Change Your Image
eric-young
Reviews
A Time to Kill (1996)
John Grisham gets "Schumachered," an "All-Star" disappointment.
So many great actors, so little worth watching. But with a script that misses so much of what made the book special, I don't hold it against anyone on screen. Though flawed, the book was one of Grisham's only that I truly liked, especially how it captured the flavor of a deep south small town, a slightly different world to a coastal urbanite such as myself. I also loved the matter-of-factness, naturalness of what occurs in the book. In the movie characters are given a "nobility" of personality that seemed so stilted. The villains and foils are flat and 1 dimensional. But as with so much of Joel Schumacher's work, genuineness and authenticity are conspicuously absent, and every point must be delivered via sledgehammer to the midsection. So preachy, stilted, and superficial about so horrendous a tragedy, I wish someone would do a remake and get the story a little more right.
Glaube und Währung - Dr. Gene Scott, Fernsehprediger (1981)
The film-maker reveals an integral part of his psyche. part 1
For a long time I was slightly disappointed with this documentary. I've had a semi-perverse fascination with Scott for many years, his degree from Stanford rather than from a bible mill, a somewhat scholarly approach to his subject on occasion which set him apart from his "peers" who merely disgusted me, and his lack of shame at appearing as a lunatic on the airwaves which set him apart much further from those who pose as the "status quo" keepers of morality and decency for average folks. This movie failed entirely to portray this essential difference. But it did capture what I now recognize as a very common underlying element to all of Herzog's movies I've seen, a character of mythic dimensions. Scott's quixotic nature to do battle with the FCC puts him on par with Aguirre or Fitzcaraldo. A living individual going all the way, taking it as far as he can, like the guy in "Grizzly Man." Herzog does something more deftly than any other director, create updated mythology for our era, and a portrait of a televangelist, even if it misses part of its subject is a very worthy part of this mythology.
The Pentagon Wars (1998)
this black comedy especially relevant under the Bush II administration
First I want to stress how wonderful Kelsy Grammar is as a pompous, self important, dilettante pentagon bureaucrat general, and how a lesser actor would probably been unable to portray a character sharing so many character traits with a character he is best known for (Frazier Crane), while creating a totally distinct individual character without a scene that the other character creeps in a little. Gen. Partridge is a classic privileged twit of the first order, and I never confused him with Frasier for a second. Richard Schiff is equally good as a career officer trying to hold his wits together without jeopardizing his career. He watches his simple, common sense defense department project spiral out of control into one of the most publicized and outrageous examples of the military industrial complex run amok in recent history. What makes this so relevant today is the attitude of "we'll fix the problems in the field" and the casual disregard for life and limb of the troops who face death of injury due to the decisions of those at the highest levels of power. Our current leadership had an agenda to go to war in Iraq from it's outset, but neglected to ramp up military production of armored Hummvees, body armor, etc. in the 2 years from when it took power until the Iraq war started. Whether you support the war or not, this is troubling, especially when you take into account that large portions of our defense budget went to develop a missile defense shield system that shows little progress, does not address the most likely threat we face, but puts billions of dollars into the hands of a company with close association with a secretary of defense who told troops "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." Both sides of this issue can find source for outrage.