and the destructive power of the atom.
Let me say up front that the ending was commendable for exposing the petty perfidy of Lewis Strauss (of the Atomic Energy Commission) and Edward Teller (the rival H-bomb physicist) in dishonoring Oppenheimer as a communist agent in Congressional hearings. As a result, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance and ended his career in disgrace.
I'm not a filmmaker or a nuclear physicist, but just a photographer, so this is my amateur opinion. Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer is excellent and understandably comes across as a morally conflicted person. But many others like Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and Matt Damon were mediocre. Damon was overacting.
First, it's way too long. I was actually getting a bit bored 15 min in and thinking the recent PBS documentary OPPENHEIMER was more engrossing.
Second, the ambient dreamy music is extremely annoying and very distracting. The film would have greater impact if there was just dialogue and much less music.
Third, the editing is jagged and erratic. There are too many jump cuts and cutting between characters that I found disorienting.
Fourth, they edited in many annoying fake explosions and pseudoscientific montages right in the middle of dialogue. I assume it was to make it look more "scientific" and dramatic. (I once read a French critique that said the problem with American films is that there are "too many explosions." Christopher Nolan is British, but is he playing up to an American audience..?)
Fifth, the gratuitous nudity was absurd, awkward and had absolutely no aesthetic or erotic value. In fact it's vulgar.
Finally, it was a mistake NOT to show the devastating bombing of Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki. This was a glaring omission given that the dénouement of Oppenheimer's efforts was the climactic bombing of these targets with a vast human toll. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2020 estimated 210,000 people died as a result of the bombings.
In this age of heightened moral awareness and political correctness, was Nolan afraid of the blowback from American audiences? Was he concerned about opening a discussion about the ethics of bombing the Japanese people a second time? Or that the US would not have used atom bombs against Europeans? Is this a movie about one of the most important scientific events in history or just an incomplete biopic of Oppenheimer? These are questions that leave me dissatisfied.
Regretfully, not a movie I'll see again.
Pale Rider (1985)
An updated version of SHANE.....
Like all of Eastwood's films, the cinematography by Surtees is excellent, the dialogue sparse and the main character laconic. But the the superhuman destruction of 7 tough professional killers and their boss by one man beggars belief. The water trough scene is absurdly irrelevant. Even more incredible is the two main female characters fall instantly and hopelessly in love with him. The scene where he rejects the advances of the teenager who wants to marry him, then throws a hissy fit and tells him she hates him and wishes him dead dead made me wince. The last scene where the 15y old Megan rides into town looking for him and cries out she and everyone else loves him is truly cringeworthy. Surprisingly, Roger Ebert, Molly Haskell etc. Did not think this is a bit of a narcissistic exercise by Eastwood.
English Estate (2022)
A very poor ripoff....
A Valley Girl from LA inherits an old "English" manor house (which is in fact a modern house in CA that is decidedly not 300y old) from a distant uncle who makes prized furniture. She flies over and meets the young man living there - the protege of the uncle - who stymies her efforts to sell the house. The fatuous storyline by Anna Rasmussen is replete with cliches - the proper way to make English tea, fish and chips, Wellies (worn on a sunny day) and cycling to a pub to play darts. Incredibly, she falls in love in a week, changes her mind about selling, stays on in England, goes into the furniture business and marries her protagonist. But only after racing to the railway station (a Hollywood staple from the 1930s) in hot pursuit of the elusive guy. She's one determined chick. This is a poorly disguised ripoff on the failed 2006 Ridley Scott movie A GOOD YEAR set in the Provençe with Russell Crowe and Marion Cotillard, based on a story by - who else - Peter Mayle. Sterling Locke and Juliet Mills at least do a creditable job in their roles. Pity.