Reviews

Super Size Me is both entertaining and very thought-provoking - precisely what a good documentary should be. There are some very surprising facts about fast food revealed in this movie. While I would never eat McDonald's, I never suspected just how bad it could be. A real eye-opener.

The result is good entertainment. The effect of a month's worth of McDonalds on Spurlock were quick and dramatic, leading to some real drama about whether he could continue the experiment. Of course we all know that McDonald's isn't healthy, but he goes on to make some chilling points about the way we are feeding and raising our children.

This is really the kind of movie that makes you come out of the theater thinking very hard about your own lifestyle. Really, a must-see.

This little movie is vastly better than it had any real right to be. When sitting down to watch a movie made about fantasy roleplaying by gamers on a shoestring budget, I was ready to cringe. Instead, the whole thing was well-paced, always funny and professional in every way (given the budget constraints). The DVD purchase is highly recommended. I eagerly await the next Dead Gentlemen production.

Rarely do I feel as misanthropic as I do when I get home from a movie as bad as this one, and as popular as this one. Sure, it will fade by morning, but until then my dreams will be haunted be the ludicrous villainy, predictable action and motherhood-and-apple-pie cheese of Spider-Man. While Tobey MacGuire was an excellent choice, the whole movie was just lurching through the motions; there were no surprises, the whole thing felt paper-thin. Many cliches were strung together to lengthen the otherwise trivially simple plot - geek getting his own back against high-school bully, agonizing death scenes, and much puppy-dog romance which everyone else seems to have found adorable. I found it simply tedious.

While the movie had some nice effects, it is, as one might expect, just another entry in a sad list of superhero flicks that are more or less indistinguishable from one another. Let me give you a hint: the good guy wins.

This movie says a lot that really needed to be said. Alas, despite my enthusiasm for the message of the movie - which is very irreligious - I felt a little let down at the end. The script was actually very good, apart from a rather lacklustre ending. The acting, on the other hand, was often mediocre, despite some excellent cameos by Ian Abercrombie as Zeus and Andrew Scudiero and John Capodice as a couple of confused Jehovah's Witnesses. Mostly the film suffered from poor timing - much of it had a stilted feel to it - the blame for which must be laid at the director's feet. Nevertheless there was much to be admired in the movie; the editing was well done, Carlos Leon did a pretty good job in the lead and there were some pretty hilarious moments throughout. I don't think this is going to be a breakout success or a cult hit, but it's thought provoking and makes me look forward to the next film by John Medoza. Any atheists out there should make an effort to get a hold of Blasphemy.

After seeing this movie I wanted to go pick a fight. I wanted to overturn some cars, or light some buildings on fire. I wanted to kick a homeless man in the neck. That's how bad this movie was.

Basically, AI played out as if the script were written as a group project by a first-year film school class. It was like a long, tedious, confusing movie with a shorter, confusing, tedious movie tacked onto the end of it. Incoherent is the best word to describe this movie; it's a bewildering mish-mash of styles and themes that is ultimately without direction or purpose. Not surprisingly, it was not without its fair share of cheesy, manipulative emotional scenes - all the more awkward because the plot was so ridiculous.

Imagine you're over 2 hours into a movie and then the narration starts. "And so, he sat there for a time. And then he kept sitting there..." This is the point you begin trying to jam a soda straw through your eyeball. Unfortunately, the movie does have some promising beginnings; the first half hour or so are quite intriguing, and play out as a reasonable sensible drama. After that, though, the movie leaves the road and goes off into the weeds and you can kiss a few precious hours of your life goodbye. By the time you realize it's time to escape, it's basically too late.

Good performance by Osment; painful performance by Hurt, as usual; and superb work by the Teddy bear, who provided a good minute or so of relief among the other 164-odd minutes.

If you liked "Mission to Mars", this is the movie for you. Otherwise, avoid it - it's the worst of Kubrik and Spielberg, which is a shame given the promise that such a combination ought to have had.

