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colinpearse
Reviews
Avatar (2009)
It could have been a classic
I seem to be in a minority who believes that a film's score depends on many factors. Some of which undoubtedly get 9/10. These include the obvious like special effects and direction. However, plot and imagination score poorly, as do dialogue and cliché avoidance. It's fine to take coral reefs as inspiration for an extraterrestrial jungle but it isn't new; neither are floating rocks; illuminating the ground with each step is a tribute to Michael Jackson, I get that; alien sex, which is much like ours only taller; horses with extra legs (come on!); and dragons!? Are our human minds so limited that artists have to fall back on mythical creatures? I might be judging unfairly here. Maybe we've conceived of all we are able to conceive for marketable films. Anything else just wouldn't sell.
And then there's the plot. The good guys win. I've clicked on "contains spoilers" just in case no one knew. Okay, so maybe the question is how. And that is another of my gripes about this movie. Strength won the day. The more woolly among us may say the forces of nature or forces of good intentions did but you only have to scratch the surface of this very superficial and moralising plot to see that winning didn't happen without it. No cleverness or ingenuity, just brute force. The irony is is that this is a sanctimonious movie with an unintentionally gloomy moral.
After seeing the way the majority voted (and I include my own 6/10 vote in that) I think the abiding moral for producers might be; make a movie with lots of bright colours and flashing lights and you're onto a winner.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Breathtaking drug tale
This is an astoundingly truthful and honest depiction of drug use and abuse; and the way society deals with it. Still (unfortunately) relevant today and I fear will still be relevant in the future. It a beautiful story of addiction in all its forms woven around a story of precarious triumph; where easy gains from illegal drugs (made profitable merely by the virtue of being prohibited) can turn into an easy descent when that scarce commodity becomes scarcer. And when almost all seems lost, it shows an unsympathetic society can go further and take the rest. A damning indictment of a society that would rather fund incarceration than treatment (money well spent the sanctimonious may cry). Even the unwary and innocent are not spared as they are sucked too into the same vortex of self-abuse and addiction, only to be abused more by the cack-handed therapy of the day. A symphony of human misery. A masterpiece.
Gerry (2002)
Landscapes hog the movie
This movie has a lot of beautifully shot mountains, ravines, dunes and deserts. There a smattering of realistic dialogue between the two characters and some emotional content due to the situation. There is also a number of lengthy background shots and several prolonged shots of our two protagonists (co-writers too) walking, sitting and lying down. If you are repeatedly mesmerised by these extended panoramic scenes then you won't need the fast-forward button on your DVD.
Apparently the above is not enough to submit so I'll elaborate: It would be nice to discover via the actors/writers and director more about the two characters we are presented with in this film. If this movie were really to show us a story of several days lost in tundra like plains in 100 minutes of film I am sure more interesting interactions between the characters would have taken place. I love to see impressive scenery in films but personally I think it ought to take a backseat to plot and/or characterisation. If conveying the passing of time was the goal than there must be a better way of presenting it other than simply filming it. Long-lasting real-time scenes seem to work wonders in other films, there was expectation, there was some emotion. Here I felt very little.
Masked and Anonymous (2003)
Wooden and Unsubtle
The most striking thing about this movie is the how unsubtle and painfully unambiguous the dialogue is. Celebrity mouth pieces appear on-set to relate point after laboured point, driven home with a mallet until the final blow; a final slogan explaining what the preceding text meant just in case you hadn't grasped it. I'm used to being spoon-fed by the Hollywood machine but would never have expected it from the likes of Bob Dylan.
Every celebrity in the picture talks in the same monotonous laboured prose giving the feeling that the whole movie consists of paper *celebrity* cut-outs brought to life by a tired narrator. You could randomly swap the celebrities lines around with each other and you wouldn't know the difference. If this was the intention then it doesn't make for an interesting movie unless it has something new to say, and it doesn't. Maybe the writers thought the same as I did after the initial screening, and why they decided to use the pseudonyms; Sergei Petrov and Rene Fontaine for the writing credits instead of their own names.
2001: A Space Travesty (2000)
Banal
I had assumed this movie would contain a humour similar to that of the writers: Abrahams, Zucker, Zucker who did Top Secret, Airplane and Naked Gun. It doesn't. Very unfunny. Most of the humour here is slapstick that can in itself be funny, but not when it's predictable and contrived and repetitive as it is in this film. "Oh look he's slipped and put ink on his face, ha, ha". "Oh, oh! That Frenchman has said fart when he intended to say fort, oh how hilarious"... are maybe some of the thoughts that will go through your head when you watch this movie or maybe you'll just cringe. A few members of the audience gave sarcastic mocking laughter in the same way and was actually more funny than the movie itself. If you ever have a chance to see the movie then save 2 hours of your life and look elsewhere for entertainment.