Change Your Image
Tom-284
Reviews
That's Life! (1973)
A ghastly & depressing TV programme
"That's Life" was a very peculiar programme - Esther Rantzen surrounded by a group of rather camp men wearing cardigans and talking in a droning and sanctimonious fashion about subjects ranging from trivia to life-saving. But all terribly boring, and as it was usually broadcast on a Sunday night, a depressing show as well.
All most people can remember of it today was animals who said things - "Sossages" - and some tedious campaigns about diet pills.
I'm told that many of the production team went on to great things elsewhere in television - so I guess the dire state of TV today can be blamed on this frightful show as well Tom
Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003)
Rubbish
As usual, I was really looking forward to a new TV/film on a favourite subject of mine - makes a nice change from a *strangely familiar* documentary about Kursk or Stalingrad on the History Channel.
I avidly looked forward to Pearl Harbour and Enemy at the Gates - but was rudely brought down to earth with the realisation of the malevolent, stupid-ifying power of Hollywood - and its ability to spend an absolute fortune on tripe.
So yet again I got excited about 'The Rise of Evil', especially as I heard that Ian Kershaw was involved, as I've enjoyed his books. I can see why he quit.
To quote some guy responsible for this rubbish:
"The Kershaw book was an academic piece," he said. "It was
quite dry. We needed more incidents."
Incidents? Are they totally nuts? Hitler's life cannot be said to be without 'incident' - yes Kershaw's two volume Hitler biographies were long and detailed, but they were supposed to be.
The thesis behind 'Rise of Evil' seems to be:
Hitler was a very bad man - no he was a VERY bad man, who HATED jews, and just in case you miss this, we're going to emphasise the fact in EVERY scene in the film.
There was no effort whatsoever to try and explain the mood of the time, and why Hitler may have adopted the views and strategy he did. Needless to say - unlike the generally excellent 'Nazis - A Warning from History' - this film neglected to point out the fact that nearly all of the leaders of the Munich communist rising were Jewish, and that this may have coloured his views on the subject - and his axiomatic linking of the jews with Bolshevism - an absolutely crucial aspect to understanding much of the Nazi era.
But there was not much understanding to be done - the film-makers weren't going to go there, so we just got all the stuff we knew about anyway. We certainly don't get the fascinating fact that Kershaw alludes to, which has Hitler briefly being a socialist/communist immediately after WW1. That would of course be far too complex for the film to handle, and might even detract from the relentless 'he was very bad' mantra which bangs away incessantly.
We know he was a bad man. However, we also know that he was a mesmerising figure both as a public speaker and in more private situations. He could be polite and even sympathetic, and of course espoused some views like vegetarianism, anti-alcohol and anti-smoking that many Guardian readers could agree with. He was also famously fond of animals, hence why that wholly invented dog-flogging scene was so absurd.
He was also, from all the accounts I've seen, a brave soldier in WW1. Whilst we saw him with his Iron Cross, we never get to see how he won it (acts of bravery were not in the script, needless to say). We also get no insight whatsoever into why he was so fired up by his war experiences, whilst Sassoon, Owen, Brook, Remarque and so many others found it so repellent an experience. And again, like the point above re the jewish/bolshevik link, this is vital to anyone's understanding about the subject. Why did he love war so much? Why did he think it was always a good idea, despite massive evidence to the contrary? Why didn't he care about his colleagues who died? Or maybe he did - but still drew the wrong conclusions.
This film certainly didn't have anything of any interest to say on this either.
As all too often these days, the film is a classic example of 'making history relevant to the present' and inventing stuff or leaving awkward facts out to fit in with 'the present' - which all too often is to cater to the lowest common denominator, where you don't trust your audience an inch, so you just ram stuff down their throats, knowing (sadly correctly) that you'll always get away with it because there are so many dumb fools in the world.
