Change Your Image
crittercat
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Lunch Date (1989)
A perfect film
This 10 minute short is nearly perfect film-making. It should be mandatory viewing in film classes everywhere.
"The Lunch Date" tells a complete and complex story, makes you feel keenly for the two central characters, has complications, twists, reversals and a wonderful resolution. It never strays from context and reality and is utterly accessible.
And it's all done with virtually no dialog.
I would love to be able to own and look at this film from time to time when I'm trying to convince myself -- against all available evidence -- that really GOOD movies can be made small and simply.
I hope that "The Lunch Date" will be made available in either DVD or video cassette very soon.
Larry Santoro Larry@LarrySantoro.com
Day the World Ended (1955)
A Truly Frightening Monster
I saw "The Day the World Ended" on its initial release. I was 13. The threat of nuclear Armageddon was never completely out of our thoughts during this period and the film's monster especially when it was revealed that he was the radiation-altered husband of our heroine was particularly frightening to me: the multiple eyes, the drippy horns, that awful row of teeth, its shambling walk... This was especially frightening when I realized, at the end, that this shuffling thing was an ordinary, caring, loving man trying to get back to his wife.
My uncle managed the Lyric Theater in Chester, Pennsylvania where such movies were standard fare, so I got to see the thing for free and, of course, returned at least a half-dozen times to steep myself in the awfulness of what might happen if I got horribly irradiated during an atomic war. I never got over feeling a bit creepy as the creature crawled through that irradiated haze of post-world's end night.
Come read the site: http://www.FeralFiction.com
Sin City (2005)
Will Be At Its Best on DVD
Someone suggested that whether or not you like Robert Rodriguez' and Frank Miller's SIN CITY came down to whether or not your Liberal or Conservative. The Conservatives, he said, were more likely to love the film.
I didn't much care for SIN CITY but political d'ruthers are irrelevant with regard to it.
I'm as Liberal as any anti-crypto fascist zombie brigade-bashing elitist snob can be. I'll fight the neocon Death Cult so long as I have breath in my body and wiggle to my fingers. But that had nothing to do with my reaction to the FILM.
I wasn't offended, didn't find it degrading to women, didn't mind the violence; I enjoy graphic novels, love comics, hell, I even write stuff like this (take a peek at my story, "Catching" in the anthology, SEX CRIMES). My problem was -- and this was a beautifully realized, well acted comic book -- that it was a comic book.
Comics/graphic novels make their point viscerally, they do it in and out in 15 - 20 minutes; they allow you linger on image, to move back or forth in time, to jump and skip at your rate. Comics don't have to be real. They exist in that twilight state between the shadows of the imagination and the world in which we live and breathe.
SIN CITY is a well-made, beautifully realize, amusing 45 million buck comic book. It costs $9.50 and takes you two hours to get through. It gives you no more character development, no more story than a $2.50 book that you can hover over allows you.
Movies have to BE, exist in a one frame, one that moves, bends, adjusts moment by moment. At their best, films give you some character progressionsomeone leans something along the way. Movies, at their heart are about change. They enforce a linear progression: we sit down, they begin, two hours later, they end (well, LORD OF THE RINGS gave you a year's intermission between acts). Yes, Rodriguez flips and shuffles time in SIN CITY, but it's at his rate, dealer's choice.
Maybe this film would best be seen, not on the big screen, but on a well-indexed DVD, one that allows shuffle and shuttle, one that lets you freeze and dwell on image. But, in the theater, for a film fan...it's not worth the emotional hype its being given.
The Truman Show (1998)
Saying it's so doesn't make it so
God, I wanted to like this film. Jim Carrey is a good actor, an excellent physical comic, he's also capable of giving heartfelt truthful performances. He does it here.
Confound it, I want to like everything Peter Weir does. I frequently don't, but I'm always willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Anyone who can do a "Picnic at Hanging Rock" can't be all bad. He obviously has the capacity to make us see, feel, understand without overstating the obvious; all while skirting the obvious, for heaven's sake! "The Truman Show," therefore, SHOULD have been one of my year's high points cinematic ally. Maybe I was in a bad mood when I saw the advanced screening. I returned and actually paid to see it. Maybe the first-view dyspepsia carried over, maybe I hadn't given it enough time.
I rented it.
