Change Your Image
doublechump
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Doubt (2008)
I DOUBT Streep will get an Oscar
What a lousy movie. Shanley apparently thinks you just aim your camera and press a button. Every shot is flat. Every performance is delivered with the subtlety of a pile-driver. Meryl sounds like she's doing a Nancy Marchand impersonation (as Livia Soprano). Amy Adams is so beatific you want to smack her. Viola Davis, as the voice of reason, acts like she's in an episode of "Law and Order" in fact during the whole movie I kept expecting to hear those two chords they always play during scene transitions on "L&O". The less said about Philip Seymour Hoffman the better. What a drip. He hasn't given a remarkable performance since "Boogie Nights". Every year there is a movie so awful that you just know it's going to be showered with Oscar noms (A Beautiful Mind, American Beauty, Titanic) this year it's gonna be Doubt, but I highly, HIGHLY doubt that any of the actors, (or God-forbid, the director) will be walking away with a statuette.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Best Movie of 2004 (no, seriously)
It's hard to think of a recent movie that leaps out of the gate as ferociously and effectively as "Dawn of the Dead", the remake. Sarah Polley manages to pull us in (with her liquid eyes and the soft cadence of her speech) almost instantly. The peril she finds herself in is so effective because she manages to seem so ordinary, so available. I can't think of another actress who manages to convey her combination of vulnerability and tenacity (see "The Claim" for more proof), yet she's never precious, she seems to barely know the camera exists. It's strange to find such good performances, across the board, in a zombie movie. Everyone is up to the task, and nearly all of them have strong believable character shifts that are surprising for this genre (to say the least). Rent it along with "Shawn of the Dead". (I made lasagna and had a double feature with friends.)
Kaka Ferskur (Fresh Rolls) or The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988)
A magical children's tale with a TWIST!
Ahh to be a child again, and frolic through the fjords! Hughes, in his phantasmagoric, hilariuos and well-dubbed masterpiece of candy colored pop, has brought the oft-told tail of Pippi, the bad little swedish girl and her friends, to a new underground audience. Sharp photogrpahy, smoothe camera work and deeply etched protrayals by the leads (Walter Barnett is a stunner as Pippi)lead to a giddy cream puff of a film. Special mention should be made of the actor who portrays the singing, churning milk-maid. He really knows how to take a fresh roll in the face!
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
God Save us from the "Spielberg" touch
I lasted about ten minutes in this "gem" before running from the theatre in disgust. I'm so sick of movies that tell you every moment how you should "feel". Spielberg doesn't trust his audience to make their own decisions about what they are watching. Each and every single second is so manufactured that it is impossible to react in any other way than in the micromanaged specific predigested fashion in which Mr. Spielberg wants us to. Perhaps his movies are meant to be watched with the sound off. They are like panels of a cartoon. The visuals are clear and they certainly tell a story in a clear and distinct way, but there's no room to breathe, no air on the screen. It's like being at a Natural History museum looking at stuffed cavemen hunting a sabre tooth tiger. Sure is pretty. But nobody's breathing up there.
Since I only saw ten minutes (which is enough for me if a movie is as terrible as this one. The film could've turned into "citizen Kane" the moment I left and it wouldn't matter, the damage had been done) I can only comment on what I saw, so here goes:
The title sequence:
I hated those faux-sixties cartoon drawings. Like everything in Spielberg's post-"Close Encounters" body of work, it doesn't quite make it. It was a cute idea, but instead of getting an artist who would really do a good job stealing from the Saul Bass school of design, he got somebody who fumbled the job, making it seem more like the cheapo animation in one of those 70's health movies like "I am Joe's Stomach" or something. Even worse is John Williams score, but the less said about him the better.
The "To Tell the Truth" opening was one of the laziest first draft attempts at expopsition I'd seen since the Ndugu letters of "About Schmidt". Doesn't anybody know who to write dialogue anymore? Plus, the transition from the gameshow to the rainy sequence in France was both clumsy and non sensical. Once again, Speilberg gets a case of the nauseating "cutes". Gee, French people are funny, they can't pronounce this character's name. Gee, does everybody in the audience get that THIS is the guy that Leonardo De Caprio was talking about in the previous frame? That fat guy who looks like he ate Tom Hanks? By this point I had one foot aimed towards the exit.
Then we get another "cutesy poo" Spielberg moment when the fat guy who looks like he ate Tom Hanks has to open an umbrella inside because there's a leak. Sacre Bleu! That's Hi-larious!
