Reviews

Fellini in top form here. I don't know why this gets so much indifference. Along with "And The Ship Sails On," this might be one of Fellini's best films, up there with Juliet and 8 1/2. You should also check out Intervista. A story of two aging performers well past their peak of popularity team up after not seeing each other in decades to dance on a variety show. "Ginger," the lady, doesn't seem to even understand the nature of the show she's appearing and is baffled and disturbed by the circus freaks and transvestites. "Fred," the man, is bitter with age and a bit embarrassed that he doesn't have more to show for his life. He even threatens to derail their appearance to make a statement about what sheep the modern audience is. The stinging commentary on television and rampant commercialization is always in the background, and fortunately it's more of a cultural critique than a political one (I don't think Fellini had a political bone in his body). For me, the emotional core of the film is probably Fred's discussion with a bemused, condescending writer about the origins of tap dancing. I won't spoil it.

Typical Scorsese effort: average crime movie script dressed up with great acting and pretentious, way overly stylish camera-work.

I'm amazed this movie holds anyone's attention, let alone earns the "best movie ever!" praise you hear about this one. As I said, I didn't think it was bad, it was just wasn't that good. I had to force myself to keep watching, trying once again to see what other people see in Scorsese. I get the feeling all the praise and accolades heaped on him are just a big prank being played on me.

At least the Godfather was an actual good movie, although certainly no masterpiece.

A far, far better movie than this that came out around the same time would be Miller's Crossing. It's actually entertaining--you don't feel like killing yourself after watching it for just a few minutes, which is another thing about Scorsese I don't like. His slickness, bleak subject matter, unredeeming violence all combine to create an effect like a low-frequency earthquake hum or day-old shellfish--it's nauseating and depressing. I honestly spend the rest of the day depressed and joyless after watching a Scorsese film. You may say that's the power of the film maker, but I say that's simply the power of the subject matter. Manos: the Hands of Fate is pretty depressing for much the same reason.

Art shouldn't always be uplifting (I love Bicycle Thief and the Year of Living Dangerously) but if it's going to put such misery on the screen then it should have a good reason for doing it and it should teach me something.

A good example of how hollow the praise for Scorsese and his works rings is the famous Copacabana scene, a two or three minute steadicam shot following two characters from the outside of a nightclub as they wind through the kitchens and so forth and end up at their table. Scorsese's fans call this "the best shot ever." As I said, it's a long shot of a fellow getting a table. Kubrick did great tracking shots too, but the key to a great tracking shot, like any shot, is that it communicates something significant to us, puts us in the state of mind of the characters, etc. But this was just some people walking to their table. The difference is contextual and often subtle, but it's there.

Forget McDonald's. McDonald's is to American cuisine what Jurassic Park is to the history of ancient reptiles. Real American cuisine isn't just burgers and hot dogs (although fast food joints like McDonald's have given those fine foods a bad name), American cuisine is about travel, more than anything, and nothing illustrates this better than AB's four-part journey across America, showing us the history of food in this country via the road. Travel, and American people. Many nations have two classes of cuisine, that for the rich, and that for ordinary people. Many times when we think of "French food" or "Japanese food" we are thinking of the kinds of food created for and enjoyed by the upper classes of those countries--elaborately-prepared dishes with expensive ingredients. These are fine, but American cuisine has no counterpart to them, our food has always been for ordinary people, just like everything else in this country. All of our haute cuisine is borrowed from other nations. Our real food is biscuits, hash browns, burgers, barbecue, fry bread, bacon, meatloaf, hot dogs, chili con carne, etc. And so any study of American food has to focus on this, and it has to be on the road, and it has to start in the East and end in the West. And if it happens to be hilarious and surprising, and teach a Southern boy things he didn't know about his own state, then all the better for it. Feasting on Asphalt is all of these things, and should be watched by everybody. Americans should watch it to get a better sense of where they come from and where they're going, and non-Americans should watch it for the same reasons. :-) 10/10

Most action movies are pure fluff, relying on clichés, special effects, and bravado to win over the mostly male audiences that keep them in the pipeline. They are junk food. They provide the illusion of satisfying us but they are not nutritious or filling at all. But then there are those action movies which are so solid, well-written, well-acted, well-paced, and well-done that we don't even think of them as action movies. They are the action movie gourmet meals. Think of Lawrence of Arabia or even Full Metal Jacket. Movies like that are outside the traditional action realm, and tend to have much wider appeal. They are entertaining and smart.