I just sat through the Patriot, to my everlasting regret. The movie was tedious, predictable, shallow and cheaply sentimental. It was the epitome of big-budget Hollywood cheese. It features a pathetically evil Englishman, who does everything short of eating roasted American babies (on screen - it's implied he does it off screen) who provides a convenient excuse for Mel Gibson to commit gratuitous acts of violence, interspersed with scenes of the American flag snapping cheerily in the breeze.

Please listen to me. If you are like me, and you think Dr Strangelove is a better movie than the Matrix, The Seven Samurai is better than Lethal Weapon, or The Big Lebowski is better than Mission Impossible 2, avoid this jingoistic piece of garbage. If the converse is true, then by all means, pop a big bowl o' popcorn and get set for a "roller coaster ride" that will have you "on the edge of your seat."

I'm a fan of the book, of course. Dune was a great book, top-notch science fiction with a few fantasy elements thrown in for good measure. It's rich, intricate, and involving. Everything a good book should be.

This movie, on the other hand, is the epitome of bad cinema. I'm stunned at the amount of praise this movie has received from my fellow reviewers. It's long, dull, and utterly mystifying. An unbelievably large amount of screen time is given to characters thinking explanations of what is going on. Oh god, the whispering voices, expositing on each scene! It's a nightmare, an interminable nightmare. The script is dreadful and lifeless; I cannot think of one single real conversation. Not one! Most scenes involve "profound" phrases from one character, usually involving a context-less piece of jargon, then the rest of the characters in the scene all stare off into space and think about what was said. There are many times in the movie, where literally 5 or 5 scenes will go by without spoken dialog, all the talking occurring as voice-overs.

The actors have no choice, I suppose, but to be wooden and overly dramatic. It's the script I blame. The only reason the Atreides are likeable at all is because the Baron is a pus-oozing, baby-eating monster. In comparison to any real, human character, Kyle MacLachlan's Paul Atreides seems, at best, a melodramatic bore. At worst, a fanatical robot.

The way the movie is shot and edited - especially the battle scenes - somehow removes any excitement from them. Battles are mostly disjointed shots of people falling over in sand. The special effects are very primitive; any time there's interaction between actors and some kind of SFX, you can practically see the blue screen, since the actors will be one color and the background a different tone entirely. The spaceships look rather ridiculous. And what the hell is a "weirding module"?

Some costumes are not bad, but many are ridiculous, like the Harkonnen and Sardaukar body-condom suits. Hah! They look like sewer workers, not the galaxy's most feared shock troops.

All in all, this movie is only fit for a thorough lashing by the robots of MST3K. We found a way to mitigate the boredom; whisper what the characters are *really* thinking. Only by making Paul think "My butt is itchy" could we sit through this disaster.

Well oil me up and call me a Roman, Gladiator was a most enjoyable action movie. The plot was actually non-trivial, Russell Crowe had a wonderful screen presence, and the violent action scenes we well shot and were genuinely exciting.

However, don't mistake this movie for Great Cinema. It isn't. This is a Hollywood-spawned crowd-pleaser, a "Roller coaster of a movie" that will "have you on the edge of your seat." While the plot was non-trivial as I said, it had few surprises and is not particularly interesting, though it did its job of wrapping the action scenes extremely well. The characters also do their jobs; unfortunately, without much flair. I would rate the thinness of the characters as this movie's worst flaw; the bad guy is wholly bad (they even make him a sexual deviant to drive the point home). The good guy is wholly good - plenty of reinforcing the "loves his family" angle to show what a wholesome fellow he is. The other slaves are eloquent, good-natured, stoic, and dignified. If you were sold into slavery, beaten, starved and then told to be hacked into little pieces for the amusement of others, would you be so likeable? Me neither. The wise emperor, the faithful servant, and anyone else you care to name, are cardboard cutouts.

So, don't miss this one at the cinema. A most pleasing way to while away a couple of hours. I just wouldn't expect to see anyone quoting it in a year's time.