Okay: I liked it less the second time I saw it. I almost hated it on the third viewing. (I know, I KNOW...A film -- play, painting, a joke... whatever -- is meant to be grabbed on first view, by single exposure. Repeated looks are bound to let us explore flaws...but, dammit, I was trying to give the thing a break. Really. It IS the kind of thing I should love...) What's wrong with Truman? It's one of those things that SAYS it's going to do something. It tells us what it intends to show, then proceeds NOT to show us, but to restate the thesis! And the audience is expected to buy into the notion that the film has actually explored the issues... whatever they are.
Truman, for me, is all statement and no delivery. It gives us a wonderfully correct theme...a charming, easy to root-for hero...a potentially exciting and interestingly equivocal villain...then blows it all away because it hasn't got the courage of it's own set-up.
What WOULD make Truman, despite a lifetime of conditioning, get on that boat? NOTHING!! He so easily accepts the unacceptable, he so easily overcomes every problem the film gives him, that there is no dramatic tension, no questions, no... Okay: no film! Of course, it presents us with a user-friendly, feel-good ending. The sit-com man takes charge of his life. Victory. Vindication. And we don't even have a clue what Truman's life -- or Life in general -- is about... nor, alas, does he.
Sorry. Too facile...like Jim Carrey's talking butt...an easy laugh, a go-for-the-guaranteed-result. This film, for me, is a smug, simplistic, self-congratulatory exercise in Hollywood telling us what's wrong with Hollywood - and us.
Go write your own screenplay on this theme. Bet you can do it better.
Rocketship X-M (1950)
A thoughtful, simple little film
This is one I've carried in my memory for years.
Without the Technicolor budget of George Pal and Robert Heinlein's "Destination Moon," "Rocketship X-M" succeeds in becoming a far more meaningful and memorable pre-"2001" science fiction film.
"Destination Moon" attempts a "scientific" preview of man's first lunar visit. Of course, this effort seriously dates the movie (I also smile at the rather whimsical, seat-of-the-pants, "outsider" endeavors of our heroes as they manfully put forth, launching their rocket one-step ahead of the narrow-minded "authorities." Okay, so much for that!).
Rocketship X-M had to vie with "D.M." for its box office. X-M's b&w budget (special effects courtesy of U.S. Army White Sands V-2 stock footage and miniatures of the string and cardboard variety) the producers made a last-minute choice to not throw a lot of "science" at us and to take us deeper into space than the moon. What they had going for them were some excellent character actors doing star-turns for a change of career-pace, a script by Dalton Trumbo, music by Ferde Grofe, and excellent -- and evocative -- sound and camera work...etc.
The film's overall messages are simplistic -- nuclear war is bad and should be avoided and the human spirit for exploration and discovery cannot be put down by failure and difficulty (I guess they never considered budget shortfalls as a "failure of spirit"). These ideas are, at least, given voice here during what was, after all, a dangerous era in American politics. Remember, Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted! The science? Okay, it sucks. Who cares!? Science fiction, to my liking, is less about science and numbers than it is about people and life. This has all of that and carries it forward with distinction and class.
When I first saw this movie as a kid, I remember being truly frightened by the bleak view of a post-apocalyptic Mars and shivered in disbelief then terror at the onrushing tragedy of the about-to-crash rocket bearing the two doomed lovers and their sole-surviving crew-mate (a young Hugh O'Brien) to a fiery demise over the Ural Mountains. The producers did a terrific job with what they had and they deserve a great deal of credit.
When I Grow Up (1951)
One of the first films to 'move' me!
I saw this film by accident; it was a second, unbilled, feature at a Saturday matinée I attended when I was 9. I have no idea, now, what that first feature was, but this movie took me in and moved me in a way that had never happened before. Laughed before, yes. Been scared -- of course! Hid my eyes and left the theater peering ahead at dark corners and the spaces between streetlights, certainly.
With this film, however, for the first time (and not the last), I found myself crying in a theater. I am certain, now, I wasn't in tears for the people in the film, but for my own life and at the way I had always responded to my grandfather. The movie -- dare I say this -- held a mirror to the reality I knew as a well cared-for middle-class kid in a small eastern town at mid-century and let me know that I, too, would some day grow up, grow old, come to know sorrow and, one day, die.
Soon, very soon after this, I encountered Citizen Cane on late night television and all things changed again. But this little film opened me up to the power and potential that movies can have toward making people see, understand and feel.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
A good film that might have been better...
