Change Your Image
tankers
Reviews
The Shape of Things (2003)
A second-rate essay thrown up on a screen.
Rather than going to the effort of hiring actors, set designers, grips, best boys and caterers, why couldn't hot air auteurs like Bute simply get someone to film him on videotape, sitting in a chair and pontificating? What people admire about Bute -- the supposed cruel honesty -- I find mere contrariness and easy irony. Perhaps his next effort will be a kid's flick in which the little girl's bunny rabbit (surprise spoiler!) is put through a meat grinder in the last reel.
What's worse than his insipid insights is his failure to entertain. The movie is so stagebound that you cannot forget for a moment the fact that Bute is just a couple of feet offscreen manipulating the players. It would've been more honest and entertaining to have watched him than the action captured by the camera.
Year of the Dragon (1985)
Horrendous
High-minded, big-budget garbage. A ludicrous story of a gutsy, out-gunned crusader taking on an evil gang and the establishment that does business with it.
Rourke (hopelessly miscast...apparently the union ran out of actors better suited to playing 50-year-olds) somehow is directed to huff and puff in order to make us believe that he's re-fighting the Viet Nam war in the streets of Chinatown. (I guess that this makes Year of the Dragon a more pretentious iteration of the theme of the Rambo movies.) Throw in a couple exotic Oriental types, John Lone, galaxies removed from the greatness of his starring role in The Last Emperor, and a non-acting actress who is tossed in merely to provide eye candy and to establish Rourke's characters bona fides as a non-racist, since he demonstrates that he is willing to sleep with some of them.
A snooze-worthy debacle. See it only to satisfy your morbid curiosity.