Reviews

The opening shots in this film were beautiful, and I was happy to recognize the New England coastline even before it was identified. I hoped I would get a look into an interesting American community. My pleasurable anticipation grew when I saw how attractive-looking the actors were.

I first realized something was wrong in the first casino scene, when I heard the English accent of the Charlie character. Why couldn't she fall in love with an American from New Bedford? What does England have to do with the Portuguese-American community? Or reprobate gamblers?

Nothing! it's really just an improbable, contrived, tinny romance. The Portuguese characters are only cardboard. This movie strains to drag in interest from afar, instead of developing the life that's throbbing all around. (I'm glad I never saw the Seattle version. That sounded even worse!)

Isn't the life and career of the woman interesting enough? How did she transform herself from the sewing factory worker to torch singer every day? What about the fishermen, and the handsome fisher-boy? I found myself wishing for a different movie.

I have nothing against the English. I love them and their accents! But something is wrong when you have nothing to do but admire Jason Isaacs' face as much as you want to. (I'm sure I never got that good a look at Sean Connery.)

I have to admit, the cinematography was beautiful, and I loved the singing. I would love to learn more about 'faro'.

This miniature movie's tempo builds, stops and starts in that comical, jerky way characteristic of Fellini. It's one of the things I like.

The interviews are a riot!

It appears to be a parable of the last few hundred years of European history.

If you appreciate the beauty of the natural world, you should not miss this movie. Obviously, some people don't. They should stay away.

I hate 'cute', and I hate it when film-makers make little human dramas from their animal footage, and I hate new-age music. This movie had all of those faults, and maybe some others. But I was so carried away by the beauty of it that I was weeping with emotion by the third shot. Tears were running down my face for twenty minutes at least.

OK, I admit I'm not a typical film viewer.

The credits said they used no special effects in filming the birds. That's hard to believe; if it's true, it's really amazing. It looks as if you're flying in the skein with the geese, close enough to touch, in many long takes. You can see every feather. You can really see how a bird flies.

In spite of the little contrived dramas, I felt that the movie was essentially honest. The things that move us in it are real, they're shown in a real way, and they're happening all around us, if only we could see.

The whole thing is the movements of animals, their lovely forms, the sounds of wings, and the air filled with thrilling calls. The landscapes are spectacular, and beautifully photographed. Moving through them with a bird's-eye view is like dream fulfillment.

For a movie about a courtesan, this show was amazingly unsexy. The lead actress is very pretty, in a wispy blond sort of way, but has no trace of the kind of charisma you would expect she would need to be the leading courtesan of her day, one who could talk her way out of the Inquisition. For most of the film, there's no conflict to speak of - every sinister turn of the plot has its teeth pulled. Prostitution is made to look like a tourist magazine version of a luxury honeymoon. The Inquisition are a bunch of stuffed scarecrows.

The lavish costumes and sets convey hardly any feeling of Renaissance Venice. The actors all have a modern, American air in their look and manner. Only Rufous Sewell looks the least bit Italian. The French king looks and acts ridiculously British. We are trotted through turn after turn of the plot with no effort to convince us that any of it is real.

Each scene seems borrowed from a different costume drama, and all the characters' motivations, too. The final insult was the heresy trial. The weakest sibling yet of all movie heresy trials! I suppose this is a feminist parable, but I think any credit you gain by proposing that a prostitute is a heroine of liberty, you lose by being as santimonious about it as the priests that retire in defeat at the end.

I guess I like movies with more grit.

I was not aware of the political significance of this movie when I saw it, but I was struck by the eerie, quiet way the story built up scene by scene, with hardly any dialog, and hardly any camera movement. This quietness allows you to reflect on what the meaning might be as it sifts gradually into your consciousness, leading to sudden realizations that come as quite a shock.

I found I had a strong empathy for the little girl who is trying to make sense of a story she has been told (in the movie) that has a powerful grip on her heart and imagination, and has an apparent connection with bigger, drastic events the real world, in a way she tries to understand.

I think it is really rather profound and affecting, even if you know nothing of Spanish history.

This is the most saccharine romance I ever sat through. The perfect film for an idle housewife in kerchief, housedress, and ostrich-trimmed high-heeled mules to watch in the afternoon, lying on the couch eating bonbons. In fact, bonbons play a prominent role in the movie.

The only reason I was able to watch to the end, is that I finally was able to gaze at Keanu Reeves' dreamy face in almost every scene. In most of his films, he moves too fast to get a good look. The only rapid action in this show is Giancarlo Giannini waving his hands with Latin emotionality - more Italian than Mexican, really.

The dialog is as stiff as wood. Unfortunately, no bodices are ripped - the hero is disgracefully perfect-mannered and mild. The aristocratic warm-blooded old-world family cliche is as old as the hills. What does it matter if they are Irish or Italian or Mexican? This is a fairy story.

