Reviews

I read some of these comments and I'm totally floored. The acting was horrid and forced, mostly due to the director creating scenes and instructing his actors to respond in completely unrealistic ways, such as when the parents of the "lost" children simply stand around staring at the assembled children until, after an eternity, one parent recognizes their kid. Um, yeah, right. Nobody would shout out a name, right? None of the kids recognize their own freaking parents. And this movie is full of moments like this.

The Japanese come off almost like clownish figures, the Chinese as mere backdrops in their own country. The set pieces are ridiculous and none of this is even remotely close to actual history. I don't care if this is told from "the boy's perspective." That's not an excuse for lazy, unfocused, and completely unrealistic work. OK, so it's not supposed to be realism. It's "surrealism." Well, it fails on that level too as it doesn't produce a sense of wonder or fascination, but rather a sense of endless irritation and boredom as scenes go on and on, or simply cut to another unrelated scene. If Spielberg was shooting for some kind of "war as seen from a kid's point of view" he really blew it, unless we're to believe children are on a permanent happy acid trip.

Scored like a soaring Disney kid's flick and sanitized to the point of being an insult, this movie is worthless. Another example of Spielberg's total inability to cover serious subjects with anything other than the mentality of a semi-autistic child. Jim's transformations are completely phony, based on nothing more than the script. Annoying English boy turns into bad-acting English boy.

Don't let the high ratings fool you. You have been warned.

Using obvious soundstages, totally unconvincing actors, and dialogue straight out of the "follow your dreams" playbook of tired clichés, the director manages to reduce the fascinating life of one of Spain's greatest painters to absolute tedium. Perhaps its fitting that it is titled "Goya in Bordeaux" as it certainly captures the flavor of the artist's dull last years spent there, essentially dying. For myself, I'm waiting for someone to make "Goya in Madrid" which will, hopefully, depict the dizzying rise of a provincial Aragonese teenager to the coveted title of Court Painter.

Maybe the guy who did that Mozart film will have a go at it.

RstJ

I still give it an 8 because it's a fun movie. When more "new star wars" movies are made (and you know they will be) I hope Lucas hands off the franchise to someone who will start the next series *after* these classic films. Hey, the Dark Side didn't just disappear, and Luke could easily be tempted by the same lust for power that Darth was. There's still plenty of movie to be made after RotJ, movie that can't help but be more interesting than this dreadful (and pointless) prequel stuff we've been handed.

As for the movie itself, well, let's just say the first part is great. I'll leave the Ewoks for other reviewers to trash. In the early going we get that fat slob Jabba at his best (worst), Leia in her unforgettable bikini, silly songs, ugly monsters, Han Solo shooting blind, and Yoda at his philosophical best. And, of course, Luke as the "Jedi in Black" who seems to be growing a great deal more sinister than this punk Anakin has managed so far. There's a kinda creepy sub-vibe going on in the first part of the movie, which shows that Luke may be more like his father than we thought. Lucas doesn't go anywhere with it (yes I know it was a different director, but if you think anything happens in a star wars movie without Big George's say-so, you're wrong). Lucas also doesn't develop the whole brother/sister thing with Luke and Leia which might have proved interesting given that Leia was just as Jedi-like as her brother. And you have to give him kudos for having Yoda die of old age. Don't look for anything as dramatic as that happening in any "new" star wars film. In fact, don't look for anything as interesting as the family dynamics of the original star wars, a key part of why the movies are so memorable, and what makes this one so good with the whole Luke/Darth battle.

On a side note, I've never understood the apology for the Ewoks; that Lucas was making a more "kid-friendly" Star Wars movie. Coming after a half-naked Carrie Fisher, the Sarlaac (a gigantic carnivorous hole in the desert) and the death of the much-beloved Yoda, just what "kids" did George think he needed to pander to? Weird, and the primary reason why this flick seems to be two different movies--one brilliant, the other muppetish and stupid.

