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gusand
Reviews
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Total let down
Let me first say that I did really enjoy the first film. Its a great matinée adventure and Johnny Depps performance is (as always) awesome.
Given the success of its predecessor, a sequel was probably a safe bet. But this is really one of the lamest excuses for a sequel I've seen in quite a while. It really feels as if the production crew tried to put as little effort into it as possible. The uninspiring story feels like something a teenager could put together in 20 minutes, the jokes aren't half as good in the first film, dumbed down and childish. The whole movie feels as if it has been "disneyfied" compared to the first film, and I do mean that in a bad way.
And I still haven't mentioned the fact that it is painfully overlong clocking in at 2 hours and 30 minutes. Maybe if the director could be persuaded into editing this and the next film into something less that 2 hours we might have something that is at least watchable. As it stands now, I certainly wont wast my time on the last film.
Loose Change: Second Edition (2005)
Lies, lies and more lies.
This movie made me very very angry, and not because of what it implies. But because so many people are actually swallowing this hogwash hook line and sinker. How can anyone possibly believe this crap when i would take you 15 minutes and an internet connection to find out that more or less every single claim is simply not true.
The people behind this mess simply don't have a clue. They seem to have made no actual research of their own. They have just put together a number of other peoples "research" without even the slightest attempt to even check if the facts are correct. If they had, they would have known that Flight 77 had Rolls Royce engines and the wreckage shown in the film DOES match the engines of Flight 77. Or maybe they do know and are just lying about it.
And this is certainly not the only time the film makes false claims about evidence presented on screen. They also fail to mention that not a single structural engineer supports the idea that there were bombs in the buildings.
Other things such as the gold under the WTC and the faked phonecalls are just ridiculous and makes me wonder what they were smoking while making this film.
And as usual with these stupid conspiracy theories, they fail to present any coherent theory of what really happened, they simply line up a number of lies and imagined anomalies in the official version and claim that this is evidence the government did it.
But I wont go into detail about all the errors and lies in this film, other websites that have done that already. The stupid message aside, even the technical aspects are not that impressive, the graphics are pretty ugly, the music dull and even the speaker voice gets pretty annoying after a while.
Zhi xi (2005)
Could have been so much better.
I saw this during the Gotenburg Film Festival. Apparently horror films are not really permitted in mainland China so Bingjian Zhang tries to get around this by making a horror film which is not really a horror film at all, rather a Freudian fantasy where you really don't know where the dreams end and reality begins. Sounds weird? Well, you'll get it :)
Visually it's a very beautiful film with stunning images although it's a little too obvious the underwater scenes are shot in a pool. But none the less it's filled with impressive scenes with lots of water, rain and dramatically lit fog.
Unfortunately the film fails miserably being a horror film (or as the poster claimed "Chinas first psycho movie"). It is, by western standards, not even remotely scary. The few scenes that actually gave me any real "gut feeling" were to few and too far apart to create any real atmosphere in the film. And without that you cant really care for the characters and their feelings either.
Maybe I should blame the Chinese censorship instead of the director. But no matter what the cause this films weakest point is that it's way too tame. If it would have had that paranoid feeling like for example "the Machinist" had and succeeded in giving the audience a real taste of the characters fears and paranoia it would have been an instant 9 but without that key ingredient I can't give it more than 6/10.