Reviews

It may be just me but I found Grumpier Old Men way way better than Grumpy Old Men. I laughed more and got involved in the plot much more. That it is totally 100% predictable every step of the way is only one of its charms... its how you get there where the fun is. And these actors turn in surprisingly memorable performances for such a slight film. I thought Sophia Loren turned in one of her most charming and funny performances, as did everyone else. The story was just more interesting and three dimensional than the first film and flowed more organically.

The story line is simple ancient classic romantic comedy that these veterans had done so many times, it seemed for them like doing a well-known dance. The fun is not in surprises but in going through the old steps with joy. The actors move through their paces with simplicity and enthusiasm and the film actually captures very well the effects of love.

The whole film hangs together and works in a way that, for me, the first one didn't. It gets airborne. It deserves a higher ranking than my seven except the story is a little too well-worn. It also allows the two protagonists to get a little more real with each other.

Even the three charismatic animal actors get caught up in the spirit of fun.

One thing about the film that gave me trouble was that all four women being courted in the film are talented, accomplished, strong and magnificent while all four of the men are hamstrung. I found it mysterious that these women, dropped by some miracle into this tiny town, would be so strongly attracted.

I rarely write reviews but this was such a delightful gem of a romantic comedy that I had to support it.

I cannot even explain why it was so great. It's a simple little movie, low-key, 100% predictable, with an absurd premise, and moves kind of slow, with no extravagant sets. The script is linear and the dialog is adequate but hardly a work of genius.

Yet I enjoyed this more than any other film I've seen in a very long time. It was totally fun and, although there are much funnier comedies, ( Bringing Up Baby (1938), The In-Laws (1979), Simon (1980), Young Frankenstein (1974) come to mind), this one had me laughing out loud over and over, which I never do, because the comedy was so light hearted and due to the acting rather than the concept.

The film has, as you know, a terrific cast. Ginger Rogers has everything. She is beautiful, she is intelligent, she can sing (no singing though in this film), dance (some nice dancing), be depressed or do comedy. I actually like the chemistry with David Niven better than with Fred Astaire, they make a terrific couple. Niven is funny as hell, and all the supporting cast chimes right in with perfect comic timing. As soon as Charles Coburn showed up on screen I was smiling. The film is full of tiny bits of physical comedy and small gags by actors with only a few seconds of screen time, who all perform like seasoned pros turning simple bits into remarkable, funny-bone tickling scenes.

The comic acting is not stunning, as in the films I mentioned above; it is stylized, theatrical, a bit stiff. It's the style of the film which is not at all realistic, and somehow it works great. Rogers and Niven go through their comic facial expressions slowly and exaggeratedly, so everyone gets it, as if they were telling a story instead of acting it, and it adds to the effect of light heartedness.

The portrayal of the romance, from the initial attraction, through the growing awareness of feelings, is nicely observant and free of cliché. Both the script and the performance capture some of the real moments that happen as two people are drawn together.

The ending is, of course, a completely unbelievable high speed wind-up, fitting the conventions of the time, but I was wishing to follow the relationship along a more extended and realistic track. It would no longer have been a screwball comedy. And there is some absurd stop-motion animation of a mechanical duck where they don't even bother to move the feet properly. This is so blatantly faked that perhaps it is a signal from the director that he has been forced into a trite ending he disowns; or maybe just that the ending is forced by convention and not be taken seriously. It is as if it is Donald Duck who has dictated the final corny scene. It didn't bother me, though, because it is clear that the film would have had to end eventually like that even if it were worked out more believably.

Also someone complained that the landlady should have known the truth about Rogers' character, not recalling that Rogers' had only been her tenant three weeks- short enough to make the plot work out. And I think it is just fine to call a baby it- plus it shows the awkward relationship the single, childless characters have with the baby that suddenly shows up in their life.