Note to the "New Hope" and "Episode 6" people--gimme a break. This is the *third* star wars movie, not the sixth or whatever. Lucas had enough material for 2 1/2 great movies the first time around, and basically faked the last part of RotJ. Taken as a whole, it's great stuff. Don't try to ramrod it into the silly and fake six movie structure that the fanboys talk about. Star Wars, the Original Trilogy stands alone. These new movies have nothing whatsoever to do with the originals.

Drones, ethnic drumming, bad synthesizer piping, children singing. The most patronizing "world music" imaginable. This is a tourist film, and a lousy one. What really kills it is the incoherent sequences. India, Egypt, South America, Africa, etc, etc. No transitions, no visual explanation of why we're suddenly ten thousand miles away, no ideas expressed in images. Just a bunch of footage of third-worlders with "baskets on their heads" as another reviewer said. Walking along endlessly as if that had some deep meaning. If these guys wanted to make a 3rd World music video, all they had to do was head a few hundred miles south of where the best parts of Koya were shot, and film in Mexico. That would have been a much better setting for "life in transformation."

But no. What they decided on was a scrambled tourist itinerary covering half the globe and mind-deadeningly overcranked filter shots. The only thing to recommend this film is that it doesn't suck quite as much as Naqoyqatsi.

RstJ

Everything that would go so wrong in his career is fully on display in this movie. Coppola shoots for a "mood" that almost works, but falters among too many long philosophical scenes, bad action shots, sloppy direction that allows his young cast to chew scenery, and a surprisingly weak score. Come on, this is 1966--a high point in the history of rock and you know these greaser kids would be into music. Instead we get a lousy, soppy, 1930s-sounding score written by Carmine Coppola that ruins sections of the flick. And two dreadful opening and closing songs that sound like they belong in a completely different movie.

The only reason the movie works at all is the strength of the source material. Hinton's "The Outsiders" was a brilliant book, one of the best American novels of the 60s, and even if it was a "young adult" book, it still resonates. Coppola tries to capture that feeling, the mixture of youthful hopefulness and poverty-ruined dreams, but just doesn't manage it. Instead we get Matt Dillon sneering his way through the flick, Ponyboy depicted way too young, and a total loss of focus on an important character: his oldest brother Derry. And why was Cherry Valance reduced to almost a bit part? Argh. That whole angle was a really important part of Hinton's work.

Oh well, at least it isn't the overly-stylized mess that Rumble Fish turned out to be, nor the completely ludicrous nonsense that Coppola would put out with numbing regularity for the rest of his career (like Godfather III and Dracula). But you can see all the signs of what was coming.

This movie proves that foreign directors are perfectly capable of putting out soulless Hollywood crap too. This movie has nothing to say about Brazil, nothing to say about the rise of crime in Rio's shantytowns, and ultimately nothing to say about any of its characters. And to make things even worse, it ruins almost every dramatic scene by applying utterly pointless fastmo/stop sequences, the should-be-banned-forever shakycam, and the super-annoying fastcut MTV style edits that not only suck, but are hopelessly dated. The only people this movie will impress are film-critics and Tarantino-wannabes.

I won't waste your time with the story since you've seen it in about 100 movies before this one. Nothing intrinsically wrong with telling a boys from the hood gangster story, but its just not in and of itself strong enough to carry the movie. Lil'Dice grows up to be a big boss then gets killed. Yawn. Rocket escapes poverty (I guess) by becoming a reporter. Snore. A bunch of other guys get killed before we have any chance to figure out who they are. Zzzzzz.

The music is buried in the background for the most part, and when it takes center stage, it's often stuff like "Kung Fu Fighting" which sounds more like Hollywood shorthand for "the 70s" than any real attempt to capture what favela kids were listening to back then. I swear it feels like this movie was scored by an American right down to the rustic types playing their little guitars on the street.