I knew before the titles finished running that this would not be the movie I hoped for. The glowing grapes looked like the paragon of all food ads in Women's Day Magazine. I didn't see his name listed, but the art director surely was Thomas Kinkade, who paints the million dollar canvases of Irish cottages snuggled in fuchsias. This film was literally seen through rose-colored glasses. If you like dreamy pink and blue sky, this film is for you! (The bonbons looked really good, too!)

Someone lent me this movie to show to some little girls whose mother is a music teacher. I was expecting something witty and engaging, off-the-wall, but suitable for children. I was surprised to feel over and over that there was something really wrong and off-color about the whole thing.

It seemed to me that the delightfully child-like Dr.Seuss qualities - lots of rhymes and word-play, funny, funny pictures, and huge comic exaggerations, are replaced with lot of adult sexual overtones, and the sort of gender-role messages that were the worst thing about the 50's. When you translate from drawings to human actors, sometimes some unintended baggage gets added that is invisible at the time, but looks glaring later.

I'm not merely complaining about datedness. The evil artist is an effete homosexual. The plumber is clearly good because he has a deep voice and is manly, like Beaver's Dad. The mother, the only female in a cast of hundreds, is a zombie and sexual slave, who cares nothing for her son. (Too often in the 50's and 60's, females are invisible except as objects of men's needs. Their efforts in other directions are represented as ugly, ridiculous, or sinister. That's clearly the case here.) The necessary resolution is for the boys (no girls among the 500 children) to destroy the piano with baseball bats instead of playing the song.

Anxiety about manliness seems to pervade the film, with sex and violence lurking right beneath the surface. The confrontation between Terwilliger and the plumber can't decide whether it's a whimsical dance, or a bar-room bare-fisted face-off. The mother's breasts in her topless gown are incredibly cow-like. The male musician dancers have sweaty torsos like a revue at the Copa. The sinister bearded pair suggested evil Hasidic Fagans.

Don't get me wrong. I think off-the-wall, subversive stuff can be great in a kids' show. I love Soupy Sales, and Pee-Wee Herman. Although the sets are cool, and Hans Conried is charismatically amusing, I thought this show was really profoundly conservative - with the message that art subverts manliness, and males must act violent to preserve their self-respect.

This movie is not good in spite of being propaganda. It is a propaganda movie, and bad. Every episode is aimed at delivering a message, not for drama. The characters are all cameos - you feel that famous actors were brought in for the weight their prestige lends to the message, rather than for the talent they bring to the production. The events are utterly unbelievable, the storytelling choppy and episodic.

It was a bold stroke to put the Germans on an epic trek through Canada, but every time you start to empathize with the adventurers, the movie slaps your hand, delivers a sermon, and yanks you into the next cameo scene where another point is to be made. A story with great potential for adventure and tragic downfall (of the arrogant lieutenant) is wasted. The movie is too artful to be campy.

There are some nice landscape shots, suggesting epic sweep. Glynnis Johns, Leslie Howard, and Raymond Massey leap out at you when they appear.

It would not have been hard to cast the Nazis in an unfavorable light by showing something true and important about them, but the bad behavior the movie portrays - kicking an Eskimo, spouting propaganda at inopportune times, smashing a Picasso painting improbably kept in a teepee, acting the ungrateful guest - seem contrived and trivial compared with the real reasons for going to war. The trouble with propaganda is that it wants to tell lies.

'Excalibur' is an intelligent interpretation of the Arthurian legend. I appreciate the attempt to convey some of the symbolic depth and psycho-sexual aspects of the story. But the Camelot saga is also poetry. It should be evocative and beautiful.

Despite the use of generous, even spectacular sets and fine outdoor locations, and lavish, probably authentic-looking armour, the movie has a trashy, dated look. All the actresses looked tarty, the actors floppy and goofy. There was no overall look to the costumes and sets, unless it is eighties club schlock. For example, Camelot castle seems to be made of aluminum blocks, and Guinevere's wedding veil of mylar tinsel. The set for the final confrontation of Merlin and Morgana reminded me of a lava lamp.

The casting is disappointing. Lancelot wasn't too bad, but only Merlin had anything like the appropriate gravity. I know the story of how Arthur came to be king is an 'Ugly Duckling' story, but the failure to deliver an adult Arthur so devoid of kingly dignity is artistic negligence!

I was interested to notice that John Boorman has portrayed the collapse of a utopian society at least twice - here, and in 'Zardoz'.

This movie was supposedly taken from a Michael Chrichton book, but it looked to me like a scene-for-scene remake of the Seven Samurai. Even the wooden stockade and tall peaked houses were the same. The fighters were not so sophisticated, but miraculously there were more of them left at the end, since there were thirteen instead of seven to start with.

