Reviews

*spoilers*

1) Intro recapping last fight 2) New event 3) Rocky reacts to new event 4) Something bad happens 5) Rocky loses heart, can't train 6) Rocky regains heart 7) Rocky trains unconventionally while the theme plays 8) Rocky defeats villain

It's been the same thing for 3 consecutive Rocky's.

Anyway, Rocky 4 is still entertaining, but the director slipped up at the beginning: the Russian team is polite, and they get laughed at during their press release and taunted/mocked by Apollo. Drago hasn't said a single word yet, but the white-collar american crowd in the first fight boos him loudly because he's Russian, and we're expected to agree with them because by doing close-ups on his cold-looking face, the director set him up as the Bad Guy (tm). Ha! I've seen better audience manipulation in the WWF. As a result, the first half of the movie has the normal audience (ie, non-americans who view this movie without national bias, without automatically hating the Russians or cheering the Americans) supporting the Russian, and this becomes problematic since at the end of the first half he officially becomes the Bad Guy that you have to hate.

Lousy movie full of the american hollywood pseudo-patriotism that every real person hates, but it's still a guilty pleasure like all the other Rocky's because of the fight scenes.

*spoilers but who cares?*

7.8? Jesus Christ, this movie must appeal to the same demographic that put LOTR and Spiderman above real movies in the IMDB Top 250.

The intro of the movie shows the usual warmongering suspects, Stalin, Saddam, and Hitler, while the narrator explains to us that after WW3, our future society decided to completely outlaw having "feelings" because wars are spawned by feelings. (I was initially frustrated that the movie didn't show George Bush alongside the other warmongerers of the last century, but after coming here I found out that the movie was made in 2002, ie, before the War For Oil And Distraction)

Nevermind the laughable rhetoric behind this. Nevermind that most wars are based not based on hate or whatever else outbursts of emotion, but are caused by cold-blooded politicians trying to fulfill their agenda and fill their pockets after careful planning and conditionning of the masses. Anyway, anything that can inspire feelings is banned from this future society, and that includes the most famous paintings, the most famous classical symphonies, bright colors, etc etc. The entire population is forced to inject themselves with a daily dose of a pacifying drug, and anyone caught "showing feelings" is captured and killed.

That's already enough for all the dumbasses who have been polluting the IMDB for the last couple of years to cream their pants and go "Wow, this raises such deep philosophical questions! You can't, like, own the human spirit, MAN!" and then run off here and give it a 10, basically harming the ratings of real movies. The director knows his target audience are dumbasses, so he doesn't mind repeating the same gimmick: you have the cop lead telling his guilty partner "I'm sorry" before having to kill him for showing feelings, then the partner predictably goes "You don't know what that word means". Then 10 minutes later the scene repeats: the lead is interrogating another Feeler, and when he asks "who are your friends?", she predictably replies "you don't even know the meaning behind that word". The director must have been real proud of himself.

Anyway, as the plot advances, the lead stops taking his Prozium dose, and starts feeling. Yada yada yada, he meets with a secret underground resistance of Feelers, joins them, and decide to kill everyone at his agency including the president, to liberate the people in a wave of pointless unplausible action scenes (unlike the Matrix, there is no explanation for the superhuman feats done here) that don't have anything to them except quick MTV cuts from various angles.

THE END. Don't bother renting.

*slight spoilers about the ending which you already knew before seeing the movie*

After watching this, I was reminded of Eddie Murphy's stand-up act, making fun of the italians screaming "go Rockooooooo!" after Rocky defeats yet another Black Guy.

On one hand, the movie is well-shot and doesn't feel like an Eminem commercial. On the other, you KNOW that despite whatever appeareances, it IS an Eminem commercial. I could see in my mind a scene of a writer presenting his script to the movie label, and then a bunch of white executives/producers sitting around in a fancy meeting room, ivory backscratchers in one hand, scotch whiskeys in the other, and deciding to change the black lead to Eminem to make more money (after all, movie audiences don't respond well to minority actors), and hey, maybe linking it to an album! Things like that genuinely prevent me from completely marking out to a movie, they stay in the back of my head and are forever associated with it.

Now, on to the movie itself. Like I said, it's well-done. Every character's acting feels natural (probably because they're just supposed to be natural, there's no real acting involved), except Kim Basinger and Brittany Murphy, who can't possibly pass as "street" characters. The director probably thought their names would give the movie more credibility, but in the end it did more harm than good.