I should have known better than to go and see this movie. It's a tale of "betrayal and revenge" so hackneyed and predictable there was laughter in the audience at each "plot twist". I would have walked out except my wife kicked over someone's soda on the way in and we didn't want to do it twice.

Apart from the utter lack of originality and perfectly formulaic plot, the movie fails as an action flick because the actual action sequences are spaced far between lengthy stretches of "character development" that is absolutely mind-numbing in its tedium. The supposed interest comes from the respective relationships between the protagonists (Han, son of Chinese gang leader and Trish, daughter of black gang leader) and their fathers. Neither have a mother (due no doubt to lazy screenwriting) which is a shame because the father characters are utterly bland and uninteresting. Even Delroy Lindo can't do much with his role as Isaak O'Day, the syndicate leader with a heart of gold and a desire to go straight - i.e., an overused stereotype. The interaction between fathers and children takes the form of about a dozen lines of stilted dialog per scene, multiplied by many, many scenes. I'm shuddering right now just reliving it. The horror.

Some of my fellow reviewers have likened this move to the Matrix. Well, I thought the Matrix was a pretty poor film, but it is vastly superior to this unwatchable dog. The use of special effects is very damaging to this movie's impact - a fighting stunt is hardly impressive when it's in stark violation of the laws of physics (compare to, say, Jackie Chan fighting with an aluminum ladder in First Strike - genius, and all his own stunts).

If you think Schwarzenegger is an acting genius, if you think a satisfactory ending to a movie is a fist-fight on top of a moving train or an exploding helicopter, if you are surprised when the shifty-eyed, dog-kicking henchman betrays his master, then this is the film for you. Otherwise, you'll have more fun at an ordinary trip to the dentist than you would shelling out eight bucks for this.

Some might call Ghost Dog slow, but I felt it was perfectly paced given the nature of the character of Ghost Dog. Forest Whitaker did an excellent job portraying a man at peace with his own death - that is, a Samurai. Although on the surface Ghost Dog might be an action movie, every second of the film was suffused with an eerie tranquility that perfectly reflects the personality of the main character. The editing and cinematography are flawless in maintaining this feeling.

Ghost Dog takes many movie cliches and intersperses them with interesting and sometimes subtle symbolism. The contrast is both stark and seamless - somehow the fat mobsters and the scenes of flying birds complement each other perfectly. The cliched characters themselves were also very amusing - there was much laughter in the theater, I even missed several lines of dialog because of that.

All up, I can't recommend Ghost Dog highly enough for the serious moviegoer. Jim Jarmusch can give this one a prominent place in his filmography.

"And the winner for most misleading trailer of 1999 goes to..."

For anyone with a shred of intelligence and dignity this movie is quite painful to watch. I can accurately summarize M2M as several hundred painfully corny emotional scenes interspersed with the occasional contrived space-vehicle action sequence.

The acting was horribly hammy, though in the actors' defense, there was little anyone could do with the cheesy, unnaturally dramatic dialog that populated this film. "If only (dead character) could be here to see this." "He is. He did it for all of us. Here, he would have wanted you to have this."

The special effects were enjoyable in their early appearances, but the plot and script soon overwhelmed the enjoyment this brought. The early sequences of the film were almost exciting (if the schmolzy BBQ at the start didn't send you to sleepy-land) but after that, the awful plot reduces any special effects to the movie-making equivalent of rhinestones glued to a cheap polyester tuxedo.

The insulting lack of subtlety of the movie is also worth noting. Flashbacks of the dead wife, replays of scenes of the film to "remind" us of important clues, "You know and I know there's only one man for this mission" - sheesh. It was also very Americo-centric, the non-American actors had about a minute of screen time, whereas the scene of the star spangled banner flapping in the Martian breeze got two. "World Space Station" my ass.

