Change Your Image
klima
Reviews
The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986)
caveman fantasy seen through 20th century eyes
This film was shot in a remote part of a beautiful park in Southern British Columbia, Canada. That's the good part.
The premiss of the film is that at some point Neanderthals and Cro- magnons must have encountered each other and interbred. There is now DNA evidence that this happened approx 100,000 years ago, likely in several places, perhaps including Southern Europe and Southern Turkey.
Unfortunately the tale that the film tells is about a young woman (the Cro-Magnon) who plays a headstrong righteous person seeking emancipation at the hands of tyrants and an oppressive culture. The development is painfully slow, people communicate through the kind of hand signals and repeated utterances, as you might see in Mexico while watching stupid tourists. Darryl Hanna is easy to look at but boring otherwise. Her repertoire consists of cliché movements and faces.
In short, it's a combination of bad entertainment and an awful documentary.
300 (2006)
plodding comic book
I was able to enjoy this film by imagining that I was watching an animated comic book. It's a kind of entertainment that makes no demands of us: it just encourages us to sit back and uncritically eat up the eye-candy.
And there were many annoying problems in the film that needed to be ignored. Visually, we are treated in every scene to badly overmanipulated images: gritty foregrounds, backlit beautiful people, wheat fields, fantastic skies, and so on. In some scenes, eyes were glowing. The closeups slide in on lips, eyes, helmet details, and other comic-book fetish objects. If you've grown up with art that consists of sunset calendars, cheap posters, video games, and comic books then you won't mind it.
Accompanying these eye-candy cliché visuals were a bad mix of guitar riffs, celtic folk songs and electronica.
The action scenes were the kind of stop-motion that was used so effectively in Matrix. But here they are used to give the look of a jerky video game. It's far over-stylised and cliché for my taste. Over and over we see thrust, then a splash of blood, another thrust, another splash of blood, slice, a spash of blood. Like, who cares? This film makes Batman movies were subtle and complicated.
King Leonidis is a big silly man with a Scottish accent who gives big silly speeches to a group of contestants from a body-building show. There is an oddly homoerotic aspect to these men in tight underwear and capes. The villain (Xerxes) has a similar look except he's got painted eyebrows, soft trembling lips and wants men to kneel before him.
This is a film of cheap sentiment, cliché visuals, a badly mixed-up soundtrack, and an ambiguous position on homosexuality.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Bored of the rings
Seeing the movie was a visual treat, all right. But. Tolkien started an entire genre and a fantasy industry: not only books, but also games, comic books, cartoons, video games, and movies. This industry has become so much part of our culture that words like "Hobbit" and "Orc" are common in our language. And you know what? I've had enough already.
The plot moved every-so-slowly forward. The characters (looking entirely predictable) made their predictable speeches. There was very little interesting about any of them, and very little life in any of them, with the possible exception of Frodo. The Hobbits, short with round faces, gawped in wide-eyed amazement. Gandalf squinted his eyes below his pointy wizard hat. Queen Cate Blanchett, the most dreary caricature of an actress filled the screen for far too long.
Scary Movie (2000)
Jiggle porn and visual puns
Scary Movie is great if you enjoy seeing a movie that contains references to other movies. Oh yes, and if you find it amusing to hear the characters talk about oral sex. Otherwise, this is a banal and tired teen jiggle porn movie that consists of sophomoric self-references and second rate smut. It's not even pornographic. Scary Movie is a kind of a Meatballs or Porky's revenge in a slasher context. It has no plot, no characters, nothing visual, and no music.
Cotton Mary (1999)
Sensitive look at complexity of British colonialism
A sensitive look at the difficulties faced by a woman in colonial India, during the period when nationalism was starting to set in. The story opens with an India-born Englishwoman who goes into labour, is taken to the hospital, and gives birth to a sickly child. When it turns out that her milk doesn't come in, a nurse with mixed British/Indian heritage takes pity on her, finds a wet nurse, moves into her house, and begins to manipulate the situation to her own advantage.
As the story progresses, the husband's infidelity and disassociation is presented, as is the blindness of the wife, and the racist superiority of the expatriate British community. The Englishwoman's preteen daughter turns out to be the voice of reason who opens the woman's eyes to the situation as it is.
This is a slow-paced visually interesting story that focuses a great deal of attention on nurturing and nursing, and the complexity of a materially richer culture clashing and feeding on a materially poorer one.