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dhyatt
Reviews
Go Tigers! (2001)
good documentary - NOT rah rah!
I'm a little taken aback by how many of these other reviewers didn't "get it".
"A good documentary, but it left me a little sad." "Great depiction of my town's enthusiastic pride." "Great for sports fans." etc. etc.
Come on, people, this was a vicious, vicious documentary about an inane town with priorities completely out of whack! Or am I too much of a big-city east coast cynic?
Presenting everything as it happened, warts and all, is a strength of the movie. Reviewers who comment that "I could have done without the party seen [sic]" are totally and completely missing the point. These kids are treated like Gods on earth and it's a Bad Thing. GET IT?!?!
I wish the film spent less time showing football games and more time exploring some of the other aspects of the subject - like, what are cheerleader tryouts like? Let's interview 12 year old girls and find out about their aspirations. Let's get some time with Coach Paterno and find out if he's really serious at all about recruiting any of these kids. The interviews with kids not on the football team were far too brief; I wanted to see what they were doing during game time. (Playing Dungeons and Dragons? Reading? Homework?)
Watching with my "elitist snob" hat on, I enjoyed how the movie still made it hard to look down on the entire high school football institution - clearly it's keeping kids on track and out of jail, keeping local economies pumping, etc. Despite what I said above, this is not a vicious one-sided depiction at all. It just feels that way for long passages. At times it feels like a Christopher Guest movie, except the characters are very real.
Highly recommended for elitist snobs and football fans alike.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
likeable even for the jaded and cynical
It's late September and I finally submitted to pop-culture will and saw PotC:TCotBP in the theater today - and was very pleasantly entertained.
I won't rehash everyone else's praises but the one thing I found most unique about the movie is that I found it very easy to root for everyone. 'Good' pirates, 'bad' pirates, british twits, 'chaotic' characters -- other reviewers complained that the movie tried to hard to make everyone funny, but I found it great that this was not a pure black-and-white good-and-evil movie. I *wanted* the black pearl pirates to get their curse removed, while also wanting Johnny Depp to get his fortune, while also wanting Orlando Bloom to get the girl, while also wanting.... well, you get the idea.
In short, the way the story allowed viewers to root for everyone simultaneously was very refreshing.
Planet of the Apes (2001)
bad, bad, bad. Wasted opportunity.
I have two huge quibbles with the movie, both of which represent giant lost opportunities where the movie could have been actually interesting:
1) the original movie featured humans who were somewhat devolved from the human race as we know it now. Incapable of organized rebellion. Thus it made more sense to have a strange space man come down and be seen as truly 'different' from the others.
In this new version the humans, as we see them, don't seem particularly stupid, just overpowered. For Markie Mark's character to be singled out as somehow 'different' doesn't make any sense whatsoever, because the other humans speak, reason, communicate, and organize without any difficulty.
A shame, then, that this version lost the whole idea of the space man leading a race of humanoids who appeared normal yet were somewhat strange and incapable. The only disadvantage humans seemed to have in this movie was some lack of muscle strength - and only barely.
2) The portrayal of 'stranger in a strange land' is always very compelling. The audience puts themselves in the stranger's shoes and thinks, how would I react? What would I do? Would I stand up and say "hey, I'm not a normal human like these others, can I talk to someone in charge here?" Would we lie in wait to suss out the situation before 'taking sides'? Would we ask questions of our fellow captives? There are any number of things we would do or contemplate.
However this movie just charges through that whole stage of the story and explores none of these possibilities. The moment he (literally) hits the ground, Markie Mark assumes the role of 'one of the hunted humans' and never makes any attempt whatsoever to say, "hey, wait a second, can someone explain what's happening here? because I have an interesting story to tell. Hey apes, i may be smarter than you assume."
Lost opportunities, both.
Plus the movie expropriates so many 'catch phrases' of American race relations dialogue as to be nauseating ("Can't we all just get along?" "Separate but equal" etc. etc.) Talk about bonking us over the head.
And the ending is as preposterous as everyone says.
Pretty costumes.
Dog Park (1998)
A complete let-down
My girlfriend and I wanted to see this movie for months because (a) we like visiting dog parks, (b) we like Janeane Garofalo, and (c) we, okay, well, at least *I* like Kids In The Hall.
We looked for it and looked for it at the Blockbusters in our neighborhood, and we just couldn't find it anywhere. We thought that was odd, particularly based on the 'name' talent involved.
Finally, I found it for sale for $0.99 at a Blockbuster 'pre-viewed movies' clearance sale. AND.... even that scant amount of money was too much to pay. At least now I have a tape I can use to tape over.
I wish we'd seen it in the theater -- it would have been quite a bit of fun to stand up and lustily BOO, BOO, BOO. Groaningly awful - and *NOT* in the fun 'so bad, it's good' way which you might expect. I do like Bruce McCulloch, I really do. And we really wanted to like this movie. But this movie had nothing of his quirky sensibility.
The script is unbelievably awful and devoid of any humor. Mark McKinney's dog psychologist character would be funny in a 2 minute KITH sketch, but does not cut it as the only 'comic relief' in a 91 minute movie.
Human beings simply do not communicate in this way. Not even Canadians! The generalizations about 'the way dating works' are the kinds of things 14 year olds might say to each other, not these 30 year old (+/- 5 years) characters.
The camera work and editing do nothing to help this weak script. There is one potentially good scene, as another reviewer pointed out, where a girl and guy discuss whether to eat first or to **** first. With good direction and editing, this conversation has at least some potential for lasting humor. However, we see the scene in a single cut from about 20 feet away, where we can't even see the characters' faces.
Consistency problems show clear lack of thought and care. Most glaringly, and at the risk of nit-picking, Luke Wilson's dull character makes a point of the fact that after their first date he doesn't know Natasha H's character's name. Then he has flowers delivered to her at work and follows up with a phone call where he asks for her by name. Okay, I figured, I guess now he knows her name, we must have missed that scene where he found out her name. Then, an hour later in the film -- he still doesn't know her name. Huh???
If you want to see it 'just for the dogs,' don't bother. The dogs get about 10 minutes of screen time, and none of them are particularly cute.
A WASTE OF TIME, unless your life's goal is to see every movie Janeane Garofolo has ever been in. Her character in this one, however, is completely unmemorable and you can't be faulted for missing it.
Six Days Seven Nights (1998)
Awful, awful, awful
I was trapped into watching this while on a long flight on an airplane. It is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Simply a disaster, in every respect. Predictable, dull, boring, cliche-packed... not an ounce of cleverness. If you liked this movie, I don't want to know you.