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Reviews
An Innocent Man (1989)
Excellent revenge flick
I thought this movie would seriously put me in a dark mood, but I found that I liked it -- a lot. I was surprised by how much I liked this film. This is a very good "B" movie, and I enjoyed just about all of it -- the affectionate scenes between Jimmie Rainwood (Tom Selleck) and his wife, the scenes with the two corrupt cops, the scenes with Detective Fitzgerald (Badja Djola), the scene at the beginning with Rainwood assuring his boss that the jet airliner his people are working on will be fixed on time, and even the scenes in prison, especially those with Virgil Cane (F. Murray Abraham), but I even enjoyed the black-gang scenes (because I was rooting for Jimmie to get mad and take his tormentors down). Can you tell that I was entertained? :-)
This is the kind of movie to rent if you're in the mood to watch a good and truly innocent man get knocked around by nasty people you'll seriously love to hate (crooked cops AND prison gang members), watch the guy suffer a bit, and then watch him get back on his feet and get his revenge on his tormentors (without losing his humanity). The characters and situations may be a bit cliché, but I don't care. The movie reminds you, as one prisoner tells Jimmie Rain after he gets to prison, that there are times when you don't have to stand tall, but you do have to stand up. Rent this and watch Rainwood learn, under Virgil's guidance, how to stand up.
The Lord of the Rings (1978)
Interesting animation technique, ham-fisted handling of the story
I don't have a coherent review, just some points to make.
(1) This movie actually has TWO visual styles. Some of the characters (hobbits, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli) are actually drawn (though they move like real people, thanks presumably to rotoscoping), and some of the characters (such as the orcs, and especially the characters in the prologue) look like live actors filmed through a red filter. But I'd rather talk about how this movie handled the story.
(2) The live actors are so bad, they're a hoot. Check out the prologue: The actors are all silhouetted and they STILL look like actors in a high-school play. Note especially the ultra-lame swordplay, and the laugh-out-loud display that Gollum makes of his suffering at the hands of the ring (he ducks behind a rock, holding his shaking hand up in the air and making gargling noises -- funny funny funny, so bad it's good). Also check out the live actors at the inn in Bree -- people in Renaissance costumes, pretending to be drunk, and grinning swaying dwarfs (the real kind). Hilarious.
(3) The movie can't make up its mind whether the traitor wizard's name is Saruman or Aruman; he's referred to by BOTH names.
(4) In the interest of brevity, the screenwriters butchered some of Gandalf's best lines, and Gandalf ends up sounding lame:
When Frodo says to Gandalf, "I wish it need not have happened in my time," Gandalf says (in the book and in Peter Jackson's film -- I'm quoting from memory) "So do all who live in such times, but that is not for us to decide. All we can do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us." This movie, instead, has Gandalf saying, almost absently, "So do I." Lame!
When Frodo says "What a pity Bilbo didn't kill that vile creature (Gollum) when he had the chance," Gandalf says (in the book and in Jackson's film) "It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Do not be too quick to deal out death and judgment. I feel that Gollum may yet have a critical part to play before this is over." This movie just has Gandalf say "Yes -- it was pity, pity and mercy." Gee, thanks, Gandalf.
(5) Samwise Gamgee comes across as a bumbling clown, with his goofy voice and flailing arm motions. But of course his flailing arm motions are nicely animated.
(6) SPOILER ALERT. This movie ends abruptly. I can only imagine how much this film angered Tolkien fans back in the day. Gollum is leading Frodo and Sam toward the Secret Stair, the orcs are attacking the men of Rohan at Helm's Deep, Gandalf shows up with the formerly exiled Riders of Rohan, the orcs flee, and a narrator suddenly announces: "The forces of darkness were driven forever from the face of Middle Earth by the valiant friends of Frodo. As their gallant battle ended, so too ends the first great tale of: The Lord of the Rings." Since the forces of darkness were driven forever from the face of Middle Earth, I guess there was no need to worry about what happened to Sam and Frodo.
So this movie is only so-so -- 5 stars out of 10. Its animation is often well done and fun to watch, and parts of the film are good, but parts of the film are awful, and its handling of Tolkien's story is clumsy and ham-handed.
Thy Neighbor's Wife (2001)
The ending doesn't add up (***SPOILER ALERT***)
I could comment on the famously fakey shower-stabbing scene. I could comment on the fact that the film seems to be rooting for a woman who spends most of the film plotting the destruction of an innocent if slightly dysfunctional family. Instead I'll comment on the ending, because it's one of those endings that stick in your mind BECAUSE THEY DON'T ADD UP. Apply five minutes of deduction to the ending and it falls apart.
STOP READING IF YOU PLAN ON SEEING THIS FILM.