History is really about making us relevant to the past and seeing how it colours our present, for better and for worse. This rubbish was a great opportunity, lost again. They spent millions on it, and the locations and large scenes were impressive, but told us nothing at all we didn't know already, and promoted no understanding of this dark period in human history.
WT
Die Another Day (2002)
Terrible Mess
Oh dear oh dear.
Having profoundly disliked Goldeneye, I enjoyed Tomorrow Never Dies and TWINE I was quite looking forward to this.
What a disappointment - a total shambles, massively over hyped, with scant delivery on that promise. Bond's PR people should get a raise, but the guys who made this should go back to TV.
The plot is just inane and uninteresting - with all respect, the forcible reunification of Korea is not something that I or I suspect most audiences can get that excited about. What happened to the good old days, when the world itself, or at least many of its major cities, was at stake?
Yes, yes, we got given all the usual PR bunk about 'empowered' Bond women and - shock - a black girl. The fact is that nearly all of the Bond girls since at least 'Spy' have been empowered and reluctant to be pushed around by Bond. And Roger Moore had the first black Bond girl in Live and Let Die back in 1973. So, purrlease Halle Berry, don't make out that this represents such a watershed - as someone else has noted, it just exposes her ignorance of all the films that went before her.
The film is a series of set pieces with little coherence and the addition of stupid and irrelevant scenes put in for product-placement - e.g. the BA plane, and him shaving -for crissakes!
I hate to say it, but the film was just plain boring. I didn't care about any of the characters, and this Bond villain was the worst since the laughably miscast Sean Bean in Goldeneye. I am a massive Bond fan, and actually fell asleep in the middle, so I apologise if I missed anything, but I somehow doubt it.
I appreciate that the end of the cold war has left the Bond 'franchise' (god I hate that word - as if its yet another branch of KFC or something) with problems in its plots - it lacks the Russian foil, so often used to good - though not always directly adversarial - effect in previous films.
Some of the sequences were OK, but totally destroyed by the increasingly infamous 'surfing on tidal wave' sequence, which would have looked at home on my PS2. The producers should be ashamed of themselves to allow such an embarrassingly bad scene in a Bond film - some people in the audience actually laughed, and they wont be alone.
The last truly great Bond film was 'Spy who loved me' - 25 years ago. I saw it recently and was reminded what recent Bonds have lacked - a coherent plot and script, interesting villains (compare the excellent and menacing Kurt Jurgens with the prep school boy villain in DAD), and large-scale battles in believable sets.
The current producers and directors seem to have no idea about their inheritance - sure they paid lip-service aplenty in DAD with oh-so-unfunny references to previous films, but none seem to have even seen any, as fas as I can see. They cannot see the vital ingredients that made those old Bonds so enjoyable and successful, and just rely on a tedious combination of stunts, explosions, and product placement to keep the show on the road.
However, I must warn them - the hype machine wont save Bond for ever; eventually the Bond 'franchise' will become an emperor with new clothes, and audiences will realise that the film-makers ran out of ideas a long time ago - they embrace things that all other actions films have, without honouring properly what Bond actually stands for: cracking but vaguely believable plots, excellent villains, and set pieces that aren't just a series of bangs and booms.
So, Mr Wilson and co, whilst you think about the next one, I urge you to view the best of the genre and LEARN. Otherwise, become a KFC franchisee, as the party may stop soon.
Hart's War (2002)
Rubbish
This film is mostly rubbish. Endless cliches and tedium are the order of the day. It's a wasted opportunity, as the film looks quite good and clearly cost quite a lot to make.
It has a lot of politically correct stuff that really wasn't an issue back then and it's not very realistic to come up with it in this film - its very like A Few Good Men, which I also thought was boring and stupid.
As someone else pointed out, it was nearly the end of the war anyway so I can't really see why they were so bothered about escaping - as for the 'Shoe factory' next door, well who gives really? All of Germany was being flattened in early 1945 and one less arms factory couldnt really have made any difference.
