Reviews

I was a big fan of the Far Side comic strips, but I had forgotten this TV special existed until I went through some old VHS tapes and found one that included Tales From the Far Side 1 recorded from its original TV broadcast.

I was excited to watch this lost gem...and then I realized why I had forgotten about it over the years. It's not very funny. Much of the humor is based on animals (and insects) acting like humans, which gets old pretty fast. Most of the funniest bits are lifted straight from previously seen Far Side comic strips. Larson's humor seems to work better as a one-panel image and a punchline - several of the sketches in this TV version were just dragged out far too long.

There no dialog, and hardly any vocals apart from one narrated bit and some singing.

There are bits that are amusing. Like another reviewer, I laughed at the insects on the plane breaking into applause while they watched the horror movie "The Fly". To balance that out though, the part at the end with the guy running from monsters through the woods seemed to go on forever and never really landed a punch line.

Even if you're a huge Far Side fan, don't feel like you missed out if you never saw this.

I loved this movie when I first saw it back in the 1980s. I bought it on VHS tape and watched it enough times that I had most of the jokes memorized. Then the tape went into long-term storage and I kind of forgot about it.

Recently I started digging through my old VHS tapes to see if any of them are worth saving and decided to give this movie a viewing for the first time in probably 30 years or so. I was worried that it wouldn't hold up and I'd be embarrassed about liking it so much as kid, but it's still a surprisingly funny film. Very much in the style of Airplane, but that's not a bad thing.

Some of the jokes haven't aged well and wouldn't pass today's PC sensibilities, and a lot of the topical references are now ancient, but it's still a pretty funny movie with a great cast.

I like weird movies. I like cult movies. I like science-fiction movies. So from what I read about this one, it should have been right up my alley. But it was not. God, was it not.

Nothing about this movie makes the slightest bit of sense. The premise is incredibly stupid. The plot as it unfolds makes zero sense. I kept waiting for something to come along and explain all the idiocy and plot holes, but instead the movie just kept getting dumber and dumber.

This is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie for people who think they like science fiction but don't have the faintest clue what good sci-fi is.

I still can't believe I wasted two hours watching this garbage. This movie was as bad as it gets. I doubt even Mystery Science Theater could make this mess watchable.

Apparently the people who gave this nine or ten stars were watching a completely different movie from what I saw. One of the glowing reviews compared this to Brazil, one of my favorite movies. This is what Brazil would have been if Terry Gilliam was brain dead and had no idea how to make a movie.

In summary, avoid this steaming pile of garbage. Wow, what a terrible movie this is.

Back in the early 80s, when I was still a kid, my parents subscribed to an early cable pay channel called Prism that showed uncut movies (along with sports, etc). Just recently I saw a trivia question about actors who have played Inspector Clouseau, which made me think of Alan Arkin, which suddenly brought back this dim memory of a weird movie I had seen a bunch of times on Prism. Specifically, I was picturing Arkin running through a parking lot with an oven mitt.

Not much to go on, but using IMDB I somehow figured out it was Simon, and a web search revealed that the movie was up on a certain video hosting site that shall remain nameless (but its initials are YT). So I watched it. Turns out my memory is crap. The scene I was thinking of was when Simon escapes from the research facility - he is running through a parking lot, but there's no oven mitt. Instead he sees a woman dancing with a man in a puffy silver suit (it kind of makes sense if you watch the film) and says "That lady is dancing with a potholder!"

That joke really cracked me up as a kid, and the whole weird, off-kilter vibe of the movie just stuck with me over the years. It's kind of a dark comedy, kind of a farce, kind of a social critique and just thoroughly odd. If you're the type that likes "cult" movies and intelligent, offbeat humor, you'd probably love it. If not, you'll probably hate it. It's that type of movie. I doubt there were many viewers who walked away thinking "Eh, it was OK".

Kind of a shame the movie has become so obscure that when you search IMDB for "Simon", it doesn't even come up in the short list of results. I had to get to it by looking at Arkin's film list.

Oh, and one last bit of trivia - while watching it, the music in the final scene seemed really familiar, so I watched the credits...hmmm, nothing that I recognize. Eventually I figured out it was Ravel's "Pavanne De La Belle Au Bois Dorman", and I recognized it because Joe Walsh did a rock instrumental version of it on his "So What" album under the title "Pavanne" and all these years I had no idea it was a famous piece of classical music.

