Change Your Image
kpw-5
Reviews
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
A brilliantly made film about a truly disgusting character
The James Stewart character is self-centred, obsessed with money, rude, short tempered, and regretfully drawn into his father's business, a housing and loan company favouring working class people by giving them mortgages they can manage, only because he feels obliged to do what his dead father wanted him to do (instead of racing off to Europe to play the university game). He does not manage things well, and is financially wounded (accidentally) by the villain (played by Lionel Barrymore: the dynamics are a lot like You Can't Take it With You, in that sense.)
Failing at everything, he goes to jump off a bridge, is saved from suicide by an angel (not at all clear why heaven wd want to save this dreadful person), continues insanely, declares he wishes he'd never been born, is then thrust into a sort of non-identity existence by the angelic intervenor, finally does his one good deed and is returned to humanity (gratefully, God knows why). Capra! Awful, though very well made. Gets huge approval from Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb. I just don't get it. Patrick Watson, Toronto.
The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)
Confused, contrived, messy and totally improbable
This film is so confused, contrived, messy and improbable, that there is no evidence of anyone's having thought their way through the contradictions that riddle any time-travel plot. Credibility having been abandoned,there is really nothing left to hold the viewer. It is not possible to believe that these characters believe any of this junk, and the viewer's mind simply wanders off. A mess. If one compares it with equally fantastic premises in films that actually work, the exercise is rewarding. I would suggest one from more than sixty years ago, entitle A Matter of Life and Death (also released as Stairway to Heaven) by The Archers, and starring David Niven and Kim Hunter: a great sense of play, and a careful adherence to the premises.
The Gingerbread Man (1998)
A monstrous piece of trash
How a director of Altman's experience could ever expect us to want to spend time with, or to care about what happens to, a lead character who is neurotic, a whiner, a jerk with no redeeming qualities -- that is the central puzzle about this profoundly confused piece of work. A monstrous piece of trash. In addition to this crippling flaw, the plot line requires serious concentration to follow. The setup that the Branagh character walks into is so obviously a setup from the start that we are inclined to wonder whether the writer and director have totally lost respect for their audience. This latter issue is at the core of the film: it represents directorial self-indulgence with profound contempt for the taste, values, and intelligence of the viewer. Very unusual for Mr. Altman.
Patrick Watson
Life as a House (2001)
This a classic example of a well-made bad movie.
LIFE AS A HOUSE is a classic example of a very well-made bad movie: well photographed, largely well-acted, sequentially clear. But, in the end, absurd, pointless, and a dreadful waste of time with a character who is not simply vacuous, but almost totally without interest.
And it contains one prodigious goof.
Kevin Kline is followed throughout the film for a period of several months. In every shot he has a two-day growth of beard. We never see him shave. The beard never changes in length, but seems to be slightly whiter at the end of the film than at the beginning. Is this deliberate??? They can not not have noticed!
In summary: This is one of those movies that is annoyingly spoiled by a small and seemingly inconsequential flaw. It is like that thing in so many movies where people go out of a house and don't shut the door behind them (real people normally close the door.) Distracting and irritating.
Eragon (2006)
A fourth-rate computer game kind of show, with unrelieved vacuity and dreadful acting.
I give it 2 instead of 1, since some of the special effects are well done. Not many, though. How we are supposed to believe this dragon can fly when she never moves her wings (well, 3 times, in the whole film) . . . is beyond tolerance.
Jeremy Irons, who is a fine actor, gives you the feeling he is looking at his watch hoping it will all be over soon. The young male lead redefines the meaning of the word 'wimp.' I am embarrassed to admit I watched it through: I guess it was in order to see if there would be any relief from the gross incompetence; there was not.
Patrick Watson Toronto
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2005)
Deeply flawed by simple errors
Leonard is always engaging, and one stays with this messy and overlong piece of amateurism. But it generates rage by the frequency with which performers appear without being identified.
