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Reviews
Climbing Great Buildings (2010)
Can't understand low ratings!
This is a quirky and unusual take on British architectural history by climbing the exteriors and in some cases interiors of Durham Cathedral, Lincoln Cathedral, Caernarfon Castle, New College, Oxford, Layer Marney Tower, Burghley House, St Paul's Cathedral, Blenheim Palace, Clifton Suspension Bridge, St Pancras Railway Station and Midland Hotel, Glasgow School of Art, Royal Liver Building, Coventry Cathedral, Lloyd's Building, and Imperial War Museum North.
It's a very close-up view of building design, construction and materials.
And there are much, much worse cultural documentaries and hosts out there with MUCH higher ratings! (See anything with the truly ghastly Dan Cruikshank, for example.)
Man Hunt (1941)
Astoundingly bad
Preposterous twaddle executed in a bewilderingly amateurish and inept way -- or perhaps several since the incredible lack of continuity, tone, realism, plausibility, suspense, and much more combine with Walter Pidgeon's bovine attempts at charm to produce a cinema curiosity to rank with some of Fritz Lang's other stupendous failures. (I thought the German ambassador was actually played by Lang but apparently not -- they could have been twins.) If you cannot predict the ending from several timezones away, you are not actually alive.
I was eagerly awaiting this DVD and was totally surprised and disappointed by such dire crap (even with George Sanders and John Carradine -- maybe I can wash my mind out by watching Viaggio in Italia instead and for the umpteenth time).
Anyone want a DVD used once? (There may be a movie to be made about the making of this atrocious film and how so many talented people could be wasted so completely.)
I, Claudius (1976)
Not THAT wonderful
If you want to understand something of the exercise of absolute power in the early Roman Empire, this is not for you.
I still cannot understand the delirious praise heaped on this version of "I Claudius" which is overwhelmingly superficial, inaccurate and a kind of infantile, tabloid version of the far better novels by Robert Graves (who had a sense of humour though you wouldn't guess it from this comic book version) and which he recognised as fiction even if some of readers could not.
This confusion seems to have increased.
The real Augustus, to take just one example, was physically slight, intellectually subtle and personally formidable so casting Brian Blessed (of all people - was it some kind of grotesque joke? - he looks like a butcher on his day off) in that role in "I Claudius" was grotesquely wrong. (Roland Culver in the old B&W "The Caesars" was an infinitely better choice.)
George Baker simply cannot hack it as the dark, malignant and interesting Tiberius and John Hurt is truly appalling as a totally loony Caligula - perhaps the worst performance of his otherwise substantial career.
This is by no means "real" history and shows almost no understanding of tyranny, empire and the realities of exercising power in any period.
Watch "The Caesars" instead - if you can get hold of a copy.
Around the World in 80 Treasures (2005)
Superficial drivel doled out by a pompous poseur
Is this some kind of surreal joke? A clueless, maladroit windbag tours "his" selection of world "treasures" and is locked out, finds the treasure invisible in mist or bestows such comments as "absolutely stunning" (on the Easter Island statues!) while endlessly complaining about scheduling problems. World civilisation is here made stupendously dull presented by someone who achieves the difficult feat of being extremely superficial and tediously rambling at the same time while being apparently unable to get off-screen long enough for viewers actually to see or appreciate the "treasures" he is so earnestly and witlessly wheezing about. So shallow and brief is the treatment of each treasure here that if you blink, you will miss one or two -- but, sadly, you will not escape the whittering of the truly appalling Dan Cruikshank whose confidence in his own narrow and banal "Little England" aesthetic judgements is such that he needs no actual expertise in casting his pearls before us. This seems to be the same absurd Cruikshank who had a tiny flash of fame with his extravagant, apparently unsubstantiated claims downplaying the scale of the looting of the Baghdad Museum, asserting that the Museum was a legitimate military target and charging that the looting was "an inside job". (Not very surprisingly, Iraq does not figure as a location for any of these treasures.) In short, this bloke seems to be a rather irritating idiot and, putting it kindly, not exactly authentic in his excessively self-conscious eccentricity. Watch this at your own risk -- good earplugs or "MUTE" would certainly help. Highly recommended for gullible people with absolutely no prior knowledge of history or culture or anyone who is interested in seeing how very low the BBC documentary has now fallen.