I'm writing this about two-thirds of the way through season 2 (as broadcast on BBC America). This show has become something of an obsession with me - it's easily my favorite thing on TV right now, and one of the best TV shows I've ever seen. I've been trying to get everyone I know who might even be remotely interested to watch it.

If you're looking for a direct translation of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently books to the screen, you'll be disappointed. I liked the books, but the TV show basically just took the character of Dirk and the general spirit of Adams' writing and created a whole new universe around them. The plots of the two seasons don't follow the two books at all, so don't go in with that expectation.

If you're looking for a show that's going to spoon-feed the plot to you, you'll definitely be disappointed. This is a comedy, sci-fi, fantasy show, but at its heart it's a detective story. So each episode lays out some clues, but you're not going to know the whole story until you get to the end of the season. And even then you'll probably want to go back and re-watch the whole thing to figure out what was going on. If you don't like shows that engage your brain, avoid this one.

But if you're looking for something with great, oddball characters, offbeat humor, frantic action and clever dialog, look no further. I'm just hoping for more seasons, and once the series ends I hope they make a DVD or Blu-Ray set of the whole thing available. It'll be an autobuy for me.

The first time I tried to watch this movie, I couldn't even sit through the whole thing. I think I gave up not long after Chris Tucker's ultra-flamboyant character appeared and overwhelmed the movie.

But recently it was on one of the free cable channels that show uncut, commercial-free movies, so I gave it another chance. I think a big part of my initial negative reaction was due to the original trailers and commercials for the movie, which totally misrepresented what it was. The ads made it seem like an epic sci-fi adventure movie with lots of action and attractive women. Well, it does have attractive women. And some action towards the end.

But this isn't really a sci-fi movie at all. It's set in the future and borrows some visual elements from other sci-fi films (I have to admit that apart from some cheesy effects and costumes, the movie looks pretty amazing), but this is purely a cartoony, campy, over-the-top comic book brought to life. If you're going to watch it, don't take any of the characters or the plot lines seriously and you'll have a much better time.

That said, this just isn't a very good movie. Or maybe it's just not what I was expecting and not to my tastes. At any rate, a second viewing 20 years later didn't really improve my opinion of the film very much.

I'm a huge fan of the original Blade Runner movie and the Philip K. Dick book it was based on, so it was with some trepidation that I went to see the sequel. But the film lived up to my expectations, even if they weren't all that high.

On the plus side:

• The sequel does a great job of recreating the look, feel and grit of the first movie. It looks amazing.

• The soundtrack music also does a great job of imitating the first film's score, while also sounding more modern.

• The plot follows logically (sort of) from the first movie, but you don't necessarily have to have seen the first one to follow this one. On the other hand, the movie doesn't spoon-feed the audience, and I overheard a couple people at my showing who had no idea what was going on.

• The film raises a lot of thought-provoking, sci-fi type questions. Just like the first movie, a major theme is "what exactly is real, and what rights do intelligent 'artificial' beings deserve"? Some of the new elements in this one seem like they could have come out of a Philip K. Dick story.

On the negative side:

• The movie is waaaaaaaaay too long. I have a decent attention span, and even I thought the movie dragged. It seemed like half the film played out in slow motion. It made 2001 A Space Odyssey (another film I love, but one of the most deliberately paced movies of all time) look like a taut action thriller. They took an idea that would have made a good hour long TV show and stretched it out to nearly three hours. Way too long.

• The plot, what there is of one, is...kind of hard to buy into. Months ago I saw someone on a movie discussion group predict pretty much exactly what the plot turned out to be, and he was told by everyone else that his idea was ridiculous.

• The movie redefines what a replicant is, although the ones in this film are later generations than the ones in the first film, so I can kind of give them a pass there.

• Seemed like there was a gratuitous amount of female nudity. I'm not complaining really, it just seemed like most of it didn't need to be there.

Overall I liked the movie. I'll probably watch it again when it comes out on Blu-ray. But it's not really the type of movie that the commercials and trailers are pitching it as, and I'm guessing there will be a lot of negative reviews from people who were expecting more car chases and fight scenes. There's not nearly as much action as the first movie.

Oh, and it seems like the last half hour or so is designed to set up more sequels in the future. Which would be cool, but for God's sake pick up the pace on the next one.

