Reviews

Okay, in spite of what some of the other reviews may tell you, this is basically a really bad movie. But it is blessed with some features that make it sporadically fascinating in spite of its frequent bouts of ineptitude. First of all, the cast is not good. Some of the acting is painfully wooden, particularly from the leading lady. To give them their due, they've been handed some very stiff and unnatural dialogue. The best members of the cast clearly did some ad-libbing rather than stick to the clunky text.

It's also poorly directed and edited. This has nothing to do with the fact that it needs some significant restoration. It's also obvious that it was done on a shoestring budget, but that can't excuse all of its technical and artistic flaws. There is one scene where the camera attempts a simple maneuver, but then chops off the tops of the actors' heads and then jerkily and belatedly returns to a more workable composition. The script is an interesting mess -- very slow and dull in spots, but then weirdly non-linear and unpredictable in others. I couldn't tell if it was an early attempt at a Rashomon or Pulp Fiction- like experiment, or if it was merely disjointed and awkward. Perhaps a little of both.

But it's interesting for a few other reasons, one of which is the excellent musical interlude around the midpoint, when the leading lady visits a speakeasy. Willie "The Lion" Smith is among the performers, and the music is terrific. Surprisingly, the technical quality of the soundtrack is not bad.

I also liked it for some of its fairly raw explanation of the race relations of the era. It's quite up front about the fact that blacks are second-class citizens, and everyone agrees that a black man who turns to the police for any sort of help is basically a chump. None of the many slicker and better movies of the era would have been so blunt about these sorts of things.

Anyway, it's good weird fun to watch, if you can get past the dullest scenes (the endless sequence between the boss at the chemical plant and the watchman he bribes comes to mind). Some of the bad acting is hilarious enough to be worth the effort.

This is a shockingly bad feature film, considering the budget and talent involved. The sci-fi dystopia it portrays is unbelievable and poorly explained. The economics of the world are downright absurd. But even if you don't care about that, it features an endless parade of actors doing their darnedest to be non-emotive and devoid of personality.

The premise seems to have been used as an excuse to put together an ensemble of pretty 20-somethings, who are working hard in every single scene to be sultry and jaded. Sultry and jaded are okay for a 30-second perfume ad, but they don't work so well to keep us involved through two hours of sci-fi clichés.

Cillian Murphy's relentless policeman is perhaps the most inadequately explained character. We're never provided with any motive for his determination to prop up an outrageously inhumane and plainly unsustainable regime -- except perhaps that, well, he's been doing it for a long time now, so, I guess he, like, feels some sort of force of habit or something.

Timberlake and Seyfried have shown signs of real talent in other productions. But any such talent has been carefully hidden under wraps here. Like everyone else, they come across as sullen, slow-witted and drab.

The second star was awarded only because the movie makes some amusing use of various locations in Los Angeles -- with a weird cameo from the casino in Monte Carlo -- and because I liked the way the production designer enjoyed remaking ugly cars from the '70s as high-style vehicles of the future.

This potentially interesting story manages to trip itself up in all the ways that "28 Days Later" avoided, doing itself in by alternating glaringly unpersuasive plot points with heavy doses of pretentious pseudo-philosophy. It would appear that the demonstrably talented creative team simply got too ambitious and hence strayed too far from their native strengths. As a self-conscious homage to "2001," the story manages to be ponderous and gloomy, in spite of the fact that it was built around a plainly dopey premise that would have been more appropriate to a fast and noisy Michael-Bay treatment. Picture a cross between "The Core" and that remake of "Solaris" and you'll have some idea of the artistic effect. The equally awkward but intrinsically more mercenary "Mission to Mars" suffered from some similar flaws.

At times the movie is painfully earnest; at other times it is blithely ridiculous. Yet whether the material being depicted at any given moment is silly or sublime, Boyle has handled it all as if it were deadly serious -- as if the fate of the world were truly at stake, and as if anyone in the audience who may have a few qualms at suspending their disbelief is simply not worth paying any consideration to.

He should have had some more campy fun with the goof-ball premise, as was sporadically done in "28 Days Later." Instead, the effort to emulate Kubrick encases all the proceedings in gallons of embalming fluid, and the frustrating tale never develops any characteristic sense of energy or authenticity. A disappointment all through.