Then we get another in a long list of what I like to call the "Pinnochio meets Faces of Death" moments that Spielberg seems so fond of. Where broad bad comedy meets the harrowing and gut-wrenching. Like in Amistad where first we get Matthew McCaughnahay doing his best High School Acting version of "Mr Toad's Wild Ride" and then we get African American slaves chained together and thrown into the sea. This is where Leo's consumptive hacking (which is better suited to "Midnight Express" than this lightweight ersatz caper/chase flick) is juxtaposed with the worst accent I think I've ever heard in a movie (even worse than Leo's irish? accent in the Gangs of New York). The fat guy who looks like he ate Tom Hanks is nattering on under that umbrella, the faceless French guys are chimpering in inaudible francois and Leo is hacking up like John Hurt in Aliens. What's wrong with this picture? Why is Speilberd so determined to gross us out? (See "Minority Report" with its hacking of snot and rancid-food-eating scene for his most recent offense)
Then we get Leo's attempted escape which of course is accompanied by the entire prison population shrieking and urging him on like the Forum crowd in "Ben Hur".
When Christopher Walken arrives, he managed to use his own quirky acting rhythms to throw a pleasant monkey wrench into Spielberg's well oiled McMovie. But by the time Leo was watching his parents dancing the wine stain into the white rug, and then when Walken told Leo not to hit the curb while parking (guess what he does anyway!? Screams of knee-jerk laughter from the multi-plex crowd)I had seen enough. I want to have my own feelings, Mr. Speilberg, thank you. I have only to refer to "Far From Heaven" as an example of how to let an audience think. Even though the movie had an arch tone and over-the-top dialogue at times and looked like a techinicolor fantasy, it never told you how to feel. It allowed you to make your own decisions. But I'm afraid Mr. Spielberg has morphed past the point where he'll have anything meaningful to say to someone past an eighth grade education.
Yuck. Ten minutes was tooooooo much.
About Schmidt (2002)
Jack Nicholson reins it in and the results are...boring.
I was never been a fan of Alexander Payne's "Election", there was a smugness to its tone that kept me from becoming involved. Now he takes on midwestern quirky middle class America in "About Schmidt" and he really ought to be ashamed of himself. Making fun of people for not being as smart as Alex Payne would be fine if he did it in a remotely interesting or funny way. But he is so condescending to the poor people under his microscope that it's difficult to watch. I have to admit I went out to the bar (at the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood) and SLOOOOWLY nursed a Manhatten, hoping that at least Kathy Bates would be on the screen by the time I came back. Alas no, Winnebago meandering, more unbearable Nicholson playing "small".
From the very first moments of the movie, Payne lets us know we're in "fantasyland" some strange fake netherworld where a man on the last day of work would actually sit in his office, alone, and watch the clock tick down the last moments. I couldn't come up with any context in the actual world where this would happen unless Schmidt were mentally challenged. Also, to show us the second hand crawling slowly around the clock, not only was dull (gee, I wonder if I can guess what's gonna happen next, wow, the minute hand is going by the nine, will it hit the ten? It did! What's next, the ELEVEN? Oh my God!)it set up a tone of predictability that lasted throughout the movie. Just like I knew automatically that the second hand would eventually reach the twelve, I knew automatically every dreary condescending moment afterwards.
Kathy Bates briefly brought some life into the movie. And the design of her house (the art, the color scheme, the candles around the hot tub) showed some detail and gave the impression a real person lived there. But her "character" (I use the term loosely), like all the others in this movie, wasn't given any dignity and eventually she was shown to be a loud, vulgar rube who showed up at the wedding if her son in some ridiculous Minnie Pearl outfit instead of something more realistic.
The real trouble with the film lies with Nicholson who just isn't very good. This year we've had Adam Sandler being praised just because he wasn't playing over the top. Is whispering really acting? Besides, Nicholson manages to make underplaying a mannered unwatchable affair.
This one goes right to the top of my years worst list. It'll probably win the Oscar. It seems that every year there's a movie so awfully, so painfully obvious and fraudulent that it automatically wins best picture. Last year it was "A Beautiful Mind" and the year before it was "American Beauty". Oh well. Just because a million people like something doesn't make it good.
Far from Heaven (2002)
A Cinematic Poem
A sad, wonderful, gorgeous film. Visually stunning; a masterpiece of composition and color. Julianne Moore is the warmest, most emotionally satisfying actor to grace the screen in years. Todd Haynes managed to break my heart while walking a very thin line between melodrama and camp, never slipping into either one. Bravo to all involved, I'll see you ALL on Oscar night.
Star Wars (1977)
Kiddie movie with decent SFX
The problem with this movie is the script. It just never rises above the level of a Flash Gordon episode. The camera work is pedestrian. The pacing is glacial except for the last ten minutes and the back and forth storytelling (a problem in all the Star Wars movies, but especially those directed by Mr. Lucas) never lets any momentum build. Like "Phantom Menace" and espcially "Attack of the Clones", Lucas just doesn't know how to write a "scene". What we get is like a quilt of little bits that are cobbled together. Each with basically the same pace. The saving grace of "Star Wars" is some of the acting. Alec Guinness really brightens up the screen whenever he's on. And Peter Cushing brings some genuine class and star quality. I saw this movie again recently and I was stunned by what a big bore it is. I can't imagine how anyone over the age of 20 could be thrilled by it.