Before anything else, let me say that I liked Blair Witch: Nice concept. Well executed. In particular, I appreciate the film makers allowing the central enigma of the movie to remain intact. Peter Weir's in "Picnic at Hanging Rock" makes a similar choice. It takes strength of character and confidence to make this kind of choice. It speaks reams about their potential.
Already a thing of talk among independent filmfolk long before it hit theaters, BWP had poked itself into my consciousness a year or so ago. The buzz. The buzz! A website before it was a film. The website, itself, less a billboard than a computer game. The lore: Really cheaply made -- 60 grand, 25 grand, 10 grand! for crineoutloud -- the whole thing improved in the woods in eight wet and stinky days; they gave a trio of actors a couple of cameras and a DAT, led them on a scavenger hunt for clues, left sketchy notes and mind-screwed the cast into near-real fear and panic and late night woodland snipe-hunts. It was all so hip, so coolly generated, so clever. Forget that it had been done before. Forget "Cannibal Holocaust," and others...this one had integrity and a kind of kick-ass honesty about it. Just following all the material about the film before it opened, you just knew that -- if successful -- it was going to be one of those demiurge filmevents that redefined the business and would spawn a thousand mini-urges flailing for a ride.
The buzz and hype! And it's all true. There it is: kind of lovely and clever. It HAS integrity. You like those three people. You buy their weaknesses and still you like them because they're weak like you are weak. They're jerks, but still you like them because they're jerks like all of us.
The actors are good, the self-revelatory stuff is honest -- forget how they did it. (John Ford gave Victor McLaglen the next day off and got him drunk as a skunk the night before the big trial scene in "The Informer." Crack of day the next day, Ford dragged McLaglen out of bed and shoved him in front of the camera. Sleep-stupid and whisky-blubbering, fuzz-gargling his lines, shaking all outside and in, McLaglen acted his way through the day and earned an Oscar for his hangover.)
So there! Who cares how they got there, they got there!
And there it was. The personal hype machine worked well for these guys, the short booking worked for them boosting their per screen opening to stratospheric levels. Great.
I still went in thinking the movie was going to be just okay. It was better. It was very good. They might have done a little more with the sound. They might have built the tension a little more. They might have paced it better. They might have... They could have-should have...
Well. It worked.
I will say: I came out of the theater not frightened but moved. I left the theater more impressed with the film makers than their film. Ah, phooey! It was a good night out.
It is, finally, a very good film that could have been better.
AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)
...bored with all that character development in your Gameboy?
Like them or not, the 'Alien' franchise fielded four unique films-not all of them good, but each of them with a voice, a feel, a look.
The first was a character-driven haunted house in space, the second was a character- driven action roller-coaster, 'Alien 3' was a tale of loss and sacrifice, the fourth
Okay each one was different. Each had style, panache, character, suspense; each had its own distinct rhythms and tropes. Each defined its own brand of terror, horror, suspense and tension.
'Predator' was a testosterone-fueled snark hunt, a mano a mano exercise in guts and will: no one in that film was innocent; no one truly survived. It was fun.
'Predator 2' was a comic book: not quite believable, not quite straight-laced enough to be a really effective monster movie but, never mind, it had its points.
'Alien vs. Predator' tries to be
Well, gosh, I have no idea what it tries to be. It grabs bits and pieces of all the films-a little of the Colonial Marines doing a combat drop, a little of the claustrophobic crawling through the ductwork, a little bit of the collapsing walls of the lead smelting plant in Alien 3
When you watch it-and you will!-you see how many little pieces this Anderson fellow has lifted. The net result is that nothing seems to be really happening, nothing is at stake, people are going to die but, oh well, they died in all the other movies in just this way
and who cares about them anyway, they're just targets.
Speaking of which, AVP's target audience seems to be kids-see? That PG-13 rating wasn't just a compromise, the thing was designed that way-kids whose thumbs have gotten tired of actually having to press those darn button on the Gameboy or X-Box and want someone else to do it. This film brings nothing to the table yet tries to suggest, to hint at, resonances from the Alien universe. The head of the company, played by Lance Henriksen, the 'artificial person' called Bishop from 'Aliens,' is named, Charles Bishop Weyland. Is this the germ of the 'Company' Ripley flies for in 'Alien?' In AVP Mr. Weyland is all human and he wants something--something that goes beyond just opening up that pyramid to see what's there
his goons are armed to the teeth and expecting something hefty to come their way. Alas they're all offed and/or cocooned too quickly for us to learn what they're REALLY doing with all that firepower on an archaeological dig. And we never find out anything! Nothing is revealed.