Keeping Mum (2005)
Bright little dark comedy
Light and bright and full of fun with a deft script showing yet again how critically important a factor it is.
Then there is the big plus of seeing Maggie Smith playing something other than the implausible faux-aristocratic harridans that seem to have blighted her career.
Rowan Atkinson shows that he is more than a comedian -- he is a fine comic actor. Kristin Scott Thomas does masterly exasperation and Patrick Swayze does masterly sleaze.
The kids are just right and the indefatigable Liz Smith sails like a somewhat ragged battleship across the screen and the Stalin of the church flower arranging committee who is vigilant in heading off any potential coups.
Totally professional in the best sense with a deft comic touch and the priceless gift of not signalling to the audience what is coming next.
Make sure you watch through to the last watery frame. You may not look at shovels or luggage in quite the same way ever again.
The Prestige (2006)
Ab-ra-cadaver
Fans of truly great bad acting, crushed birds, bogus history, boredom, bogus science, preening smugness and amateur amputation -- this idiotic flimflam is for you.
And if you thought mining or bridge-building was a dangerous game around 1899, think again. Stage magic was apparently fatal or, at last, crippling for nearly everyone involved -- especially if you were an assistant or a canary. Might have been a sound move to avoid using blind (I am not making this up) stagehands.
Playing tricks on the audience is as old as film -- perhaps the medium itself should be seen as one big trick -- but this is so clunkily done and so much is signalled in advance (just one example of many -- closeup of rope, medium shot of distraught woman, closeup of rope again, then, abracadabra, silhouette shot of human pendulum -- and watch out for anyone with a limp and of being hit over the head by repeated, blatant examples of duality).
Except for Caine, Serkis (maybe) and the feline Bowie, the performers of these very unlikeable characters are cringingly inept with Hugh Jackman taking the marzipan for playing multiple roles so astoundingly badly that you wonder if he thinks great acting consists of SHOUTING while crying and, possibly, having your nose run (or was that yet another tear?). After all, I suppose, if you can't be childishly histrionic at your own wife's funeral, what's the point of turning up? And as the out-of-work actor (if only!) Jackman seems to be doing an outrageous send-up of Robert Newton (not known for his own under-playing, I think).
If the idea of such cardboard cutout characters battling over who is the greater not-very-inspired magician seems a bit thin, well, you might be on to something -- at more than two hours this is wildly overlong as well as overwrought. It is also a bit hard to care who wins the "duel" (or how) if you think each is a boring, revolting, homicidal creep.
Even the magic business is supposed to be entertaining from time to time but these guys aren't just magicians, they're psychics and so know all about tricks like Sawing a Woman in Half which, as Chris Priest knows, was invented by an illusionist called Selbit and not performed until 1921. (According to the author the dueling magicians' story ends in 1903.)
And where does the sadomasochism come from? With all the gloating over gore, violent death and grime, you'd think Mel "Mad Monk" Gibson had had a bloody hand in this.
Yet all this grimness is so very silly -- no sense of period; no sense of the theatre or of how magicians actually work; no point of view; no sense of time (which does, probably, have a kind of inexorable reality); above all, not a trace of irony or humour (though some in the audience I was in laughed when one of the ridiculous Hugh Jackman characters fell down). I suppose, though, it is rather comical if the great (offstage) villain is Thomas Edison -- in fact, he may be the Moriarty here, the Napoleon of Crime -- let's hear it for direct current.
