robertstjames Reviews

Alien Outlaw (1985)

If anyone can figure out why these outlaw "aliens" are on Earth in the first place...

[1/10 · 25 September 2015]

This one is beyond awful. The aliens look like guys dressed in frog suits with cheap Halloween masks and seem to have no purpose on earth but to twirl six guns (for real, that old fashioned swing the gun by its trigger guard thing), bust out windshields on cars (interstellar vandalism...huh?) and from time to time, shoot people for no particular reason (do these guys not have laser guns or any weapons other than what they find laying around?)

Not to worry, tho...awful acting and cornball plot fill in the very large blank spaces between action scenes. You'll be so desperate for something to happen that you'll find yourself cheering the car destroying scene. And then turning the movie off because not even Rifftrax makes this steaming pile worth finishing.

Evita (1996)

Decent music and acting, terrible screenplay

[4/10 · 15 May 2010]

Not sure why so many people are complaining about Madonna and Banderas. Madonna, well, you already know what she's going to sound like, so if you expected something else, you were deceiving yourself. She's not a great actress, but who expects her to be. Banderas, he basically plays himself, kind of a narrator who is peripherally involved with the action. His singing is fine, but again, I don't buy CDs of Antonio's greatest hits, y'know? What killed the movie was the terrible screenplay. Maybe the original play was different, I don't know. But opening the movie with a big long overly weepy series of scenes about a dead character we haven't even met seems to me a bad choice. Yeah, she was beloved by the whole country, more or less. I get that. I don't need five minutes of wailing and funeral shots (interspersed with her father's funeral years before, I guy I care even less about).

When the movie finally gets to Eva Duarte/Person and her rise up from poverty, it really takes off. The songs are better, then action has pacing, and the movie has direction.It doesn't give much of a sense of Argentina of the 1930s and 40s, but poor is poor no matter what the country. It also doesn't explain what made Eva so special (i.e. why her and not some other guttersnipe). But it has life, and action, and dancing--in other words, everything that makes Madonna interesting.

But once at the top, the movie is just lost. Peron's story in and of itself has no inherent drama, and the screenplay can't invent any. Yeah, sure, she loses her connection with "the people" but since we never saw much connection to begin with, the loss is cerebral. Yeah she was the first woman in South America to have actual political power, but I don't really care in 2010, the novelty has long worn off. Yes, she had some enemies who were trying to bring her down, but what political figure *doesn't* have enemies? Whether you're male or female isn't relevant--your enemies are trying to toss you out of power so they can take it themselves, not because you've offended the natural order.

Of course, Eva didn't really have to do battle with them (her husband took care of that) and long before he fell, she died of cancer. Which, means, of course, long weepy scenes just like the movie started with. We know she's going to die, we know she's going to be brave and noble about it, and we know the songs are going to creep along at dreary pace. Fine, whatever--keep it to the last 3mins, and I could have dealt with it by getting up to go to the bathroom and maybe check some basketball scores. But it's almost *half of the freaking movie*! Don't Cry for Me Argentina should have been Don't Indulge My Drama Queen Flourishes Argentina. But again, there was really no story here to tell, or if there was, the screenwriters didn't find it. Enjoy it for the music and the spectacle. As soon as she collapses in Rome, stop the movie and go do something more enjoyable with the next hour. Like listen to Ray of Light and let it take you back to the late 90s again.

Metropolis (1927)

Tedious dreck, horrific acting, bad music, and there's the plot

[3/10 · 27 March 2010]

Goebbels had lousy taste in films.

This is routinely cited as a big important film, and if reduced to iconic images, it probably is. But as something I had to sit through, it was torture.

The acting is hopeless unless you're a fan of the "act with your eyes" school of the overly dramatic. The music was standard orchestra fare with no defining theme. Just the same kind of boring old crap you'd hear on early Looney Tunes. But the biggest offense is the plot.