Bruce Willis is hopeless in this, completely miscast, and looks as if he's as bored as the audience, coming out with lines that he clearly learnt in the trailer a few minutes earlier.
It's all a bit of a mess really.
Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)
Shockingly bad
It is a shame that a film of the calibre of BHC 1 should be followed up by this. 2 had its moments and carried on some fun themes from the 1st.
BHC3 is however a cynical, greedy and utterly unimaginative cash-in on a dying franchise. Sensibly Simpson and Bruckheimer played no part - and must have winced at the awfulness of it (even though they did 1 or 2 horrors themselves - remember Days of Thunder?).
I stumbled upon this film by mistake tonight - definitely so bad it was funny...
John Landis must be trying to forget this one - the guy who made Trading Places, Blues Brothers at al must have been real short of dough to take on this one - an empty, pointless and uninteresting script encompassing an awful plot, worse characterisation and total absence of tension, meaning or message.
The whole film is utterly inane and implausible to anyone over the age of 10.
This was quite big budget - it doesn't show; together with awful music, it looks like a TV Movie, and the way it jerks along from one contrived and tedious set-piece to another confirms this.
Two knights of Hollywood - George Lucas and Ray Harryhausen (the modellist of films like Clash of the Titans and the Sinbad movies) also make irrelevant cameo appearances. Hey guys - do anything to stay busy, work for charity, make awful sequels yourselves ;-) (by the way, that Serge idiot in this is disturbingly like Jar Jar Binks I fear - annoying, loud, and deeply irritating), anything, but do not get involved in embarassing rubbish like this. . must have somehwat regretted being a cameo in this.
A distressingly bad film.
A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Last of a kind
People criticise ABTF because of the overload on stars - but thats one of the reasons I love it - one of the last films ever I think to have that huge blue chip group in one film: Bogarde, Caine, Connery, Edward Fox, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Kruger, Schell, Gould, Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Redford, Liv Ullmann, Denholm Elliott, together with a load more you'll recognise.
The escalation of star salaries makes this more or less impossible nowadays, and I guess that's a reason it's interesting. The film itself is well done with poignancy but not to an irritating degree.
The stars aren't reduced to cameos - many of them contrary to critics make a measurable contribution to the whole, and help to emphasise that war of the 1940s wasn't like today - without computers and effective communication noone had the heck what was going on in the middle of a battle. Deprived of working radios, these guys could be a mile away from each other and know nothing.
One of the closing scenes has the major allied leaders on a tower, watching with binoculars the battle a few miles away. It is a scene - never repeated in terms of the constellation on screen at the same time - that remains unforgettable for anyone interested in the history of actors of this century, and the pleasure they have individually shown millions: Bogarde, Caine, Edward Fox, Gene Hackman, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford - All staring at Connery's guys marooned ahead.
For this scene alone, and for what it represents this film deserves significance. The message of the film is well conveyed through the humanity of its director Dicky Attenbrough.
I agree with most of the positive comments of others and appreciate the ambition of the film - like the operation it describes, it must have been a logistical nightmare to execute and I salute all those involved - one gets the feeling as a viewer of the scale of such an operation and the guts of all those involved. Compare it with the equally ambitious but incredibly flawed Pearl Harbour - well don't - I know which film I'd rather spend $200m on.
The Chain (1984)
A great, grossly underrated British film
The sort of film that reminds us that a nice story and a great cast still make a great film.
The film centres around a group of Londoners who run across the social spectrum who are all moving home on the same day, some of whom are being ably assisted by a gang of removal-men fronted by Warren Mitchell.
Among others, notable appearances from Nigel Hawthorne, playing a socially obsessed miser, Leo Mckern as a plutocrat who's decided to go back to his roots, and of course Mitchell himself who is clearly the wisest person in the whole film.
The pace is excellent and the characters well realised - and for anyone who loves seeing London on film it's a treat too.
It's a charming and very humanitarian film that you'll enjoy immensely if you allow it to.