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lakeidamike
Reviews
Powder Blue (2009)
Dreadful
This movie is one of a number of pictures in the last five years that attempts to mimic "Crash." You know--tell a number of little vignettes and then tie it all together at the end of the movie in some way that purports to represent the meaning of life...or something like that.
This ain't no "Crash." This is one of the most pointless movies I have ever seen. It wanders all over the place with soap opera like clumsiness. The people who made this awful waste of celluloid must have had a checklist in front of them. A very large checklist. Let's see--there is the single mom with the dying child who's forced into prostitution to save the little nipper. There is Grandpa, just out of the can, looking for redemption. There is the man who wants to be a woman who ultimately kills himself, because no one will love him. There is the man who goes door to door looking for someone who will shoot him in the heart for $50,000, because he took his eyes off the road and killed his new bride. They even remembered the struggling waitress with the hillbilly ex-husband and a dorky white kid who is desperate for love, but my God, they forgot to include an incest victim (although they almost got there).
And just for good measure, like your local evening news every night, they did work in a missing dog story.
How can anyone watch this stuff? It is so contrived that it's unwatchable.
One last question about this movie. What is this fascination about snowfall in Los Angeles with these Hollywood types? It was kind of cute in the remake of "Father of the Bride." It was kind of interesting in "Crash." It was downright silly in this movie, especially when Grandpa dies in a snowdrift the size of which they would never get in LA. We get snowdrifts like that here in Minnesota, but I have yet to see one that is blue. We also see powdery snow here and I can tell you that it doesn't look like the gravel at the bottom of your fishbowl.
Blue Powder is truly one of the worst pictures I have ever seen. By the time we get to the scene with dead Ray Liotta teaching the dead little nipper how to fly a kite on the beach, I couldn't stop myself from laughing. It got only funnier when the dorky white kid was kissing the prostitute Mom at the bus stop with two tickets to Paris in her hand. This was really one of the most horrendously dumb movies of the decade.
Husbands (1970)
Just Plain Bad
I began watching this awful mess on TCM tonight at 9:45 and found myself clicking for something better about 15 minutes into it. In fact, I checked my e-mail while I was watching and found a message from a friend discussing the ancient religious philosopher Pelagius. He wrote: Pelagius was an early advocate of the doctrine of salvation by works, as opposed to the doctrine of salvation by faith.
I immediately declared myself a Pelagian and promised to go to this website and warn others not to watch this movie in order to do a good work--in order to avoid any further suffering that might be endured by anyone who might tempted to watch this train-wreck in the future.
Gazzara, Falk and Cassavettes were good friends, I believe. How they got some studio to finance their time in New York and London is something we'll all never know. The first hour of the movie is dominated by an interminably long scene in a New York City bar that could have only been there to jack-up concessions sales for the theaters back in 1970 that had the nerve to screen this nonsense. They must have been flooding the lobby in droves searching for candy, popcorn or poison with which to kill themselves.
I can't tell you anything about the second hour of the movie, because I didn't have the stomach to watch it through to the end.
Homo Faber (1991)
Creepy
I thought this picture was nothing short of just plain creepy. I've never read the book and doubt that I ever will. But the whole idea of a man through a series of accidents having intercourse with his daughter is pretty nauseating. The story line, as creepy as it is, is extremely far-fetched to the point of silliness. I felt as though I was watching something almost as facile as "Somewhere in Time." One other point: if a director is intent on making a movie set in another decade, in this case the late 50's, I wish he would take some care to watch over some of the small details. The street scenes in New York are full of modern day cars. Worse yet, there is a scene in which baseball scores are heard over a radio involving the Angels, the Blue Jays and the Royals--none of which were major league teams in the time this story is set in.