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Reviews
The Last Descent (2016)
Partly Really Good, Partly Unfortunate
Most of the movie was good and compelling, but some things were irritatingly vague and faux-artsy.
The identity and purpose of that old man/middle-aged man/kid who showed up here and there, for example, never were made clear---and if they were, it was done poorly. A viewer should not have to do the movie-watching version of straining at stool due to severe constipation to figure out what's going on.
The whole end was disappointing, not because of the message, which was very good, but because of the seeming effort to avoid anything that looked too "religious" in the depiction of the recently dead protagonist. And, as an aside, if a person who dies in a cave enters immortality the way we saw there, the Afterlife is very oddly organized.
Ishtar (1987)
A Truly Funny Movie
This will be short, given that so much already has been written here about Ishtar.
Those who don't like it---and given the crummy rating, it must be a pretty decent majority---never will like it, and those who do like it will continue to like it. I not only like it, I nearly died laughing the first time I saw it and have continued to find it at least as amusing through more than 30 years and many viewings.
Perhaps having had some peripheral involvement with song-writing and pop music performance back in the proverbial day helps me to see a depth of humor someone else who likes the movie might not catch, but that's not anything definitively determinant, just helpful.
Rather than go on and on about the well done script, excellent acting, superb casting (for example, Charles Grodin is a hoot as the CIA agent, and of course Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty are perfect for their roles), and other attributes, it is enough to say that the crowning glory of the whole production is those songs, which are like the original string of Japanese horror movies of the 1950s: so bad that they were perversely and immensely entertaining---so long as the viewer understood what was going on.
This movie is a real treasure, vastly underappreciated though it may be.
Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express (2010)
Absolutely Superb in Every Respect but One
I understand completely the strong feelings Christie aficionados have when departures are made from the stories or novels when constructing visual versions. I feel the same way about Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes 54 short stories and four novelettes, all of which I have read many times and passionately enjoy them.
Fortunately, I very much like the "Agatha Christie Poirot" TV series quite independent of the stories and novels---because I have read exactly one of them, "One, Two Buckle My Shoe," and only so that I could have some idea of how Poirot was portrayed by Christie and then adapted for television.
Frankly, I didn't much care for the book. It was OK, but I was not inspired to read more, so I won't. I'm not much of a mystery fan to begin with, the seeming Sherlock Holmes exception not so much because of the mystery but because of the great skill of the writing and story-telling. As for Poirot, I like the TV adaptations for themselves, which means that unfaithfulness to the originals bothers me not at all.
As a nod to those who are offended by departures from what Christie wrote, I note this as the one thing that is not absolutely superb about this particular TV adaptation.
Those who have been distressed by the emphasis on Poirot's Catholic faith must remember that this is not the only time in the TV versions that his spiritual foundation has come up; furthermore, and with all due respect to those little gray cells, he clearly organizes his entire view of existence with his Catholic faith at the bottom. And as is perfectly clear throughout the TV episodes, Poirot knows exactly what he believes in every area, great and small, and acts accordingly.
There certainly was a grand internal struggle here, which distressed Poirot so deeply that he sheds tears at the end, but he did the best he could---which is all anyone can do. It is fortunate that Poirot's best is at least as good as most others' best, and very often better.
Ms Ohlsson emphatically asserted to Poirot that they were carrying out the Biblical injunction that those without sin cast the first stone---because they all were without sin. Such hubris. The devout Christian understands that no one is without sin, no one, which was precisely the point of the declaration on the subject made by Jesus to the Pharisees in the temple.
All of the "Agatha Christie Poirot" episodes are at least good, many superb, some breathtaking. This is one of the latter. And again, I fully understand the discomfiture of those who carry a torch for Ms Christie's original work. Some of us just don't care about that. I am one of those. This mystery is great on its own merits.
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes: The Last Vampyre (1993)
A Blotch on an Otherwise Brilliant Series
As a long-standing fan of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories and four novelettes--I have read them all many times--I found nearly all of the video adaptations starring Jeremy Brett to be outstanding, with just a few only very good and a couple of them below that. If DVDs wore out the way VHS tapes did, mine would be ready for the fire that consumed the poor Stockton's worldly possessions at the hands of the villagers following his death in "The Last Vampyre." What a sorry production--not from any technical standpoint, given that everything else was its usual superb self--but because of the meat-axe butchering of a wonderful story, hacked and bludgeoned beyond recognition to fill two hours.
When someone is as good as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was at this particular thing--no one ever was better at detective fiction, and many would say he was unequaled--it is an unforgivable offense to go beyond the reasonable necessities of converting a written work to a visual work. This exceeded those bounds by orders of magnitude and is especially offensive in dropping Holmes into supernatural ridiculousness that anyone familiar with him knows to be completely alien to the character.
They should have changed the characters slightly, added a few pratfalls and some trick bubblegum, and called the movie "Pee-Wee's Great-Grandfather's Big Adventure."
Timeline (2003)
Calling it "Bridge on the River Kwai" would have made as much sense
Most of Michael Crichton's novels--they are truly masterful--have been superbly represented in the movies made from them. This one is the exception. It has been noted elsewhere that the battle scenes are pretty good, and I agree, but for the most part, the movie and the book are only tentatively related.
It is hard to know even where to begin, there is so much to criticize, but let's have a go at a few things. One might ask why two female characters in the book suddenly became men in the movie when their femaleness is necessary to the plot, and there is no discernible reason for the change. The acting, to be charitable, is very uneven, and the script is hardly a work of art--nor even particularly workmanlike. And the movie could not have been shot on film, because the lighting and daylight images have all the charm of stark and harshly lit soap operas, especially closeups.
If you are attending the Daughters of the Serbian Revolution convention, and they are selling this DVD for 50 cents in their bargain bin, buy it if you want to favor someone you don't like with a gift. Otherwise, don't bother.
Pride and Prejudice (2003)
As a Good Use of Time, You'd Be Better Off Plunging the Toilet
Oh, please. If someone is going to use the name of one of the truly great English-language novels ever written as the title of his/her/its movie, it had better be (1) pretty darned good and (2) decently faithful to the intent of the novel. Otherwise, call it something else. In this case, using "Pride and Prejudice" is a gross insult to the intelligence of even modestly intelligent movie-goers and to the creative genius of Jane Austen.
Compare this to an outstanding, perhaps the greatest, visual rendering of the novel: The 1995 Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth BBC television series made into a seamless 300-minute movie. It is superb in every way, a nearly flawless production with fewer identified errors of various sorts in it than are normally reported in a movie of more typical length. Then there is this sad spectacle. It would not be so offensive had it been named something like "Twits and Tittering" or "Plodding Petulance"--anything but Austen's own title. This is something like making a mediocre-or-worse movie about break-dancing and calling it The Holy Bible.
One cannot say too little about this movie: It is embarrassingly poor. That is quite little enough to say.