tiercel1 Reviews

The End of the Affair (1999)

"Love" of no consequence

[1/10 · 2 November 2014]

"I'm bored with my husband." "I'm bored with my life." "Let's have sex like teenagers." "Sweet."

Welcome to "true love," _End of the Affair_ style. No indication of how the lead characters came to actually "love" each other, or what that "love" consisted of besides sex or creepy obsessive jealousy.

The "twist" when it comes is underwhelming, to say the least, and involves retreading material that was dull the first time, and depends on the trite inability of the estranged hormone-weasels to actually TALK to each other. That's true love right there, folks.

But hey, being a creepy obsessive stalker pays off, which is {sarcasm}an awesome moral to impart{/sarcasm}. Or rather, it would pay off for more than a brief interlude if it weren't for the glaringly obvious Chekov's gun being fired. The predictable denouement that follows rambles rather interminably, right to a saccharine beatification and cheap attempt at a metaphysical love/hate relationship with God. Meaningful, see?

This movie wants to be a self-indulgent tragedy, but it's just tragic.

The Purge (I) (2013)

Star Trek TOS ripoff: "One Percenters Behaving Badly/Stupidly"

[1/10 · 7 June 2014]

The original series of Star Trek had this idea a long time ago and did it better. This movie takes that premise and drowns it in a whole lot of stupid.

"Advanced" security system as some laughable metal screens and security cameras? Check. (Safe room? Active defenses to keep people attacking the metal screens? Layered defenses at all? JUST LEAVING THE COUNTRY? Why do any of that?) All crime is legal EXCEPT weapons above a certain grade or attacking government officials above a certain rank, but no one is available to enforce these restrictions? Check.

Bringing a knife to a gunfight? Check.

Using gun as a melee weapon? Check.

Splitting up protagonists to wander alone in under-siege danger situation? Check.

Depending on guns for your family to defend themselves, but with no particular evidence any of them are trained to use guns, or are trusted for much of the movie to have or use a gun until it's dramatically appropriate? Check.

"I want to 'purge' by engaging in random murder, but I will pause to gloat/pose when I'm about to actually accomplish said murder so I can be completely unsurprisingly shot from behind at the last moment that I have so helpfully supplied?" Check. (More than once.) "Let me compromise the supposed safety of our "secure" home to let a total stranger in"? Check.

"I drive a creepy remote-control Chucky-doll spycam around my own home, to no real end"? Check.

Creepy older possessive boyfriend thinking "if I kill my hot younger girlfriend's dad then I will win her heart or at least her body"? Check. (Bonus points for this being then essentially unimportant for the rest of the movie, once the boyfriend is summarily killed for the crime of attacking a protagonist.) One could go on, but most egregiously, the movie gives us one-percenter protagonists who feel entitled to hold themselves above the violence that engulfs the country, one-percenter antagonists who feel entitled to "cleanse" society of "lesser" (i.e. less-rich) members, and more one-percenter antagonists who want to take vengeance on our unsympathetic protagonists for being slightly richer than they are (when they should be taking vengeance for being sold crappily unimpressive "security" systems).

The best-case scenario would be the tough, apparently innocent black veteran being the only survivor, with all the unsympathetic characters killing each other off. (Spoiler: this does not happen.)

Castle: After the Storm (2012) Season 5, Episode 1

Shark seems well in the past...

[1/10 · 20 October 2012]

If there was a jumping-the-shark moment, it wasn't the hookup... it happened last season when the will-they-or-won't-they "tension" became more important to the show than its wacky, unlikely police-procedural comedy.

I could have accepted more of a shift to serious drama (the conspiracy behind Beckett's mother's murder, a more serious relationship between Beckett and Castle), but the relationship issues played out more like painful awkward teenage angst than serious dramatic development.

I was hoping that just giving in and letting the leads hook up might let the show get past making Our Heroes act like insecure kids and either get back to the fun wacky silly that made the show fun... or go on to significant character development and more serious drama. Instead, the show and the season opens with such excruciating sophomoric awkwardness that subsequent episodes are languishing unwatched on our DVR.

I only got through last season through sheer inertia, watching because of how fun Castle had been through its first three seasons and hoping that the show would break out of its funk (one so bad that characters in the show were hanging a lampshade on the fact that leads were clearly, obviously, blatantly in love but required by plot to be unable to talk about it all season).

