Change Your Image
marvanhogan
Reviews
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Watched Because of Kidman. Now I Avoid Her
Yes, it's that bad. A sex and violence stroll through putrid pretentiousness.
Ice Road Truckers (2007)
They Freeze Ass So That We May Live Free!
This show delivers for me. The pure harshness of the frigid North pitted against the blessed functionality of the cab heater is the most delicious tension that beats out the others. The other contrived frictions and dillemas of the gig, including the dreaded cracking lake ice, are a distant competitor to the miracle of cruising comfortably in a climate resembling a distant planet. But said dilemmas do provide for some interesting conversations up in that silent void. And the time I got to spend hearing Alex and Lisa explain themselves and their occupations to me is a time I felt at the feet of wonderous and beautiful adventurers.
11.22.63 (2016)
Stupendous
It was for me King's best book and his best film. The book was slightly better and kept me aglow with its immersion at all times. But this film brought it to my senses with quality I had only dreamed might be accomplished. The film seems to give Dallas more of its due as a cosmopolitan city than the book's more miserly treatment of it. You can never escape Kings political graffiti which for me flaws his luster. In the movie it seemed confined to a Nixon gag. But I anticipate revisiting both versions again as each entices my thirst for the other.
Catch-22 (2019)
A Few Niceties Amid Antiwar Moralizing
Quite some effort expended for a realistic feel that gave me the privilege of feeling aloft in WWII aerial bombing runs. But the MASHy air of superiority over military oppression from our own side quickly got toxic enough for me to abort my mission of sitting through the film. If you'd like the futility of fighting the Axis explained by Hollywood elites, this is just the ticket.
Alone in Berlin (2016)
A Slow Cooker Epiphany
I would like to thank the filmmakers and cast for the craftsmanship that made this feel like I was just a stowaway allowed to watch mundane lives unfurl in the Third Reich. It started out pretty nuanced and had me feeling the whole thing might be a bit too sympathetic to its subjects. But my willingness to just let the flow of fine acting and stagecraft keep conducting me on its journey was slowly nourished into a memorable feast with inspiring scenes of transformation and deliverance.
Cold Mountain (2003)
Tender, brutal nourishment by an America we should all know
Frazier's book is the best I have ever read.
His wordsmanship is something transformative and magnificent.
With text, he somehow manages to play music.
His odyssey provides the canvas for the purest of meditations or the most fertile of indulgences in lives human.
This movie isn't as good. But is the best movie I have ever seen.
It brings to the ear the music Frazier painted.
It brings to the palate the hues of the land and passions of those entwined of it.
It brings friendships I will keep for a lifetime.
It harbors enemies I fear intuitively.
It rests in glories of character and generosities that stir me to gasp.
Marvan
Murder in the First (1995)
Another Hollywood Leftist, bleeding heart manifesto based on false history
If you like prison films, as I do, you would be attracted to the filming of this one in Alcatraz.
That's the sole virtue of this film.
The rest is an assemblage of Central Casting clichés about the Big House, the System, the supposedly semi-innocent ragamuffins wrongly branded criminals who inhabited Alcatraz.
They depict Young as the victim of an economically unjust America who had to feed his sister by stealing a few bucks from a post office - grocery store. So he didn't really belong in Federal prison but for the technicality. But the briefest of web research reveals the was a killer and a bank robber. And a constant prison troublemaker, hence his assignment to Alcatraz.
The film reeks of the theme: We are really brutalizing decent people with our horrible prison system. They would flower as good human beings if we just sent a psychiatric social worker, or similarly minded public defender, as here, into each cell to uncover their horrible traumas from the wrongs heaped upon them.
So we are treated to the Quasimodo-like catatonic subject being lured out of his foaming at the mouth animal state by a humanist "Miracle Worker" type, armed with a few baseball scores. Time to liberate all the criminally mentally ill with such simplistic therapy, you would think.
If you weren't better informed.
Check out the real biographies and theories behind the Hollywood lie machine and you will be better informed why it is going into the financial diaper pail now that it has to contend with a literate internet-informed fan base.