The acting is fine but can't escape the one-dimensional writing. The Tender Trio are amiable thugs whose roles in this movie are completely superfluous. Lil Dice is 100% bad, Rocket is 100% good, and Benny is so underwritten that we don't really care what, if anything, motivates him. The one character who might have acquired some depth (and around whom the entire movie should have been built) is Knockout Ned, a bus driver who turns into a murderous gangster. He, more than anyone else in this movie, embodies everything that went wrong in the favelas in the 80s--a deadly combination of ex-military and drug gangsters, with the military guys supplying the connections for heavy firearms, the organization to mold the drug warlords armies, and the training to shoot to kill rather than simply spray bullets around. Knockout Ned is portrayed as a "hero" of course, even though so many of his kind were anything but heros, taking advantage (and often creating) the total anarchy of the favelas in order to grow rich and powerful.

The cinematography often makes this film all but unwatchable. Fast cuts, speedups, filter shots, the abysmal strobe-light sequence on the dancefloor. All of this is crap and totally kills every scene where its employed. The one great scene in this movie (where Lil Dice shoots one of the "runts" in the foot, then forces another young kid to decide which of the two "runts" to kill) is devastatingly effective because it doesn't use any crap film tricks at all. It's a tense, realistically portrayed scene shot at medium distance which manages in a few minutes to show just how the mindlessly violent generation of the 90s came into being. If the whole movie had been like this, it would have earned all the critical praise heaped on it.

But of course, the whole movie isn't like this because the director is too busy showing off his technique to worry much about how the scenes connect. Copying Tarantino's style of putting little titles up for each segment, he seems to utterly forget what story he's telling, jumping around from character to character, and even short flashback loops like the whole "apartment" sequence that he seems to think build dramatic tension whereas all they really do is shout "hey, look at how cool this narrative technique is!" It might be cooler if we hadn't seen the same "Lil Dice takes over another dealer's turf" sequences so many other places. And all the praise about how "realistic" this is must be coming from critics who think Quentin's films are realistic because almost all the violence is as perfunctory and fake as any movie coming out of Hollywood these days. In the end, this feels as plastic and stylized as any gangster rock video, and carries the same emotional weight.

In short, a real disappointment. Essentially a tired American gangsters from the hood movie shot with a Brazilian setting.

The pilot was pretty cool and if the writers had followed up on it, this show might have been one of the best of the late 90s Buffy-type shows. But no...instead of interesting episodes about aliens we get scene after scene of "we need to talk" between dopey boring Max and perky boring Liz. Even their names are boring.

Nothing much happens. Ever. The whole premise is that "we have to hide our true identities" which might be interesting if the writers had ever bothered to show us what those true identities were. They're aliens. Great. So what? Are all aliens boring, angsty teens? Then they should fit right in on WB.

The show never developed an interesting mythology like the early X-Files, it doesn't have the great dialog of early Buffy, and it doesn't have the whatever people saw in Dawsons. It's like a 2nd rate knockoff of all three shows. Every conversation is one person saying something...pause...more pause...then the other person says something. This gets really tiresome.

So if you have infinite patience and enjoy 16hr movies that go nowhere, by all means, get the first season. If you can survive that, then you'll probably be one of the people posting here who loved the show.

But my guess is you won't bother.

Some people renting this expecting "Gator" style silliness are probably in for a surprise. This movie had a lot more of a "Deliverence" feeling than I expected, and felt authentic to the South of the 1970s. Ok, I wasn't there at the time, so it could be completely wrong. But it was convincing.

This is what Reynolds could have been--a middleweight serious Southern Action actor, like a cornpone Marlon Brando. There's just enough meat on the script to get the old mental wheels turning, and just enough action that it doesn't turn into one of those boring intellectual films about the Bad Ol' South. All in all, a good, interesting, tight movie.

Of course, it unfortunately led to "Gator" -- a bloated mess -- a few years later. Watching them back to back, it's pathetic to watch how Reynolds declined into a buffoon. As he showed in Boogie Nights, he's quite capable of playing serious dramatic roles. Too bad he didn't follow through on the promise of White Lightning, but I'm sure the $$$ were better for the garbage films he later made.

