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Reviews
Switchback (1997)
And Then for Some Unknown Reason
The killer is elusive. All they know is they figure he's an adult man less than 45. And then for some unknown reason, he spends most of the movie driving around in a car he stole. And then for some unknown reason, he befriends a hitchhiker and takes him along. And then for some unknown reason, they go to a town where he is well known to everyone. And then for some unknown reason, he starts killing his friends left and right. And then, luckily, an FBI agent slides down a snowy mountain and happens to land on the train with the killer. No, really. That happened. For some unknown reason.
Tigerland (2000)
It Sure Wasn't the Same Vietnam-era Ft. Polk that I experienced.
I might have liked this film if I knew nothing about the Army. The hero goes AWOL and nothing happens to him. Deserters went to the brig, at least for a while. Those who get discharged for being unsuitable weren't sent home.
They stay confined to barracks until their company graduated. Until then, they were isolated from us. They get the nights off to go partying downtown.
We occasionally got weekend passes, but only after we "turned blue" and only after we were given back our civvies. These guys can't even wear their helmets correctly. And oh, yeah, you don't get sergeants to stop yelling at you, but offering him a smoke and asking for his first name.
Civilians didn't drive their vehicles onto an active military operation. Soldiers never left their weapons unattended. The list goes on and on. It's like the liberal crybaby didn't even do basic research for his war-is-bad masterpiece.
Gunsmoke: This Golden Land (1973)
A Poorly Written Show
What a crock of feces. Dad sees his son roped and dragged off. Later, the son is found, but dies shortly after. Dad tells Dillon he can't testify against his killers because he didn't see the killing blow. He didn't have to. Dillon would have brought the killer in if the dad had just said that he saw him rope and drag his son. But nooooo, dad refuses to say a word. I guess no one, including the Jewish actors, knew anything about Jewish law. I suppose their interpretation is that they can't testify about beating someone up if that person eventually dies. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The Sterile Cuckoo (1969)
It's the Liza Show in UglyVision
Liza Minelli talks and talks and talks. Not about anything in particular. She's just talking. If there is a plot it's that she usually is relentlessly pestering this poor mouse of a man.
Bonus: Minelli does everything she can to make herself look like the 50% off rack at Target.
Other reviewers (the ones who adore the fact that she talk and talks) say that the movie is sad overall. I agree. However, I would like to add that those reviewers are also sad if they think listening to Minelli whine is a good thing.
Fat City (1972)
Meandering Plot; Psycho Woman for No Reason; Kristofferson really can't sing
Supposedly a contrast of losers -- young, old, and really old. The story lurches about from one person to another for no real reason. If you like psycho women, you're in luck. The movie stops moving whenever she is on screen.
And the best you can say about Kristofferson as a singer is that he was good looking. He really croaks out a groaner.
Anthony Adverse (1936)
If you ever get a chance to miss this movie, do it
People loved the book; so they made the movie. It's about rich people in the agony of only having dozens of servants and anything they want. Oh, the horror. It's pretty much done the way you would figure they would do it on Broadway -- lots of costumes (not clothes, but full buffoonish costumes), overacted, overemoted, and plain slow as heck.
See this movie if your heart breaks for rich people who only soil their hands when they are beating servants.
Miss it if Bowling for Dollars is on a competing channel.
Peter Pan (1955)
Peter Pan1.0
They were, of course, doing Peter Pan on stage for years before this hit the small screen, but this was the version that was seen by the masses. More than the performance itself, I remember the rave reviews given to Ms. Martin for decades afterwards.
The two most memorable scenes for me (as a very young boy) were the bedroom with the huge windows and the fire-breathing alligator on wheels. If I did need to jump out a window to fly, that's the kind I would want. And although it was scary (I had trouble recognizing it as an alligator), if you are going to fight an alligator, a wooden one on wheels is probably preferable.
I'm very surprised to be the first reviewer. This show was famous and highly praised.
Léon (1994)
Good Action, but too flawed to be a classic
I don't know what everybody is gushing about. It's a nice action movie, but has improbable to impossible scenes just to move along the movie. The dress-up game to help the memory is a good one. They live in squalor. They have nothing. Yet the kid has no trouble going into the bedroom and putting on expensive clothes so she can pretend to be a celebrity. The guy is supposed to be a hitman, yet he allows the girl to "practice" on the rooftop of their apartment building which, of course, would draw a ton of attention. He kills for a living, but he allows his boss to keep the money? Really? He hangs straight down from above the apartment doorway to fire on the cops and then bends backwards and upwards to escape. His legs would have to be in the hallway to do that move. He escapes by pretending to be one of the cops. Sure, this same ploy has worked in many many other movies, but only because directors seem to think that cops don't know the people they work with.