I just watched this on DVD and found myself more amused than anything by the disclaimer at the front that warns viewers that it was made in racist times and should be regarded as a historical artifact. Are they kidding? Even by the standards of today, the movie is extremely sympathetic and affectionate toward its subjects. Compare this with the Chris Rock movie "Head of State" and then try to judge how much genuine progress has been made since 1943. Many films from the first half of the 20th century were vastly more racist in tone and attitude than this one. "Birth of a Nation" this ain't. So the people in the movie gamble and fight and screw around? Who doesn't? I watched "Dead End" last week, and the thuggish white kids in that were portrayed in a much less appealing manner than the cast here.

Some gripe that the script is a little rudimentary and the acting uneven and un-nuanced. It's a little heavy on sentimentality and slow in spots. But it's a musical. You could say the same of any of the Andy Hardy movies or even many Astaire and Rogers pictures.

On the plus side, the cast is utterly stupendous. It's only a shame that Minelli couldn't shoehorn in a few more spotlight moments for all the talent that was on hand. Unlike one of the other commenters, I very much enjoyed the performances of Waters and Anderson, neither of whom I was especially familiar with previously. Bubbles of "Buck and Bubbles" was riveting for his few minutes on screen. Horne is cute as hell. Would have loved to see more of Ellington and Armstrong.

I did get the impression that Waters was holding back at times for the sake of a screen performance. She begins to let loose vocally during the dance scene in the kitchen, and Anderson humorously reins her in, seemingly making a joke of the fact that they've been told to make their performances a bit more staid for the benefit of conservative audiences in the hinterlands.

Worth seeing as just plain old entertainment, never mind the "historical interest." If you can't see its good points, it may have more to do with being unfamiliar with the idioms and conventions of the era than with any major intrinsic deficits in what's on offer.

Pretty lame and predictable period farce, but includes some pleasantly gratuitous nudity. Seems to be part of a series of French soft-core productions with Masterpiece Theatre pretensions. I caught the second half on late-night Belgian TV and was delighted and amused to notice Penelope Cruz on-screen. By far the prettiest and liveliest member of the cast, but at least in the sections I saw, she did not get around to displaying her physical assets. It's certainly easy to notice her potential star quality even in this bit of nonsense. My first reaction was, "Now that's a pretty girl." After that came, "Hey, she can actually do some acting too." And then, "Gee, she looks an awful lot like Penelope Cruz."

Most of the negative comments posted below seem to be from people who either just don't like musicals or who are unaware that all the "cliches" in this movie were essentially invented by "42nd Street." It's sort of like complaining that Shakespeare is full of quotations. This movie is absolutely brilliant, which is why it's been imitated endlessly for the last seven decades.

Sure, Keeler's not the end-all of tap dancing, but she fits the bill as an ingénue and is generally amiable and perky. The plot is predictable, but only because we've seen it duplicated so often. If you hadn't seen the same sort of thing a million times, you'd notice that it's tightly assembled and even somewhat suspenseful. The show is full of first-rate comic asides, even if some of the material is dated by obsolete slang and contemporary pop culture references.

And do people still take the trouble to complain that Busby Berkeley's dance numbers couldn't have been seen properly by the audience in the theater? That's like complaining that an ape couldn't really grow to be as large as King Kong. The whole point is that it's a movie, and Berkeley is able to do things that can't happen in the real world. Hence the transformation of background settings while the camera is close up on an actress's face. There isn't even such a thing as a close-up in a stage production. Carping that a '30's musical isn't realistic enough is like complaining that Venus couldn't actually have been born out of a clamshell.

In any case, this is one of the great '30s musicals... and one of the great Hollywood movies of all time. If you don't like the genre, then so be it. It always amazes me that so many film fans strongly prefer "Singin' in the Rain" to such predecessors as "42nd Street," "Dames," "Top Hat," "Swing Time," etc., when "Singin' in the Rain" is simply an homage to the '30s musical and generates quite little fresh material of its own. Mind you, it's a brilliantly executed homage, and it arguably benefits from its overt tongue-in-cheek attitude, but I can't help thinking many are simply swayed by the fact that it's in color (really good Technicolor) and has clearer sound quality than its '30s predecessors. Either way, you need to see and appreciate the original movie musicals before you can really understand what "Singin' in the Rain" was about... just as you should see some Hong Kong action flicks and blacksploitation films to get what's going on in "Pulp Fiction."

But I digress. See "42nd Street," and try to keep an open mind. Just because it's old is not a reason to assume that the people who made it didn't know their business extremely well.

