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Revolver (2005)
1/10
Unimaginable twaddle
14 February 2011
Unfortunately all of the points have been covered in every way, and my contribution is - like British Rail in its latter days - late and slow, but the vituperative lucidity of the comments here on IMDb deserves its own swift review.

It is unusual to come across so many cogently hateful thoughts; almost rare, to come across this number of people making intelligent points about an almost deliberate paucity of filmic imagination with the maximum of wit. Never before in the history of criticism has so much pre-meditated celluloid sh*te been met with such a barrage of skanky old veg. Whichever film you thought deserved second place after the sheer outrageous genius of "Plan B", and especially if that film was "Surf Nazis Must Die", now is the time to reconsider.

The concept of "Ray Liotta feasting on the scenery in his Y-Fronts" deserves its own place in the film history books, and if it were possible to gratuitously insert the phrase "the smell of ideological napalm in the morning" without upsetting the well-respected moderators, I would do so.
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Mother Song (1937)
2/10
A truly dreadful film
22 February 2010
The Wikipedia entry for Carmine Gallone says that he was considered one of Italian cinema's top early directors, directing over 120 films in his fifty year career between 1913 and 1963.

Judging by this sole example I have seen of his work (made in 1938), he hadn't made much progress since 1913. Static camera work, flabby dialogue, plot cooked up on the back of a postage stamp, editing done by a hibernating sloth, indifferent lighting, opera stars who couldn't act their way out of a paper bag in front of a camera, let alone on stage; I could go on and on ripping this paper-thin film to shreds, but it gets depressing after a very short while.

Gigli and Cebotari may have been great singers, but they get upstaged by the furniture. There are plenty of operatic excerpts, but they are even more boringly acted and shot than the main film.

There is, however, one great moment when Gigli sings the Mozart duet "La ci darem il mano" with his young son aged about 5; the roles are reversed with Gigli taking the soprano role, wearing a headscarf and singing falsetto. This apparently unscripted 30 seconds of film is genuinely hilarious (for opera buffs at least) but the rest is really appalling.

2 out of 10.
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3/10
Under-rated? No, just mediocre.
8 August 2009
I saw this film not long after its original release, and it stuck in the back of my mind for some 35 years. Thanks to the internet I discovered it recently, but I was dreadfully disappointed. I had remembered it as an extremely funny film, but what made me laugh as a 12-year old made me cringe as an adult.

The film only begins to attempt humour half-way through, but script and direction are extremely flabby and the cast sleep-walk their way through this limp rag of a movie.

There are plenty of funny films from the '60s, but I'm afraid this is not one of them.
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10/10
Wonderful.
26 July 2009
I've been a Robert Donat fan for many years but only recently saw this wonderful film for the first time. The internerd cunningly delivered the French dubbed version to my computer, which was less of a challenge than I had feared. All the voice-over artists are unusually -and deservedly - credited, and they obviously had a load of fun doing it. Robert Donat is even more debonair and insouciant in French, if that's possible.

An absolute sense of fun pervades the script, which kept me grinning all the way through. Reading through the full credits here on IMDb I can now see the reason for the fine cinematography - the amazing Jack Cardiff was behind the lens. I'll have to watch it again to see if I can spot Terry-Thomas. The riddle about the thistle in the heather makes even less sense in French, by the way, and no, I don't get it either.
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6/10
Beautiful
21 July 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Despite its length, the mish-mash of accents and the alarming number of handkerchiefs needed to watch this film, 'The Inn of the Sixth Happiness' overflows with love of life and humanity. Bergman is luminous in her role, and the intense emotion she pours into every scene lifts this otherwise average film onto a higher plane.

Robert Donat was terminally ill with a brain tumour when he made this film, and (much to his professional embarrassment) had to have his lines on cue-cards dotted around the set for his last few shots. Ingrid Bergman's tears are desperately real, for Donat's final words are the farewell of a dying man where art and life fold together into a brief unity. One of the most poignant moments in cinema.
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5/10
Disappointingly conventional
23 April 2009
Compared to the pared-down, bleak economy of Two-Lane Blacktop or The Shooting, this film comes over as a flabby, conventional affair. There is not nearly enough attraction between the two romantic leads; the plot wanders and the direction frequently lags; even Warren Oates is not at his quirky best here. The characters are not observed, they are merely filmed.

By way of compensation, some of the cinematography is actually quite interesting. The director of photography was Guiseppe Rotunno who worked on many of Fellini's films, and in many of the exterior shots he and Hellman achieve a singular chiaroscuro effect; the foreground characters are often in deep shadow while an intense, golden morning or evening light illuminates a stunning backdrop of cliffs or mountains.

Many of the interior shots are also carefully lit, again with strong use of shadow; but the main characters just aren't interesting enough to engage the attention. The sudden intensity of Sam Peckinpah's brief appearance points up the shortcomings of the rest of the film; the way Jenny Agutter focuses on him makes you realise how little chemistry there is between her and Fabio Testi.

Hard to recommend, especially with the truly dismal quality of the available prints.
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8/10
Read more
27 March 2009
It is important to realise that Eisenstein was a committed Marxist film maker who held some very specific and particular theories about what film could achieve, and how.

It is simply idle to compare Alexander Nevsky negatively with anything from a similar period in the US; this film comes from the oldest film school in the world, from another continent, from an entirely different approach to cinema.