This is without a doubt one of the dumbest movies I've seen in a long while. The whole premise is ridiculous: some guy trapped in a phone booth by some psycho dude with a rifle and the cops just stand around. Yeah, makes perfect sense to me. Everybody's just played impossibly stupid, and every time someone in the cast thinks of something smart (like listening in on the call) someone else comes up with a stupid reason not to do it.

Wretched.

RstJ

At the beginning of this, with the obtrusive music and interminable opening, I groaned "oh no, this is gonna suck." Yet it quickly righted itself and established a good pace, the music backed off, and the director found a good way to reach a dramatic ending despite the case never being solved. Yes, we get an avalanche of characters at the beginning, and yes, that doll was absolutely ridiculous, and the constant "let us pray" scenes were a drag--but none of this seriously detracted from the movie (I'm calling it a movie because on the DVD it's a continuous 3hrs).

Does it answer the question "who killed JonBenet?" No. And more importantly, it doesn't try to do so. It presents the two main theories: parents did it vs. intruder did it, and shows us how and to some extent why each of the characters supports the theory that they do. The infighting between the Boulder Police and the DA's office is brought to life (best part of the movie), Danny Shapiro's role is clarified (very muddled in the book), and we're shown exactly how the case was screwed up almost from the very beginning, by detectives that were in over their heads. Thankfully, the director also edited this down to be a tight 3hrs as opposed to Schiller's sprawling, poorly written 800pgs.

High points:

The autopsy: as fake as the doll was, the girl on the table looked real and gave you an idea of just how badly JonBenet had been tortured before being killed. DA Alex Hunter: we get to watch him go from hip, experienced, Boulder DA to a frazzled, hard-drinking, Boulder politician whose career is going up in smoke because the police department can't bring him an actual case. Steve Thomas/Danny Shapiro: this whole bizarre game between the BPD and the Globe's reporter on the scence is fascinating. Who's playing whom here? The detectives make fun of Shapiro, while Shapiro plays all sides against the middle. Scene editing: the scenes go on just long enough to give you a sense of why they're there, but not so long as to make you twiddle your thumbs in irritation. Lou Smit in the Ramsey House: a great presentation of the key points of the intruder theory. Location: the film was shot on the actual Boulder locations for the most part, giving it a boost of realism.

LowLights: Music is annoying at the beginning: all that soppy piano stuff lends an unwanted covering of daytime soap to the early part of the film. Too many closeups: if Linda Arndt's (character, not actress) face came billowing into the screen one more time, I was going to hit FF. The director finally got out of that "dramatic closeup" mode by the last 2/3, but for a while, it was too much. "Let us pray" While I appreciate that the Ramseys may be deeply religious, 5min scenes in a church listening to a 2nd rate church choir can be yawn-inducing. There are a few too many long "let us rely on our faith" scenes.



All in all, very much worth seeing.



RstJ

Dear god, so the South was actually fighting to *free* the slaves. Who would have thought?

Probably one of the most mind-numbingly dull civil war movies ever, and believe me, that's saying a *lot*. 3 1/2 hours of impossibly stilted speechs, starry skies, clean people wearing clean clothes, and civil war buffs re-enacting the same battle over and over.

Please, Almighty and Loving Creator, do not allow another one of these soporific movies to tarnish the face of your green earth!

This movie has been made before (Shindler's List) and was a lot better that time. Polanski might never have seen a holocaust movie before because he treats every scene of Nazi brutality as if it's something new and shocking rather than something that's been filmed one hundred times already.

His action sequences are some of the worst ever and his special effects laughable. Every "uprising" scene is obviously shot on the same section of street, every "burning building" is the obviously the same set, and every random death scene is just that--a random death scene. No reason to be there, has nothing to do with the story, it's just thrown in there for background, even though the background is totally obvious. Lots of people have talked about Polanski's "personal touch" but this movie is impersonal holocaust porn. When things get boring, Polanski tosses in a "people getting shot/burnt/shipped off" scene although they have no connection to the story.

