Change Your Image
jackhack999
Reviews
Inherit the Wind (1960)
Great as an example of how we once thought about Darwin and modernity
Of course, this one hangs on the performances of both Tracy and Kelly - the movie itself is, confirming the statement of another commentator right above mine, not to be taken as historically authentic! It is the product of the Sixties and their propagandistic neo-liberalism and pseudo-philosophic naive ideal of a so-called (never existing) "modernity" - I had oppposite impressions, I felt the good side of those conservatives right at the start, the movie only displays them as real evil, untrue, untrue, though I'm alternative and anti-fascist!
What is keeping this movie so interesting, although its main subject has not only "worn out" its actuality, but has changed in the context to our time nowadays:
The subject of the movie is "modern" thinking versus that so funnily called and sung "old time religion": It is about a teacher having proclaimed the Darwin theory in his class and then immediately gets busted (arrested), for he finds himself in a very old-fashioned town somewhere in the south of the states. This movie is really good in displaying those conservatives, and for me, having grown up "only" in the eighties, long after this movie was made, it is again interesting to watch it ("again" means not for me, but in general: for this movie to be viewed again, for instance for some who have seen it already when it came out some 40 or more years ago), just BECAUSE we live in a time now where this subject does in fact not exist anymore in this way it did in the middle of the last century.
Religious conservativeness and fear from modern threats to our culture, on one hand, is of course not the real conscience of the few - well, really not? If those conservatives from this movie would be taken to the meaning and plot of a whole different, much newer science fiction movie that deals with the rightful fear from modern threats like totalitarianism or other certain scientifically induced perspectives, ways of thinking and seeing, they would suddenly be right! But of course, its the conservatives who support the potential rise of any fascist system, BUT they can be, in a specific place and time, put in a whole different context, I urge everyone to think about this overlapping of good and evil: Fear can be good or bad, and this objectively: There, we fear rightfully, in "1984", as the best example, and there, on the other hand, we do not, as in this already bearded movie: Of course, it has been a big step in our history to overcome old ways of thinking - but have we not KEPT our way of thought and behavior exactly by changing their surface? I am pointing at my idea that this whole plot of the movie about Darwin is really most awkward: Of course, America has done great things towards liberty and equality, but also a lot more of things against those ideals, but to deal with the taboo of religion against Darwin, even when set in the fifties or sixties (I really don't recognize that so exactly), seems much too late to be a major argument inside the US. One could object now that that was the time when this subject and its state of condition was running out, when the last bits of this struggle between old and new were yet flaming up, but no movie is set upon minor problems and themes, if we watch something like a movie, we understand every second of it as if the screen itself was the whole world. The second thing to keep in mind is, as I stated in the beginning, the temporal gap between us youngsters watching this black and white flick today, with our so-called "free" or "legal" sexuality, with our ways of signaling our potential sexual partners and finding our friends, our way of building up a system of opinions and beliefs - even atheism is a belief, and as for today, most people believe in sexuality, it has become a whole "new" religion. Imagine the makers of this movie, if they could have foreseen our today. They could never have.
When I see Spencer Tracy talking to the really good-hearted Colonel Brady, and the music swells over the utopia and ideal of a free and cool and just America, I feel a tear running down my cheek, only in my mind, over the love-hate I deeply feel towards this great country that once was consisting of a few towns, build up to cities on "rock and roll", as they sung in the eighties, more than half a century after - this federation of states is sadly also structurally undermined by so many perversions, by so much evil. It will always be the dialectics of America, its "two-tongued mind", trying to use an Indian point of view... (but I'm a jew, doo! ,-)
PS: Many folks stated here that the movie would be very unrealistic, I did myself already recognize the propagandistic touch in it towards the justification of the two-sided modernity: It is humans, it is only the acting ITSELF and BY ITSELF that counts! Even that, the movie shows us at its end, when Tracy as Drummond stands above the journalist played by Kelly who is in fact a "believer in nothing" - the flipped-out Brady was honestly Drummond's friend, and also the scene with Brady's wife and Brady shows clearly that those cultural and religious or military over-signs we carry are there and do have an enormous power, but for the inner human self in us, they are completely irrelevant: We can be cool folks, but cruel as carriers of certain official statuses - like with the Nazis: They were no monsters like the Americans thought, they were normal people that just did their jobs. Society should look at itself nowadays...
Ghost Ship (2002)
Unwatchable
- ATTENTION: May be a 'spoiler' to some, I didn't like it all, so don't read on if you really LOVE it! Thanks! -
It is astonishing how bad modern movies have been since the change of millennium.
The acting was so bad, I pressed Eject after some minutes only.