If I had to say what it was that was so great about this film, other than seeing Ginger Rogers and David Niven, those two remarkable warm and generous personalities, playing off each other, it would be that the film seems to be filled with love and kindness. Released the year after Kristallnacht shocked the world, it features a saintly very Jewish landlady who comes to the rescue a number of times. There is a six month old baby, who does great work, and Rogers has some lovely scenes with the baby where she seems, briefly, to be genuine. Everyone wrongly thinks Rogers' character is an unwed mother, and there is not the slightest tinge of stigma associated with it throughout the film by any of the many characters that deal with her with kindness, love, acceptance and total respect (if not understanding), and there is also sympathy for the working class pain during the depression. The film totally avoids p retention, it wants to make us laugh and feel good, not to impress us, and it does.

So I give this an 8, but really in terms of the heart it is priceless gem of a film, without a single wrong note, for anyone who loves screwball comedy and the great actors of yesteryear whose like, I am afraid, the business is not likely to produce again.

As an action film, it was simplistic and predictable.

As cinematography, the glorious rain-forest never looked so boring.

For entertainment, I would look elsewhere.

But the reason I hope this is the worst review of all is that I believe the message the film programs into the minds of viewers is a slander to the Native Americans, and a deceptive version of history destructive to world peace.

The Mayans are portrayed as savages and their priests as hypocritical mass murderers, deceiving the people for power. The exaggerated caricature of the Mayan priests is absurd propaganda. The idea that human sacrifice was a means to control the population is, as far as I know, pure speculation, and it doesn't make much sense. A scapegoat has to be portrayed as a villain, and the humans sacrificed were considered sacred offerings if not divine themselves.

The truth is that the Mayans never sacrificed humans on the scale of the Aztecs, which seem to be the model for the film. There is rich evidence of a powerful, peaceful spiritual religious tradition in Mesoamerica. The pre-Columbian Mexican religions had ideals of worship and love for the God who had created the world and provided for humanity. They had a rich artistic, literary, spiritual, architectural, and scientific traditions. Their culture was not inferior to that of Europe, except for technology, particularly military technology. As Prof. Jared Diamon points out in his brilliant "Guns, Germs and Steel", the reason the Mesomericans fell to the European invaders was not because their society was corrupt, as Gibson states, but because of specific geographic and ecological handicaps beyond their control.

At the time of the Spanish conquest, Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was one of the largest and most beautiful cities in the world including Europe, according to the conquistadors themselves as well as modern archaeologists.

Even the ruined remains of the Mayan temples today are much more impressive and beautiful than the crude, small, primitive buildings of Gibson's misleading sets. When I first saw Tenochtitlan and the many other astounding architectural accomplishments of Mesoamerica, I realized I had been mislead in my education into considering Native American civilization as inferior. These buildings were as advanced and beautiful in their unique way as those of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. I felt then that the Europeans had razed them to the ground not to save the souls of the natives, but to eradicate a challenge to European supremacy. The present lack of appreciation of Mesoamerican culture as compared to ancient Greek or Egyptian culture is, I think, partly Eurocentrism and partly racist.

At least Gibson's propaganda is free of biological racism. One other good point is that the dialog is in, I am told, passable Mayan, with subtitles. This encourages survival of the Mayan language. The world is facing a crisis of language extinction (another Jared Diamond theme). True, Gibson was arrested for drunk driving and ranted against the Jews as the cause of wars, which causes doubt that his bigotry is purely the result of religious dogma rather than displaced anger. But there is no hint in this film that the Mayans are inherently inferior or evil.

Gibson has the same illness as the European invaders, who destroyed the beautiful cities and temples of the non-Christian natives out of bigotry and religious intolerance. Nothing could be allowed to challenge European-Christian supremacy four centuries ago.

Gibson has destroyed Mexican culture for a second time in his film.

Spoiler: At the end of the film, a European ship is shown landing with a Catholic priest, and the Mayans say they need a "new beginning". The film is saying, as it says in the opening credits, that pre-Columbian civilizations were corrupt and evil, and the European invasion, and conversion to Christianity, saved the natives from themselves.