I find it interesting that this lame and obscure comedy is praised in the user comments by foreigners and disparaged by most of the Americans. It must be related to the reasons the French think the Disorderly Orderly is the greatest film comedy ever to illuminate the silver screen. Objectively speaking, most coherent humans over the age of eight should agree that this movie is pretty lousy. Like many others, I saw it because I'm a fan of Pesci and Gardenia. But it's impossible to get past the underlying lameness of the script. All the hackneyed gags fall flat, and the spiritual growth of the irritating leading man is wholly unbelievable. It's of more interest as a case study in how a comedy can go wrong than as entertainment.

This is dreadful crap, hardly worth wasting ink on. Maybe if you never saw any of the cheap horror films of the '60's, '70's and '80's, you could find something in here to get interested in. The first half hour is strident and irritating, but moderately atmospheric. It's all downhill after that, and the more negative of the comments below are right on the money.

Don't waste your cash on this. Instead, go see THE OTHERS, which is a class act on all counts and genuinely frightening.

A first-rate old-fashioned horror flick, an update and improvement on The Uninvited. This is what The Haunting should have been if its makers had known anything about the dynamics of the horror genre. All the performances are strong, and the story keeps you on the edge of your seat for longer than you think you can bear.

The story is a fairly absurd little farce that doesn't really go anywhere, but it's possible to enjoy this as just a goofy buddy comedy with some good, irreverent slapstick. Given the lack of subtitles on the copy I watched, you might want to brush up your French first; the dialogue is fast and idiomatic. I missed a good deal of it.

Wow! What a tremendous, eye-poppingly awful stinker of a movie. It's not even enjoyably dumb in the tradition of DOUBLE JEOPARDY. The most negative of the people who have already weighed in pretty much hit the nail on the head, so there's no point going into detail. But I'm amazed at the fair number of people in this comments section who claimed to enjoy the movie. Perhaps they are relatives of the writer/director. I'll admit that the cinematography and acting were perfectly decent, and ol' Ashley is nice to look at. But the script was laughable and frequently incoherent. I stuck it out to the end only to find out if there was some clever revelation that would serve to make sense of the rest of the story. There wasn't.

In this German ghost story, a mischievous little girl swaps places with a ghost, and enjoys stirring up trouble in ghostly form. But when she wants to switch back, the snotty and ungrateful ghost won't cooperate. Mayhem ensues, but the cheesy animated effects are so primitive that it's hard to get caught up in the action sequences. There's not really much of a story outside of the effects gimmick, and there's certainly no clever dialogue or gags. The little girl who plays the lead is fairly adorable, but the ghost is more irritating than scary or funny. Only a European audience could get any pleasure out of the outlandishly goofy theme song.

While sporadically fascinating as a foreign art film, the movie nonetheless is likely to be of interest only to a specialized audience in the U.S. It represents a very Japanese version of such films as WHAT DREAMS MAY COME or DEFENDING YOUR LIFE.

One of the points of interest is the film's Buddhist Japanese attitude towards death and eternity, so different from what most Americans and Europeans think of. The key plot point of the movie is that everyone spends eternity in endless contemplation of one perfect moment from their lives. This notion differs drastically from the western emphasis on variety as the spice of life -- or death. Compare Wim Wenders' film, UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, in which a group of westerners are emotionally and intellectually crippled by having to sort through their inmost thoughts and memories.

Our hell is usually depicted as a place where one must carry out pointless repetitive tasks or where one is forced into an obsession with the past (as in WHAT DREAMS MAY COME); heaven is usually thought of as listening to music, living in palaces, and socializing with a wide array of friends and loved ones. The Buddhist heaven suggested by this movie comes all too close to resembling a Sartrian hell in a westerner's eyes. Thus most American filmgoers would have no idea what the story was hoping to convey by insisting on the choice of a single cherished memory. Those with an interest in a different perspective may find the film thought-provoking.

It's less clear what the movie is getting at by suggesting that the afterlife is a place where people must make movies of their lives on limited budgets and with inadequate props. Perhaps the filmmaker is merely making a joke about filmmaking. Or perhaps he's trying to suggest that film is the ultimate artistic format, most closely tied to people's actual experiences of life. A little movie magic is all that's necessary to capture the gist of reality, even if the technical aspects of production seem cheap and mundane. Either way, the filmmaking references are likely to be lost on mainstream audiences.

Even when judged as a Japanese film, the movie is successful primarily when it relies on actual documentary interviews with old folks. Listening to these non-actors trying to describe the best memories of their lives is absolutely fascinating, whereas the drama narrated by the film is considerably less engaging.