Reviews

My rating would have been much higher if all the scenes with George Brent were cut. It's totally unbelievable that the Myrna Loy character would have fallen love in love with this schoolboy. He never comes over as a student and did you see the size of his apartment in Berlin? It doesn't look like there is a war going on.

The ending is not exactly happy and that kind of fits with the rest of story, there is some ambiguity about whether George really survives or not.

Overall Myrna and the other actors do a great job but unfortunately every time George shows up (like a stalker) you immediately switch off.

What a strange little film. A dysfunctional family sow their wild oats but then don't live happily after.

Probably influenced by Happiness a decade before, this tries too hard to be provocative but the characters are so unfunny that one soon starts to concentrate on the many dogs and cats wandering around the apartment.

I wonder how Emma Suarez ever signed up for this as her character is one of the most useless mothers ever to wander the screen. She and her husband never seem to work so they can act out their fantasies.

Who knows, the director might claim it was all a very clever plot to provoke you into thinking exactly that.

A clever idea of a bored orthodentist getting himself a sex doll from Japan to satisfy his needs both emotionally and sexually. The first part of the movie is intruiging as the ideas are fleshed out and there are some funny scenes involving his mother and a fashion shop manager - it's the first time I see a manager dressed in a see-through blouse.

After the so-called wedding the film starts to lose focus and has nowhere to go and the final scenes at a kind Christmas party seem to belong to a different movie and are just boring. There's not much more to add to the original concept and the padding just becomes tiresome.

Nevertheless a novel idea with a typical Picolli role of the Seventies, the bored bourgeoisie man who seeks alternatives.

Taking place in East Germany just before the Wall went up (1961), this interesting but forgotten movie concentrates on the struggle of religion within a communist environment. Funded by a Christian company (Lutheran?) it shows how a Lutheran priest fights for the freedom of being able to worship God against all the communist ideologies and rules.

It makes it clear that communism overtakes all facets of every day life like school, work, sport, music etc. either by friendly methods (like the school teacher) or more forceful ways (like the Party Secretary).

Filmed on location in West Germany although near the border with the East, it comes over as well researched with a fair amount of German actors. There is no neat ending where all is resolved although when the film was released some aspects had been overtaken by the construction of the Berlin Wall.

No well known names are associated with this movie except for the director Stuart Rosenberg who went on to bigger things like Cool Hand Luke and Brubaker.

Nobody seemed to have noticed but this is actually a remake of a 1983 French movie called Mortelle Randonee with Michel Serrault and Isabelle Adjani. Unfortunately for Eye of the Beholder that movie is about 100 times better. In Mortelle the "Eye" is a much older man like in the original book and Isabelle Adjani is much better in purveying an emotional detachment when knocking off her suitors.

Eye of the Beholder tries to be a stylish movie but what is needed is something that shows a passionate deadly obsession. With all the gimmicks used that is totally absent so we get some interesting scenes with no connection. A wasted opportunity.

Imagine we live in a world where people only communicate by saying one sentence. That's it, followed by a long silence where nobody moves as if we all let the words sink in.

This is the world of Guernsey, slow, silent, morose. Even before the major incident of the movie, which is supposed to bring the main character into a kind of shock, she doesn't seem keen to talk or ask questions. She now just becomes suspicious of her partner whom she has plucked away from her sister. This sister has one big chip on her shoulder, she spits venom at every comment and makes every sullen teenager look like a warm personality.

At the end we lose patience with this non-verbal "interaction", worst of all it seems to be resolved by again one sentence followed by an obedient silence, sigh.

The movie struggles with time and place. As one can see in the end credits the so-called Guernsey scenes were filmed in Spain so it suddenly makes sense that the gardener is called Juan and the new house of the father looks like a modern Spanish country retreat. Why this Guernsey connection? Is the director trying to make some comment on tax-dodgers, an altogether weightier subject but rather out of place in this glacier paced personality crisis.

When I read the synopsis of this movie it seemed like a great idea. A team that is supposed to save the world ends up destroying it instead. After the first Paris scene this seemed possible and hopes were high. However the movie soon changes gear and ends up being as boring and predictable as any Hollywood Blockbuster. Yes there are some slightly funny scenes during those long 98 minutes but overall it is tedium. Probably the worst are the songs which just repeat the same words over and over again. Using the word f*ck a hundred times might have been brave 40 years ago. Nowadays everybody has heard it all and when it is repeated to death a big yawn is the result. If a movie tries to parody something it has to be at least a bit funny, otherwise watch Top Gun, now that was hilarious.