I avoided seeing this movie for two years until it came on free TV, just based on the abysmal reviews when it first came out. To those who trashed it so badly - what were you expecting? It's an Adam Sandler movie, it's not going to be masterpiece theatre.

So the premise is ridiculous (aliens create weapons based on 80s arcade games to attack the Earth), the script is silly and at times self-contradictory, some of the humor induces groans rather than laughs and a lot of the acting was over-the-top. OK, maybe I'm seeing where those bad reviews came from...

But if, like me, you practically lived in the arcades in the 80s, this movie is just jam-packed with nods and references to games like Centipede, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Robotron, Burger Time and others. It was fun just trying to identify which games all the alien attackers came from.

My one gripe is that there were some characters that were just made up for the movie. I was scratching my head trying to figure out what game the purple ninjas were from, or where the red dressed warrior lady came from. Turns out they were both invented for the film.

Another questionable aspect is why the intellectual level of this movie is clearly aimed at pre-teens. They weren't even born when these games were popular.

Overall though, if you're looking for a mindless comedy with well done special effects and tons of 80s video game references, this makes for an entertaining couple hours. Just don't expect an Oscar winning film.

The title of my review pretty much says it all. I read in a movie newsgroup what a genius Terrence Malick is. So this weekend I got Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life from the library and watched both. In both cases, it was largely like watching paint dry.

In Tree of Life's favor, at least it wasn't three hours long. Both movies are incredibly pretentious, overly artsy, and feature a seemingly random jumble of short scenes. Both are full of shots that look like beautiful paintings come to life. Both feature characters doing poetic, half-whispered voiceovers to explain the philosophy behind the images we're seeing. Neither movie has what you could call a coherent story, or is particularly entertaining enough to justify their bloated lengths.

I think these two films are enough to prove that Terrence Malick movies aren't for me. And that film critics and movie buffs will praise anything that seems too "artsy" for the unwashed masses.

I read some old newsgroup posts from film buffs discussing this movie, and they almost unanimously agreed that it was visually stunning and a great work of art. Not a straightforward narrative in any sense, but a film to be experienced. Sounded good to me, so I found a copy at a local library and just spent the last few hours watching it.

I think I've learned the secret of making a film that critics and movie enthusiasts will hail as genius. Start with a fairly straightforward drama - in this case, a man dealing with childhood memories of his hardcase father and the loss of his brother. Now chop that up and show it out of sequence to make it harder to follow. Sprinkle liberally with whispered voiceovers, surreal and/or symbolic scenes and shots that are beautiful to look at but which may or may not actually have anything to do with the story. Just the main tale gets rolling, step aside for a half-hour long special effects extravaganza about the creation of the Earth and evolution up through the extinction of the dinosaurs. Finally, top it off with a completely symbolic ending that could be interpreted a dozen different ways. Stand back and let the experts argue about what it all means.

From watching the bonus features on the blu-ray disc, I gathered that the whole movie tries to illustrate the theme stated at the beginning that life is a struggle between Nature and Grace (with the latter being humanity's ability to rise above our animal nature). The whole "creation of life on Earth" sequence is meant to show the inexorable forces of nature, and the father character is a product of that, teaching his sons that life is dog-eat-dog and it's better to sock the other guy on the jaw before he has the chance to hit you and take what's yours. The mother character tries to help her children rise above that and learn love and forgiveness. The character of Jack (shown as a child for most of the film and played by Sean Penn as an adult) struggles to reconcile those two points of view and in the end...has some sort of vision or something. Your guess is as good as mine about what that final scene is supposed to mean.

As a fan of odd movies and artistic directors (favorites include Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick and the Coen Brothers), I thought I'd like this movie more than I did. Having said that...I'll probably watch it again before I return it to the library. Partially for the beautiful visuals (I really want to see the prehistoric scenes again) and partially to see if I can wring any more sense out of it.

A few of the reviews I read before going to see this fifth (and supposedly final) Pirates movie basically boiled down to "well, at least it's better than the last one". I don't know, am I the only one who liked "On Stranger Tides" because it at least tried to do something different with the franchise? This new entry just tosses the soundtrack and best bits of the first three films in a blender, adds a new zombie bad guy and a couple youthful new romantic leads and hits the puree button. They even re-use the "bad guys can walk through the bars of a prison cell" effect from one of the earlier movies.

