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almondbrot
Reviews
The Animation Show (2003)
Great collection
-- Light spoilers ahead --
This is a collection of original and entertaining animation shorts, which I recommend for viewing without any reservations. There are very few parts which do not live up to the overall standard, and only while watching "Cathedral" I was longing for a fast-forward button. Highlights are the shorts by Don Hertzfeldt, especially the "Rejected" part, where he pretends to show his rejected commercial attempts for advertising the Family Learning Channel and some stupid consumer products. This is hilarious and over-the-top humor, sprinkled with gratuitous violence and cruelty (sometimes maybe a bit too much), very enjoyable. There is also a beautiful French short with music by Berlioz and drawings which look like impressionist paintings morphing into one another, though with a very dark and depressing mood to it. Then there is the Japanese flick about a man growing a cherry tree on his head, a German short about very slowly living stone people watching human civilization inventing the wheel, growing and finally destroying itself. There are beautiful and funny "short shorts" by Mike Judge, clay animation in "Ident", a great piece by Tim Burton on a boy identifying himself with Vincent Price (narrated by Vincent Price himself, all in verse), too much to be told here. Go and watch it, you won't regret it.
Masked and Anonymous (2003)
Terrible
This movie is one of the worst I have ever seen in my life. I like Bob Dylan's music, and the cast of this movie is awesome. However, the dialogue is dreadful and filled with cliches, the story makes no sense at all and the political issues about revolution, religion and violence are so trivialized that the O'Reilly Factor would look like intelligent political commentary in comparison. Oh, and the continuous Dylan-worshipping in the movie also gets quite annoying. I watched the movie together with a die-hard Dylan fan, and he was really embarrassed when we walked out of the theater. Maybe it was only an experiment trying to see how bad a movie one can make with great actors and good music. If so, it was utterly successful.