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monatodras
Reviews
Thunderbird (2001)
The Best Short Film I've Seen This Year
As a teacher and occasional critic, I probably watch three hundred shorts a year. THUNDERBIRD is a knockout-- a fully imagined, beautifully realized fable. Visually the movie is far better than many feature-length Hollywood blockbusters. I don't know how the director managed to grant his low-budget work such impressive production value, but the cinematography, editing, and set design are all first-rate. Each shot was slaved over, and the resulting composition pays tribute to all that time and effort.
Gary Castillo delivers a charming performance, leavening despair with humor.
Eschewing the current fad for music video-style frantic editing, the creators of THUNDERBIRD favor a quiet, stately pace, an elegant cadence. Though shorter than fifteen minutes, the movie has the feel of an epic, and I look forward to watching whatever these boys put together next. You just know they're aiming big.
Groove (2000)
Good soundtrack; lousy movie
I think that pretty much sums it up. Feeble acting, direction, and writing combine to make a dank and useless little stain of a movie. What else is there to say? Does Groove really deserve four lines of criticism? Hm... ah, the protagonist is perhaps the most annoying male lead I've seen. He made me want to become a lesbian.
American Beauty (1999)
Whatever
This is the movie America deserves: overwrought, under thought, and ultimately banal. Beautifully filmed and edited, well scored, and irredeemably smug, with its pseudo-lyrical imagery (rose petals on a naked girl! ah!) and an unbearable performance by Annette Bening. A swamp of cliche.
Carnal Knowledge (1971)
A Great American Movie
It's depressing to see what a low rating Carnal Knowledge gets. Jules Feiffer, the brilliant cartoonist, wrote an extraordinary script for this film. I loved the dialogue so much I found the script on Alibris and read it immediately.
This is a dark movie. Not that it's violent or bloody, but its take on men vs. women relationships is bleak, blunt, and accurate. Jack Nicholson is charismatic and smart in his role, showing the misery at the heart of a cynic.
As others have written, it's not a kids' movie. It's not even a young adults' movie-- I was bored when I first saw it, at 21. It's an "adult movie" in the non-euphemistic sense of that phrase, an adult movie about the mortality of romance.
Le notti di Cabiria (1957)
Masina's Finest Performance...
...and, for me, one of the great acting jobs in the history of film. I know, I know, that sounds like hyperbole, but Masina's face is a miracle here, able to project any emotion with a twitch of the lips, a waggle of the eyebrows. Oh, why am I writing about it? You need to see this movie, and if you've already seen it, you need to see it again.