End of spoiler.

The fact is that the European invasion killed an estimated 100 million natives. In comparison the Mayan and even the Aztec human sacrifices were negligible homicides. The Europeans destroyed the native cultures and religions beyond recovery. The Europeans enslaved the natives to work in their mines and plantations, and stole their lands and resources. To this day in many places the descendants of Europeans oppress the natives and control the lands.

Gibson subscribes to schismatic, right-wing Traditional Roman Catholic views. Some such sects reject the present Roman Catholic church as heretical, and all reject Vatican II, the reform that brought the Church into the modern world by repudiating religious intolerance and antisemitism. He funded construction of the Tradionilist "Holy Family Chapel" Roman Catholic church in Agoura, California, which is schismatic from the Vatican. Gibson, in a few rare candid interviews, defends the brutal Inquisition. He is also associated with holocaust deniers, those who deny the reality of Hitler's genocide against Jews and Gypsies in spite of the overwhelming physical evidence and testimony. His documented beliefs are relevant to this review because this film amounts to the justification of another genocide, that of the Europeans against the American natives.

Gibson is entitled to his religious beliefs and to make films that communicate his world-view. That is exactly why a strong negative review like this is necessary. Millions who see this film will not know it is a completely falsified version of history, and that they are being injected with bigotry and intolerance under the guise of entertainment.

For me this is one of the 10 best films ever made.

It is certainly an art film for the dedicated appreciater of film, not a film at all for the consumer of Hollywood entertainment. It is a film that makes you think, as you can see from the numerous long comments; a film in which the viewer has to work to appreciate as a participant.

Antonioni's films are slow,langorous, visual, driven neither by plot nor by character, but by the unfolding revelation of the perception of our situation itself. In this they are unique, and represent a challenge to the viewer, to drop the expectations of fantasy gratification that film usually exploits. If the viewer can lose the speed of modern life and just flow along with the film, much deeper rewards are to be found here, as attested by the many posted reviews.

When sound was added to film, many filmmakers were worried that the artistic value of film as visual motion would be lost to the complexities of text, which has largely been the case. Antonioni's films, however, have explored and deepened the visual aspect of film as a means for making profound communications. The dialogue doesn't, for the most part, "tell" anything about the message, but is merely a supporting aspect of the visual metaphor. His last film, the superb "Beyond the Clouds", is more talky and gives some verbal clues about Antonioni's world view.

I feel that Antonioni's films are artistic and spiritual landmarks of cinema; but of all his films I have seen, this is the most accessible, with the most conventional presentation, plot, etc.

The rest of this includes my interpretation of the film and might include spoilers.

A lot of the comments here are excellent. I will just add that for me, the film is about our attempt to observe and understand our world through our placement of our attention. The photographer is just us as the observer; his professional work reflects our customary perception of the world through pre-conception, kitsch, convention. It is meaningless, exploitive, alienating, even cruel.

On the other hand, when he observes reality rather than artificiality, when he turns up the intensity and magnification until things are no longer recognizable, he is seeing the essence of things and not his conceptual projections. He discovers a crime- for me this murder is a metaphor for the murder of real perception, along with real feeling, by a society which alienates us from our own natural ability to see things as they are.

From here, the film goes even deeper into the meaning of this crime, and how one can live with it. Yet the film never gets into any obvious deep speculations; it makes its point completely in the domain of visual images and metaphors that also serve as plot devices, until the enigmatic conclusion of the film.

Like any great work of art, the meaning of the film lies in the symbols and metaphors and cannot be reduced to words; the success of the film lies in the tremendous emotional impact it has on its viewers who probably often, like myself the first time I saw it, don't even realize it has such deep levels to it. Antonioni has constructed something that has a life of its own, with the ability to reflect profound meanings that arise from an interaction of the film and the viewer.