Change Your Image
jjucovy
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Jack Goes Boating (2010)
Another American Indie failure
I am not sure why American "small" films are so alike and so poor and so boring. Like so many indie films made in this country, if a film directed by a major actor qualifies as such, this one manages to combine boring "losers" caught in a mesh of unbelievable situations. The so-called character development is telegraphed from the first moment, the so-called plot twists equally so. There is not a single moment of interesting dialogue to sustain any interest. Compare this film with the excellence of Mademoiselle Chambon or Un Couer en Hiver and one gets a full sense of what is missing from "sensitive" American movies. While the acting is perfectly acceptable, there wasn't any especial range required of the actors either. Hoffman's quiet, inarticulate blandness was a stand-in for any real sense of character.
Little Children (2006)
Everything that is wrong with American film drama
Another one of those overstated films, with exaggerated characters, no real sense of who these people are and what motivates them, a narration that has that oh so annoying tone of wry understatement, a feel good ending that comes out of no where. The acting was fine, but for what purpose. This is the sort of film that doesn't trouble the imagination because it bears no semblance of reality, its characters are all hateful, and it hits you on the head with its manipulativeness. This one reminded me of such equivalent disasters as the Royal Tanenbaums and the Squid and The Whale. Why do so many American authors and film directors seem to think that fiction requires extremes of behavior? Having just seen the classic, Forbidden Games, a couple of days ago, watching this piece of fluff was even more difficult, since the comparison was so stark and fresh.
Gangs of New York (2002)
Stylized and silly
Scorcese continues to have style, as other recent films of his have demonstrated. But like with those films, he really doesn't seem to have much of a reason to be making movies anymore, except to display his flair with the camera. The story here is utterly banal and Scorcese's decision to base the plot on real historical events only makes the movie more annoying. Scorcese also cannot himself from falling victim to a film code that is apparently inviolable now-- his chief protagonist just happens to be an Irish-American devoid of any racial prejudice, going so far as to befriend African-Americans. That this fictional protagonist should display such far-sighted tolerance in a film that has the New York City anti-Black draft riots as a backdrop only adds to the irritating silliness of the plot. Scorcese would be a little more interesting if he had dared to feature a racist as the hero (and if he had done a fade-out of the WTC in the silly scene that appears in the movie). The film drags, but there are some fun moments.