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Reviews
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Would have been a 9, or 10, if it wasn't for Niven and Quinn
What makes this movie great is the story line.. and of course Gregory Peck. What a match!! But the choice of Niven and Quinn are so malplaced and distracts from the seriousness of the movie. Niven's role is the worst. His british one-liners don't belong in this masterpiece. And if there ever a person who should not play soldier, its Niven. Quinn is a good actor, but the character he plays seems out of place and again distracts from the story because he's such a forceful actor. Every time I watch this movie, and I just did so for the 5th time, I always start watching it with a "Oh damn, gotta sit through all that Niven and over the top Quinn nonsense". But its still one damn good WW2 story.
The Assistant (2019)
Expected more. But happy I didn't get it.
Yes, I expected more. But halfway through I finally accepted that I wasn't gonna get any closer to the real, or rather implied, truth of what is probably going on behind those closed doors behind her desk. It's a movie that, if you hang in there, will suck you into the girl's mind and her experiences and leave as stressed out as she is about what dispecable things are probably happening to other female employees and in the executive's life as a whole as well as how you, oops I mean she, is being treated as a floor mat and how it feels like working, and living, with other people who are 100% bystanders who just puts up with everything and plays the game because otherwise their careers are toast. I didn't for a moment think this couldn't be real.
Oppenheimer (2023)
Disappointed because this movie could have been a 10
Dang I was looking forward to this. Being 62, having a phd in electrical engineering and growing up in europe, I had all the background knowledge needed to know about WW2 and the involvements and moving around of scientist in the 30s and 40s between Germany, England and the US. But this movie made the greatest efforts to include and put in perspective legends like Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fyenman, Fermi and still make a confusing mess of it due to its insonsistent jumping back and forth in time and randomly using black and white and color footings and sometimes Oppenheimer looks the same in two successive time slices. Secondly, geographical locations are never shown in letters on the screen (no doubt deliberately left out by Nolan.) If you're not carefully focused when watching this movie, you'll miss context way too easily, including the names of the scientists Oppenheimer is associating with. The whole nuclear arms race is utterly poorly described as is the context of the much more powerful H-bomb. It's just thrown in your face multiple times in different time slices and the viewer never gets a sense of timely development of all of it. All of this is a result of the movie jumping back and forth in time like 25 times throughout the movie. The movie would have been so much better had it evolved entirely chronologically. It would have been much easier to understand Oppenheimer's complex personality and increasing opposition to develop nuclear weapons and even to drop the first A-bomb over Hiroshima.
Secondly, Oppenheimer's wife's role and their relationship, in view of his adultering, are not well told and frankly I found it irrelevant to the whole movie, yet way too much time was spent on it, including an utterly rediculous scene where Oppenheimer and his communiist girlfriend are chatting at length while sitting in chair completely naked.
Third, a quite a few great actors are wasted in this movie. They never get a chance to shine because their characters never develop. The reason is that the movie tries to cover way too many aspects of Oppenheimer's complex personality, his initial educational and scientific path until ending up in Los Alamos, his political affiliation, his nuclear bom oppositions and associated witch hunt of him post WW2 and finally his adulterings. The movie is EXHAUSTING to watch and the main reason is the irratic jumping back and forth in time.
The only place where the movie shined was in how it portrayed the paranoid, narrow-minded, war mongering and biggoted US politics post WW2, and which resulted in the Korean war, the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war.
Having said all this, a couple of performances save this movie. Most importantly Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer is Oscar worthy. Second must impressive performance was Jason Clarke as Roger Rob. Trust me, you will want to strangle the a-hole when you watch the movie.
Babylon (2022)
Chaotic movie, yikes!
If it wasn't for the stellar performance of Margot Robbie, I would have left this POS movie after an hour or so where it was clear this movie didn't know where it was going. The only character that built up was Robbie's. Brad Pitt was good, as he always is, but the script and director didn't allow him to grow or shine in any way. The story line is utterly chaotic. The decadence scenes try so hard to be shocking but amazingly end up not even being interesting. Pitt's character's downfall due to the ushering in of talkies should get an oscar for worst screenplay and worst directing. Then towards the end of the movie it tries to play tribute to the first few decades of talkies but it's like an after thought and is completely disconnected with the previous 2 1/2 hour of the movie. It just doesn't go anywhere. The movie doesn't have a point. It's just a whole bunch of disconnected sub plots. Very disappointing movie.
Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Boring and no story
I love a good story. I love when rich stuck ups get put In their place. I love satire. I love polarizations. This POS tries to do it all but fails miserably. Mostly because there is no story. Nothing holds the three parts together. Heck, nothing even holds each part together. Everything is so, probably purposely, randomly stitched together. Im not a fan of this style. Though the sea sickness section is outstanding. But the drunken talk section between the captain and the russian was unnecessatily long and borrring. The initial part of introducing us to the young model couple was cringeworthily done though. Damn i wanted to smack both of them. The boat section was the best parr but the portrayal of the decadence of the rich was your run of the mill priviledged behavior. Borrring. And to top it off, the island part was an utterly irratic no-story-to-be-found POS except the shocking, lmao, reversal of the sanitary lady gettng the upper hand and quickly turning into the rich people she usef to serve. And the ending, wtf. Is there gonna be a part two. Terrible story. Even Woody was no good. Dear lord. Who are these people giving 8-10 stsrs? TikTokers?
The Lost City (2022)
Good acting, but poor story and looses momentum
Great chemistry and good funny lines between Bullock and Tanning. But the story drags and takes breaks and there's never really a climax. It just fizzles out at the end with a typical kiss in a typical setting. Pitt's part was the highlight of this movie. But then they decided to kill him off after only some 15 min of screen time. Wtf? Radcliffe's part was ok in the beginning, but then his role became typical narcissistic criminal. The worst part though, for me, was that the island context didn't make sense. That this
(pretty small) island somehow was home to both a thriving community of people living in a lush town with a hotel and then also contained a huge hidden (yeah right) valley, wide open and viewable from the sky, where the "treasure" eventually was found to be located, made absolutely no sense.
No Time to Die (2021)
A bit too emotional, but otherwise good.
Not the best Bond movie ever, but among the better ones. Craig's 2nd best. Only Casino Royale is better.
NTTD has a bunch of highlights and flaws.
Highs
#1
Opening scene is one of the best ever.
#2
The love story is great.
#3
Rami is great as the villain. If only they had let him have more ownership of the villain role, it might have been superb.
Lows
#1
The lady 007 replacement is so malplaced. She's not cool. She's doesn't deliver her lines convincingly. She doesn't have any charisma. I was annoyed every scene she was in.
#2
The villain's role starts out good and the acting by Rami is excellent. But his role, actions and lines become increasingly rediculous and out of context as the movie progresses. (Though not Rami's fault, but the director's!) He never grows into a convincing and strong villain. Unlike Blofeld, who is very convincing in the few scenes we see him.
#3
The movie is a bit too long. They could easily have cut it down to under 2 1/2 hr.
The Big Sick (2017)
Hillariously serious movie
Nothing beats a good story. Throw in stellar acting by every person on this set and humor coming from the left and right and you end up sitting on your couch bopping up and down in laughter, intermixed with tears and time spans over which you probably aint even breathing. Outstanding. Bravo. I want more.
American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story (2017)
Captivating story about a visionary and innovative entrepreneur
After I started watching this documentary I realized that I've had the completely wrong perception of Playboy my whole life, i.e. if I'm to believe everything depicted in this documentary. I've only browsed through Playboy magazine a few times in my life, and I never read any of the articles in it ;-) Though I've always been fascinated by the life of Hugh Hefner, though from a purely sexual perspective. After watching the first 4 episodes of this series though, I'm even more fascinated and impressed by this man as I had no idea he was such a visionary and innovative entrepreneur and that he had such a nag for surrounding himself with talented people. Further, the documentary gives the distinct impression that he was anti-establishment, an equal opportunity employer, had an open door policy, was a great boss, was surprisingly respectful of women (even though at the same time he was obviously exploiting them too), was color blind and, even though indirectly and possibly unintended, he supported for the civil rights of blacks by ignoring the fact that the southern states didn't want to air his Playboy Penthouse TV show because he had a lot of black entertainers on this show. It's almost too good to be true. And as mentioned I have only seen 4 episodes so far, but I kind of doubt the tone is going to sway again Hefner. Lastly, I liked the acting and the occasional switching back to real Hefner footage.