Oh, yes: The film plays fast and loose with alien biology. What took weeks--or at least a couple of days--to accomplish in terms of the Alien alternation-of-generation (look it up) gestation-egg to hugger to larva to full-blown alien motherhumper-now happens in, no seriously, a matter of minutes!
I probably should stop here. But I have to spoil it for you because this film, rotten as it is, needs spoiling: The chummy alliance between the human survivor and the predator is repulsive. Predators are not nice people. Not these guys. They are awful, Republicans with too many mandibles, and even less of a moral compass than
Never mind. The (Capital A) Aliens are animals. They are dumb things that do what they do because they do it! They live to breed. That's it. An alliance between human and Predator here is like the turkey and the Pilgrims ganging up on the ham.
Now I will stop.
No. I won't. Do not see this film-at least don't pay to see it. Sneak in.
Go to a multi- plex, see a good movie, buy a second bag of soggy popcorn, then stroll into this one and see how truly wretched it is.
AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)
...bored with all that character development in your Gameboy?
Like them or not, the 'Alien' franchise fielded four unique films-not all of them good, but each of them with a voice, a feel, a look.
The first was a character-driven haunted house in space, the second was a character- driven action roller-coaster, 'Alien 3' was a tale of loss and sacrifice, the fourth
Okay each one was different. Each had style, panache, character, suspense; each had its own distinct rhythms and tropes. Each defined its own brand of terror, horror, suspense and tension.
'Predator' was a testosterone-fueled snark hunt, a mano a mano exercise in guts and will: no one in that film was innocent; no one truly survived. It was fun.
'Predator 2' was a comic book: not quite believable, not quite straight-laced enough to be a really effective monster movie but, never mind, it had its points.
'Alien vs. Predator' tries to be
Well, gosh, I have no idea what it tries to be. It grabs bits and pieces of all the films-a little of the Colonial Marines doing a combat drop, a little of the claustrophobic crawling through the ductwork, a little bit of the collapsing walls of the lead smelting plant in Alien 3
When you watch it-and you will!-you see how many little pieces this Anderson fellow has lifted. The net result is that nothing seems to be really happening, nothing is at stake, people are going to die but, oh well, they died in all the other movies in just this way
and who cares about them anyway, they're just targets.
Speaking of which, AVP's target audience seems to be kids-see? That PG-13 rating wasn't just a compromise, the thing was designed that way-kids whose thumbs have gotten tired of actually having to press those darn button on the Gameboy or X-Box and want someone else to do it. This film brings nothing to the table yet tries to suggest, to hint at, resonances from the Alien universe. The head of the company, played by Lance Henriksen, the 'artificial person' called Bishop from 'Aliens,' is named, Charles Bishop Weyland. Is this the germ of the 'Company' Ripley flies for in 'Alien?' In AVP Mr. Weyland is all human and he wants something--something that goes beyond just opening up that pyramid to see what's there
his goons are armed to the teeth and expecting something hefty to come their way. Alas they're all offed and/or cocooned too quickly for us to learn what they're REALLY doing with all that firepower on an archaeological dig. And we never find out anything! Nothing is revealed.
Oh, yes: The film plays fast and loose with alien biology. What took weeks--or at least a couple of days--to accomplish in terms of the Alien alternation-of-generation (look it up) gestation-egg to hugger to larva to full-blown alien motherhumper-now happens in, no seriously, a matter of minutes!
I probably should stop here. But I have to spoil it for you because this film, rotten as it is, needs spoiling: The chummy alliance between the human survivor and the predator is repulsive. Predators are not nice people. Not these guys. They are awful, Republicans with too many mandibles, and even less of a moral compass than
Never mind. The (Capital A) Aliens are animals. They are dumb things that do what they do because they do it! They live to breed. That's it. An alliance between human and Predator here is like the turkey and the Pilgrims ganging up on the ham.
Now I will stop.
No. I won't. Do not see this film-at least don't pay to see it. Sneak in.
Go to a multi- plex, see a good movie, buy a second bag of soggy popcorn, then stroll into this one and see how truly wretched it is.