Workers rise up against the industrialists and in order to really drive their point home--abandon their children and then flood (?) their part of the city. Brilliant. Why flood? Who the hell knows. Looked cool I guess and the lame cardboard city models would have gone up too fast if they'd used fire. None of the action is remotely logical. Like Maria showing up with all those dirty school children in the middle of some "Club of the Sons" sex party. Huh? Or Fredersen's plan to send a robot chick to foment rebellion among his workers instead of, you know, getting rid of their leader (Maria) and arresting the other ringleaders. Said robot chick is apparently whipping up the workers into a froth by day and stripping at some swanky club by night. Which has the result of turning the industrialists against each other (in some of the silliest fistfights ever put on film) which advances Federsen's plan how again? The storyline is absurd and used to drive set pieces, nothing else. 90mins, 124mins, 153mins, doesn't matter. There is no length that would fix the dimwitted writing (courtesy of Lang's wife who went on to join the Nazi Party in 1933). Like so many of today's bloated FX extravaganzas, Metropolis has nothing to say, no story to tell, no reason to be remembered beyond the classic images. So don't go in expecting a narrative masterpiece.

Watchmen (2009)

Another garbage comic book movie

[2/10 · 19 January 2010]

Some notes to the makers of the next Watchmen (and at 100mil+ total box, there will be another one):

a) Have an actual story to tell next time. Blue Guy Saves the World is something a 6th grader comes up with.

b) Turn the FREAKING SOUND EFFECTS down. There is no way to watch this without using the volume control every 2mins.

c) The music sucks. I don't care if it's 1985 since everything looks like 2009 anyway, so use some songs from modern bands. Seriously, Dylan, Hendrix. That's grandpa music. Or re-use the rest of the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack like you did for Origin of Blue Man. That part was good.

d) Bring the hotness. Transformers had Megan Fox. Who did you have? Malin Akerman. Snort.

e) I don't care if you follow the stupid book or not. It's a graphic novel, not a collection of storyboards. Don't go all Fantastic Bore on us, but use the source material as a starting point, not an ending point.

f) Don't ever show me the origin of a superhero again. Maybe in the 60s they cared about that cr*ap. Not now

g) Get rid of the Tarantinesque violence, and the recycled 'fu. It was funny in Pulp Fiction and The Matrix. Those movies were made a long time ago.

h) Is it possible to make a comic book movie that doesn't have a half dozen big "boardroom" scenes? They all look phony. Worse than indie films. Yeah, that bad.

Watchmen may have had unique characters, blah-blah, but the story was the same boring hash we've been fed a dozen times before and everything down to the costumes is retreaded. The focus is all over the place. Choose *one* character (Rorsach, duh) and stay with him. Ditch the cliché "save the world" plot line. Then you might have something like Watchmen II: A Comic Book Movie Worth Watching!

RstJ

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

Another turd from Gilliam

[3/10 · 18 January 2010]

With Ledger dead, don't expect Gilliam to be able to con anyone into forking over this kind of money again. The film is the typical mess--wild visuals, zero storytelling, viagra-like zaniness from the Python days. Except Python was funny.

I don't care if it's Ledger's last performance. He looks bloated and sick, and his character does zero. Not even any great lines. He's just some d*ck named Tony who (with the usual Gilliam lack of coherence) escapes fate/a crowd/Russian mobsters by swallowing a magic flute and hanging himself (or being hung). Make sense to you? Yep. Did to me too. Yeah, oooh, spooky because Ledger himself died while filming it. So what? Does it make the movie any better? No.

His replacements roll in and ham it up (Depp, who can't play anyone other than Depp), Jude Law (being a piece of lumber with one facial expression) and Colin Farrell (don't these people have real jobs?). The fantasy sequences are nice to look at, but, again, as always in a Gilliam movie, do nothing for the story other than illustrate how drab the "real" parts are.

Plot, you ask? Parnassus makes yet another bet w/the Devil (Tom Waits can't act, sorry, he's a smoked ham) to score five souls. Why five? Who cares. Does Parnassus actually go to work on this? No, of course not, he sits around in the remains of what looks like a GM factory in Detroit and proceeds to bore the living sh*t out of us. Then there's something about his daughter and Tony Ledger and some kind of poignant ending then Gilliam goes on for another 10mins and ruins what little emotion he managed to generate. Again, like he always does.