The movie builds up great, but kinda loses track in the final 30-40 minutes. It's hard to put into words how, it's just that you let yourself be lead all throughout without commenting "they should've done this, done that", and then it starts slowly derailing and you end up feeling it could've been great if only they did this or that. Things like pointless temper outbursts on the part of Eminem, bad dynamic in the plot progression, things that are only there to trigger the next event, even though they don't go with the flow of the movie, etc.

A few minor flaws do get to me. Like I already mentionned, this is Rapping Rocky. Except unlike boxing, where the winner is the guy left standing, the winner in the rap battles isn't as clearly defined. During the ending, Eminem "defeats" two other rappers, thanks to the vote-like cheering of the audience. Supposedly he won because everyone felt his lyrics were more powerful, except his lyrics weren't as good as Lyckety's or Lotto's. And yet you watch him advance to the next round. Odd. And whatever happened with his pregnant girlfriend? She stopped existing because Brittany Murphy showed up?

Anyway, it's a good movie, and worth watching if you can get over the fact that it's tied so close with the black community's equivalent of bubblegum pop music.

*slight spoilers*

I hate it when I'm watching an interesting movie, and I spot glaring flaws. I mean, I'm just some 20yo nobody with little film experience, so why couldn't the co-writer of Pulp Fiction see how damaging some of the things in this movie were? Don't they have test screenings?

It starts off very strong, with the unusual characters being introduced in their "natural habitat". Then it starts spiraling down to its death. The characters and their interactions get progressively worse.

The cold, cynical gay guy who uses drugs to take advantage of younger guys, is literally turned into a queen. He starts jumping up and down on his bed in his underwear for 5 minutes (I kid you not, it may be even more than that) while singing and listening to pop music. I don't even care about the stupid stereotyping (which shouldn't have existed in the first place in a movie that tries to be intelligent). What kills the character is that he's being the exact opposite of what he's been shown as throughout the movie.

Then there's the FF8 effect, the lead girl and Van Der Beek suddenly decide they're in love without any preparation. I don't really mind that if it was in character (like if it were two ditzy and very romantic people), but VDB's character had been built-up as EXTREMELY anti-social and cynical throughout the movie. He was sold as someone empty inside. He's gonna decide he's in love with this girl after exchanging ONE extremely short and normal conversation? What makes her different from the countless other girls he seduces without caring? Not only that, but he starts acting "love stupid" (You know, the typical "can't live without you" crap), again completely out of character.

There's more such examples (the tacked-on suicide girl subplot, the flashy MTV re-telling of Victor's story, and more) but I'm already bored of typing so I'll stop now.

There are some good points about it. Jessica Biel is great eye-candy. She's been whining so long about wanting a "bad girl" role (she started attacking the series that made her popular in the first place because her character was too nice, blamed them publicly, posed in Maxim to spite them, etc), well she finally got it. Enjoy the upcoming slutty girl roles, Jessica. Also, it's good to see the ever-hated James Van Der Beek abandon typecast roles, and do things on camera that can seriously hurt his image as a sex symbol for teenage girls (kissing other men, sitting on the toilet and wiping, etc). I didn't really like his acting, I felt his whole "emotional vampire with Donnie Darko look" shtick was unnatural, but that's probably the director's doing more than his own.

It's still worth a rental, but don't expect much.

*spoilers, not that it matters*

A couple of teenagers are thrust into the world of 1950 TV show Pleasantville. The girl, a slutty airhead or valleygirl or whatever you americans call those "it's like, you know, totally!" types, proceeds to bang the first guy to talk to her, and since sex doesn't exist in 50's TV shows, it turns their world upside down. We are then kindly told by the director/script-writers (complete with cheery music) that lots of sex with no feelings involved is better than having ultra-clean morals. After all, clean morals are for boring people. Tobey McGuire's character goes from calm geek to sex-starved teenager because some good-looking girl he never met made him cookies after he becomes popular (awwww, true love). This film is filled with such positive values.

All in all, it's a very childish movie obviously written by an amateur. It even contradicts itself, since the nice people portrayed in Pleasantville would never turn into a fanatical violent mob. The worst scene is when the father of the family, who is consistently shown as a nice guy throughout the movie (talking to his children, kissing his wife, etc), is ruined by doing a 180, he's turned into a close-headed chauvinist so that we can give the lively wife a big scene where she proclaims her independence about how she doesn't want to make dinner, that she wants to run off with another man. And we're actually supposed to be glad for the wife here.

Definitely pass.

