Alphonse_van_Worden Reviews

The Yellow Squadron (1954)

A waste of time

[1/10 · 7 April 2008]

A flic of mind-boggling worthlessness. Only aficionados passionately in love with airplanes are likely to find anything of interest in it. There's no plot, the dialog is badly written and the actors don't seem to be very pleased with wasting their talent. Some of them have actually made good performances in other movies. It's a disgrace to Swedish cinema and it almost defies the imagination that this movie that should never have been made in the first place is available on DVD.

What we're supposed to pay to watch and listen to is, besides a great many airplanes making a lot of noise and the dramatic line "You're too close, yellow (gula) 5!", the "story" of the bad guy who threatens to tell the officers that the good guy's dad is in jail so he can't become an officer and the good guy has to lend the bad guy 10 Swedish crowns (about a dollar and a half), but it turns out that the major knew all the time so the good guy gets his dollar back from the bad guy and he can become an officer!

Kidulthood (2006)

Cliché-ridden melodrama

[3/10 · 17 December 2007]

This movie so much wants to be La Haine goes to London. Unfortunately it lacks the authenticity of that movie. It starts out pretty good on the schoolyard and the scene in the classroom where Katie gets humiliated. Large chunks in this movie have however been pasted in from other movies betraying a lack of originality and we're not getting the true feeling of the street. How many times have we seen the psychopathic smiling gangster? In spite of being played by a good actor he's no more frightening than a monster from a comics magazine. There's even a pinch of Victorian morals. The bad egoistic girl is promiscuous and the little goodie girl has only slept with one boy and become pregnant. The characters are all stereotypes and one-dimensional.

You may like it if you haven't seen enough movies yet but if you have you'll surely note that there's nothing new and fresh about this one.

Naken (2000)

Worst movie ever made

[1/10 · 16 December 2007]

This might be the worst movie in the history of cinema. Watch it if you get a chance and feel the rock bottom. It ain't gonna get worse. Actually it must almost be difficult to make a movie so devoid of talent, plot and acting. 10 year old kids doing something for their comrades at school and we're not talking about the smartest kids here might be the nearest equivalent. Projects as bad as this gets stopped on the way but something went wrong here. A monstrously stupid script made it to the screen. I had to watch it to the end. There's an ocean between this movie and the second worst one.

Gimme me money, actors and a camera and I'll make a better movie in a month. This is no bragging - most of us would.

I'd be very surprised if anyone who thinks this movie deserves even 2 stars don't know the film makers personally or were involved in the project.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Unbearably dull

[1/10 · 30 September 2007]

I can't think of any movie more monstrously overrated than The Shawshank Redemption. Giving it only one star may seem harsh but considering all the undeserved praise heaped on this mediocre and dull movie I think it's fair. I watched it on TV and it is good enough for some entertainment for a few hours if you're too tired to do anything else but that's about it. It is predictable and unimaginative: innocent guy (well we never learn if he is if I remember correctly but as he is such a nice fellow we're supposed to think so), sexually assaulted, escapes and there you have it and that's all there is to it. Of course Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins are good actors but I can't think of anything more nice to say about this movie.

Magnolia (1999)

Very good and very bad

[5/10 · 12 January 2006]

Reading the reviews on Magnolia is great fun. Views are divided between those who hail it as a masterpiece and those who call it crap and man'o'man are they angry or not.

The funniest comment is made by Daff-4 a guy from Melbourne: If you are a dumb person and yet fancy that you are intelligent, you will love this film.

Well, ha-ha, I would like to take a stance in-between the extremes.

Magnolia is based on Altman's Shortcuts which is a far better movie in which the different stories are more skilfully interwoven. Magnolia fails miserably in many respects. At worst it is pretentious (some heavy lines sink like stones) or even ridiculous. The Monty Pythonesque frog-rain may be the silliest idea ever put into practice in the history of cinema and the beginning and ending scenes of strange coincidences are just misplaced.

All that is good with Magnolia comes from the acting and that it is refreshingly free from clichés (excluding a few bad lines). Given a great script, preferably not written by himself, Anderson may some day even come up with a masterpiece. He must also understand that madcap ideas aren't always ingenious.

So, yes if you like good acting and don't care that much about a great plot Magnolia may entertain you though it is best to watch it with quite a few breaks.

King Solomon's Mines (2004)

African adventure and treasure-hunting

[1/10 · 4 September 2005]

This is the worst imaginable crap. The novel by H. Rider Haggard is very entertaining and dramatic. The makers of this worthless movie don't follow it closely. Well, old novels aren't sacred and making free versions of them is fine with me if one has ideas of one's own. If all one can do is changing things and replace them with uninteresting and watered-down clichés one should stick to the original. If they had done that this film would have been at least twice as good even with worse actors and if filmed inside a studio with huts made of cardboard. BUt there's no imagination at all only tiredness. This should be bought or watched only by collectors of Victorian novels made into movies.

Just a hint, and not a spoiler I think, to make those of you who have read the novel understand what has taken place and what you may expect if you decide to watch this on TV or - God forbid - waste money on buying this. Gagool an old baddie witch in the book and some precursor to Gollum has been turned into a nice gal!