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Reviews
Mother! (2017)
Huh..? What a waste of two hours. Spoiler alert.
Where to begin? The actors in this film are all quite accomplished. The Director/Writer, Arnofsky, has multiple large and unusual films to his credit, if not the critical acclaim he undoubtedly thinks is his due. The film tries to be art, but ends up being only artifice. It's full of allegory, and symbolism, but not for dramatic or literary effect. The viewer is beaten over the head with the allegorical inferences until they lie in a bloody pool, like so many of the characters. A better writer might have taken a few weeks to smooth out the more ridiculous moments in the script, or heighten the few suspenseful ones. A better director might have used the house to better elucidate the plodding plot. The man, Javier Bardham, cleverly named "Man" is a poet/writer in an old Victorian house damaged in a fire. He has some sort of writer's block. His wife, Jennifer Lawrence, named "Mother" is doing all the work to repair the house. This is where the film departs from sanity. Two additional characters enter this home, unannounced and unwelcome by "Mother", Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer. Ed is dying of cancer and is a fan of Javier's poetry. Javier's character welcomes them into his home, for "as long as they like" without even consulting his wife. It was at this point I decided that the film was set in some alternate universe where common decency and compassion are unknown. Shortly after that two brothers arrive, the children of Harris and Pfeiffer, and begin to fight over a will, until one finally kills the other in the house. The dying brother is carried out of the house by Bardham's character, supposedly to a nearby hospital. Apparently they have no ambulances in this alternate universe. While Bardham's character is gone tending to the fallen brother, the other brother is still gliding around the house, until finally Jennifer Lawrence, a bit of a neat freak, begins to clean up the blood. Apparently, in this alternate universe there are no crime scene investigators, or detectives, or police. The blood has created a hole in the flooring that drips into the basement, making one wonder if perhaps the Harris family doesn't have something else in common with the Aliens, of the 1979 Ridley Scott film, whose blood is molecular acid, other than their utter lack of empathy. Yes, I know, this is art. It's all symbolic. The film continues for another hour full of blood, murder, and cannibalism, but that's art, right? No, it's not. It's stupid, and voyeuristic, and humorless. Some writers will undoubtedly write that they found laughs in this film, well if they did then they need therapy.
Lions for Lambs (2007)
Don't waste your time
There is so much wrong with this talky polemic that it's hard to know where to start. First, a US senator with Presidential aspirations brings a TV journalist to his office to announce a new military strategy in Afghanistan. Huh..? Since when do US senators make or announce US military strategy..? What happened to the Dept. of Defense, the SECDEF, the POTUS..? Are they on vacation..? Then the senator, Tom Cruise in one of his most unbelievable roles, tells the journalist, Meryl Streep, the new strategy has begun 10 seconds ago. Hold on, this US senator is announcing a military operation to the press while it is still ongoing..? Isn't that a violation of security..? Perhaps you're beginning to see some of the problems with this film. A film that purports to be realistic, dealing with real world issues, in politics and military strategy should at least try to achieve some verisimilitude, that is it should at least attempt to look real. Then we have the actual military operation, beginning with a briefing by the Battalion Commander to what appears to be his entire command, where they continually interrupt him with questions. Huh..?
Hanna (2011)
Wow, was this a waste of money
This film was derivative of many other films including (Soldier, Resident Evil), with little new in the way of plot. The immoral CIA creates a program in which they are attempting to genetically create the perfect soldier by fooling with the DNA of embryos. When the experiment proves successful (huh..? Why shut down a successful program..?) it is decided for unknown reasons to end the project and terminate all those involved. Eric Bana, the CIA field agent who recruited the women for the experiment has a change of heart and tries to save one woman and her child. For no particular reason, except to give Hanna a reason to want revenge later on, the mother is killed by Kate Blanchett, and Eric Bana escapes with the infant. Bana raises Hanna as his own in an "arctic" cabin without electricity or modern conveniences, in order to prepare her for the day that she has to face the CIA and their henchmen. The day finally arrives when Hanna decides that she is ready. Bana digs up a transponder he had buried and places it in front of Hanna quipping that once the switch is flipped it can't be undone. Since there is no electricity in the cabin, and in fact Hanna has never seen an electric light, the method by which Bana got a battery to operate after over 14 years is never explained. Bana leaves Hanna alone to be captured by the dastardly CIA operatives. He did this apparently in order for Hanna to kill Kate Blanchett. Why he doesn't take Hanna with him, instead of leaving her to be taken by the CIA is left unexplained. Hanna is brought to an underground holding cell, the size of the Superbowl, in Morocco.
