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Reviews
The VelociPastor (2018)
Oscar snub
Why on earth this wasn't in the running for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, or anything else boggles the mind. Seriously a good watch for the sheer weirdness of the film. Definitely a good popcorn movie if you want to MST3K it.
The Dark Tower (2017)
Bad casting, worse story
Look, I like Idris Elba. A lot. I like Matthew McConaughey. Both actors are just wrong here. I'm not complaining about Roland being black. Elba did a great job with what he had. Ditto with McConaughey. They just aren't right for these roles. Elba just seems lost. If he was going to play a character from the book, he should pay Cort, not Roland. I can readily see him fitting into the role of training gunslingers. As for McConaughey, he still comes off as he does in his comedy roles and I can't take him seriously as the man in black. This casting also breaks a large amount of the dynamic between Roland and a key book character, Detta Walker. The rest of the story is a weird mix of the first and I guess fifth or sixth book. This means there's no real exposition of any kind. This really should have started on the first book and ran from there. The whole thing is just confusing and messy.
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
Could have been so, so much better
I really wanted to like this movie. I'm going to try to keep this as spoiler free as possible so bear with me.
First off, anyone that complains about changing the ethnicity of the lead character get over it. Storm Reid is servicable in this role and I can easily see her as Meg. Chris Pine dominates every scene that he's in, as does Gugu Mbatha Raw.
Here's where the problems start....
When I read this book, and it was written in the 1960s so I'll grant that some stuff just wasn't there back then, the Madeline L'engle was at least somewhat subtle with the message she was writing between the lines.
This movie isn't subtle. This movie takes it's message and beats you in the face with it over, and over again.
I get the fact that this is aimed at younger kids, but you really don't need to narrate everything that is happening, or should or will happen. I kept thinking that maybe there was a reason that the adults(not the parents) were phoning in their lines but there really wasn't. The costumes of the three Mrs. characters, when taken out of the previews just look silly. Meg is basically turned into an ersatz audience member where she's just led around being told what to do. I think that with a slightly better script, Ms. Reid would have really been allowed to shine here. She has some potential that isn't really tapped here. I hate to say, but I think that the directors picked her because she looked like she could be the child of the parents more than over her acting ability. That in itself is a real shame, because given the right role, Storm Reid could be fantastic.
Zach Galifianikis is completely wasted here. So is Oprah Winfrey, and Reese Whitherspoon. Mindy Kailing seemed like she was trying to outdo everyone, maybe because she's used to being in tv. I don't know. A lot of the acting just felt forced.
Green screen is used and abused in this film. The first world they go to is amazing, the second interesting, but the whole time I kept thinking that they were going to flash a hitpoint gauge on the screen or prompt me for a quicktime event. There's such a thing as too much CGI and this movie is a poster child for that. Maybe some more work to clean things up would have helped. Maybe not.
Had they stuck to the book more closely I think it would have been a much better film. The early 2000's had a TV movie that I found myself liking more and it was done for a fraction of the budget here.
House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic (2009)
They're all dead
The two women that are featured in this film that are "healthy" have both died. Both died of AIDS related illnesses. Despite what the deniers are telling you, AIDS is real. Just about everything in this film has been reputed in some form or another. The director got a bunch of footage to support a denialist agenda and edited it together to make it seem like there is this some sort of debate in the scientific community. There isn't. Both of the two major researchers that he got interviews with have gone on record saying that their comments were taken out of context, or that the footage was edited in such a fashion to make it seem that they disagreed when in fact the opposite is true. The director wants to claim he's neutral yet he's done denialist films before. Most of the theories he's mentioning have been disproved for years but denialists claim them to support their position. Sure, there was debate twenty years ago, but not now. Medicine evolves over time. This film is just sad, and it's going to get people killed.
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Great directing, good actors, lousy story
THere's been a lot of talk about "Crash" winning best picture and how the academy awarded it out of homophobia. Frankly, I can see why they would award it to that picture over Brokeback Mountain.
Brokeback Mountain is a good film. Brokeback Mountain won Ang Lee the award for best director and he definitely deserved it. However, I found the story itself to be downright depressing. Both Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are great in their respective roles, and so are the actresses that play their wives. I'll go as far as saying that the acting in this is wonderful, especially on the part of Ledger.