If there's not going to be any real character development, let Castle just be a fun, silly, wacky comedy. (Beckett and Castle could maintain essentially the same obviously-in-a-relationship badinage from the early seasons while BEING in a relationship, really.) If we are going to let characters actually take on lives of their own and grow, let that happen; let them act like actual adults in a relationship. But the "relationship" between the leads has gone from obvious wink-wink-nudge-nudge "coyness" to artificially maintaining "tension" by requiring monumental blind stupidity on the part of both leads.

Eventually I may give Castle another try, but a season starter that's put the entire series on hiatus again already deserves no better than 1/10 from me.

Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012 TV Movie)

Excruciatingly dull

[1/10 · 30 May 2012]

It's not a good sign when everyone in a movie is busy praising the main characters in lieu of the characters actually exhibiting any of the traits that would presumably make them interesting or praiseworthy.

Welcome to "Hemingway and Gellhorn," a picture overblown with its own importance and desperately in need of an editor's scalpel. Ironic that this should be so, given how Hemingway is so often cited for his "terse, lean" style, much less Gellhorn's necessarily efficient war correspondence journalism.

The lethargic disjointed pretense of a plot finds itself upstaged by cameras fading between monochrome and full color as well the occasional tawdry unconvincing grapple of a sex scene in lieu of actual romance. While the paper-thin writing gives Kidman and Owen little to do with their characters, they might as well be phoning this one in, for all the depth they invest in this film.

Man on Fire (2004)

Tremendously dull "Man on Fire" never ignites

[1/10 · 20 May 2012]

There's a reason so many critics panned this movie (and many of those who didn't, were tepid in their endorsements) -- it ponders itself far too seriously, when in fact it is not much more than a poorly-mishmashed combination of paint-by-the-numbers elements.

The man who's hit rock bottom.

The cute child who gives him reason to believe again.

The "shocking" irony that caring about the child leads to her getting kidnapped (since she runs back into the danger).

The cold brutal revenge arc.

Redemption via narrative demand for it (because one self sacrificing act completely wipes out any other considerations).

Furthermore, the pacing is painfully slow; each act of the movie drags on until the inevitable transition to the next act is clearly telegraphed. When even the brutal action revenge segment is lethargic and dull, it's a sign of how little editing has taken place to tighten up the storytelling.

I can't give a movie credit for just trying to have a message when its storytelling credentials are so utterly lacking.

Mansfield Park (1999)

Things you never knew about Jane Austen

[11 August 2008]

Apparently, if you are to believe that this movie is at all a faithful adaptation of the book, Jane Austen was just fine with depictions of:

-- overt lesbianism -- interracial violence including rape -- implied incest (no, not just cousins) -- explicit adulterous sex

Forget the fine details of who gets whose lines and which characters or events have been tinkered with in order to adapt the movie -- these themes *being shown* are not in the spirit of Austen in the slightest.

If you are going to change the tone of Austen this much for modern sensibilities, it would be better just to move the entire movie into the present day and present it as a loose, updated and heavily modified adaptation, rather than cloak it in historical garb and pretend it is anything like the fairly close adaptation of, say, the 1995 P&P miniseries.

As a movie on its own merits, this is nothing really special. As an interpretation of Jane Austen's style generally, it is more a *perversion* of her spirit than any kind of faithful adaptation.

La Vie En Rose (2007)

Disjointed story doesn't disguise lack of storytelling ability

[1/10 · 27 July 2008]

Sometimes, the flashback can be an effective tool. Sometimes a story is best told in pieces rather than a single, linear, contiguous whole.

This movie? Goes to the other extreme. We are whipsawed back and forth all over the main character's life, increasingly as the runtime progresses -- doing little to advance our understanding or sympathy for the character. In fact, it seems specifically concocted to try and make the story more incomprehensible or simply to obscure the fact that the makers of this movie couldn't stand to try and tie together the thread of Edith Piaf's life, preferring to serve up a mishmash of melodramatically tragic vignettes.

