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Reviews
Shadow and Bone (2021)
Deeply flawed, but great cinematography and effects
First of all, I have not read the books, so this is based solely on the series. I really liked the atmosphere of this series, the scenery, the sets, the costumes, the effects, especially of the fold, were all really good. The plot was less good. Too contrived, too pat, too predictable. Anytime you get too unexplained immortals walking around the world for no good reason, you can tell not much thought was given to the plort.
The character development was absurdly weak, especially with Alina, but also the Darkling, Brekker and Mal.
It was also confusing as hell trying to figure out where things were happening, because they were happening all over the map, something that could have been helped by showing a map once in awhile. Game of Thrones famously wove the locations of where things were happening in their opening credits, something like that would have done wonders for this series.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2009)
A train wreck, but I wonder...
This is a train wreck of a family and a train wreck of a film. You really get the impression that the jerks (there's really no other way to describe them) who made this film gave the White's enough rope to hang themselves and sat back snickering as they proceeded to do exactly that on camera. Yes, the White's are lazy, shiftless, stupid drug addicts, unfortunately, too many people in this country fit that description.
However, the one thought that sticks out in my mind about this film, is that if a similar film was made in the same way about an equally dysfunctional urban black family or reservation dwelling Native American family or any other minority family, the film makers would be pilloried as racist, bigoted jackasses.
I feel sorry for the Whites and their addictions. I feel nothing but disgust for every sick individual involved in making this film. They are more reprehensible in every way than the Whites. The Whites are ignorant or drugged out of their minds. The film makers don't even have that flimsy of an excuse.
V for Vendetta (2005)
Stylish, but seriously flawed...,
V for Vendetta is a silly story about a victim of medical experimentation taking on the role of Guy Fawkes to lead society to revolution against the fascist oppressors and, oh, by the way, exact personal revenge on his tormentors in the government. In order to enjoy the movie, the level of deliberate suspension of belief you must maintain is extraordinarily high.
V (named because he was in cell labeled with a Roman numeral V) is rounded up by a fascist UK government with a group of 48 others and subjected to medical experiments, which kill almost everyone except V. Somehow (never explained) there is fire and explosions that result in massive damage to the medical facility and V escapes. Ten years later, V who can only exist behind a mask because he is so violently disfigured to be almost unrecognizable as a human, has ensconced himself in a formidable fortress built out of the closed London Underground. He has also managed to fill it with priceless works of art while digging out and laying track beneath the English Parliament building.
He then decides to go on the attack, and using a variety of terrorist tactics, blows up the Old Bailey, takes over the government controlled network and makes a personal broadcast to the nation, and goes on an assassination spree. Somehow Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond gets sucked up in V's path and is spirited back to his redoubt where they have deep conversations over fried eggs in toast, archaic jukebox music and the movie The Count of Monte Cristo.
Evey gets talked into helping V kill one of his victims, but only goes along with it to try to warn the victim (a high ranking bishop of the Church of England who likes his girls young). When V makes his appearance and kills the bishop, Evey escapes and makes her way to her boss's flat. Her boss is a popular variety show host on TV and just happens to also harbor revolutionary sentiment, although he does not express it as strongly as V. However, he does tear up a government approved script on his TV show and replace it with one that makes fun of the government's attempt to find V. He discovers that he misjudged the government's reaction to his show when jack-booted thugs appear at his flat in the middle of the night, beat him up and haul him off. He later gets executed because the government found a copy of the Koran in his flat. He wasn't Muslim, he "just enjoyed the poetry." Evey gets caught in this fracas and wakes up in a prison cell, where she is tortured for information about V. When she is threatened with immediate execution and still does not give up any information about V, she is told she is finally free. She walks out of her cell past the fake guards and discovers that she has been held by V all along, oh my! But V let her live and lets her go after extracting a promise to see her before November 5th, which is when V plans to blow up Parliament. Oh, and as near as I can tell the only reason V took on the Guy Fawkes persona was that Fawkes originally planned to blow up the English Parliament several hundred years ago. That and maybe V's penchant for swords and explosives as weapons of choice over guns. But really, it's probably because a wooden Guy Fawkes mask looks "cool" on someone dressed all in black.
Meanwhile the police discover that the Conservative Party used the fear that America's War on Terror generated to take control. They then purposely staged three biological attacks around the UK that killed over 100,000 people to cement their power. Then they rounded up all the writers and artists and killed them. Oh yeah, since Conservatives just absolutely hate homosexuals, they rounded all of them up and killed them too. They also conducted medical experiments on some of the gay people they rounded up. No word on whether V is gay, Evey tried to kiss him, but how much can you get through to someone by kissing his wooden mask. Now for some reason the government hates America. This all just goes to show how evil the fascist government is and how much V's revolution needs to succeed.
I won't bore you with the ending, it's pretty obvious what it would be anyway. The movie is basically a prettily filmed load of tripe. Even the fighting sequences aren't what I would expect from the Wachowski's except the one at the end, which is admittedly pretty cool. Some of the settings are effective, and the visual impact of the film is impressive. But you just can't get past the fact that the plot just stinks.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Can't abide the Dude,
I finally broke down and bought this movie because of all the glowing reviews I'd read here about it. Surely a movie so many people liked and waxed lyrical about would be worth owning. The first time I watched it, I got to the dude's second encounter with Maude and turned it off just annoyed by the film. I watched it again and made it through to the end a few days later.