However, the short story and the script are both very, very depressing. The film goes from racy to just plain sad through the film, ending with the final shot at the end. Were this a story about a man and a woman or a woman and a woman I would be writing the same thing. If anything this film is saying "homosexuality leads to sorrow" which is especially sad. I know several homosexual couples where this is the exact opposite. I wouldn't really praise this as Hollywood's coming out. It's more like a well dressed gay bash.
Batman & Robin (1997)
Joel Schumacher has killed his career
Joel Schumacher has NEVER been able to direct a reasonable film. You can blame Clooney and Goldsman all you want, but at least he has some chops. It was Joel Schumacher's call to move away from the dark and foreboding presence and replace it with the crap video feel of so many of his other duds have had. He single-handedly destroyed Phantom, Phone Booth, and turned Veronica Guerin from what should have been an Oscar winning role for Kate Blanchett into a complete failure.
His next target is the movie 23. Fortunately this has a very strong script and a good cast. Hopefully the producers will reign in his music-video style and make that film a good watch.
The Mouse and His Child (1977)
Beautiful, sad, amazing. Just don't let the kids see it.
I'm a huge fan of animation, especially ones like this. I remember seeing this when I was around 5 years old and not really remembering the significance of it. Now I finally got to see it again and I'm happy that I did. The animation is a little weak by todays standards definitely, but the message is still there. There's a LOT of symbolism in this film, most of which little kids will not get. The other issue is some of the imagery is bizarre and downright disturbing, even to adults. Its an interesting film that can bring you to tears in a few scenes but at the same time make you smile and think. If you get the chance to see this by all means do. Its great, but I would watch it before I let my kids see it. Some of the scenes like I said are kind of harsh.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
L. Ron Hubbard's Career Kerflush f. Jon Travolta
Travolta's career will never be able to recover from this trash.
Bad book.
Bad film.
Bad casting.
Bad stumping for the film.
I remember seeing Travolta on TV telling everyone how great the movie was going to be. He even said that the people that had commented how terrible the movie was were wrong.
Barry Pepper wouldn't even talk about it the same night.
The movie tour of Europe consisted of the director telling people "It's not as bad as everyone in America says it is"
The movie is terrible. The book was terrible. Travolta's career is forever tainted by this bomb. The real shame is that Barry Pepper may never recover from this, and he has serious potential as an actor.
What is this film like? Imagine a solid gold statue of a retarded person. Imagine Michaelangelo's David carved out of human feces.
All the Scientologists that have come here and said "read the book" are only fooling themselves. The book is amateurish crap that's little more than a series of sci-fi cliché's joined with an illogical storyline. Analog magazine tanked the book, and after trudging through it, I see why.
Elephant (2003)
Proof cannes awards aren't worth sh*t
Hmmm...where to begin.
Lets start with the acting. Is is bad? Yes. Definitely not professional. Gus Van Sant has done much better work. What saddens me is that he was rewarded for this piece of mediocre crap. Basically 1 hour of drab, bland crap. Twenty minutes of shooting.
Is there a plot? No. You already know exactly what you're going to see from the first second: a fictitious rendering of what happened in Columbine, CO. Every single character is a cheap cliché from the tortured killers all the way to the dumb jocks.
It's disgusting that someone would try to make a film about a tragedy like this. What did this hope to accomplish? Now we have a movie that pretty much provides a howto manual for kids to go on killing sprees.
Only in France.
Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004)
Shows how you can make a good movie for little $$
This film definitely couldn't stand on its own without the extensive backstory of the original film. As a sequel, it does somewhat build on the ideas of the original, but not too much. Most of the Verhoven-esque touches are gone. There wan nowhere near the same budget for this film as the first, but they made it work. How did they do it? Simple...they switched from the expansive outdoor bug-blast that was the first film and managed to compress it down into a sci-fi horror film. Does it work? If you are expecting another starship troopers, then no. If you want to see more of the Starship Troopers universe, then it works out well.
The cast is reasonable. Yeah, they were no-names, but who was headlining the original? The cramped quarters add to the suspense of the film nicely. My only real complaint is that it is called "Starship Troopers 2" and not something else. Much like Roughnecks wasn't called "Starship Troopers: The Series" This film takes place sometime after the feature film and during Roughnecks. If it gets a theatrical, they'll probably drop the "2", since this is primarily a side story that doesn't involve any of the characters from the first film.