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clark789
Reviews
The Last Voyage (1960)
hitchcock, take a lesson
This is without a doubt the most suspenseful movie ever made. Yes, I said it. The most suspenseful film ever. One of the reasons it's so suspenseful is because it's so realistic and unyielding in its adherence to what would probably happen in real life. The husband's trying to rescue his trapped wife, and the crew is sympathetic but too busy and distracted to help. The water keeps rising. The suspense is almost unbearable. Not the best movie ever made, but it will make you jump around nervously and tie you up tighter than a Christmas bow. The site requires ten lines of review, so here I am writing more than needs to be said in order to jump over an absurd hurdle. (See the film.)
Wanted (2008)
Brutal and bully-minded
This movie sums up all that's wrong with modern culture -- it glorifies mindless excessive brutal sadistic violence from one end to the other, it's morally confused, it exudes an air of contempt for everyone, and it has the most childish philosophy of meaning.
Becoming a man -- or even an authentic human being -- in this movie means becoming the best possible killing machine. Growing up means becoming just like your father. The movie tries to justify the cult of assassins, and then gives up and just wallows in a sadistic, voyeuristic, pornographic love of bloodshed for its own sake. The director can't show a body without including a quick closeup of the bloodiest possible wound. The most gratuitous beatings are piled up one on top of another till my wife just got up and walked out (she got her money back). This is the perfect movie for the gore-soaked video game crowd.
There are some terrific John Woo-like ballets of legitimate action and some great stylistic effects. But it's too bad some obvious talent is being wasted in the service of corpse-worship. At the end of the film, the protagonists exults in his killings, and invites the audience to follow his lead. I left in disgust........
King Lear (1983)
magnificent performance
All minor reservations aside, this is a powerful and utterly compelling screen version of Lear. Olivier is near flawless, and at 75 years of age. His involvement in the role is -- as usual -- total. He plays up the fatuousness and foolishness of the old king, who has learned nothing throughout his long reign. His errors in judgement, which even a professional fool can see, and the resulting agony, bring him to madness rather than wisdom. All this Olivier portrays with awe-inspiring finesse, bravado and insight, that musical voice ranging all over the scale, and still possessing a vast dynamic range. Brilliant acting of a piece that haunts and harrows from beginning to end.
The Four Feathers (1939)
Spectacular thinking man's epic
This has got to be the most underrated movie of all time (just as Nashville is the most overrated)! The Four Feathers has it all: almost flawless directing, stunning color cinematography (parts of it look like it was shot last week), Oscar-winning set design, a brilliant and engaging script of a very high intellectual calibre, and plenty of compelling -- at times overwhelming -- action, action action.
How this film came to be virtually forgotten in the public mind is a travesty and a mystery. Only Lawrence of Arabia approaches this one in terms of being a standout in that extremely slim genre: the thinking man's epic. The battle scenes seem extraordinarily fresh and suspenseful, and the scale of the production is enormous -- some of the combat scenes are breathtaking, as are the scenes of dhows being towed up-Nile by thousands of peasants. Everything about this movie is convincing and thoughtful and thought-provoking. A classic among classics, even if no one has heard of it. What a shame....
The Queen (2006)
unspectacular, smart, rewarding
The film is a wise rumination on the pitfalls of leadership -- on how the fickle mob turns, eventually, on all rulers and makes them dance a different step than the one they want to dance. Mirren is perfect as she shows us how the queen, at first, fails to understand the psychology of the masses, and then proceeds through dawning realization and reluctant compliance.
Nicely balanced, the movie is fair to all involved, with the exception of Prince Philip (who is much more jovial and joke-loving than he is portrayed here).
The Queen is full of brilliant vignettes that underline the central theme; for example, in one scene Elizabeth commiserates with a slain stag who seems to foreshadow for her the coming extinction of the monarchy.
All in all, a superior film one may profitably digest for weeks and months afterwards.
Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914)
worth seeing for historical reasons only
If this hadn't been the Tramp's premiere, there'd be no sense in watching it. Very primitive comedy -- the whole film is a 7-minute shtick that consists of Chaplin standing in front of a cameraman who's trying to shoot an auto race. This is repeated for the length of the film.
Like most of Chaplin's first one and two-reelers, the comedy is almost completely obscured by the crudity of the film technique. As in most of the 1914 films, it's sometimes almost impossible to make out what's happening on screen, the technical side of things is so elementary. But it IS the tramps first appearance, so it will always have that claim on our attention.