*Very slight spoilers*

The movie starts out great. The relationship between the popular rich kid and the hated nerd (both wonderfully acted btw) was extremely compelling. They were stand-outs in a sea of mediocre teen characters in recent movie history, and for a while seemed to elevate the film above the typical thriller. But unfortunately Miss Executive Producer Sandra Bullock decided that the movie should be about HER character, so we end up having to suffer scene after scene about boring Cassie and her boring past.

Then comes the plot errors: Cassie is omnipotent, all-knowing and all-seeing! Just from exchange a few sentences with one of the two kids (who is smart and had a perfect alibi), and not having spoken with ANYONE ELSE in the entire school, she decides that HE'S the murderer! Nevermind that he doesn't act suspiciously or says something that's off: he was playing with the ring on his finger while talking to her, so as Sandra tells us at the end of the scene, he's obviously "hiding something", like murdering a woman! Wow! With detectives like that, it's a wonder there's any crime at all in the world! This type of **** continues ON and ON. She keeps defying all logic: sure WE, the viewers, know who did it, but that doesn't mean we can just watch the cop magically solve problems without saying a thing. What puts the nail in the coffin is when she drives over to their secret hideout without ANY explanation being made as to HOW she found it...heck, the entire ending is crap.

Another complaint is that the movie doesn't show any of the gore, doesn't give you a close look at those wounds they're talking about, etc. The movie was already rated R...so why not go ahead and show us the goods, in Seven style?

*ending and plot spoilers*

I rented it expecting a great thriller after seeing it's IMDB score but instead got a stupid movie with stupid characters. The filmmakers expect me to believe that these people find 5 million dollars, and that they actually HESITATE to take it. Normal people like you and me (well me at least, maybe it has to do with the fact that I'm 19) fantasize every day about finding a bag full of money to finally enjoy life, all of a sudden it happens to these people, and they actually spend half the movie debating wether to turn it in to the police or not. What a load of bull, people like that don't exist! The fact that so many people on IMDB can actually forgive this while they flame nearly every other movie for having unbelievable characters is truly astounding. The only normal character was the wife.

And the most insulting part is the ending. An FBI agent reveals that the bills are marked and so you can't use them without being caught, so the moron lead burns the money in a fit of anger instead of flying (or taking a ship to avoid being searched at the airport) to that government-free "no man's land" province in Brazil or some other place where the arm of the US law can't reach, and launder the money there.

Truly, whoever made this movie is still stuck in the 40's. This is probably the only movie I've seen that insults the viewer's intelligence so. I couldn't care about the dialogue, I couldn't care about the acting, the only thing on my mind was how the hell someone could think up such characters.

DEFINITELY pass. Rent Three Kings, it has a slightly similar storyline, only with REAL people instead of a bunch of Mary Poppins cast-outs.

*Spoilers Ahead*

Reading the other comments I really expected something with more depth. This movie feels incomplete, it's as if the writer couldn't think of any good conversation that Elin and Agnes might have had to make us believe they really loved each other. In the end, you walk out with the impression that the only reason it ended that way is because Elin, who is obsessed with being different from the others, feels that loving Agnes would make her "rebellious" and "cool", while Agnes loves the Elin she was always fantasizing about, and not the actual Elin. There's barely any conversation between the two: I think Agnes must have spoken at most 10 sentences, and almost never to say something that isn't casual talk (things such as "but why?" "why do you ask me that?" "really?"). How can we believe that they love each other if they only appear together in a couple of scenes and even then, they only talk to each other in a brief moment about nothing that would make them look more interesting for each other? But I guess the movie could be realistic in that way, since that's how shallow teenage romances usually are anyway...

I did like the scenes with Agnes alone or with her father, though. Those were, IMO, very authentic, and will certainly strike close to home to many of us, since nearly everyone will identify with her as she is portrayed.

Just one thing left to add: Agnes is way too cute for that role. When you're trying to give a girl an "outsider whom no one wants to befriend" role, as opposed to Elin's "popular bombshell" role, it's not a good idea to have the outcast be the cutest girl in the whole movie, or the viewer will have a hard time believing that she can't make friends. I don't mean cute in a sexual way, what I mean is that she has a child's face. I honestly think that if Agnes didn't have that appeal (a previous reviewer mentionned how she's so cute you just want to hug and comfort her, I agree), this movie wouldn't have been as popular.

Please don't think I'm one of those uptight pseudo-intellectual a-holes that you see in every IMDB comment page bashing good movies for little insignificant details (it's the impression I got from another IMDB reviewer before watching the movie), I'm just posting my honest opinion about what I think is an overrated movie. If you do decide to rent it, though, I hope you don't spend as much effort finding it as I did.