Likewise, the action movie's female counterpart, the romance movie, tends to be fluff, relying on overwrought acting and writing, schmaltzy music, and clichés. Even rarer than the "good" action movie is the good romance movie. A movie that realistically depicts love and interpersonal relationships without relying on any clichés or overwrought acting or writing. City Lights is one example of this, the works of Ernst Lubitsch are another. Think of his movie The Shop Around the Corner. It's a love story that works by depicting real "moments" (as critics like to call them). Instead of being a hammy soap opera, these movies work by touching us on a real level. You don't cringe watching these, you don't say to yourself "Who talks like that?" and you don't hear schmaltzy music all of the time to let you know what emotion you are supposed to be feeling.

I'm bringing all this up to make the point to any guy who is reading this that "Yes, there are good romance movies you will like." Whisper of the Heart is a movie like that, and BOY is it a good one. You've heard of the rare romance movie that both men and women like equally, this is one of them. Guys will like it because it isn't junk food. Comparing this movie to typical romance garbage like Up Close and Personal is like comparing a piece of filet mignon to a Slim Jim. People talk like real people, they have real problems that 14-year-olds have, and they relate to their family like real 14-year-olds do.

This movie should be easy to find on DVD and for once I do not hesitate to say "watch it dubbed." Miyazaki himself says that his movies should be seen in the language of the viewer, and not subtitled, so that you can devote your full attention to the image on the screen and not to reading subtitles (I make the exception for Princess Mononoke which IMO has a inferior dub). It was written by Miyazaki but directed by another very talented man who unfortunately died not long after making this, his only film. The influence of Miyazaki shows in this film, although the animation style is a little different, and the style of the backgrounds is *very* different. I do not know what process was used, but I'd say they based all of the backgrounds on real photographs. The lighting in them is so well that some of them could easily pass for photographs on an NTSC display unless you look at them long and closely. The pacing in this film is also very well-done. Too many directors hurry through pacing, they don't want there to be any silences because they don't know how to use silence. This director does.

This movie is considered to be one of the best movies ever made, if not the best. It frequently shows up on top ten lists. Some have suggested that Vigo is the best director who ever lived......WHY?!

Okay, there are some nice things about this movie. The photography is good (most of the time), the acting seems relatively authentic, there are some genuinely funny scenes, and.....that's all I can think of.

But what at first seems to be a light, easy-going story about quirky, charming characters on a riverboat quickly turns into a light, easy-going story about truly horrid people, a story that takes up too much screen time for what little actually happens.

Okay, let's get this out of the way. Michel Simon is the most off-putting, loathsome, grotesque person I've ever seen in a movie. He sticks out and flaps his lower lip like he's trying to fan his eyebrows. He grins like an orangutan in a centrifuge. He stumbles around frequently grunting "eh?" to his boss's wife, who is bizarrely intrigued by him. He spits huge gales of saliva, INDOORS. We will not speak of the scene in which he goes shirtless. In fact, that scene never happened. Did Simon alone taint my view of this movie? Perhaps, but Nicolas Cage makes me gag and I enjoyed Raising Arizona. The monkey-man in Wild World of Batwoman is more charming than this guy. Why does Simon's face look like that? It doesn't appear to be actual deformation, he just looks odd. Is he storing nuts for winter? Is he severely allergic to his own face fuzz? He gives cat lovers a bad name (and face). Thank God the fortune teller scene ended where it did.