For a Nordic/Celtic fantasy battle film, it was more convincing than many - not that it made any sense. It had great looking warriors, costumes, and sets, and some nice touches - learning Norse, the boy messenger. I could watch more films shot in British Columbia! I kept getting irritated by the cramped framing, but the general momentum of the picture was fine, with a nice shot of the boat in the fjord at the end.

Antonio Banderas doesn't much resemble an Arab, but he is cute as a button, so I'm not complaining, just so no-one tries to persuade me this was a *good* movie.

This movie is billed as a great romance. It is, if you approve of wife-beating. And even more, if you think of Ireland as a cute place, and the IRA as just a little joke, and drunkenness and violence as quaint local color.

I have to admit that John Wayne has great personal charm, but why couldn't he ever appear in a movie that wasn't totally phony, plastic, and bombastic? (Never mind politically regressive.)

Weren't there enough real Irish people in California to cast this movie with people who can actually do an Irish accent?

If this same plot were made into a movie today, it would probably be gritty, dark, and bitter.

'Fort Saganne' is a disappointing waste of a striking setting and an evidently interesting story and character. There's no dramatic tension. The actors all seem to be asleep. The director doesn't seem to know what story he is telling. Full of stereotype situations and unconvincing scenes. How could a movie full of exotic action scenes be so boring?

Terence Stamp can carry off anything, but this is still a shallow one-dimensional movie. It's nice to look at - so are the actors - and if you're into drag queens, I guess you might like it a lot, but the plot and characters are as thin as cardboard. It's one of those politically correct movies that warps everything else in order to make a 'minority lifestyle' seem warm and cuddly. It gets a lot of mileage out of bitchy dialogue, which is amusing in this sanitized form, I guess.

Ninety percent of the action is parading around in gaudy costumes in incongruous situations. The dramatic content is a token appendage - they hardly try to get you to take it seriously.

I have to admit that this is a 'feelgood' comedy, a category I usually avoid, but it was very nicely done. Almost every scene had some kind of neat bit of acting or a nice twist. Gross cliches were mostly avoided. In fact, in quite a few places I was rather surprised. Although the movie has a slightly unrealistic, almost fairy tale feel about it, the drama all hangs on whether the main character can find a genuine way to interact with the other characters. This is a rare movie example of a kind of heroism that is actually relevant to most people's every day lives.

This TV production is based on a play by Terence Rattigan, about Lawrence's life in the RAF after he turned his back on his life as a famous war hero. I have read the play - it seemed to me to convey Lawrence's complex and attractive character vividly.

I think Ian McKellan would be an excellent actor to portray Lawrence - I would very much like to see this film if I could find it on Video.

This film is the best attempt I have seen to make a true-to-life, culturally unbiased depiction of an early encounter between the white man and American Indian, in Eastern North America. In keeping with this aim, it unflinchingly depicts several incidents of what seem to European eyes to be shocking cruelty and 'barbarism' of the Indian.

Although the Indians appear from the point of view of the visiting priest, the white man's beliefs, appearance and customs are also shown from a startling, alien perspective.

All the same, it is a story of a heroic quest, that leaves you with a sense of the awesomeness of human courage and the mystery of the commonality of human nature across gigantic cultural boundaries. And, yes, the photography and the aboriginal landscapes are breathtakingly beautiful.

Movie depiction of Eastern Indians, and of this era in North American history, are so rare, that I have to give it extra credit for illuminating a culturally formative time.

Grant and Hepburn are as charismatic as you could want in this movie, and there were lots of jokes. I found myself getting irritated after a bit, though - two or more characters shouting at each other and not listening is the center of almost every scene. And after that, I found myself getting annoyed that no effort was being made to develop any of the many relationships or incidents of the story - the leopard, the aunt, the dinosaur, the fiancee, or even the mayor. They were all like scenes racing by a train window. It was really like one long ad-lib duet on a single theme.

Everyone else seems to love this movie, so I guess I have to be the one to 'dis' it. I really don't understand why it is so popular. I really enjoy a good adventure, but I like it to be more than a quarter inch deep.

It was so continuously noisy that I had to turn the volume down. The music was bombastic and grating. People die like flies. The protagonists gaily wreak havoc with no apologies. There is no psychology or character. The hero is brave - a cheap virtue since he's obviously invulnerable. The cultural icons dragged in to lend an exotic tone were given the most superficial treatment - everything was a throwaway, but none of it was stylish, witty or funny. We are talking about a cartoon - except lots of cartoons are more sophisticated and better developed.

