Reviews

Well, Bollywood was telling the truth. Aside from the title, this has nothing to do with Drive 2011. What it really is is a bizarre mishmash of what look like music videos, vlogs, YouTube comedy sketches, car commercials, bits of gameplay footage from some 2003 racing game, and a few things that look SOMEWHAT like scenes from a movie. As for the writing, all you need to know is that one of the first lines of the movie is "Wow, I don't know what's more sexy, you or your driving skills". The most positive thing I can say about it is that it's almost entertaining purely from how bizarre it is. ALMOST.

There's a lot to like about this movie; in addition to the story and acting both being great, it was interestingly shot and I really liked the presentation choice of the spouses never actually appearing on screen. The main thing that took me out of the movie was the editing, of all things. The way it was done, changing between cuts and fades seemingly at random, often made it very difficult to tell when we were changing scenes, and whether a scene was supposed to be taking place right after the last one or the next day or something. Also, the repetitive soundtrack got a bit irritating, and the epilogue went on for far too long. That's all.

It's so weird that a movie could be so unique yet so predictable at the same time. The only thing that wasn't obvious to me really early on was exactly WHEN a certain reveal was going to take place, though to give them credit, the time they chose to reveal it instead was definitely a much better point to do so than when I thought it was going to happen. Also, to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, Sam Rockwell gave a very good performances for how unusual the circumstances were. Not one of my favourites, but I'd definitely recommend watching it at least once.

I couldn't even finish watching this one. The plot for this movie has been rehashed about 100 billion times and I'm kind of sick of seeing it; there are far too many comedies about some fish-out-of-water character winding up in New York (not even in a large city in general, SPECIFICALLY New York). It also got annoying very quickly how on-the-nose the humour was; it seemed whoever wrote the screenplay for this movie somehow thought the very simple jokes might go over the audience's heads, so after every single joke some character had to explain it. A perfect example of that is in the very first scene of the movie; when the main character was getting bathed by some women, and one of them rises out of the water directly in front of him, and it's implied that she was washing his g------. That's not that great a joke, but it would have been fine if they'd just left it at that. However, rather than just moving on, they have the girl say "The Royal P---- is clean, your highness", removing all subtlety and what little humour the scene actually had. I don't find any of Eddie Murphy's comedies all that funny, but this is the only one I've seen that I think is straight up bad.

Like a lot of British comedies, this movie is really hit or miss for me. There are some GREAT moments in this, the two leads are great, and the third act is one of the best I've seen in any action movie. However, there are also huge chunks of this movie that I'm not a huge fan of, mainly caused by the fact that I find nearly every character other than the two leads massively annoying, ESPECIALLY "The Andes" (I honestly don't even buy them joining the main character at the end; what was different about this time versus all the other times it was blatant that something nefarious was at play?) I definitely still like it overall, but it was a massive step down from "Shaun of the Dead" for me.

Sooo... someone decided to remake all of the most famous scenes from John Carpenter's "The Thing" with Pingu characters. Why? I have no idea. Honestly, the most interesting thing I got out of this was learning all these years later that the seal actually had a name (Robby).

There is definitely a lot of good about this movie but... it is kind of a tonal mess. We have a scene with Frollo (who is DEFINITELY one of the better Disney villains) attempting to murder an innocent family followed immediately by a scene with the gargoyles singing a goofy song about whatever; such are the limitations of making a movie like this marketable I guess. This was definitely worth watching, but it also definitely could have been a lot better.

I'm just going to briefly give my thoughts on each short-

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: I'd say this is probably the weakest one, unfortunate with it being the opening. The animation is nice of course, but there's not really a whole lot to work with when all you have is some vague shapes moving around.

The Nutcracker Suite: There's definitely a lot more to work with animation-wise once you actually throw settings, creatures, and objects into the mix, but I still found this one pretty dull compared to most of them. Maybe I'm just tired of hearing "The Nutcracker", as it's easily one of the most famous and overused pieces of classical music.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice: It's an okay Mickey Mouse short. The water looked really nice in certain shots, particularly in the dream sequence and the whirlpool, but other than that it was probably the most average short on the fronts of both storytelling and animation.

Rite of Spring: Easily the strongest of the shorts from a storytelling standpoint, and has some of the best animation as well. I wouldn't call myself a fan of classical music, but this was also probably my favourite composition out of the bunch. Picture "The Land Before Time", only even more brutal and with no dialogue.