Also, as one with a degree in Astrophysics it would be appropriate to comment on the scientific plausibility of the film, except that I don't think I really have to at this point, do I. Hooray for Hollywood!

I was forced to watch "Armageddon" because I was on a plane, but alas I paid for this one. Don't make my mistake - steer clear of it unless you're somewhere over the Pacific and can't sleep.

Things go horribly awry. The makers of Payback seemed to be trying for a gritty, suspensful, hard-boiled flick with a few twists in the tail. It flops. Payback is predictable and boooooring. The characters were stereotypical and shallow; for example, the short, oddball loan-sharky guy, the hooker with a heart of gold, the smartass dirty cops. The pace of this movie is dreadfully slow. I basically tossed a coin at the 1/2-hour point whether to continue. The voice-overs were painful; the wannabe Chandlers who wrote this turkey try too hard.

All in all, this movie turned out like you'd expect a Mel Gibson Hollywood noir film to. Explosions for all!

Forget about the Scorcese and Coppola, Woody Allen outshines them with Oedipus Wrecks. Sure, I guess "Life Lessons" would be an excellent short on its own, but next to the shining Allen glory of the Godzilla-like mother yelling, "Sheldon! Sheldon!" any serious film would seem pretentious. And they do.

Coppola's contribution, Life Without Zoe, is also notable for an 8-year old Arabian Elvis impersonator.

I am, or rather was, a lukewarm fan of Bond movies. But these days, they so closely follow the formula that it's impossible to be surprised at any point in the film. TWINE had the most hackneyed plot ever, and the script - egads - the dialogue was painful. Adding insult to injury, Denise Richards was not only implausible as a gorgeous twenty-something nuclear physicist and weapons expert, but her acting was on par with an Idaho potato. You can quote me on this: "She's a female Keanu Reeves!"

Just imagine a plot involving a big explosion, and lots of suspense-less firefights where Bond effortlessly dodges bullets while hanging out in one of the omnipresent fuel dumps that litter the movie. There, you've seen it all.

I think I must be in the very small majority of people that neither loved nor hated this movie. In many ways it was skillfully made and well acted. However, the first half of the movie felt like a wacky romantic comedy with an Italian slant. The second half of the movie, however, is set in (of all places) a Nazi death camp. I happen to believe that if you're going to set a movie in the midst of one of the most terrible parts of history, you want to have something say and to do it very carefully. This movie fails in this, I feel. The message of the movie is very trite: "The human spirit can triumph over any adversity" might be a good summary. Rather than being uplifting, though, I found the implausible caperings of Guido and the credulity of his son to be ghoulish and disturbing in a way I doubt was intended by the filmmakers. I'm afraid I can't go along with the premise that the horror of Auschwitz could be covered up with some clever lies and a silly walk.

However, I must stress that the movie is artfully made and contains some memorable scenes. The mountain of corpses in the mist was almost as creepy as Guido's final conversation with his friend, the good Doktor Lessing.

La Vite e Bella is certainly worth a look; it is, however, neither profound nor historically valuable.

This movie has it all. Poor quality film, bad dubbing, non-existent acting, a laughable plot, mystifying editing, shots randomly framed and torturous music (read muzak). The wisecracking robots of MST3K could hardly make this movie bearable.

On a less cheery note, actor John Reynolds, the legendary Torgos in this movie, unexpectedly recovered his dignity by killing himself after filming this movie. It's a wacky world we live in.

As a geek in Silicon Valley I enjoyed this movie beyond my expectations. The makers of this movie seemed to agree with its protagonists that the evolution of the personal computer is a process that shaped the history of the world - and they're right. If you're not sitting in front of a Windows box or Mac right now, you're in the vast minority. The story of how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates amassed such wealth and power is an interesting one.

Noah Wyle (Jobs) and Anthony Michael Hall (Gates) fit their characters to a T. Gates was portrayed just as I imagined him - smug, opportunistic and sneaky, but hardly villainous. Surprisingly, during this movie I was more sympathetic to Gates than to the brilliant but unstable Jobs who came across as arrogant and petulant.