I can see that the idea is to evoke a golden age of imperialism where we are excused from the duty to care about history, culture and religion, or to feel bad about archaeological piracy, mass murder, ethnic stereotypes, shoddy scholarship, etc. etc. and can just have some good clean fun. But with all this freedom, what is the fun? Knocking over piles of blocks like a three-year-old and punching the bad guy in the nose.

The movie is a pastiche - almost every scene is borrowed. The cultural vein of nostalgia that is being mined is old -obsolete - adventure fiction. If we could see most of this fiction now we would probably find it childish and dated - we know more about the world now. The trick is to make us forget that so we can enjoy our nostalgia.

Do people really need permission to regress this badly?

I had expected something extraordinary from an actor I had thought was one of the greatest Shakespearean performers, but I just could not see it. I did not think it was bad but I remained unmoved. Also, there were substantial cuts to the text.

Maybe sensibilities change. Maybe I am too jaded by modern lavish production values to appreciate this primitive-looking one. The pace seemed jerky, some of the acting mannered, including Olivier's, and the mannerisms seemed dated and not all of a consistent style. The miracle I hope for is that the play in its fullness could be intelligibly pitched to a modern sensibility - or else that the production style could elucidate an earlier sensibility. In this version, the flowery Renaissance sensibility that pervades the lovely poignant scene of the death of Ophelia seems replaced by half-hearted Freudianism and a dated concept of medieval style where austerity and floridness jarringly conflict.

I would be grateful if one production could make clear to me why Hamlet feigns madness. I guess I am still looking for the definitive Hamlet.

This beautifully made romance has an odd appeal. I only ranked it a seven, because it has some flaws - the complicated story is is not rendered clearly in all its details (I could not figure out what was going on with the Reverend Haslitt, for example) and the style tends towards a gothic/romantic manneredness in places.

All the same, I recommend it for anyone who can tolerate the genre. I love these two actors, Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. They and the supporting cast, including the bit parts, fill out their roles with life, warmth and poignancy. There are numerous evocative touches in the details of the production - the mysterious moving church in the opening scene, for example, the music, the costumes, and the sets. The story is unique, original, character-based, and there are some unexpected flashes of insight into human nature.

Kenneth Branaugh and Emma Thompson had to carry most of the weight in this one. They're delightful - very good, in fact, and Denzel Washington holds up his end well, but the overall production is clumsy and ponderous. The interesting acting bits stick out like sore thumbs with no connection to each other. The music is obtrusive and unappealing, there is way too much slow motion for no particular reason, a lot of meaningless boring 'business', and the color is murky (this was video tape, though).

This is a nice little bit of fluff. It has more Gogol in it than you might expect. It's not really tha-a-at good, but I gave it a 7 because it's *completely* harmless, and really, Danny Kaye is so lively and charming, and so few actors have that quality of total innocence. He looks quite handsome in the officer's fancy uniform (until he starts making with the funny faces). A good one for kids.

This is the story of the fatal hubris of an artist who vainly tries to maintain neutrality in the face of encroaching Nazism, in order to pursue his brilliant career as a hypnotist and magician. The suspense grows unbearable as the perverse evil intrudes into every aspect of life.

There are wonderful examples of the way the Hitler's propaganda machine co-opts everything in sight, and how people underestimate, over and over again, the lengths he will go to. The character of Bruno Bettelheim, with a clear, humane view of life, appears as a foil to the protagonist who is seduced by his 'art'. I really liked the irony of the man who predicts the future, coming up against his own unrolling fate, as becomes clear in the last, most sinister scene.

This is my favorite of the three Istvan Szabo movies about protagonists trying to control their fate in the web of intrigue of a totalitarian state. It is exciting and provocative.

No one can deny American movie makers, and Spielberg is a king, can produce the best technical effects in movies. This movie also has some wonderfully personable stars. (Tom Hanks is great, and I liked the sergeant, too.) And the human scenes are tastefully understated - no brash posturing here. This is Hollywood art. But under the beautiful technical veneer, is there anything more here than an incoherent collection of cliches?

Is consistent thought or feeling or fundamental honesty too much to ask? What is the point of making another movie about World War II after all this time? What does this movie say that so many others have missed, if anything? War is a serious subject - "serious" is a drastic understatement, if you happen to be in one - one that a new generation knows nothing about. And it doesn't look as if the world has made any progress in avoiding them, since the one depicted here.

I think it's dishonest to play the patriotic sentimentality card with such intensity while claiming credit for condemning war. To show blood and guts is not necessarily to say that war is wrong - only that it is unpleasant, or possibly, exciting. Is shooting prisoners really wrong? Or only what you gotta do, and the mark of a real man? Is war really senseless? Or is it a patriotic duty, well worth giving your life for?

I have never been in a war, but I promise you war is a lot worse than what you will see here.