Change Your Image
Kevin-142
Reviews
La balance (1982)
Excellent Thriller With Gallic Style
I can't believe that this movie has no comments and hardly any votes. It's a tough 1982 thriller set in Paris' Algerian sector. A specialist Police Unit pressurise a pimp and his hooker into becoming informants to enable them to bring down a local gangster. Although directed by an American (spot the U.S. film posters at the Police Station), the film is full of French style. The clothes, the food, the shades... The pacing is fast, the plot is good and the characters are fascinating. Baye is incredibly sexy as the 'tart with a heart' and Leotard looks suitably seedy as the pimp in love with her. It's a strange relationship, letting your lover have sex with strangers in order to put money in the joint account! I also like the way that the cops, who arrest and harass hookers, are shown to be willing to use their services on lonely nights. Pace, excitement, black humour and romance. What more can one ask from a thriller? 8/10
Von Richthofen and Brown (1971)
Wasted Opportunity
What a wasted opportunity this film is. The flying sequences are pretty good and the aeroplanes look authentic but everything else is dreadful. Lousy acting by all concerned coupled with a script that should make the writer embarrassed. These are real people that the film is about but the story is virtually complete fiction. And what was with all those awful cod-German accents (Zis time ve vill show ze Britisch, etc.). Accents like that belong in a comedy rather than a drama. Had Corman learned nothing from The Blue Max? Finally the soulless music score tries its best to kill off any sense of excitement whatsoever. That final piece sounded like the backing to a vampire being staked rather than an airman's death. I'll give it 6 out of 10 purely because of the flying sequences, otherwise it would have scored a 4.
Stuart Little (1999)
Surely the cutest movie ever made!
This is one of those movies where you only really appreciate how difficult it must have been to make after it's finished and your reflecting on it. While watching the movie you just can't help but believe it's all real, it looks that good!
The behaviour of the cats all appear to reflect the dialog they're supposed to be saying. Is this a case of excellent training of real cats or CGI? Or both? It's getting to the stage where you just can't tell anymore!
As for Stuart himself, the animation is simply outstanding. His expressions - matched to a faultless vocal performance by Fox - generate genuine emotion and really make the film a magical experience.
Mission: Impossible II (2000)
Where was the spectacle?
Considering this movie cost over a hundred million bucks, where did the money go? Cruise's salary one must presume. In a blockbuster like this I like to see some spectacle - the helicopter case/explosion in M:I-1, 747's exploding like in Die Hard 2. But this movie seemed to have the production values of your average TV movie. We didn't even see the plane crash at the beginning, just a cut away to the opening titles.
A decent motor bike chase just isn't enough to save this movie from being moribund. Woo showed a lot more Hollywood style energy in Broken Arrow and Face/Off.
Watch those again and forget M:I-2.