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patbuchanan-1
Reviews
The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011)
Don't miss this
I'm just enjoying my second voyage into film with the excellent Mark Cousins. Don't pay any heed to the criticisms of his narrative style, and his Ulster brogue; the only reservation I would have on that score is that sometimes I get so transported by his seductive tones, that I stop listening to what he is saying and just get transported by the sound of his voice (bit like Alistair Cooke). Hence this is my second watching of the series. It's worth not paying too much attention on a first watching of this epic and just let this vast wave of cinema wash over you. I'm sure I will go back to the series again and again just to follow up on some of the directors and titles from around the world which it has introduced me to. The wonderful way that so much cinema has been pulled together and shown in context with each other making some sense of the history of cinema on a world scale, without showing any favour towards one country or culture. It truly is about as all encompassing as any treatment of the subject could be. At the same time Mark Cousins narration always keeps you entranced, it's pure poetry and full to the brim with delightful insights. I can not recommend this enough.
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Utter tosh
I'm amazed that this spume ever got close to winning an Oscar. It only goes to show that no matter how great the accolades or how high the rating you can still end up watching the most appalling drivel, dressed up as some kind of worthwhile exercise in entertainment. Bulls balls, last night I watched "in Bruges" and it was very good, a million miles away from this Oscar winning (substitute prohibited word).
OK so now I must get down to a serious criticism of the movie, based on twenty five minutes and twenty seven seconds, after which I couldn't stomach it any more. Where do I start? Hollywood in its purest form is a place (a fantasy) where we are taken and everything is wonderful. But this kind of Hollywood is just a pretend world which is not real and not uplifting either, it neither corresponds to an ideal or a real, it is just pap. It is a depressed fantasy of a reality that never existed. The idea that you have a genius cleaning a college corridor and filling out maths equations on a blackboard, and then having a verbal fist fight with a student at a bar by quoting lots of long words and phrases at him, which will really impress the girl at the bar with the English accent is just so lame, why would anybody think that that was cleaver. Is this film just patronising uneducated but intelligent people or what, I don't know. I give up.