The Pastoral Symphony: This short is colorful, cutesy, and for the most part completely inoffensive, though I think it does go on for a bit too long. Of course, it's impossible to talk about Fantasia without mentioning the controversy surrounding the racial caricature that appears in this short. Normally I can accept this sort of thing as a product of its time, but whatever your personal feelings are, it's made a MILLION times more offensive by Disney essentially trying to hide the scene from existence and acting like it was never part of the equation. Seriously, Disney for doing that.

Dance of the Hours: Not really a whole lot to say about this one; it's just a bunch of animals dancing ballet, with some decent physical comedy. I will say that this probably has the dullest colour palette out of the bunch, and kind of stands out in a bad way for that reason (that really sounds a lot harsher than what I actually feel, but I can't think of a better way to word it, so whatever).

Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Marie: Definitely has the best animation out of the bunch, though I think it's somewhat weaker than "Rite of Spring" in terms of storytelling. Seriously though, the animation... even if everything about the rest of the movie sucked, it would still be worth watching just for the animation in this short.

Ranked Worst to Best- Toccata and Fugue in D Minor The Nutcracker Suite Dance of the Hours The Sorcerer's Apprentice The Pastoral Symphony Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Marie Rite of Spring

I'm not even kidding, just think of any adjective and it probably accurately describes some aspect of this movie. That's about the only input I can possibly give, because describing it in any other way would portray it as "good", or "bad", or "somewhere in the middle", when really it isn't on that spectrum at all; it just is what it is, and that's that.

I like this movie enough, but Dr. Loomis is... not among my favourite movie characters. I could already do without a character who's only purpose is to repeat the exact same exposition every 10 to 15 minutes (seriously, why?), but what's even worse is that these scenes actually bring down the rest of the movie for me. All of the best scenes are the ones that treat Michael Myers as a mysterious stalker who's motives and intent are unclear, but thanks to Dr. Loomis, I already know exactly who he is and exactly what he's up to. In my opinion, all of the context we needed was in the opening scene, and once it was over they should have left it at that.

I love the meme as much as anyone else, but nothing about the movie in and of itself is remotely entertaining, not even ironically. Despite only being 80 minutes in somehow still feels like it goes on for far too long due to the atrocious pacing, and that combined with the fact that there is literally NO sound other than the dialogue makes it one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. The only parts that are a little bit funny on their own are the two or three occasions, which take up about 15 seconds put together, where the scene is sped up for no reason, and there's still no sound or music whatsoever. Overall, I would never recommend this movie on its own, but I would certainly recommend RalphTheMovieMaker's video if you haven't seen it.

Watched in preparation for Ed Wood (1994). This movie is basically everything one would expect it to be based on its reputation; the plot was complete nonsense, everything on the production end, from the set design to the practical effects to the makeup, was terrible, much of the dialogue showed off Ed Wood's practically non-existent understanding of how anything in space works, and the acting somehow managed to be even worse than the already pretty low "old movie" standard. So I think many more recent filmmakers should be pretty embarrassed that this was more watchable and enjoyable than stuff they made many years later with much higher budgets. I don't think this movie is good in any way, but it's far from the worst thing I've ever seen.

The movie was decent, but 14th best movie of all time (according to this website)? I don't think so. Joaquin Phoenix gave a great performance and there were certainly some awesome moments, but there were a lot of issues with the story (NOT because I find it offensive, hear me out). First of all, while this movie was definitely going for something different, a lot of plot-points were nearly directly ripped off from Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy". This isn't to say there can't be two movies with very similar stories and have them both be good in different ways, but some scenes are almost word-for-word identical, the only differences being character names (especially any scenes involving the two main character's shared quirk of rehearsing conversations ahead of time), and that got pretty distracting whenever it happened. Even if "The King of Comedy" didn't exist, there was still the issue that there were several plot threads that really didn't go anywhere. The main character's neighbor and especially his mother have way too much screen-time for the amount of effect they have on the plot, and they spend a LOT of time giving answers to things where it probably would have been better to just let the audience figure it out themselves. I'd say the two peaks are the subway shooting and the talk-show/riot climax, and everything else is pretty hit or miss. It's definitely good, but it's overrated.

What can I even say? The Birth of a Nation is just a boring, uninteresting movie that takes the wrong side of history. It misses out on a 1/10 because of its innovation, with it being one of the oldest fully surviving feature length films and in all honesty not being terribly made, but don't watch this if you're easily bored or easily offended.