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anakin_99
Reviews
North & South (1975)
Patrick Stewart is great. The rest is not.
If you are a fan of Patrick Stewart, this may be worth a watch. He is young and has hair. His acting in this is solid as always, but he is the only redeeming part. His fake "Northern" accent is a bit weird, but OK.
Most of the other actors are mediocre or just terrible. I especially didn't like the lead actress. The camera and lighting quality are low which also made it hard to watch. I was often distracted by the edges of the picture being blurry, which must be from using cheap zoom lenses.
At 4 hours long, with slow pacing, this was almost unbearable to get through, but Patrick Stewart's performance made it worth finishing. The story is also good, but I've been told the 2004 version is better.
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010)
Attention people who like to laugh
Tucker & Dale vs Evil is the Shaun of the Dead of slasher flicks like Halloween or Friday the 13th. Even if you don't like those movies, this one will make you laugh as long as you don't mind a lot of gore. It turns the slasher genre upside-down in ways you won't expect that will keep you laughing throughout. Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk bring the comedy and sympathy as the leads who fall victim to a series of unfortunate events. You should go see this movie. It has been sitting on a shelf for a year and a half because they didn't know how to market the movie. It is so good, you should see it in theaters and let movie execs know we want more creative films like this that poke fun of the standard Hollywood clichés.
American Experience: A Brilliant Madness (2002)
what A Beautiful Mind left out
A Brilliant Madness is an excellent documentary on the life of John Nash. It fills in the blanks and shows the true facts of Nash's life in which the details are more compelling and interesting than what was revealed in A Beautiful Mind. A Beautiful Mind was of course a great movie to show cinematically how schizophrenia can affect someone even as brilliant as Nash. A Brilliant Madness discusses things like the child he had with an earlier girlfriend and then abandoning them. Also his trips wandering Europe asking to give up his US citizenship. Most interesting was that they left out of A Beautiful Mind that his wife divorced him and then remarried decades later. If you liked A Beautiful Mind, I highly recommend seeing A Brilliant Madness. Both films compliment each other well.
Road Lawyers and Other Briefs (1990)
horrible start but great end
I'd give "Road Lawyers" a 3 by itself but there are other shorts on the tape. It barely makes sense and the "special effects" aren't very special. Escape From Heaven isn't a much better film about what heaven is really like (5 out of 10). Radar Men on the Moon made me laugh pretty hard because it is done like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 show but it seems like it took little effort to make aside from writing the jokes (8 out of 10). The final short Hairline was my favorite because it has some humor and some drama as it shows a middle-aged man coping with the lose of his hair (8 out of 10). If you fast forward through the first two shorts, this is an enjoyable tape. I have no idea why they headlined with Road Lawyers, but that is the reason it has such a low rating. I wish I could separate the votes for this movie, but as a whole I gave it a 6.