Polanski has nothing to say. The Pianist is indistinguishable from a dozen other movies about the fate of the Warsaw Jews except by its relative technical ineptitude and overlong running time. Whatever "power" this film has is derived exclusively from its subject matter and not its artistic presentation.

There's a good 20min movie in here somewhere. The rest is pointless filler, done far better by a half dozen other directors.

RstJ

Absolute garbage. Take a bunch of big names, throw in cameos by stiffs like Heche and Willy Nelson, do a lot of ad-libbing that was only funny to the actors, and what do you get? Another lame "satire." Not even remotely believable; it scans like Mamet's speed-dream of what the White House is actually like. God, he sucks. And so does De Niro, whose name is fast becoming videoese for "don't rent this movie."

Looks like it was filmed in about 3 days and the director was too lazy to do any editing, just threw the whole mess on the screen and figured the actor's names would sell the movie. If you're really into watching big stars putting in sloppy performances in what feels like a pet project gone to seed, this is the movie for you. If you want a show about White House politics that doesn't blow, go watch the West Wing. It makes Mamet's soggy dialog look like the bad joke that it is, the inane ramblings of a past-it playwright.

Awful.

RstJ

Sometimes the whole is just the sum of the parts. Most of the parts here are very, very good:

The Music: the title track by Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is amazing and adds depth, especially during the opening sequences. If there was more of it, particularly during some of the long silent scenes, it would have improved the movie. The long silent scenes tend to get boring after a while, whereas the scenes of the car in the forest with the eerie music in the background are riveting.

The Acting: No one should be surprised at Sean Penn. Look at his film bio. He obviously has the chops. And Sarandon gives one of her best performances, which is saying something. Between them they're easily able to carry a 2hr movie.

The Story: There's not a lot of story here. There's never any doubt about what's going to happen to Poncelet. There are no hidden twists, no deep revelations, and no "wow, what's going to happen next" suspense. And thankfully the director doesn't try to inject any into the movie in the hopes of making it more intense. The movie is as slow and inexorable as a river. It goes exactly where it's supposed to go.

The Point: This is where the movie fails, mostly through concentrating on the last days of Poncelet's life instead of giving us any background on him, the crime he's guilty of, what happened to his accomplice Vitello and why Vitello only drew life in prison instead of the death sentence. Poncelet is "poor" so that's why he didn't have a good lawyer. So Vitello was rich? From a prominent family? Then why was he hanging around with Poncelet? The director just can't take his focus off the two lead characters long enough to answer questions like these. Robbins draws most of his drama from the situation (the execution of a killer) without quite showing why he *was* a killer. Robbins also can't quite explain why Prejean became so fascinated with such a man. Most importantly, is the movie about Prejean or Poncelet? Robbins can't quite make up his mind, and the result is two characters without as much depth as a focus on one could have given us. At the end we have Poncelet the hard guy who becomes remorseful, and Sister Helen, the smitten nun. Ultimately, Robbins can't think of much to say about either character that isn't intrinsic to their roles (killer and nun), and this is why DMW is only a good film, but not a great one.

RstJ

This would have been a much better movie if Stone had focused on the era instead of the man. Nixon was a shallow cheap politician whose presidency exposed him as such. Nixon is a big expensive movie whose subject reduces it to a display of directorial pyrotechnics. Even Oliver Stone couldn't make Richard Nixon into a star.

Oddly enough, Stone's Nixon is an almost sympathetic character. Maybe Stone found something in Nixon's paranoia that resonated within himself. The film produces the really odd effect of making you feel as if you know *less* about Richard Nixon than you did before you started the film. The big, plush sets and polished, brilliant film cuts and edits just swallow the man, even with as powerful an actor as Anthony Hopkins portraying him. What you're left with is a sad, but still curiously tragic character whom everybody (including the people who used him) really didn't like very much.

This is the last of Stone's masterworks with began with Platoon(1986). Love him or hate him, he produced an entirely unique visual style. I only wish he'd chosen a subject worthy of the Grand Epic, instead of the sordid story of a pugnacious little politician who was the living embodiment of the Peter Principle in which every man rises to the level of his own imcompetence.