The captain is only somewhat better, he's hot-headed, jealous, and hits his wife. The wife is not very bright. Not only does she actually marry this loser, she then finds herself somewhat attracted to Simon, and some loser who can do card tricks. The kid doesn't say much, which makes him my favorite character.

I do not believe a movie *has* to have characters we like in order to be good (just look at virtually any Kubrick movie), but when your movie is a character-driven piece, that obviously tries to ingratiate itself onto the audience, then should we at least like someone?

It seems to me there are some plot holes. Why does Simon know where to look for the wife? He's standing right outside the arcade as the music begins to play. And doesn't it seem a little trite that her particular machine is connected to the outside speaker? Am I missing something or does anybody else agree with me here? And I just want to point out that this movie has TWO robot puppet shows.

It's a shame Vigo died so young, as this movie shows a lot of promise. I honestly don't know what to think here. Is this a bad movie with good photography and acting? A good movie with horrid characters? A so-so movie that could have used a better script? Somebody help me here.

Not only is this the movie that made me appreciate Kurosawa (my first viewing of Seven Samurai left me disappointed, though I like it a lot more now), but I can't think of many movies that made me laugh as hard as this one. All you Star Wars fans need to watch this (and The Searchers) to see where George Lucas stole (uh, I mean borrowed, yeah...) his ideas. C3PO, R2D2, Princess Leia, Han Solo, the Empire, it's all here (Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are in The Searchers).

This movie is probably the best use of 2.35:1 photography I've ever seen, and a director has to be extra good for me to like that wide of a ratio. Watch the scene when the our two peasants are complaining about digging a pit, the camera follows them perfectly as they walk on either side. Or the scene when they get lost in a crowd and spot eachother. Not once does Kurosawa seem to be using the wide ratio to impress us or create an artificial sense of grandeur.

I recommend the Criterion DVD, the picture is very sharp and the contrast is perfect (I've never seen this theatrically, so I can't vouch for its accuracy, but it looks good).

Tarkovsky at his best. I guess it would be more respectable to say Andrei Rublev is my favorite Tarkovsky movie, since it's not science fiction, but I like this more.

I admire a director like Tarkovsky who can make a movie strictly on his own terms, taking as much time as he wants to hold a shot, never being hurried by concerns over what "the audience" might think. I doubt I could be that brave were I to make a film. Probably the closest any other director came to this philosophy was Stanley Kubrick in 2001.

I advise anybody interested in this movie to read Andrei Tarkovsky's book Sculpting in Time, the best thing I've ever read about movies.

Don't bother to try to change my opinion, I just don't like this movie. I didn't think it was funny, or entertaining, or anywhere near being worthy of all the accolades. Why do people mention this movie in the same breath as Hidden Fortress or City Lights? It's obscene and insulting. This is no classic movie. This is just a stage musical in front of a camera. And why is that one dance number near the end so interminably long?

Musicals and non-musicals should be kept separate from each other, as documentaries are not put in the same category with fictional or "depicted non-fiction" movies. If you want to like musicals, fine, but don't insist that *I* have to like them in order to "appreciate film."

Okay, it makes me shudder to say such cheesy things, but this movie is less a horror movie (sorry Carpenter) than a "study in fear." Phew, pretentious, I know, but it's the simplest way to describe it. By fear I mean the fear each of the characters is experiencing, not necessarily the audience's fear (although this *is* a scary movie). As in a lot of Carpenter's movies, the premise and tone is very Lovecraftian, which involves a lot of hinting at horrors past, and horrors to come.

The story is adapted from a short narrative called Who Goes There? that was made into a movie by Hawks in the fifties (I have not been able to find a copy of Who Goes There? but Carpenter's version is supposedly more faithful to the original concept). The idea is that a creature has gotten into an arctic research station and is able to become any other organism there, whether dog, human, or something kinda between the two. That's all you need to know. We watch as the men at the station try to come to grips with their situation, controlling their fear while trying to decide which one of them is the creature, and most importantly, how to kill it so it doesn't reach civilization and conquer Earth. It's a light-hearted romp for both young and old.