Others have commented upon the frequent and irritating inclusion of the luminous graphic frame that anticipates the arrival of Bono and the lads, and they are dead right: it is just one of the many deeply irritating aspects of this potentially delightful piece. EG:
Many of the performances just go on and on and on and on -- including, in one case, through the introduction of every member of the band. And a very long series of introductions it is. This is a very thick, incompetent director, who needed to be taken in hand at the editing bench and reminded that the primary responsibility is to the audience.
One would have thought that Mel Gibson would have had something to say about tidying it up. Alas.
Patrick Watson Toronto
Proof (2005)
A powerfully engaging and moving film, marred by a dull intrusive score, and the intrusion of two puzzling directorial lapses.
This film orbits around the epicenter of a gravitationally powerful Gwyneth Paltrow, a fine actor, who like Laurence Olivier on the stage pulls off the near miraculous achievement of making us care and believe, and yet all the while we are aware that there is a brilliant actor at work.
Jake Guyllenhaal is different: it is almost as though director John Madden had found him in a math lecture room at Northwestern while he was doing location research: a real young prof who would fit the story perfectly just by being himself: one does not have the sense of watching an actor at work.
The issues entailed professional integrity and filial love are handled in a way that makes us feel they are our issues, and we come away knowing that we have touched something of value.
The music is unnecessary, lumpen, intrusively ugly. When, in the final scene the two protagonists finally begin the conversation that has eluded them from the beginning, and is the triumphant outcome of their extraordinarily painful struggles, the camera dollies back and the titles roll, and in comes that awful music, just when we could use a couple of reassuring minutes, a closure that would stay open so to speak. We yearn to hear them in this amazing dialog right to the end of titles and even beyond, into black for a few minutes. There could even have been, in black, a kind of verbal climax that wd give us a true ending. But no: smothering, dumb, useless music. I can only hope it was imposed upon director Madden (a capable guy, Captain Corelli, Shakespeare in Love, several fine episodes of the British police TV series about Inspector Morse) imposed by the money, I guess, and not his own choice.
But he has to take the blame for allowing a couple of slightly distracting conventions to show up in this otherwise very clean and instructing movie, one of those in which you forget about the director because he is seldom being clever (except for the time shifts, which we are not prepared for, and take a little getting used to at first).
One of these distractions is the Leaving Doors Open syndrome. It happens a lot. Remember Chocolat Where people keep coming in out of the wintry outdoors, and leave the chocolate shop door open behind them? People don't do that in our culture, even in France. Guyllenhaal does it here, in summer on a porch: opens a screen door, comes out onto the porch, leaves the door open behind him. People don't do that. Well, film directors do, a lot, and it is weird.
The second dumb thing is running after cars, in which a beloved is leaving. Paltrow has announced she's leaving, gets in the limo for the airport with her sister, says a definitive Good Byy. Guyllenhaal is devastated, calls after her. And then runs after the car! This intelligent guy. And the director keeps the car slow enough (despite the fact that it's a limo hurrying to the airport) that the actor can run for half a block still close to the car. People don't do this. It is dumb. And we wonder why a fine director would indulge it. Perhaps he took a day off and let the first AD direct this scene.
There. That's my rant. And it is that rantish only because this is a fine, fine film that should not have to have suffered from even minor stupidities.
Patrick Watson
The Barefoot Contessa (1954)
A very loose and improbable screenplay, from which Bogart is too often absent
It is hard to understand how Mankiewicz got any more work as a director after this messy, incomprehensible bundle of improbabilities and disconnects.
Performances on the whole are good. Ava Gardner is gorgeous, but Bogart seems restless and uneasy, and one suspects he knew what an absurd picture was shaping up, and wished he were elsewhere. After working on so many masterpieces under the direction of John Huston, he must have wondered what in the world he was doing here, and much of the time one feels this.
Nonetheless, this great actor is almost always a huge presence on the screen, and, vacant as the picture is, there are a few scenes between him and Gardner, and between him and Edmond O'Brien, that are fairly strong.
But don't go out of your way to see it; you'll be disappointed.
Patrick Watson