Strangely, Morocco looks a lot like the desert southwest of the US. Naturally, Hanna is more than a handful for the loutish CIA operatives and manages to escape through the ubiquitous air-conditioning vents which just happen to be her size. She makes her way to the surface, and just as she is looking out of a vast desert vista in broad daylight, Hummvees start driving directly over her head, apparently oblivious to the fact that there is an open submarine door in their path. As the last Hummvee passes the hole is shown as empty clearly showing that Hanna has managed to take hold of the undercarriage of the last vehicle as it passed at 50 mph, where she hangs on similar to Robert De Niro as Max Cady in the 1991 film "Cape Fear". Too bad nobody told the director about this same treatment by the "Simpsons" with Sideshow Bob. I'm sure I'm not the only one surprised by the location of Morocco for this CIA detention cell, instead of somewhere in the US. It becomes obvious later on when Hanna has the opportunity to show off her dexterity with languages, which wouldn't have come up in the US quite so easily. Also, since it was decided by the Director to have the final fight scene in an amusement park in Germany, the CIA detention center had to be someplace from which Hanna could conceivably get to Germany, without a passport or any ID.
At one point in the film Eric Bana picks up a post card at a post office, apparently where they've been holding his mail for the past 14 years, and there's a postcard from Hanna telling him in code she has killed Kate Blanchett, which is unfortunately incorrect. How she bought the stamp, mailed the postcard, or knew which post office Bana would be near is unexplained. The fact that all of this action takes place in a matter of a few days, makes the idea that a post card can get from Morocco or Spain to Germany in that amount of time laughable to anyone who has lived overseas.
There are several editing or continuity errors, like when Hanna kills the reindeer with a bow and arrow, but then guts a reindeer of approximately half the size, and then brings the originally sized reindeer home on a sleigh, apparently having made the sleigh from the raw materials by hand.
The choice of where and when to use blood spatter effects is also interesting. Hanna gets her face splashed when shooting people, and the picture in front of grandma gets covered when Kate Blanchett kills her (again for no reason), but the reindeer is remarkably without blood, even though Hanna is in the process of gutting it.
If you can willingly suspend your disbelief for this film, then you really have no disbelief to suspend.
The story is derivative, the characters are two dimensional and without motivation, the lines are full of clichés, and the violence is unrealistic. Eric Bana is supposed to be the Zen like trainer of Hanna, but he can't seem to handle a Aryan Brotherhood with a knife. I suppose 12 year old girls will like the scene where Hanna flips a Spanish boy who tries to kiss her, but her reactions were closer to that of someone suffering from anti-social personality disorder than of a normal teenager.
The fact that Hanna kills people for little or no reason would seem to suggest that she is in fact meant to be characterized as a serial killer, except that she announces to Eric Bana that she doesn't want to hurt anyone anymore, when all she really needs to do is to stop hurting people.
I found it disconcerting that Eric Bana had spent 14 or so years training Hanna to kill everything that moves, when the CIA was unaware of his or her actual existence. He could just as easily have changed his name and raised Hanna on a ranch in Idaho or a tenement in the South Bronx, but then there wouldn't have been as much of a story, as such.
Hombre (1967)
One of the best westerns ever made
Outstanding direction, writing, acting, and cinematography make this film perhaps the best western ever made, and certainly outstanding in it's genre. The good guys aren't all that good, and the bad guys are despicable. The dialogue is from Elmore Leonard, and is some of the best dialogue ever written, western or not. Example: Early in the film Diane Cilento has retreated to the privacy of a shack to remove her petticoat because of the heat. Paul Newman is in the room, and watches her silently as she bears her legs. Then he says, "You'd better stop right there lady, or I'm gonna know all there is to know about you." Ms Cilento's character Jessie (a hard frontier woman who runs a boarding house and sleeps with the town sheriff) retorts, "You might have cleared your throat." Newman says, "I couldn't, my heart was in it." The minor part cast is also outstanding: Martin Balsam, Richard Boone, Cameron Mitchell, David Canary. I also mention the cinematographer, often overlooked, because it was James Wong Howe (Molly McGuires, This Property is Condemned, Hud, Fantasia) who was one of the greatest cinematographers that has ever lived.