Change Your Image
julesbrian
Reviews
Last Holiday (1950)
Leaden and unconvincing.
While I appreciate that I am looking at this film again nearly seventy years after it was made, and I first saw it, I think that first viewing of it provoked the same feeling of disappointment and near scorn. Some of the script and acting shared high levels of ham, and the usual team of (excellent) English character actors were given no chance to do anything more than their standard performances. Except perhaps Sydney James.
I was astonished to see that only one other person seems to have been disappointed by this film. I found it almost irritating in its social inaccuracies, heavy-handed acting, and unceasing tear-jerking.
Not a film by which to remember Alec Guiness.
Brian Hermann, March 2018
Malaga (1954)
Not worth watching.
This is a classic 'B' movie, except that it is so b... awful it is really an F movie. All I can find to say about it is that Maureen O'Hara did NOT play Mrs. Miniver, as claimed by an earlier reviewer. That was Greer Garson. This is a film that makes you realise how far Hollywood has come in the last 65 years, and also how lucky Hollywood is to be able to still sell this kind of old rubbish to TV.
Chicago (2002)
One person's meat is another one's poison.
Bizarre how one person's reasons for liking one picture above another can be so absolutely reversed; I thought that Moulin Rouge was a boring mish-mash, apart from the terrific ring-master, and found Chicago an exhilarating ripper. Other people seem to have exactly opposite opinions. A lot must depend on one's very personal reactions to the actors - and who knows what those are based on. For instance I find Nicole Kidman BORING! (except in "To Die For"). But in "Eyes Wide Shut" the only thing worse than her performance was Tom Cruise's. Yet some people even enjoyed E.W.S. My main, and idiosyncratic criticism of Chicago, was the huge 'clonky'-ness of Richard Gere's shoes in his tap scene. Why was he wearing 'industrial boots'? Criticism of the plot seems pretty pointless; when were stage/film musicals required to be realistic? Surely 'Guys and Dolls" and 'Cabaret' would rank pretty highly, but only paid lip-service to real life. But my main reaction to the negative criticisms of 'Chicago' is wonderment; I found it uplifting, and a great buzz. I am only sorry that others did not.
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Critical of acting, directing, and whole film .
This film starts with the basic handicap of both leads being undeniably pretty, but utterly lacking in cinematic sex appeal. One of the reasons Kidman was so well cast in "To Die For" was the frigidity and detachment she brought to the part of a woman using her sexual charms to get where she wanted. Add to this Cruise's lack of talent - to the extent that in some of the scenes when he was meant (I think) to be in an extremely emotional state, I honestly found it hard to tell whether he was laughing or crying, and in a scene where he sits in the back of a taxi, there is almost a voice-over saying "Look at me; I'm brooding!" True, there are lots of remarkably gorgeous women's rears, and some fronts, and some inevitably unrealistic sex, but I was left not only sharing most other critic's bafflement at what the picture was trying to say, but why on earth it was trying to say it - whatever IT was.