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johnbluefinch
Reviews
The White Diamond (2004)
Much ado about nothing.
A rather dire attempt at making a grand movie of what is essentially is just a test flight. The filming itself is beautiful. But I think the problem with the film really stems from a poorly drafted mission plan, in the end it is only Herzogs skill which pulls the thing together at all. The airship designer Dorringer is rather shallow his dialogue feels fake layered with intentional pauses to elicit some form of emotional response, this is not aided by Herzogs constant focus on the failing of his last air trip. Out of the few other characters in the film only local Rastafarian Mark Anthony stands out but he too feels slightly token-like, during particularly slow points in the documentary the focus is brought back to him in various roles, the native plants expert, the easy go lucky local, the hear-string plucker with his lament for his family in Spain and finally the rather odd rooster fanatic, each feels as manipulated as the last. Perhaps the worst part is that despite the documentary supposedly setting out to do this, no "canopy exploration" actually takes place. In the end what you are watching is a drawn out feature length doco about a test flight. This begs the question, why go to all the lengths transporting the whole affair to distant Guayana? In Herzogs closing scene Dorringers truly outdoes himself. When the local children do not appear awed by his landing in their little village this leads him to postulate that the aircraft must have been invisible to them due to its alien-ness. In an insensitive comparison, which smacks of white prejudice he tells Mark Anthony about the colonist fable wherein the New Zealand Maori are not able to see James Cooks ship because they had apparently never seen one before, a tall tale to tell about a peoples descendant form a long line of seafarers.
Everyman's War (2009)
I don't know what people are hyping about this for
I don't get what the big hype is for. i got this movie out on the strength of all its five awards it got, didn't end up being able to sit through the whole thing. If you speak any German do not watch this, the movie does not cast the average German soldier in an evil light like many other WWII movies, but the accents are like getting your teeth pulled out. Why couldn't they get some decent German actors? the American actors speaking in German are truly awful. The plot is weak in the extreme, and the acting and dialog is disjointed and awkward. This movie would be fine if you are really bored. Apart from that the movie is on a super low budget, so you don't even get good action scenes to make up for the terrible German accents and the sloppy lines.