There may be an interesting movie to be made about the business of magic in the late 19th Century theatre -- but this is definitely not it. It's a typical Hollywood mess which says nothing new, makes not a whole lot of sense and assumes (perhaps correctly) that the audience is a pack of clods. The novel (as usual) makes more sense than the movie which is (as usual) the mucked-up, dumbed-down version of part of the story. While you can't set a whole novel on film (though there have been some interesting attempts) you don't need to turn it into some sort of crazy, inept pantomime set in a mortuary.
Many of the changes/"improvements" are inexplicable -- why, for example, is Rupert Angier now Robert? Murdoch-phobia?? Some are crudely for US consumption -- you try putting a pre-decimal English penny in a pistol and see how far you get!
And it's full of unsubtle tricksiness such as "AB" (Alfred Borden) "RA" (Robert Angier) "C" (Cutter - no first name? Like Sabu or Paladin?) and for all I know there may be a "DA" "BR" "A" lurking somewhere - but by now who cares? This is the sort of thing that seems clever to people who don't get out too much.
Perhaps someone could re-edit this dreary rubbish to transform it into a real movie; cutting out (or dubbing with a human voice) any character mugged by Mr Jackman might be an excellent starting point.
But I would much rather have listened to Cutter talking the illusion business over with Tesla -- especially on precisely how you deal with the blood and the noise when you smash a live bird on a table top or how you can produce all that Tesla lightning without deafening performers and audience with Tesla thunder.
Is The Illusionist any better?
Gosford Park (2001)
Not as bad as Pret-a-Porter -- but what could be?
The Player sells out on a "period" piece. Looks great; sounds terrible.
You might enjoy Gosford Park if you like a feeble plot, illiterate script and overall a kind of pompous, superficial windbaggery of the worst sort -- a farcical servants' eye scrapbook of what some might think the ruling class.
This pointless, vastly overlong (should lose 40 minutes and half a dozen characters at least), confused claptrap has some of the foullest performances by some great British actors on film (especially Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith yet again, Alan Bates and Stephen Fry).
They are not helped by the ludicrously implausible behaviour of the circus of cardboard characters -- they seem to talk business ALL the time (so common) and money! Even the tiresome American character/s (is Ryan Phillippe playing an American -- or anyone -- in Act II?) are incredible as people and everyone seems be shouting at each other ALL THE TIME or whispering. Whatever "witty" venom on offer is spectacularly childish and no-one seems to be listening to what anyone else is saying (wisely, I believe).
It is hard to believe that anyone could take this appalling drivel remotely seriously, especially when big chunks of plot are doled out from time to time with such clunky clumsiness.
When is it set? Hard to tell since the period bits and pieces are all over the place -- and Bloody Mary (the drink, not the monarch) was first recorded in England in 1956. And precisely where would "bought" marmalade be available? And what was wrong with Frank Cooper's Oxford anyway?
Where is it set? Those standard rent-a-great-house locations that now look more like horrible new-rich "country house" convention and wedding reception centres than anywhere real people might actually live? Is there any coherent floor plan of the house and the catacombs for the far-too-obtrusive servants? (Continuity seems to have been a big problem here.)
See The Shooting Party, Rules of the Game, The Magnificent Ambersons or Remains of the Day instead -- do not waste your time with this dreadful tin-eared goo.
Treacle (1988)
Everything fizzes - see it if you can.
Treacle is a strange reincarnation of English music hall seen at times through the eyes of a small child and therefore exhilarating and scary at the same time and, much later, at a modern leisure venue.
My memory is that the character played by Stephen Tompkinson is actually the grandson of the (relatively) great music hall star and that his own father (the child) was horrified by the pier entertainments and became a music teacher. In the grandson, the raw ability to put a song across reemerges in a concert at a ghastly leisure centre filmed as if it were one of the nastier pits of hell.
And there is more - all in a very brisk 12 minutes or so.
Incidentally, I was surprised a the low votes this got from some people; perhaps the thumbs-downers might explain why they so hate this crackling little short.
The Caesars (1968)
Better than "I Claudius" by far
Having seen "The Caesars" when I was at school, I could not understand the swooning praise heaped on "I Claudius" which is comparatively superficial, inaccurate and a travesty.