Yeah, some of the special effects are spectacular, there are battles at sea, lots of stuff blows up, the villains are creepy and some of the comic relief is funny (and some is painfully unfunny), but watching this movie it was hard to shake the feeling that I'd seen it all before. It's pretty much paint-by-numbers, even down to Javier Bardem's bad guy reciting the film's title line just before it appears on screen. Even Depp's Captain Jack seemed largely uninspired.

On the positive side, many of the characters you've come to know from the first four films return for this one. Orlando Bloom's Will Turner shows up to help set up and resolve the plot, and even Keira Knightley makes a very brief appearance. At over two hours long I was afraid the film would drag in spots, but it moved along so quickly that I was actually a little surprised when they reached the big finale.

The plot, without getting into spoilers, revolves around Will's son Henry who is determined to break the curse on his father and rescue him from the Flying Dutchman. In order to do so, he has to retrieve a powerful, magical item that is also being sought by a brilliant young woman with a mysterious map that her unknown father left to her. It soon turns out that they need Jack Sparrow's help, and of course that drags Captain Barbossa into the fray. Opposing them all is the undead Captain Salazar, who bears a grudge against Sparrow and will not rest until he's dead.

There's a very short and unnecessary cameo by Paul McCartney as Jack's uncle Jack. He tells a lame joke, there's a single off-screen laugh as if even the filmmakers realized how pointless the scene was, and then the plot moves on.

One bit where the film really went off the rails was a flashback scene in which we learn why Salazar hates Sparrow so intensely. Instead of hiring a younger actor to play Jack, they digitally de-aged Depp and raised his voice about an octave. The result is just...creepy. And entirely unconvincing.

I don't know if it was just the theater where I saw the movie, but the picture was really dark for a lot of the film and the sound mix was terrible. The explosions and music were super-loud and often drowned out the dialog. I'm glad I didn't see the 3D version because I've heard that's even murkier-looking. At the rate movies are going, in a couple decades the theater experience will be staring at a black screen for two hours while being deafened by a continuous roar.

At any rate, if you loved the earlier films in the Pirates franchise and want another dose, or if you're just looking for a big, mindless spectacle with some bits of humor, this movie fits the bill. I can't say I really disliked it, but it also didn't make me sad that it's supposed to be the last one. Or is it? Stick around for a final scene after the credits that hints at an unlikely sequel. Or maybe it's just meant as some weird sort of joke. I heard people discussing it in the lobby and no one quite knew what to make of it.

I was recently watching a Sherlock Holmes movie from the 70s on one of those TV channels devoted to old movies, and my wife walked in, watched about a minute of it and said "I'm pretty sure the guy playing Sherlock is the same actor who played Merlin in Excalibur". And of course, she was right. She loved Excalibur so much back in the 80s that she bought a framed copy of the movie poster which hangs proudly in our living room.

So that observation led us to dig out our DVD of Excalibur and watch it for the first time in decades. And you know what? It still holds up. You can tell by some of the hairstyles, effects and other details that it was made in the 1980s, but overall this movie has aged remarkably well. And a lot of the actors who were unknowns (at least to us) back then have become household names in the years since (Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart).

Now, one could certainly make the argument that this film is way over the top in nearly every aspect. The actors chew so much scenery that you can almost hear the director off screen yelling "More! Bigger! Sell it!" Everyone wears shiny armor all the time, the good guys are incredibly good and the bad guys are incredibly evil. And then there's the soundtrack that uses a ton of Wagner and the O Fortuna section of Carmina Burana no less than three times. But it's all fitting for a serious film about the Arthurian legends. If the scene towards the end where Arthur, recently healed by the holy grail, rides out with his knights and brings the land back to life while O Fortuna blares in the background doesn't bring a tear to your eye, you might be dead.

Balancing out all this seriousness to some degree is the character of Merlin (played wonderfully by Nicol Williamson), who has a few wicked one-liners and adds a much-needed dose of subtle humor to nearly every scene he's in.

Many of the actors do a remarkable job of portraying their characters all the way from youth to old age. It's almost hard to believe that it's Nigel Terry playing both the young Arthur who acts as a squire for his brother at a joust early in the film and the elderly, gray-haired Arthur in the climactic battle.

Another reviewer mentioned that this film came out just a few years after Monty Python's Holy Grail movie (which I also love) making Excalibur play almost like an anti-parody, with many nearly identical scenes done with deadly earnestness. Well...of course the movies are going to have similar scenes - they're both based on the same legends. The Pythons just took it in a comedic direction while Boorman played it mostly straight.