I've only seen three Coen brother films, Raising Arizona (mostly hated it), Fargo (mostly loved it) and this one (still trying to decide). One thing you can say about the Coen brother's films is that they are complex. This one is somewhat of an homage to Raymond Chandler's LA based Philip Marlowe mysteries. I happen to love Raymand Chandler's works and consider him one of the most brilliant authors of the 20th century, so am somewhat disappointed by the Coen brother's thievery (their characterization, not mine) of his style.
The Dude, like Chandler's Marlowe get's caught up in a web of intrigue and runs around LA meeting mostly unsavory characters that you can't begin to like. Marlowe himself is somewhat unlikeable, but not as unlikeable as the Dude. At least Marlowe is working while the Dude is motivated by primarily his own greed, first in wanting to obtain a new carpet for free, and secondly by increasing offers of money from the other Lebowski and the other Lebowski's daughter Maude.
But if the Dude is unlikeable, most of the other characters are even less likable. John Goodman as Walter, is especially annoying, and most of his scenes are played out so over the top to be totally unbelievable. Most of the other reviewers talk about how "realistic" the conversations between Walter and the Dude are, yet gullibly laugh at Walter throwing himself out of a moving car with an Uzi wrapped in bubble wrap to go try to catch a kidnapper to beat the truth out of.
Donnie is probably the most likable of the three friends, or at least maybe you feel most sorry for, as he is continually told to shut up by Walter. At least Donnie gets one of the most memorable lines of the movie when the Dude and Walter are talking about something that Lenin said and Donnie interjects, "I am the Walrus?" Of course the Coen brothers for no discernible reason kill Donnie off at the end of the movie.
I don't know why the Coen brothers felt they needed Sam Elliot in this movie, but I liked it as a nice touch of surrealism. I didn't like the dream sequences very much, especially the second one. I also found the German nihilists very insultingly portrayed, kind of along the same lines as how the Germans in Hogans Heroes were portrayed. I'd expect better from the Coen's they are smarter than that.
The film wasn't totally worthless, I did laugh out loud at points (the In and Out Burger fixation was hilarious, as was the 2X4 nailed to the floor as a doorstop that the Dude later trips over, for a couple of examples), but there were as many things that I found just downright annoying about the film as well.
Far from a masterpiece, it's a badly flawed, albeit, amusing film.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
A very well crafted film....
This is a fantastic movie about the HMS Surprise, commanded by Captain Jack Aubrey, stalking the French vessel Acheron to the "far side of the world" during the Napoleanic era. The film is intricately detailed, and while I am no sailor, most of the details strike true. I do know that the British Navy by the time of this story absolutely revered Lord Nelson, and that reverence is played out in this movie when several younger officers ask the Captain for impressions of Nelson during one of his two meeting with the Admiral. The cannons have names, the bells number the hours of the shipboard day. A knotted rope line is played out to measure the ship's speed in knots. A sounding is taken to read the depth of the sea, and sextant lessons are given to measure true noon. In fact the level of detail is overwhelming, but the story is just as good.
The Acheron is the superior ship, and at first it seems the Captain is also superior. He surprises the Surprise twice, once coming out of the fog at the beginning of the movie and once by hiding in an inlet and letting the Surprise chase on by. Captain Aubry only barely manages to escape into the fog the first time, and into the night the second.
Russell Crowe's performance as Captain Jack Aubry is spectacular. I was also immensely impressed with Mix Ppirkis's portrayal of young Mr. Blakeny. The photography and camera work were absolutely first rate, as well as the tremendous attention to detail.
This is a really great movie on so many levels. I highly recommend it.
Kung fu (2004)
An Extraordinary Movie
This movie is really cool. The basic plot involves a guy (Stephen Chow) who wants to get into the Axe Gang in circa 1930 Shanghai by impressing them with how much of an arch criminal he is. He decides to pick on an apartment block inhabited by the working poor and triggers a massive confrontation between the landlady of the block and the working poor on one side and the Axe Gang and their hired thugs on the other. Both sides turn out to be more than they seem and the confrontation quickly escalates into a battle filled with Chinese Magic and Fighting Arts.
Wah Yuen steals the show as the iron-fisted landlady, marching around in a silk house robe, hair in curlers, puffing away on her ever present cigarette while shouting orders. Really a fun, fun movie to watch.
My only complaint is that some of it is a little hard to follow, and I would blame that on the translation. The movie was made in Chinese and I generally watch foreign language films with the subtitles rather than dubbed, because I like to hear the way the actors sound when they are saying something while I read the subtitle. But the subtitles didn't quite seem right, so I switched to the dubbed version, and that didn't seem quite right either. So I watched it dubbed with the subtitles and half the time the dubbed spoken English didn't agree with the English subtitles. So a really crappy job of translation makes this a 9 instead of a ten.
Other than that, the acting, the visual effects, the camera work, the choreography, the comedy, the story are all first rate and make for a spectacular show.