To appreciate this film a little more, try finding out about Pudovkin's and Kuleshov's theories of montage, for example, or read the Wikipedia entry on Marxist Film Theory. If you're feeling really bold, you might even investigate the triadic forms of Hegelian dialectic.

It follows that if you watch this film without some understanding of Eisenstein's ideas and ideals, you probably won't get it. In Alexander Nevsky the main characters aren't playing themselves, they are meant to be distillations of their nation's character. Nevsky and his generals are deliberately shown larger-than-life, because they represent stylised, heroic aspects of the entire Russian people.

The acting isn't wooden, it's meant to be slightly mannered. It represents a completely different school from the more naturalistic, narrative style which Hollywood was rapidly adopting. Eisenstein's films are especially designed *not* to be realistic. If anything seems somewhat "obvious", whether lighting or language or a pose struck by an actor, it's meant to be that way. Eisenstein was one of the early proponents of film as an art form, not just as entertainment.

If the editing sometimes seems to consist of a clash of images, well, that's the idea. Shots are meant to contrast with each other, Eisenstein's films contain and embody elements of a political/philosophical argument, namely Marxist dialectic.

So sit back, shout hurrah for Russia and her folk-hero defenders, boo at the cowardly nobles and the Teuton invaders, and enjoy the difference.
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Cypher (2002)
4/10
Great if you've never seen a sci-fi movie before
21 June 2008
Somewhere inside this movie is a half-hour episode from The Twilight Zone trying to get out. Whereas Cube was taut, well-made, claustrophobic and mind-engaging, I'm afraid Cypher is a bloated, tedious rehash of several well-worn themes which just don't add up to much, especially if you have seen almost any other half-way decent sci-fi film before.

Cypher manages to drag all the way through its relatively short 95 minutes right to the incompetent ending. None of the characters spark off each other, and for a film made in 2002 the technology is truly cheesy. It is difficult to connect this tired and uninspired movie with the director of Cube. It's not a bad movie, but it is most definitely not a good one.

When you've watched the grass grow and paint dry and are bored of your stick insects then by all means watch this film, but the other activities will probably prove more stimulating.
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10/10
A object lesson in film-making
1 June 2008
Warning: Spoilers
So many good words have been written about this brilliant film that it seems unlikely that any more are necessary. However, there are a couple of points which occurred to me as I watched it again yesterday.

Firstly, the language. This is a truly multi-lingual film, and one of its chief joys for me is the wild multiplicity of thoroughly mangled foreign accents and the earthy, slang-filled dialogue. It's great to hear Italians and Germans and Americans talking in French, Frenchmen and Russians in English, Englishmen in Spanish. Eet iz as if I wurz to write ze 'ole of zis revieew lyik zis. And when the two French guys (Mario and Jo) are together, their speech is peppered with really down-to-earth slang and obscenities.

The subtitles of my copy (although good) didn't always manage to convey the exact sense of the rough talk. One instance was blatantly censored; as Jo and Mario are leaving the depot with the laden trucks, O'Brien shouts a very male "Merde!" at them for luck: the subtitles' "Break a leg!" misses the muck a little. O'Brien tries again, with a more human "Good luck, boys", but Jo's response, hidden in the roar of the accelerating truck is, "Et un Coca-Cola dans le c*n!" For non-French speakers, men don't have one.

The second point, neatly enough, follows on from that. Although movies can be "about" almost anything you want, Wages Of Fear presents us with an intense, highly-charged subtext of what it means to be a man and how men relate to each other. There is a whole load of unacknowledged sexuality just below the surface of this film - hey, Mario even gets to kiss Luigi - and I feel that any accusations of misogyny levelled at this movie need to be interpreted in a slightly wider context.

I first saw Wages of Fear at an after-school film club over thirty years ago, where we were lucky enough to be introduced to a number of movie masterpieces by a teacher who simply adored good film-making. He would talk coherently and intelligently beforehand about each film for a good ten minutes (without notes) and this was one of his all-time favourites. He was right, of course. Thanks, Tony. 10/10
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Se7en (1995)
1/10
Words cannot describe the unmitigated nastiness
30 April 2008
I know there are many reasons to like or dislike any movie, and that most people who rate a movie 1 or 0 simply don't 'get it'. I feel a great sympathy for those who cannot find anything to praise in a film. Se7en is not an especially bad movie; it creates and maintains a particular atmosphere most of the way through; it is deliberately grungy, nasty, and brutal. The extreme lack of lighting serves a purpose - Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now seems bathed in floodlights by comparison - and the film achieves its ends efficiently enough.

I am relatively OK with gore and violence (either on-screen or implied.) Many plots have holes, many movies get very clunky at the end, many actors share features with cardboard, and Se7en is no exception. If this film were in any way critical of the human capacity for the sheer unbridled brutality which it portrays, I might forgive it. If it had any redeeming qualities whatever, I like to think I would be prepared to try to acknowledge them, however grudgingly. Many dark movies manage to evince a knowing smile at some point, or succeed through technical brilliance or gripping acting.

But I came out of this film wanting to throw myself under the nearest bus. It was as if everyone involved with the making of this film had spat (I think I spelled that correctly) in my seat. My experience of this film exactly matched that of another reviewer: it raped my soul. What worries me most is that there are quite so many positive reviews for this movie. I think this would have been one of H.P. Lovecraft's favourites, since the guiding hand behind it is most obviously that of Cthulu.
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