Change Your Image
nobody-1
Reviews
Iga ninpôchô (1982)
A laugh riot.
I couldn't decide whether to give this movie a 1 or a 10.
Back in high school, some friends of mine and I used to watch this almost every week. A couple years ago, one of them e-mailed me out of the blue with a link to a website discussing it, complete with audio clips. I ran to ebay and ordered a used VHS right away. Now my wife is hooked on it, and we've started showing it to our friends.
I can't post spoilers, because as many times as I've seen it, I still never know what to expect next. I think some of the scenes might be out of order.
If you were amused by the flying and running up vertical surfaces in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, wait until you see this. And the baffling endings of Strangelove and 2001 scarcely hold a candle to the sudden tacked-on weirdness here.
I know this film as "Ninja Wars", but maybe it's available under some of it's other titles. The Ninja Wars VHS version features crazy dubbing with poor translations and silly voices. Wouldn't be the same without it.
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Bizarre and Hilarious.
This delightful film is occasionally misunderstood by people who think it should be less strange than it really is. Cary Grant's over-the-top acting is -perfect- for the over-the-top plot. A lot of people get confused because the film switches back and forth between being completely bizarre and being realistic, and they assume it's one or the other, and judge the switching as lapses, or shortcomings. It's incompletely weird, and incompletely normal, because it's a juxtaposition of the two. Yo. It's very mild surrealism and one of my favorite movies ever.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Good, but not great.
Haven't seen this for a couple years, guess I should give it a try again. It was enjoyable and clever at turns, but a little formulaic. I was also very bothered by the lack of racism portrayed in the film. Racism is a very bad thing, but it was also so very pervasive in the 1930's that portraying it as basically nonexistent is tantamount to historical revisionism. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Great, but not as great as the Godfather.
This is a very good film, and if you liked Godfather, you'll like the sequel. But it IS a sequel, not a companion as one other reviewer claimed. The original film is a complete work without this, and a somewhat stronger one. There are a few inconsistencies with the historical stuff, and frankly the flashback story, while compelling, is a little weaker than the future one.
Worth seeing! But not worth being in the top 10 of all time.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Great movie, but requires good viewing conditions.
Some movies translate very well to a small screen with poor sound and the neighbor's dog barking in the background. This is not one of them. If you see a good print of this in a big theatre with a good sound system, or if you've invested thousands of dollars in a big screen and fancy home-theatre sound, you're in for a real treat. If you see an old print in a lousy theatre, or you just have a regular TV and an old VHS copy of it, you'll probably hate it.
Some people will hate it even under the best of conditions. But all will agree that it's a film unlike any other, and it's very impressive visually and auditorially.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Gone with the Wind for the 21st Century.
There was a marked increase in the production quality of Hollywood films following the release of the epic film Gone With The Wind.
Expect a similar rise in quality in the next few years. The bar has been raised again.
See this movie. It will move you.