All in all, this was quite enjoyable for a tele-movie. If you're inclined towards the geeky yourself, and remember the early days of the PC biz, you'll probably find this movie quite educational.

Funny. It has Christopher Walken on the cover, it sure looked like a gangster movie. Check out the cast - it looks like the cast of a gangster movie. But brother, if you want to watch a fun gangster flick, rent Harlem Nights, because this is a character study that would be disturbing if it wasn't so dull. There were several disturbing scenes, but not disturbing in a good way (e.g. Casino: "You made me put your head in advice for that piece of ....?") but disturbing in a bad way, e.g. Chris Penn's character Chez basically raping a teenage prostitute. Nobody needs to see that unless it's part of a really good film. which it ain't. On the plus side: Chris Penn can really sing! Hot damn!

I have to wonder about the point of these here pico-reviews, since obviously they are skewed towards the kind of people who loved the film enough to take the trouble. Well, I didn't like it, and here's why.

The profound matter of "what is reality?", supposedly the film's underlying theme, is rather superficially treated. Don't expect your mind to be blown unless the thought "reality is just the way we interpret electrical signals in our brain" is bizarre and new to you.

Keanu has been given the thumbs up for playing a dazed and confused character so well - I kind of agree, except playing a dazed character is neither interesting or challenging. The lead character in this film is dull as dishwater, Hugo Weaving's Agent definitely steals the show. Fishburn was quite cool, although the way his character was set up I was a bit disappointed he was actually a tall black dude with sunglasses (exactly like you'd expect) and not an old Vietnamese woman with arthritis, which would really surprise you.

However, my main issue is with the film's plot - it has plot holes so large Hannibal could drive his army through them. The future portrayed is mind-numbingly unoriginal, and the rationale for the existence of the Matrix itself is simply laughable; it's just patently ridiculous. (I feel so dirty.) The way in which the characters interact with "reality" and "the Matrix" is necessary to drive the plot, which I might liken to a new volvo; shiny and with computers in it, but still the same old boring car as they made 10 or 20 years ago. This interaction is, alas, stupid and nonsensical. Suspension of disbelief is easy to achieve in a movie with great acting or plot, but here, I tried and failed.

On the up side, the combat sequences were amusing, the effects were OK - quite average for 1999, which is to say, pretty amazing. Weaving and his cohorts were cool, and until you actually find out what is going on, the plot is somewhat intriguing.

This film is a Hollywood-made, Keanu Reeves-starring cyberpunk movie. You get what you expect - as long as you haven't read the other reviews. :)

Antz was a rather neat film, and there's no denying it. Bad language? Communist propaganda? *laugh* People are funny. "Quit yer bitchin'"? Oh no! Antz makes baby Jesus cry!

Antz is a classic Woody Allen film, 'tis true, and I expect he had a bit of a hand in writing Z's script. The neat thing about the film, though, is that all of the characters are sterotypes of their voice actors. Imagine Stallone, Hackman or Walken as ants, and bingo!, that's how they are. Playing their perfect roles, they all do a sterling job, although Walken's character, Colonel Cutter, only has one real sinister 'Walkeny' scene, which is a shame.

Animation is really a liberating medium, and they took good advantage of it. Visually the film is superb; the grand caverns are amazing, and a traditionally difficult piece of animation, water, is done really well. I was impressed. The sound was great, with a fantastic score - and NO, this isn't a Disney film (it was made by Dreamworks SKG), so the ants do not sing, thank the stars.

All up, Dreamworks have made a fine animated comedy. It's not a film for kids - just because it's animated doesn't mean it has to be aimed at small children/christians; it's only a little less sophisticated than an ordinary Woody Allen film (whatever that means). There's no swearing at all, and no ant sex (although there are frequent ant births!), even still the relationships and social commentary are just enough to amuse a thinking person.

Go see Antz. Antz good.