RstJ

Better FX, better plot, better filming, darker tone. Get rid of the Kingpin angle, put the flashback in the middle, and this is a great movie.

Never thought I'd say that about an Affleck project.

As long as you're willing to watch a movie with no particularly engaging conflict, with people whining about being discriminated against while having dinner with theatre stars and attending Cambridge, and you're willing to not smirk at the fond glances every male casts at every other male, this is the movie for you.

Should have been called "Chariots of Flamers"

While I doubt it was Stone's intention, his "JFK" does more to damage the credibility of the conspiracy theorists than any other work besides Posner's "Case Closed." In telling the story of Jim Garrison, the man who never met a theory he didn't believe, Stone convincingly tells the story of almost 30 years of wacky "theories"--none of which have stood up to even the most cursory scrutiny. He, does, however, leave out one very important group of characters, namely, the small army of conspiracy nuts who attached themselves to Garrison's "investigation" with all the tenacity of a bunch of leeches going after a warm body.

The great irony is that Stone himself genuinely seemed to believe in a conspiracy and set out to create a counter-myth to stand against the much-maligned but never seriously refuted conclusions of the Warren Commission. And given that Stone is an incredibly gifted film-maker (or was anyway), his version is quite a bit more entertaining than that dry 26 vol. report. But, as the movie progresses, the counter-myth becomes ever more maniacal--it was the homosexual underworld, no, wait, the Cuban exiles, no, it was the Mob, no, it was the Mob and the CIA, no wait, it was the CIA and Lyndon Johnson, no, it was the entire structure of government and industry working with all the above!

There's no great mystery, really. The evidence (the real concrete evidence, not all the alleged forgeries and coverups and faked autopsies) has, and always did point at one person and one person only: Lee Harvey Oswald. And Stone, to his credit, gives time to this; and Gary Oldman, to his huge credit, creates a very convincing LHO. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine his character killing JFK. The creepy underworld of the conspiracy theorists is well depicted: the depraved homosexuals, the sinister "black ops" people, the lunatic fringe that Garrison dredged to produce his "case" against Shaw. Everyone and everything is over the top, as it should be.

The JFK Assassination has always been about sensationalism and hysteria and Stone captures this world perfectly. He also does an incredible job of re-creating the swirling sense of paranoia of the early 60s and the aura of government betrayal at a time when the Kennedys were assassinated (and MLK), the CIA seemed to be running amok, and the Vietnam War spinning out of control. The movie is an artistic triumph. It's also a fast primer into the world of conspiracy theory where every piece of evidence against Oswald is "fabricated" and every conjecture about a conspiracy the "truth." Garrison the lonely crusader for truth is accurately (and ironically) depicted as a guy who got caught up in the JFK obsession to the point where he believed anything and everything anybody told him. If Stone had any sense of irony of his own, he would have showed us how Garrison's massive ego and vendetta against Clay Shaw made him the perfect tool for conspiracy buffs who desperately needed an elected official (another irony) to demonstrate that other elected officials orchestrated the murder of JFK.

JFK: the Movie does more to make JFK: the Conspiracy look laughable than all of the conspiracy literature put together. It's an incredible movie about how a search for the truth becomes more twisted and bizarre than the "truth" it's supposedly pursuing. A great movie, if not for quite the same reasons as many posters here would have you believe.

Make for one ridiculous movie. Basically, this one french doctor guy and his indian pal go ass-kicking around the french countryside until the indian dude is killed, the doctor discovers the secret of the "brotherhood of the wolf" and the movie ends. Ok, here's the deal: the "brotherhood" makes no sense and plays almost no part in the movie other than to provide weirdly dressed guys for the doctor and the indian to kick-ass on. The 'fu is terrible, the beast is laughably inept CGI, and if it weren't for the Italian Chick's hot body, this film would be totally forgettable.

Useless. We live in an age where stylish slo-mo and "lavish" cinematography has replaced plot development and any vestige of emotional engagement.

RstJ