What can I say? I've always been a fan of Hitchcock's but I wasn't really on fire for his work until I got this one from the library. I checked it out so often I decided to buy it (the Criterion DVD is pretty good, if a little light on extras). This is a movie so breezy, fun, intriguing, and surprisingly lacking in morbidity (for a Hitchcock movie), how can you not watch it, no matter what your mood? Call me crazy but this is good escapist entertainment, the characters, even the villains, are so endearing you wish you could meet them (with the exception of Eric Todhunter, who everybody wants to slug). Ms. Froy, the hotel manager, the doctor, the nun, Caldicott & Charters, and especially our two heros (Michael Redgrave gives one of my favorite performances in this movie).

In case you don't know, the basic story is that in a tiny, fictional, and somewhat backwards European country, an English girl meets a little old English lady, a governess. On a train back home, the girl wakes up to find the little old lady is missing from her seat, and everybody on board denies that they ever saw her, including the passengers sitting right next to her, so she sets off to find out just what's going on, enlisting the help of a arrogant British man named Gilbert. Stop reading this, just go watch it already.

*Somebody* has to say it, you either get this movie or you don't, and you're not some kind of idiot if you don't. This movie just fell flat with me, it relied too heavily on cheesy, nonsensical wordplay, and the Marx brothers seem to have a standard, all-purpose delivery for every single joke: fast. The famous "slow burn" scene felt amateurish to me. The lauded "anarchy" in this movie strikes me as a lame excuse for sloppy editing and writing, I guess it's easier for a scene to lead into another with no segway at all, or for pun-oriented conversations to begin and end like a light going on and off. Really, this is not so much a movie as a string of miscellaneous gags with a VERY flimsy story to try to tie it all together. If you want an example of classic comedy intertwining elegantly with a story watch a Chaplin or Keaton movie.

Shouldn't the Marx brothers be totally forgotten by now?

There aren't very many movies with which I can't find a single fault, but this is one of them. Perfect in execution, in every conceivable way. This is a film to put in a time capsule.

STORY: A poor, seemingly homeless tramp bounces from one mishap to another, eventually meeting and falling in love with a poor blind girl selling flowers. She mistakenly assumes he is wealthy and falls genuinely in love with him too. As her health worsens, he learns of an expensive operation that can bring back her sight. He sacrifices everything of himself in order to get the money, his time, his effort, his health, his freedom. I won't spoil the rest of the movie for you, but suffice it to say the ending is probably my favorite of any movie.

I'm not some naive fan who thinks Carpenter can do no wrong. I didn't care much for Vampires or Village of the Damned (they were alright, but the scripts for those two were not up to snuff for a great director like Carpenter). However, I think Ghosts of Mars is one of his greatest movies. If you can't appreciate this movie then you can't really appreciate Carpenter, IMO. From the Lovecraftian story and atmosphere, to the anamorphic photography, to the excellent music, everything here is Carpenter. Hopefully this movie will find its audience, in time, rather than be forgotten. One criticism of Carpenter I've never been able to understand is that people say he isn't subtle, he relies solely on shocks and violence. Yes, his movies have shocks and violence, they are the release mechanisms for all of the terror he slowly builds up, neanderthals! It seems some film critics are just too good for American horror, they can't stoop to its level from their lofty perch.

This movie bears no thematic or stylistic similarities to Redford's other movies, so I can only surmise that this movie was carried by it's cast, writer, cinematographer, and editor. If you've seen the Horse Whisperer or A River Runs Through it and you're scared to see this one for fear it's like Redford's later movies, fear not. It's a great movie everybody should see. Definitely better than over-rated Raging Bull.

It's that realistic. Every character reminds me of people I've met, and they're not stereotypes or one-dimensional characters. They don't even seem like actors, but like actual people. To the guy who said Alvin's journey made no sense when he could take a plane or something, think about the last lines of dialogue in the movie.