To take just one example, the real Augustus was physically slight, intellectually subtle and personally formidable so casting Brian Blessed as Augustus in "I Claudius" was grotesquely wrong. Roland Culver was an infinitely better choice.
This was a series about the realities of power in any period - and rather closely followed the surviving record of the sophisticated and lurid Roman historian Suetonius.
The DVD was released in April 2006 - PAL/Region 2 - and is available from Amazon in the UK - but IMDb does not seem to have heard of this yet. The picture is sometimes rather dodgy but it is probably as good as we will get - and TV production was pretty rough in 1968 (compared to today's digitalised everything).
The writing and acting are still superb.
Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran (2003)
Memories do not always make perfect sense
In reading some of the comments here, I wondered if I had seen the same movie.
We are being told a story that consists entirely of Momo's memories, impressions and, possibly, fantasies of when he was growing up.
So it seems strange that, for example, some reviewers complain here that there is not enough formal comparative religion or, God/Allah/Yahweh help us, that the film is antisemitic.
I also wondered why no-one (apparently) mentioned what Momo found inside M. Ibrahim's Koran (which surprised and intrigued me) and what that might mean.
The message boards didn't help much -- and there was more ranting about more or less nothing and "facts" that seems unlikely, to say the least.
Then I found the author's site and things started to make a lot more sense.
Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt tells us that Momo and Monsieur Ibrahim are two people who pass unnoticed through the world. Momo is an only child with no mother, and a father who barely deserves the name of 'father', too sunk in depression to take care of his son and bring him up, or teach him and hand on to him a taste for life and its principles. As for Monsieur Ibrahim, the only thing anyone asks of him is that he give them the correct change. Both man and boy change their lives as they get to know one another. Their encounter is a marvelous enrichment.
The author notes that there has been a lot of verbiage about the fact that the child is Jewish and the grocer Muslim -- "Rightly so. It was a deliberate move to create them like that. I set out to prove something and be provocative. What I wanted to prove was that in many places in the world (European capitals, ports, American cities, North African villages), people of different religions from different backgrounds live together in harmony. In Paris, Rue Bleue, the road where this story takes place and where I once lived and which definitely isn't blue, was largely inhabited by Jews with a few Christians and Muslims. They all shared not only the same street, but daily life, their joys, discontents and conversation. Friendships or mutual understanding developed among these people who came from just about everywhere, either geographically or spiritually. In this unpretentious quartier down from Montmartre, I felt I was living somewhere rich and burgeoning, where cultures met, took an interest in each other and joked about their differences."
Also, when Momo is handed Monsieur Ibrahim's old Koran, he finds what was in it -- dried blue flowers. The Koran is the text but it is also what Monsieur Ibrahim has placed in it -- his life, his way of reading, his interpretation. According to the author, "spirituality is not about repeating sentences parrot-fashion, but about grasping the meaning and understanding the concept and shades of meaning, the implications. True spirituality is only worthwhile when obedience and freedom are balanced".
There is a quite a bit more that you may find useful and interesting - search "Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt" if you want to explore further.
The Producers (2005)
Surprisingly atrocious
What a waste of talent - did anyone actually see this in production? It's a bit like watching an early silent film when stage actors had not learned movie technique - that what might work across a cavernous hall is grotesque and simply dumb to do on film. And in modern extreme closeups, this kind of extravagant mugging looks amateurish and clownish - or like having some kind of seizure.
Perhaps the success of the Broadway show so great that no-one had the guts to say that this pathetic filmization just is not funny.
But it is wheezy, clumsy, tedious and v-e-r-y v-e-r-y l-o-n-g with even more of the sub-adolescent crudities that have stained much of Mel Brooks's later work.
Maybe it's my problem but repeated erection gags ceased to be hilarious when I was about 12.
I really wanted (and expected) to love this film (as I do the Mostel/Wilder original); I hated it and still find it hard to believe that I considered walking out after about 10 hair-raisingly awful minutes.