All in all, this will probably always be my favorite King Arthur movie. Before the Lord of the Rings movies came along, this was the best epic fantasy film I'd ever seen. And it's still one of the best.

While browsing the movies at a local library, this one jumped out at me - psychedelic looking cover, big list of name actors on the front, interesting and plot blurb on the back...so I took a chance. And ended up wasting two and half hours watching what looked like an attempt to do a prequel to The Big Lebowski that went wrong in every way possible.

The film is based on a book, so I assume there was a plot buried in there somewhere under all the mumbled, slurred or whispered dialog, confusing and disconnected scenes that go nowhere and cardboard acting. The director must have realized that no one was going to be able to follow this, so he added a hippie astrologer chick as the narrator, but she's even more confusing and annoying than the movie she's trying to explain.

From the start I couldn't tell what was going on, and every time I felt like I might be starting to understand a bit of it, the plot (such as it was) would veer off in a completely different direction. When the thing finally ended, I had no idea what happened, I was just glad it was over.

It had something to do with a stoner detective named Doc living in the early 1970s. He gets tipped off about a missing millionaire real estate developer by his crazy ex-girlfriend. But then he is told about something called the "Golden Fang" by an Asian prostitute. But before he gets too deep into that, he is sidetracked by a supposedly dead jazz musician who turns out to be an unwilling FBI undercover agent. And there's a bitter police detective named Bigfoot who wants to be an actor and seems to get all his leads from Doc. None of this really adds up to a coherent story.

I have to give the movie credit for using some interesting music in the soundtrack (Can's "Vitamin C", Neil Young's "Journey Through the Past", etc). Some of the performances are good like Josh Brolin as Bigfoot, and occasionally Joaquin Phoenix as Doc, when he's not mugging for the camera. There were a couple laughs, although most of the attempts at humor fall pretty flat.

Overall recommendation: avoid. There are far better ways you could waste two and a half hours of your life.

I'm a big fan of Kubrick's films, so back in the early days of DVDs I bought a boxed set that contained Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Lolita and Barry Lyndon. I had never seen the last two on that list, so I was really looking forward to watching them. Lolita, apart from the intentionally creepy subject matter, wasn't bad. And then I got to Barry Lyndon.

On first viewing, I couldn't believe this movie was made by the same person who had made those others. What a dull, dragging, pretentious...did I mention dull?...movie this is. Now, I can handle deliberately slow-paced movies. I love 2001 and that film is almost as glacially paced as this one. But when that slow pace is coupled with a painfully boring story and wooden acting, it makes for a nearly unwatchable movie.

It probably didn't help that Warner Brothers crammed a movie that's over three hours long onto a single DVD, resulting in sub-VHS video quality. But within half an hour I was looking at the clock, wondering how much longer the movie had to go. By the time it reached the intermission an hour and 40 minutes in, when most movies would have the decency to just end, I was ready to give up. But I soldiered on and watched the remaining hour and a half...I should have just gone with my original instincts.

What made me return to this movie recently was that my wife is a big fan of 18th century period piece movies, so she had watched the last two thirds of this one on TV and asked me to get the DVD out so she could see the part she missed. She liked the detailed costumes and settings, and actually enjoyed the story. So I thought maybe my original opinion had been hasty and maybe I should give it another try.

Nope, this movie is just awful. Such flat, bland acting and boring direction it's like the film was given some experimental treatment to extract any emotion, action or interest from it. The main character, Redmond Barry, rises from poverty in Ireland to wealth and high society in Europe not by any virtues of his own, but mostly through stupidity, cowardice and cheating. Once he finally steals the wife of a sickly Lord, he loses any likability he had in the first half of the movie and changes suddenly into a disagreeable jerk who mistreats his wife and cheats on her while squandering her family fortune. Why exactly are we supposed to care about this guy? I guess you can't expect perfection every time, but it's hard to believe the same guy who created Dr. Strangelove, 2001 and Clockwork Orange was responsible for this mess.

Maybe it's just because I prefer sci-fi to period dramas, but I can't for the life of me understand why this clunker has an 8.1 average on IMDb and so many people have given it raving reviews. I can appreciate that the costumes, dialog and settings are all very authentic to the time period, but so what? That alone doesn't make for a good movie. This film should only be taken as a cure for insomnia.