If you've never seen the BBC sitcom Black Adder, there is a scene in which the idiotic Baldrick hands Black Adder a copy of his novel (his "maximum octopus"), and it goes like this: "Once upon a time there was a lovely little sausage called Baldrick, and he lived happily ever after. The End." Black Adder, quite rightly, deems it "completely and utterly awful." Now imagine if the intellectuals of the day heralded Baldrick's manuscript as one of the best novels ever written, and it appeared constantly on critics' All-Time-Top-Ten lists. This is very close to the situation that has actually occurred with Breathless. It's one of the worst movies I've ever seen (and I'm a regular viewer of MST3K), and it is lauded by critics and famous film makers alike as a true masterpiece, up there with Citizen Kane, The Searchers, and Modern Times. Apparently, if you make a movie disjointed, poorly edited, illogically paced, and really uninteresting, all you have to do is be French, call it "new wave" and you can get away with it. Before you commie elitist snobs say I don't know what I'm talking about (probably too late), let me say I'm no stranger to so-called sophisticated films. My favorites are Andrei Rublev, 2001, 8 1/2, and The Thin Red Line, not exactly Big Momma's House. Some might be inclined to say that this movie is a style over substance, except it has no style. It has nothing. It is an artistic black hole, playing its modernist siren song to weak-minded intellectuals (a contradiction in terms, I know) and wasting people's time for over 40 years. One day, maybe five thousand years from now (give or take...), critics and cineastes will rightly ignore this movie, perceiving it's heyday popularity as a mere freak occurrence in public opinion, like disco or hula-hoops. Those of us who value rightness, decency, and good movies like The Crowd, can only hope.....

I see this as America's Bicycle Thief. To me, these two movies have similar tones and themes. I can't really say much about the Searchers that you can't read in the comments surrounding mine, except that it is an amazing movie. People who dislike this movie (for whatever reason) tend to think that we Ford fans only say we like it because we have to, because everybody else says it's so great. They're wrong. I heard one positive comment about this movie, before I knew anything about it, so I rented it (now I own the DVD). I remember after the final shot, I stared at the tv for a few seconds, then walked upstairs to my room, silently. I couldn't think what to say, except "that was a great movie!" I was almost overwhelmed by Ford's complexity and simplicity, his plainness and his beauty, and of course the performances. I couldn't sleep that night, all I could think of was the movie. I hummed that song from the opening titles for weeks. After seeing it I knew I had been privileged to witness one of America's great works of art. And to those who didn't like the film, try giving it a second viewing, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth...

Okay, let me explain where I'm coming from. I'm a movie fan. I mean a really big movie buff. My favorite directors are Chaplin, Keaton, Kubrick, Fellini, Tarkovksy, Malick, Wilder, Kurosawa, Welles, Reed, Lean, Bergman, Gilliam, Coen, Vidor, Ford, Benigni, and Cocteau, to name a few. But I had never gotten around to even seeing a movie by Scorsese, although I'd heard great things about him. You can imagine how excited I was to see that Raging Bull was number 2 on the Sight and Sound director's poll, and ranked the best movie of the 80s. I was gung ho. I was hoping to add Scorsese to my list of favorites. But then, I actually saw Raging Bull. I cannot for the life of me understand the glowing praise about this movie. Is it a bad movie? No. It's just nothing special. Scorsese's technique is, if anything, showy. De Niro and Pesci are wonderful actors, there's no denying that. But the movie as a whole just isn't particularly good. I can find nothing about this movie that would bring it even close to the accolades it has been given. Believe me, I wanted to like this movie. I thought it would be great and then some; equal to the Searchers or 2001, from the praise it got; but it was uninteresting. It was like the type of movie arthouse theaters show that is competently made but lifeless and boring, like Shine. I'm sorry. Call me an idiot. I did not like this movie.

A simply splendid movie. This is one of those movies in which the script, direction, acting, set decoration, costuming, effects, makeup, cinematography, editing (in Gilliam's version) and everything else is done at the very highest level, and everything comes together perfectly. I have no doubt that future generations of filmakers will recognize this as a hugely influential movie.