I'm going to try to be circumspect about this and hope I don't spoil it too much -- but if you have already seen this film, you know that eventually the police get involved, and that Person A is arrested. If you've seen the film, you may remember that someone has died before this and that the personal effects of that person are brought to the house. Mixed in with the personal effects are some things that belonged to the spouse of Person B, the person causing all the mayhem. One of these items was a framed photograph of Person B and the spouse. Think for a moment and you'll realize that Person B, after several days, has planted fingerprints all over the house. Recall also that Person A was told, not long after discovering the photograph, that (1) Person A's spouse replaced Person B's spouse at work, and (2) Person B's spouse had died, and (3) both events happened not long before Person B got involved in Person A's life.
***HERE IS THE SPOILER:*** Person A is framed. The film tries to leave us with the impression that Person A is in massive legal trouble, while Person B drives off into the sunset smiling serenely -- that Person B has won. But wait a minute!
What about all the forensic evidence that Person B would have left around? How much time could Person B have spent cleaning all of it up? Ask yourself if Person B would have known about the photograph showing Person B's face. Recall that Person B showed up at the place where Person A's spouse works and made a huge scene, so that at least two people who work there would definitely remember seeing and hearing Person B (along with however many people there would have been who weren't on camera but who were presumably working in cubicles and offices nearby).
Ask yourself whether it's really Person A or Person B who's going to be facing legal trouble, when all Person A has to do is explain the events of the past few weeks and SHOW THE COPS THAT DAMNED PHOTOGRAPH. Ask yourself how long it would really take, if the cops had any competence at all, before the cops got curious about Person B.
I realize this is just a cheap erotic thriller and you're not supposed to take it seriously, but still...
The Wicker Man (1973)
Wonderful little film
This movie isn't "scary" in the conventional horror sense. There are no bogeymen, no mad slashers, no witches or vampires, no supernatural happenings, and no gore.
This film concerns a cop named Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward), who comes to Summerisle, a village in Scotland, to find a missing girl named Rowan Morrison. Sergeant Howie is a prim and proper Christian man, appalled at all the unseemly things going on -- naked couples having sex outside in the open at night, women dancing around a bonfire in the buff, and so on. Sergeant Howie realizes that the townsfolk are not being straight with him about the missing girl -- first they claim that no such girl exists on the island; then he finds that the schoolteacher has the name "Rowan Morrison" in her records, and manages to get the schoolteacher to admit that, well, OK, Rowan existed, but she died. He discovers Rowan's grave, but then learns that no death certificate was ever made out for her.
Sergeant Howie comes to believe that the girl might not be dead, but simply held somewhere, so that she could be sacrificed to the gods. First he searches every house in the village to try to find her; then he decides to infiltrate the May Day parade/sacrifice ceremony.
Sergeant Howie does find out what happened to the girl -- but the movie ends with a twist that seems to reverse everything you expected to happen.
I must comment on the music. I usually hate musicals, but the musical numbers in the film worked fine for me. There was the ribald drinking song about the landlord's daughter (Willow, played by Britt Ekland). There was the lovely siren song that Willow sings to Sergeant Howie from the other side of the wall. There were a couple of others. All of them helped the film, usually by showing the viewer how ribald and paganistic these villagers really are.
I'm pleased to have discovered this film. Rent this if you want something more intelligent than the latest Jason slasher flick.
Space Mutiny (1988)
A summary of the laughable things in this movie
There is so much I could mention about this movie that has already been mentioned: The fleet commander who looks like Santa Claus. The daughter, supposedly in her twenties but who looks as if she belongs on the local PTA board, even as she flashes her butt at the beefy hero while squirming suggestively on the dance floor. The bizarre scenery-chewing of the chief villain. The outrageous contrast between the spaceship exteriors (Emmy-award-winning visual effects stolen from Battlestar Galactica) and the spaceship interiors (worst set designs I've ever seen). The bad Casio-keyboard score. The ludicrously primitive (circa 1980) computer-display graphics. The slow-motion "car chases" on what look like Zamboni machines. Lieutenant Lamont, whom the villain murders in one scene but who is back at her console on the bridge in the very next scene (are we supposed to think Lamont has a clone of herself running around?). The sexy but useless and silly Bellarians, supposedly some kind of benign witch cult that accepts only really skinny women with really long shampoo-commercial hair, who do nothing but swish and sway around in unison and who add nothing to the plot. The absurd surprise ending, when in one scene someone is immolated in a stupendous fireball in one scene, and in almost the next scene is seen sitting up, dirty and grimy, but unburnt and alive.
But there are two bits of lunacy that have stuck in my mind that I don't see mentioned here:
(1) The casual ease with which everyone involved, heroes and villains alike, start fires, even though they are all in a spaceship and, well, you can evacuate a burning building, but where are you going to go if the whole spaceship is on fire? (The producers of the film had to steal other movies' spaceship effects, but they sure knew how to set things on fire.) I can't work up much sympathy for people stuck in space if they're all a bunch of pyromaniacs.