In particular, as has been mentioned, I'm not sure that revealing the death of the main character's daughter only near the end accomplishes much, or anything. It's not a "big reveal" or unlocks anything that we've seen all film; it seems cheap that such a particular tragedy would be deliberately hidden until near the end, and then treated as a throwaway reference. But then... characters who aren't Edith Piaf are largely treated as throwaway, popping in and out of disjointed scenes seemingly at random.

There are some who might turn up their nose at linear storytelling because it is somehow too simple to lay out the line of someone's life, and forces you to make sense of the presence of others in that person's life. Using flashbacks, nonlinear disjointed scenes would require *more* skill, not less, to portray facts of the main character's personality more effectively -- a skill that is sadly, even wholly, lacking in this film.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

Execrable tedium

[1/10 · 18 December 2007]

I have to admit, looking at some of the other comments here I'm not sure if I and other reviewers saw the same movie. I want the mind-dulling 2:40 of my life back.

Moreso than even your average Hollywood movie, this picture is overlong. Sufficiently overlong, in fact, that it makes the overblown title seem succinct in comparison; it has one of the lowest plot-to-movie-runtime ratios I have ever encountered in cinema. (And at least a film like, say, Koyaanisqatsi, does not pretend to involve plot but is more honestly a painting in motion rather than a photoplay.) I did not come into this movie expecting a typical, shoot-em-up Western. But at the same time, some hint of charisma in the portrayal of Jesse James, some hint or shadow of how one of the most famous outlaws in American history *became* famous and even revered, would have been appropriate here. This movie relies on *telling* us Jesse James is revered and having a simpering Robert Ford hanging at his heels for most of the picture like a spineless puppy dog. There is very little in the character himself to suggest even past greatness or charisma. Russell Crowe's Ben Wade in "3:10 to Yuma" illustrates -- even, and especially outside of the actual shoot-em-up scenes -- the kind of charisma, the personal presence, force of personality, what have you, that make his gang fanatically loyal to him. There is essentially no trace of this from Brad Pitt's Jesse James. If the viewer's knowledge of history and the film's many narrative assurances weren't constantly reminding us that Jesse James was a Very Great Man, you certainly wouldn't guess it from the portrayal of the character here.

As for the portrayal of Robert Ford, it is overly kind to call the performance nuanced or low-key; it is so low-key that there might as well not even be any music. The character is weak, dull, uninteresting, and shows very little actual development. Essentially, he goes from being a lightly-regarded lightweight who retreats into his Jesse James fantasies to a lightly-regarded lightweight who is spurned by the object of his fantasies to a self-puffed up caricature of himself, cashing in on his notoriety (or rather, as the film might have us believe, the notoriety of Jesse James) before someone finally, mercifully ends his "story" and thus the movie.

As for the other characters in this film, they are sufficiently even more forgettable that I have literally forgotten them. Large stretches of film yawn, devoid of anything happening, great empty spaces more forsaken than the Western landscapes the cinematography so lovingly dwells upon. Main characters disappear from the screen for long periods of time, and their return is heralded by a lethargic second helping of yet-increased tedium.

It is true that some of the landscapes and cinematography are quite beautiful -- however, for around the price of an average movie ticket these days, one can instead go to the local chain bookstore and obtain a coffee-table picture book of lovely Western landscapes and/or national parks from the bargain bin. I would have greater respect for the camera-work and locations if they were either the backdrop for an interesting story, or the centerpiece of a more documentary work in which the open spaces themselves starred. This movie is neither -- in fact, the lingering shots seem to exist primarily to pad, both the movie's already-bloated runtime and the equally bloated and self-satisfied egos behind the excretion of this allegedly artistic work.

In the end, to me, a movie may involve skillful work or some measure of importance beyond the creators' self-importance, but if it fails to somehow intrigue me or draw me in or, perhaps above all, entertain me on some level, then I judge it to be a failure. By this standard, this picture is an utter failure. It bored me with almost perfect uniformity from beginning to the end to such a degree that the only dramatic tension I experienced was whether I would literally fall asleep in the theater from sheer tedium or simply walk out of the theater in pure disgust at wasted time and money. Sadly, I did neither.

In retrospect, I would rather have had three hours of my life painlessly and instantly excised from my lifespan than have my memories polluted with the remembrance of what is easily one of the most dull and flat-out worst movies I have personally experienced.