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frogsy999
Reviews
Paycheck (2003)
not at my table
A heaping ladle of the protagonist & his squeeze being chased around by all the dangerous people shooting guns at them - from trains, cars, motorcycles, and so on. One long, intensely boring and repetitive car chase that makes you question the meaning of your existence (if you were born to watch this, maybe better to shoot yourself).
When is Uma going to stop doing love movies? So you were ugly in high school. Lots of us were. Get over it already. You have a brain. You have no excuse.
I really doubt if the Dick story had long car chases in it. It is like a huge, bland casserole sprinkled only a tiny bit with Dick's tasty ideas. So, if you are addicted to those ideas, you have to swallow the whole greasy mess and be sick for a few days.
Fatherland (1994)
here's a review that's bound to be unpopular, but my commitment is to truth
Thanks to the storytelling capabilities and high education and literacy of the Jews, we are privileged to be repeatedly beaten over the head for decades with the simple message: "the worst things in history happened to us". Sometimes the richness and human depth and insight of a production redeems a film of this type. But there is no subtlety here. If you feel you have, up until now, had too good a life, and you want to be clubbed on the noggin yet again, watch this movie. There is no subtlety here, nor any hope of intelligent or philosophical discourse.
I give it a 4 because the alternative-history settings are somewhat interesting, and rare to find such approaches in the literature.
Sleep Dealer (2008)
brave new world
I can't believe this movie got only a 5.9 on IMDb. If you are someone who thinks, and if you like science fiction, this is a gem. It brings totally new angles to bear on cutting edge social issues; and if you think about what has been presented, you cannot find any flaw in the logic of it, even in the small points. In fact, one leaves the movie fearing that such a world is just around the corner and may be unavoidable. The acting is good and there are no lagging moments; every scene drives the plot. An excellent, deeply satisfying movie worth watching more than once.
Unfortunately I am driven to believe that the reason the rating on IMDb is not higher, is simply that the movie is in Spanish, and north American audiences just are not sharp enough to get it. Perhaps an IMDb rating over 6 is impossible without any car chases or sex crimes.
Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu (2006)
if you're not Japanese, and have lived in Japan, watch this movie
This is the kind of movie I would have liked to have written myself about Japan and the foreigner experience. This is a well-written, original, totally tongue-in-cheek farce. Foreigners living in Japan spend all of their time talking about the strangeness of the experience, but it had yet to be made into good literature. It's hard to be funny (as a comedy or satire) for the full duration of a movie, and also all movies, in general, tend to founder and become clichéd in the second half, after their structural pretexts have been presented. But this one continues to deliver and be trenchantly funny and topical and original all the way through. That is rare for a comic piece. Highly recommended if you can get your hands on it, especially for anyone who has lived as a foreigner in Japan, or any Japanese who have had close relations with foreigners in Japan. People who don't know Japan will not understand the farce, and will not like this movie. People who know Japan will be rolling in the aisles.
Creation (2009)
a chick flick about charles darwin
How to take Charles Darwin's fantastic intellectual journey and turn it into a chick flick. His pivotal and seminal ideas and their radical influence on Western thought and capitalist society are untouched except for two brief scenes, in one of which it is claimed he is "killing God"; pure demagoguery to make the movie emotional. And the rest of the movie buckles to that purpose: it consists entirely of melodramatic and long family scenes with overloud music at which one is beholden to cry. Anyone who actually read "Origin Of Species" would be vividly aware that there was no breach with God in any of Darwin's work; to the contrary, there was an increased awe and respect, and a revolutionary new way of looking at things. A good movie about Darwin could be educational, thoughtful, and deeply inspiring, even in a religious sense - but that would contradict the soap-opera intentions of this flick. This is a flick that is designed to make people wail in contrived sympathy and then feel transformed although unable to understand why; it makes fast use of Darwin's great name only as marketing clout, as one would drop a famous name at a party to create an impression. Sad that the sets and costumes are so good: production values, except for the writing, were obviously high. See it if you want to weep, for the loss of intelligence in American literature.
Saturno contro (2007)
A Soap Opera, but Ozpetek is still good
This one is a disappointing Ozpetek - like a telenovela, everybody having musical-chairs sex with everybody else and having constant confrontational and emotional crises; one of them dies, they try to get over it. It's a well-made soap opera, but it's still a soap opera. The music is still awesome as in any Ozpetek, and the movie is crafted well. But it does not deliver the transfigurational power of Hamam, La Finestra, or Cuore Sacro. The rare theme he developed in Hamam, and brought to maturity in Cuore Sacro, which centered around a charismatic ancient building housing, or anchoring, the true spirit of an exiled ancestor who had been thought to be lost, and the transfiguring power of rediscovering that - is absent. The magic is gone.
It's still worth watching if you're looking for apologetics for the gay lifestyle, or a feel-good ensemble piece that will pacify you, but not seize and inhabit your center.
The fat Turkish lady, Serra Yilmaz, is still totally fascinating, though; what an actress! Whenever she's on the screen nobody takes their eyes off her. She's like the Turkish equivalent of Thelma Ritter: her timing and delivery is impeccable. She would improve any performance, and her presence makes any movie watchable.
Crime + Punishment in Suburbia (2000)
a well-acted movie with heart and something very special
Very watchable. A movie for the disaffected, in league with Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, Ghost World, and the many other high-school nostalgia movies about coming of age and not fitting into society. Yes, the view is from high school, but the issues are deep and mature. It is not brilliant writing but it works, without any too-slow sections. And the acting? Well, Ellen Barkin is in it (she should never have married the billionaire - she should have just kept on acting. Please tell her for me. - arjuna).
For Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky) fans, this is indeed something special. It contains so many reflections of that original masterpiece: from the trivial ("suburbia" sounds like "siberia") to the intriguing: the nihilistic existentialist murder of the old woman next door as an intellectual experiment and the unavoidable subsequent guilt and exile from the city to nowheresville, the way that guilt marks you, the strong undercurrent of faith in God (yes, this movie shows faith in God in a realistic way!) and its liberating power, the isolation and bleakness of siberia/suburbia, and, perhaps the most Dostoyevsky-like of them all, dream sequences brilliant and absolutely engaging in their unexpected improvisations.