Obviously, someone was able to look at this digital brown splatter and realize it didn't belong in nationwide release. Released on Dec 25 (funny, that) it's realized 3mil at the box office as of Jan 18, 2010. Meaning it's another gaping hole in someone's spreadsheet and the most persuasive argument yet for keeping Gilliam out of a director's chair. He can write all the screenplays he wants in his spare time--no one's going to greenlight them because when you take away the big names and computer-generated crappery from a Gilliam movie, you have another Tim Burton stinker, and we have plenty of those, thank you very much.

So why did I give it a "3" instead of a "1"?

a) The girl has legs that go all the way up b) The opening scenes had some promise, so I could imagine a better movie based on them c) It didn't go on for 45mins past the end like the insufferable Brazil did.

RstJ

The Cement Garden (1993)

Why it all actually works

[9/10 · 11 March 2007]

As aimless-46's "big wow" review states, the set is fantastic. As is the overall look of the film. The only difference is I actually liked the movie, primarily because it plays as an incredible piece of imagination rather than as any kind of shocking, deep philosophical statement.

The film works best as "this is our world" rather than "forbidden love." The sense of isolation, of familial insularity is all-pervasive, probably due to Derek being the only adult character of any consequence. Both mother and father are so faintly delineated that there's no real sense of loss when they both die. Scenes where the children reflect back on them have no real power since the parents were hardly there to begin with. In fact, the film works better if you start it around 11 mins. This creates the feeling that the father has been dead for quite some time rather than very recently. The characters lack of emotional reaction to his being gone makes more sense then. Likewise the mother's illness becomes something that has been going on for a significant length of time, so that when she too dies, it doesn't change much--the children have already adjusted to living w/o her.

I could go on in a similar vein as there's so much which doesn't really make a lot of sense when looked at too closely. What makes it work is the kind of otherworldly shimmer Birkin gives the story. It frees the viewer up from having to parse it for cues to deeper meaning in the real world, so that we can get a feeling of what it's like to live in a very obsessive, very small world where your older sister is a disturbing little tease and your brother is a 15yr old version of Jim Morrison.

Aimless-46's review touches on Birkin's artsy pretentiousness, and yeah, it's definitely there. Fortunately, Birkin is so inept when it comes to symbology that it works in the film's favor. The flashbacks to the beach scenes were probably meant to be something very specific, but they're presented in such an uncoordinated manner (and at such random points in the narrative) as to be utterly mysterious, heightening the sense of disconnection from reality. Then there's the voice-overs (in a Saturday morning cartoon announcer's voice) of the cheesy space novel Jack is reading, which should be really weak attempts at ironic commentary, except for the quoted passages seem to have nothing to do with the Jack/Julie storyline. Or, in fact, anything in the movie at all. And, of course, there's the "Naked Jack in the Rain" scene, possibly intended as ...well, I have no idea. Something metaphysical, I suppose, although the way it's shot it seems like little more than cooling off in the rain on a hot sweaty night.

Birkin (following Macgowan's lead in the book?) appears to be trying to say something profound about gender, but it's laughable, which gives the movie some needed levity at key moments. By striving (one imagines) to depict the universal, Birkin ends up adding character depth. Julie dressing the youngest boy Tom up as a girl comes off not as a statement about gender identity, but rather as a hint that Julie has an actual sense of humor. Jacks's discovery of Tom, wearing a ridiculous wig and playing at husband and wife with his friend William, underlines Jack's essential cluelessness. Even after Tom informs him that they're playing at being Jack and Julie, Jack doesn't seem to get it. Or care.

The only thing keeping me back from handing out a 10 for this one is the intrusive subplot of Derek. Nevermind that there's no particular explanation for why a successful 33yr old is perving around trying to score with a barely legal teenager, or how in hell he figures out that a locker down in the basement of a very large house contains the cement-entombed body of said teenager's recently departed mother. The guy is just annoying, popping up at all the wrong moments. His "he's your brother!" scene is aggravating. It's like "yeah, we know, OK? That's kind of the point of the movie." Derek is unwanted voice of sanity in a movie that really doesn't need one.

The whole incest angle would be icky if it were presented in anything like a realistic context. Since it's played out in a world so completely imaginary that we can't even tell what decade it is, it succeeds in being erotic--a glimpse into a world so private and self-contained that it succeeds in being its own self-generated heat source.