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charlesheld
Reviews
Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones (1973)
Talking' 'bout the midnight rambler
The Stones at their amphetamine-and-heroin-fueled best, tearing through half of "Exile On Main Street" and selected other favorites on the Texas leg of their infamous 1972 tour. With their sound fleshed out by sax, trumpet and piano, and their musicianship raised by the addition of virtuoso blues man Mick Taylor, "Ladies and Gentlemen" offers definitive versions of "Love In Vain", "Sweet Virginia", "Jumping Jack Flash" and other Stones classics.
Taylor's remarkable slide guitar playing on "Love In Vain" convincingly mimics harmonica and train whistle to great effect. A couple of tunes don't quite work: "You Can't Always Get What You Want" in particular is too slow (drummer Charlie Watts could never master its shuffling rhythm and the Stones' producer Jimmy Miller actually plays on the record) while Taylor seems out of his comfort zone on his solo. But on "Midnight Rambler" - for years the centerpiece of Stones shows - the whole band returns to form with a blistering 11+ minute mix of Robert Johnson and Jack The Ripper. The widely-bootlegged Brussels '73 show might be a better performance of "Rambler", but here the visuals of Mick Jagger's showmanship before he became a self-parody carry the day.
The camera most often sets its sights on Jagger (indeed the film could've been accurately titled "Ladies And Gentlemen: Mick Jagger and Seven Other Blokes"), though you get glimpses of Keith Richards playing band leader and Watts having a smashing good time pounding his skins. No playing to the camera, and no silly crowd shots. All in all, LAGTRS shows a band at the top their game - both believing all the hype and committing themselves to going to an even higher level.
The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
Dreary, dull and dumb
If you think "Don't give up" is a newly-minted nugget of wisdom worthy of being the centerpiece of a movie's dialog; if you think naming a boy being treated for an incurable brain disease at Our Lady Of Sorrows hospital "Christian" is subtle, ironic and touching; and if you think a surgeon can perform a "complex, four-part experimental operation" to save the aforementioned boy's life after an hour of Googling, then you are apparently the audience Chris Carter had in mind when he decided to co-write, co-produce, and direct the second TXF feature film.
From the implausible (Scully and Mulder are living together, yet the FBI has no idea where to find him) to the gratuitous (The priest's a pedophile! The villains are gay AND Russian!), to the unintentionally hilarious (Mulder arrives at the villains' hideaway armed with a wrench and yells "Stop"! - Stop or what? I'll make your toilets leak?), the script is a boring mess. Carter and co-writer Frank Spotnitz try to fill in the holes and fill out the two-hour runtime with sledgehammer social messages and Scully's Crisis Of Conscience (TM) involving the terminal youth.
The primary story rips off "The Silence Of The Lambs." Villain #1 kidnaps women and cages them until they're ready to be used as "body donors" for the cancer-ridden Villain #2 (#1's boss and gay lover). The pedophile priest fills the Lecter role of helping (maybe) the investigation, and provides the film with its only paranormal content: rather than getting into Jame Gumb's mind as Hannibal does, the premise is that Father Joe has a psychic connection to Villain #2, who happens to be one of the Father's altar-boy victims, and the Father's alleged visions aid the FBI. These angles are undercut by the fact that (a) the victim looks like he's nearly as old as Father Joe; (b) Billy Connolly looks and acts like a 65-year-old cross between Lone Gunman Langly and Garth from "Wayne's World."
Many other questions go unanswered: Why do the FBI and Mulder kiss and make up so quickly? Why don't the police uncover the other side of the swimmer's car so they can see she got sideswiped? Why does Russian #1 talk to Russian #2 in English but to all the other bad guys in Russian? Why does the Russians' lab equipment look like it was leftover from 1950's B-movies? Why does Whitney's infatuation with Mulder go undeveloped? Why is snow accumulating at about a foot per hour?
The movie's obvious intent to show parallels between Scully's attempt to save the boy and the "body donor" lab - one of Scully's Google hits even points to the vivisection procedures the Russians are using. But Scully's Catholicism here only serves as an excuse for Carter to throw together random broadsides about religion, from stem cells to pedophilia. Hopefully the experience was far more cathartic for him than the end product is entertaining for us.
House of Sand and Fog (2003)
Dull, dreary, depressing film without subtlety or nuance
First off, let me say that Sideways was my favorite film of 2004. So I don't need - as one pretentious "artiste" puts it in their review - a "Jerry Bruckheimer" fix. Don't need happy endings, or even perfect, noble and likable lead characters.
But I *do* need the film to have a pulse. This film has none. Every 15 minutes, the director shows the same overhead shot of the house, until it burns onto the screen, to remind you that the HOUSE is overlooking the SAND of the coast and that it is engulfed in FOG. Combined with the stasis and tedium of the story and editing, this film just *screams* "clueless first-time director".
Just as unsubtle is the repulsive Hollywood racism - every white character is shown negatively (especially the dimwitted Rambo-wannabee cop); every minority is portrayed positively (i.e. the doctor).
The reviewer who took the Bruckheimer swipe points to the "cultural divide" as this film's finest message. Well, "Coming To America" covered that subject without boring its audience to death or wallowing in self-loathing.