Good scary sea movies are: "Moby Dick", "The Fog", and only the original, again there, the remake is on the same low level as this one, "Jaws", "The Deep", also with the best actor EVER, Robert Shaw (but "The Deep" doesn't reach Jaws in the slightest), "HMS Defiant" with an Alec Guiness at his very best, one modern not SO extremely bad movie is "Pirates of the Caribbean" with Johnny Depp, he makes it all superbly funny and gives his character a depth, but the movie lacks seriousness.
I think sometime I'll try to watch Ghost Ship again, but I think it's not necessary to sum up the whole story of a movie if the movie proves already in the first minutes that it's not worth watching!
Midway (1976)
Only judgeable in three different aspects
Especially to this movie, there are three possible general points of view from which it can be 'judged' or simply absorbed emotionally and intellectually while watching it.
I prefer to call that chewing on the pieces of propaganda America's distorted image of what happens here on earth throws on the ground before us, as if we were dogs like those poor scorched jap and us soldiers - Lancaster, for once here, was really disappointing, he could have spent a lot more time with his injured son, instead of ever being present on the stupid bridge - but then again, a modern possible version of this movie or any scene like that, where big war competes with personal, private, emotional issues, would have in the contrary put much too much weight on the emotional - this is the strong side of the movie: Although fully a propaganda, as if to calm America down after Pearl Harbour, even only from the historical eye of the Fifties and Sixties, this movie succeeds in showing some strategic truth, really well-combined with the personal feelings of each character, BUT: On this point, as I said, where war and emotion meet, it immensely fails to achieve our moral and ethical standard of today, which might be spoiled, but the solution, also for a movie, is NOT to put more weight on the issue of big war than on personal emotions, but to realize those two issues are deeply related, out of which this movie makes a mockery.
Never are we made aware that the individual is trapped between patriotism and its own conscience - the movie is forbidden to show this, because it is a definite try to delude our view of the political truth, which is that America is all but the hero of the world, even if the Japs were in fact poisoned and really infected with nothing else but fascism, at that time - America went so hard on Japan because Japan was too strong an ECONOMICAL opponent rather than only a war enemy - war or peace and business always go along together in our corrupt system of international relations.
In the two categories 'strategy' and 'emotion', I would give this movie full support and only the best notes, whereas in the third and most important one, the political objectiveness and frankness of the movie, it fails so badly, that I can hardly tell how much and at what many, so many times it lies, lies, and lies again.
That Fonda agreed to demonstrate such American chauvinism, probably really desperately needed both the fame and the money the job got him. Sad. But I do enjoyed this movie, you just got to cut out the whole view it wants to indoctrinate you with.
So I'm feeling now quite a most tiny bit like Kramer from 'Seinfeld', when he popped out of his hiding cave (his apartment), only to say "Hey, I just watched 'Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo'!"
Gothika (2003)
Not even good for cultivated Horror Fans
If you like a good, moody and classical Gothic story and movie, watch "The Others", not this one whose title is confusing: No goth AT ALL.
The comment on this movie I currently see simply summarizes the content and story of the movie - which tells me not one thing about the movie ITSELF! As a fan of well-realized Gothic and movies in general, I was extremely disappointed with this one.
It is objectively clear that already the opening is so full of easily analyzed current cultural and social stereotypes and clichés: It is extremely improbable and in our very time nowadays still indeed uncommon that such an attractive model-like girl has a really fat (which I don't mean insulting in the least, but one HAS to name things AS THEY ARE!) boyfriend, and in general, the whole opening of the movie is totally unconvincing and atmosphere-less.
I don't know what this movie tries to express - it is the result of good, but too moral intentions: When he tells her she murdered her husband, and then he says "I'm on your side", but steps away from her and lets the nurses inject her with some drug. -> The movie does in fact succeed in displaying the inhumanity and schizophrenia of psychiatry itself. But then, she remembers clips of what must have happened, and those half-a-second pictures are only a show of gore. This is what is the real evil of our time which might sound conservative - In fact, the opposite of it is the truth and nothing but it: As a 'Goth'-chap, I like feelings of the kind of really-not-feeling-comfortable-or-at-home-at-all very much, but I dislike and condemn all that is only evil and/or gruesome "just like that", with no reason for this at all, with no sense, for a good example national socialism which is a modern form of the absolute, absolutely not in the slightest 'fascinating' form of evil - people nowadays have got no idea about what the evil really is and how quick and commonly it can arouse and be summoned before our very own eyes and in our very own garden, they, and mostly young teens, are often misled by the clichè of the fascination or the 'cool'-ness, the mysteriousness of the evil, and many of those who even intellectually preach sorts of half-built, mostly fashist-back-grounded satanism even might use the confusion about what is really evil and what only is defined as evil by society for their own purpose, because society is stupid enough not to be smarter than them! Anyway,there is another so-called movie"-line named "Faces of Gore". which shows victims of terrorist attacks and of wars. It's terrible to watch, it's a poisoning of our minds to watch this with the slightest delight or interest. As for myself, in order to free the kind reader from a certain potential prejudice he could conclude to with all this muttering about the badness of senselessly disturbing gore in movies and about the kind of gore in this one, let me say: I am young of age (and whit, as I hope: 30 of age) and alternative (got long hair .-), I do not dislike what is called 'splatter', for example. if there's consequent seriousness or humour or both in it, and: I am really not what one would call 'conservative'.
