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Reviews
Lucky Number Slevin (2006)
Watch the trailer, not the movie
Thee are a couple of good one-liners in this movie--they are in the trailer, so you can save your $8. For the rest, it's one of the most irritatingly stupid films I've ever seen.
The basic problems are: 1) Really, really annoying main character. He gets punched around a good deal in the movie, but he's so snotty that I actually started rooting for the thugs to beat him up after about 20 minutes. The writer probably thought he was adorably brash, and I imagine a few 14-year-old girls will agree, since he does spend a lot of time wearing a towel.
2) Insulting the audience's intelligence. Many plot elements are predictable, but instead of supplying the viewer with just enough information to put things together, the movie provides extra hints, followed by tedious explanations from the characters, topped off with a replay of scenes from earlier in the movie, just in case you had nodded off for a critical scene. This is _The Usual Suspects_ remade for people with the attention span of Beavis and Butthead.
3) Completely depraved. The ending makes no sense from a human perspective; it only works if you think of characters as automata driven by cheesy genre conventions.
It Happened One Night (1934)
Talent wasted on brutal misogyny
So, this woman marries a guy her father doesn't like. He kidnaps her and imprisons her on a boat. She makes a daring escape, swims to shore, pawns her watch to buy some clothes, and slips past her father's goons at the bus station. On the way to New York, her remaining money is stolen and a fellow passenger takes advantage of her situation to subject her to a further barrage of verbal and physical abuse.
And every step of this process is supposed to be FUNNY? This would have made a perfectly good nightmare thriller, but as humor, it's about as appealing as the musical-comedy version of Rosemary's Baby. I guess people had a lot of anger built up during the Depression, and venting it on women seemed like fun.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Ambitious, stylish, unsatisfying
This is a courtroom drama that aims to be modern, sophisticated, and adult.
The film's virtues and vices are summed up in its score, by Duke Ellington, which won a Grammy for best soundtrack album. Ellington was a genius, of course, and even a non-expert can tell there's a lot going on in the music, but it is sometimes quite jarring. Why do these ultra-sophisticated orchestral arrangements accompany scenes of a rundown trailer park or the streets of a small Michigan UP town? Why, oh why, is small-town lawyer Jimmy Stewart a hep-cat jazz pianist when he's not fishing? There seems to be no reason except to lend a cosmopolitan feel to everything.
The story is engaging until it gets bogged down in a muddled attempt to deal with sexual issues at the trial--this must have all seemed very racy in 1959 (there's a tittery discussion of the word 'panties'), and the filmmakers deserve some credit for at least trying to talk about a taboo subject, but the movie ends up stumbling around without much insight.
The discussion of the insanity defense must also have seemed very au courant, though it has now become one of our most hackneyed clichés.
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Classic Love Story
Surely, despite the Boondocks column in which Grandpa gets a rude shcok, it is not a spoiler to say that this movie is about gay cowboys. But more that most movies with gay characters, it is not about being gay. It's a story of lovers divided by social obstacles, and has a great deal in common with other stories about a woman and a man divided by race or class or family antagonism or whatever.
Ang Lee has recovered from the nightmare of _Hulk_ to produce a humane, visually apprealing story. Excellent acting, beautiful scenery, strong dialogue, and a compelling story...unless your taste requires exploding cars, there isn't much more you can ask for from a movie.
I notice that a highly unusual number of IMDb 'users' have given this movie a 1. I think that this cannot be because they think that Lee, Ledger, McMurtry et al. have done an incompetent job at the level of, say, Showgirls or Plan 9 From Outer Space. Most of these votes must be from people venting their spite and anger that someone made a movie about this topic--one wonders how many have even seen it. How pathetic is that?
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (1966)
Amusingly campy, but a great movie?
There is something amusing about the Italian fascination with the wild West, the absurd over-the-top score, the cheesy sound effects (at one point, one of the bandits sounds like he's walking across a marble floor in high heels), even the obsessive closeups of Eli Wallach's dentition. Less amusing is the relentless glorification of brutality and exaltation of greed--I can watch the NFL any time, I don't need a movie for that.
The campy fun of this movie is dampened by the knowledge that it has somehow been mistaken for a classic. All the characters are pretty equally repellent, unless you count Clint's gesture of giving his coat to a dying man 2 hours into the movie...in fact, this seems to be the only point where the movie even considers anything resembling humane values, and it's really not enough.
And the title is mistranslated. In English, "the X," where X is an adjective, doesn't refer to an individual who is X, it refers to a class of people, and is always plural. The movie should have been "Good, Bad, and Ugly" or "The Good One, the Bad One, and the Ugly One."
Herman U.S.A. (2001)
Cute story developed with little imagination
The story of the bride fair is an amusing and engaging one, and it is to the filmmaker's credit that he sets out to portray rural Minnesotans with the same respect ordinarily reserved for Coast-dwellers. It is weird, though, to find an independent movie, the brainchild of a single person, that is as unambitious and cliché-ridden as a committee-brewed Hollywood potboiler.
The portrait of rural people is intended to be affectionate, I think, but these characters don't ring true to me--I have had quite a few meals in small-town diners, but never overheard a debate on the merits of different nineteenth-century English novelists. One might suggest that writer/director Semans has no more experience with rural culture than the Coen brothers, and considerably less satiric verve.
Fight Club (1999)
Ambitious, intriguing, flawed
In an environment where so many movies seem to have been formulated entirely by the marketing department, a movie that even tries to tell a story and express fairly sophisticated ideas is already above average, even if it doesn't do everything right.
'Fight Club' contains some fun social satire, mocking corporate doublespeak and the culture of 'recovery.' It also contains a portrait of a kind of fascism that is quite reminiscent of the followers of Mussolini, with their anti-rationalism and their cult of action and virility. The movie has a sense of humor on occasion, and a central puzzle that keeps the viewer scrambling to put the pieces together.
On the other hand, it also glorifies the culture of violence that it purports to critique. The commentary track on the DVD shows that the filmmakers are blind to this: did they ask themselves whether their scathing attack on "frat boys who take themselves too seriously and shave their heads" was actually presented in such a way as to appeal to said frat boys? Are the endless scenes of men beating each other up necessary to make a point? I quickly started to find them tedious, and began to wonder for whose benefit they were being offered.