(2) There is a shot of an extra that somehow sums up the whole enterprise for me. The scene is near the beginning of the movie, right after our hero Beef Thickmuscle has crash-landed into the hangar bay, starting the first of many fires. One of the women working on the bridge tells the commander that "the energizing turbines have been sabotaged." The actress is young and reasonably pretty, with nice long blonde hair, but the look on her face is so bovine and sleepy and stupid that I can't believe anyone could seriously mistake her for someone bright enough to serve on the bridge of a starship as huge and complex as the Southern Sun is apparently supposed to be. She's in good company, though -- hardly anyone in this movie looks particularly bright. About the ONLY character who doesn't come across as either dopey or goofy is the above-mentioned Lieutenant Lamont, and SHE'S undermined by that huge halo of unprofessional frizzy black hair.
Godzilla (1998)
Good FX, but the characters are annoying
I just saw Godzilla on cable, and I think I have a few ideas as to why it bombed in the theaters.
1) Why is it that whenever a character stands face to face with Godzilla, his reaction is invariably to keep standing there and stare at it as it approaches? A cameraman runs out into the street soon after Godzilla shows up in New York and STANDS THERE as Godzilla's foot crushes a taxi cab parked right in front of him. The strangely unmasculine hero of the picture with the Greek last name nobody can pronounce, along with the Frenchmen, just STAND THERE in the bowels of Madison Square Garden as Godzilla's eggs start hatching all around them. Having characters standing there in the middle of imminent danger does not build suspense; it makes the characters look stupid.
2) The hero of this picture is - well, somewhat less of a hero than we usually expect to find in an action picture. Let's face it, Matthew Broderick is not an action star. He actually looks a little ungainly in the shots showing him running from the Godzilla hatchlings. Imagine Bruce Willis in the role and you'll have an idea of what kind of excitement is missing here. Nevertheless, the movie has Broderick spending the final third of the film running around. And unfortunately, he isn't running around trying to be proactive, setting up traps and thinking on his feet (if he were, that all by itself would have made this movie much more enjoyable). No, instead he spends lots of screen time being chased and calling on the military for help. You might ask, "This guy is Mr. Everyman. What else could this guy do?" -- to which I would reply, "Why have as the hero of what is supposed to be a high- octane action picture a guy who can't do very much about the problem that the movie presents, other than calling in the military?"
3) Various inconsistencies. Other posters have listed a few of them, but the one that really annoyed me was the difference between the initial dogfight with Godzilla and the scenes in which our "heroes" are fleeing Godzilla in a taxi cab. How is it that Apache helicopters have a hard time keeping up with Godzilla, but the taxi cab (surely a much slower vehicle) manages for long minutes at a time always to stay inches ahead of Godzilla? Has Godzilla gotten tired by that point in the movie? After the helicopter-attack sequence, the fleeing-taxi-cab sequence feels like a cheat to keep the suspense going. So my answer to the people here who genuinely liked this movie and keep pointing out that the movie is supposed to be a roller-coaster ride, not "Shakespeare in Love," is that the movie doesn't quite work even as a roller-coaster ride -- for reasons that include those I've just listed.
Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)
Good as MST3K material
"Highlander 2: The Quickening" is best watched as unintentional comedy. I just finished watching it on TV, and I have to say that it's something that could have been shown on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" if it weren't so violent.
The movie has a number of elements worth goofing on, but four stand out in my mind:
(1) Christopher Lambert's "old man" voice in the first twenty minutes or so of the film.
(2) Michael Ironside's commandeering of the subway - and supposedly accelerating it to such speeds as to kill everyone aboard. I found the scene so ridiculous that I laughed all the way through it.
(3) The room in which anyone trapped therein is cut to pieces by this huge ceiling-fan thing, which descends slowly, slowly, slowly toward our heroes. What corporation, what government, what military organization would build such rooms? I can't believe such rooms have EVER existed outside of the movies.
(4) The fact that the characters have unannounced powers. In one scene, Sean Connery is able to lift the abovementioned ceiling-fan thing with his mind long enough to save his companions, even though the thing looks like it weighs tons. NOBODY has telekinesis in this film - until this moment. In another scene, Christopher Lambert merely stands in a high-energy beam, and not only does he not get vaporized instantly, but roof of the building in which he's standing, and the satellite receiving the beam, both dissolve in fireballs -- yet our hero walks away unscathed! Maybe I should look for Highlander 3 and see if either Lambert or Connery plays someone with X-ray vision or the power to fly like Superman.
This film was completely loony. Watch it only if you like laughing at silly movies.