If you can overlook the senseless gore, you can easily and quickly really see the propagandistic intentions and motives of the producers: to arouse fear, pure fear!), because those short most gory and in their fashion really illogical and not really plot-useful scenes reveal the whole expensive production is made only for the delight of naive teenagers about the gore and blood and perversity in it. And at the same time, this movie has the REAL IMPERTINENCE to demand to be taken seriously, which is undermined in a fragile and audience-begging way, namely by those teenagers' wondering about the supposed "mystery" of and inside psychology (an abuse of an academic subject, even completely mixed-up together with the whole other and whole different subject of super-naturality in order to arouse an emotional response from the audience: structurally equal to any kind of propaganda whatsoever) and about the main "Who-done-it"-question constructed until there by the movie, where she begins to remember.
One could say now that I tear that movie down to a level so low it is not on, that I would not have understood that movie. Archiving the plot and story in one's mind is what a movie is NOT about: It is not only a story of such and such a content, it is a succession of pictures that give us a critical view and, most important, either desperation or hope.
With its bad opening, this movie has failed its own layout, even if one says now: "You're only afraid of those pix or you don't like feeling too uncomfortable!", which is altogether totally untrue, I like being afraid and horrified by movies, but with sense and a certain feeling that the watcher is guided by a human and heartily, but critical and strict hand.
And by the way: Of course, if you're a gore or specific horror fan, maybe you'll like this movie, if you like feeling somewhat disturbed and uncomfortable in antiseptic surroundings like hospitals or psychiatric departments. I really disdain those modern so-called "goth"-like movies, for me, there has to be a classic frame for it all, the story has to be wrapped in a feeling of rottenness, of long periods of time that passed by without the alteration of a certain place.
Hearts of Fire (1987)
late Eighties-Song-to-Rock-Movie; interesting for musicians fascinated by that period
I saw it only once on TNT a year or less ago, and not even from the beginning.
I write this for music enthusiasts, not for movie-insiders.
This 'flick', how one nowadays seems to call a film, is, as another commentator says, really 'brilliant', but she (Miss 'Heidi') misses the point in a film-academic perspective which is not relevant to youngsters.
Young and pure people are interested in personalities, their private characters in connection with what their doing in reality or in a so-called 'fiction' which reflects this 'reality'.
If you're mad about the Eighties, as many Twens and 'Thirths' like my never moderate self are, then you'll become mad about this movie.
I Think one of the best scenes is when Molly MCguire is performing live in a relatively small Hall, and she starts that strong singing, and the camera goes to the producers and record company representatives, showing clearly their innermost admiration and feeling of something great and in front of all: new (but very old!). Then in another scene she is shown alone at home, gripping a very nice soft and very virtuos tune out of her guitar and singing extremely nice to it.
The Plot is really not interesting. It shows Molly MCGuire as musically talented, but immature as a human being and unexperienced in the choice of sexual partners, so she falls for the Writer of 'Tainted Love', that eighties-hit, which is shown at the end of the film. She has paradox feelings about him, her ex-lover, because he is irresponsible (has a daughter and leaves her to an internee - once Billy played by Bob Dylan asks him, the young Eighties-Newcomer, when he wrote his last song, and he answers 'two years ago'. The main moment of the film to me!
So this movie has a surface defined by the movie industry, but also goes deeper - on one hand, some of those guys in Hollywood appreciate good music, good and earnest music, on the other, a critical - and therefore: good movie watcher, and first of all: a good CRITIC should be able to distinguish superficial entertainment from the one reality and mirror we all have and cannot deny: Which is and will always be music itself, not us playing.
And You won't forget the hard n heavy drummer of the band when he finally gets his thing in the scene I mentioned where they perform in the hall with the record folks behind the glass listening to the P.A. (the music monitoring and mixing device)! And of course cunning but nevertheless so wise Bob Dylan and this Fiona - I'm gonna buy all available records of her. Then I will comment this movie again only in concern of her, the one wo plays Molly.
most sincerely,
Joshua Gainsborough