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droberts@imdb
Reviews
Miller's Crossing (1990)
The Coen's best, and the genre's
My Top Five Movies list is constantly changing, but Miller's Crossing has never fallen off. It is very nearly a perfect film.
At this point, the gangster film genre is completely hackneyed, but somehow the entire movie feels fresh and vital. Everything -- the characters, dialogue, acting, cinematography, direction -- is highly stylized and lovingly deliberate. Every shot would make a good framed photo, and every line of dialogue is quotable.
Yes, everything here has been done before, but the brilliance of Miller's Crossing is that it distills, with obvious love and stunning talent, the essence of the genre. You must see this movie.
Almost Famous (2000)
Touching, funny, and honest: a joy to watch
I saw an advance screening of this film and I just can't say enough good things about it. It is close to flawless.
As usual, Crowe's gotten a superb ensemble cast together. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Lee, and Billy Crudup are predictably great, but the real joy is newcomer Patrick Fugit, whose winsome, innocent portrayal of a teen coming of age is pitch perfect.
The plot is gripping and unpredictable. The subject matter is intimately familiar for anyone over the age of 25 or so, but younger folks will also identify with the characters' love for music.
But the real strength, as with all of Crowe's work, is the *writing*. Good writing is rare in movies of any sort, particularly this summer's blockbuster sludge, but Crowe nails all the details of dialogue, characterization, and pacing with unparalleled skill. You will laugh out loud, repeatedly, and cry too, many times simultaneously. Every time he makes a film he renews my faith in the medium.
I'm not one to gush over films, usually, but this touching, honest gem is worth losing the cynicism for a while. I consider it a life preserver thrown to save me from the Perfect Storm that rages over Hollywood.
Showgirls (1995)
A Misunderstood Classic
Calling Showgirls "poorly acted" or "sexist" completely misses the point; it's like accusing Britney Spears of not being a "real musician," as though you've discovered something.
Of *course* Showgirls is exploitative and demeaning to women. Almost all Hollywood movies are demeaning to women. Almost all of them are male-written, male-directed male fantasies. But most of them cover this fact with a thin veneer of "empowerment" and "sensitivity," making perfunctory, surface concessions to political correctness. It's hypocritical, dishonest and has horrible long-term effects on the psyches of young impressionable girls (and boys). The brilliance of Showgirls is that it gathers all of the worst Hollywood masculine excess and throws it unapologetically in our faces. The movie is straight-from-the-id, primal, brutish male fantasy. Every woman in the movie is a laughable caricature who advances, if at all, by deceiving other women and becoming a sexual object for men. The "heroine," Nomi, crosses every line, sells every shred of dignity, physically assaults her female competitors, sleeps with her boss (in the most over-the-top sex scene in cinematic history), gets her best friend raped... and at the end of the film, claims that she has gambled and won "herself." This tragi-comic nod to empowerment is a slap to the face of anyone who's been paying attention.
Whether Esterhauz and Verhoeven intended it as such, Showgirls is at once a camp classic and a sly satire, an example of everything our culture at once wallows in and disavows. Sure, you can react with righteous indignation, waggle your finger at the movie, and pat yourself on the back for being so enlightened. But maybe you should take a look around, at the billboards, the commercials, the sitcoms, the movies, the music videos, your own prejudices... and think about whether you can't find a better target.
The Perfect Storm (2000)
What a manipulative piece of c**p!
I simply can't believe that this movie is so popular. The first 45 minutes are a ham-handed attempt at getting us to care about the characters, but the dialogue is so generic and the characters so hackneyed that the attempt is laughable. We are not shown real people, we are *told* what to think. Then we are taken to sea, where we are introduced to some random other characters (in a sailboat, and a helicopter) who are also in trouble. But who cares? I don't care about the main characters, much less these completely random unknowns. The special effects are decent, but even in the storm the writing and acting are wretched. The sailors are stupid and incompetent, and even though they are continually on the edge of death, they have little cheering/bonding sessions every time they fish one another out of the drink. The ending of the movie is embarassingly maudlin, pumping (and pumping, and pumping) for tears after cheating us of any real human beings to care about.
To top it off, the musical score is intrusive and, like the rest of the flick, ham-handed and manipulative. Strings swell every time somebody so much as twitches, until the audience is numb.
I was insulted by this movie, and I'm insulted that audiences no longer have the capacity to be outraged when they are pandered to and their intelligence is repeatedly insulted. Screw special effects -- give me one, just one character that resembles a real human being and not a paper-thin idea in some hack scriptwriter's mind.
The Sopranos (1999)
What Television Could Be
This is so much more than just a normal tv show with excess cussing and violence. The writing is unparalleled -- subtle and intelligent. Problems are not neatly resolved after an hour, or even a season. There are no pat, sound-bite lessons shoved down viewers' throats. There are no one-dimensional characters, and no character is immune from love or tragedy. Where else could you find a character like Tony Soprano, at once dense and sharp-witted, tender and savage, idealistic and self-absorbed? The show is brilliant because it depicts the stresses of work and family in their full, ambiguous complexity. When a moment of real contentment or connection happens it is far more moving than a thousand tear-jerking ER episodes, all the more so for being brief, ephemeral, and often un-mentioned. It is a miracle that this show was made -- take advantage.