There are easy ways to overcome all of these faults. Basically, I think they took the first idea to come to mind. The kid could have acted like the star/actress without magically having these outfits available in her bedroom. They could have practiced firing in the country, at a range, at a paint ball park, etc. Instead they chose to draw attention to themselves by doing it on the roof. They shot at cops, and somehow the cops didn't come to investigate. They could have had some sort of apparatus at the door so he could do his upside down shooting, but nothing helpful was on or near the door. He could have escaped in any number of ways, but pretending to be a cop in the middle of a bunch of cops is plain stupid.
There were more glaring deficiencies. The ones I wrote about were just the ones that popped to mind as I typed.
Nice action, but really flawed. I give it 8 stars for the action and nothing for the Lolita angle. It wasn't deep. It wasn't insightful. And it sure as heck wasn't necessary to the movie.
Bellevue (2017)
No Story; just strange stuff that remains unexplained
Yet another show where nothing makes sense. All I can say is hire a few writers or put it on the shelf.
If you like strange people doing stupid things with no explanation, then this show is for you.
If you like a story, well, turn the channel.
Point Blank (1967)
It's Lee Marvin being Lee Marvin and a little Angie Dickinson being Angie Dickinson
Lee Marvin was great at not acting. In every movie, he stands there silently watching all the other actors until eventually he does something (usually very slowly). Rumor has it that Keanu Reeves studied his method religiously.
Marvin plays a dead guy -- no, a dying guy -- no, a guy who almost died -- even the director said he didn't know and didn't care. Anyway, Marvin gets double-crossed by his buddy; so Marvin spends his time either bumbling his way into unintentional deaths or watching other people murder people. One highlight is when the hit-man is ordered to kill Marvin and instead kills the very guy who ordered the hit. The hit-man can pick off a moving target at great distance, but apparently he had trouble seeing Marvin pushing his boss out into the open and he had trouble seeing that his boss was not Marvin. Until later. Then he reported to the next higher boss that he killed his boss because he was there instead of Marvin. Good reasoning.
And Angie is great at -- well, at being a model who gets a few lines. Her character learns that her sister just died due to Marvin scaring the holy heck out of her. So she leaves her sister to rot on the floor and goes off with Marvin. She gets to wear a few garish outfits and towards the end, for no apparent reason, she goes berserk on Marvin and then sleeps with him.
The bad guys are a trip. "We don't have cash. We use checks. We can't get you your money. Only the accountant writes checks." That's what they keep telling Marvin, and apparently, it's not their concern whether Marvin kills them. They just know that they don't have cash.
They threw out the script. They only liked the main character. I don't think they wrote a replacement script. I imagine each day on the set, they told Marvin to stand over there and don't say anything because that's mostly what he did.
Marvin can't carry a movie. He can be great as a supporting character with his one-dimensional non-acting, but that's all.
Dickinson certainly can't carry a movie. She is eye candy and nothing more. This is supposed to be an action movie, and she is the second lead playing against a guy who doesn't act, emote or move any facial muscles. That's much too much for her. She would be better as the second banana's love interest.
Marvins stands and stares. Dickinson has boobs. The director had no script. That's about all.
Strangely enough, because this was done like a rushed high school art project, people look for great meaning in its obvious deficiencies. No, it's not avant-garde or highly stylized. It's a bad or non-existent script with exceptionally bad editing.
Is he dead? Is he alive? Is he dying? Nobody knows because (not to beat a dead horse) they didn't have a script.
Hardcore Henry (2015)
Oh, Boy, a First Person Shooter. Never saw one of those before
If you haven't played video games in the last thirty years, this will be a new adventure. It's a first person shooter just like classic games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, and thousands of copycat titles.
If you have played any video games, then you just might have made your own first person shooter movie long long long before Hardcore Henry came up with this new and exciting concept. In many games, it is as simple as pressing one button to turn on the recording.Millions of gaming videos exist all over the Internet. Besides games, there are similar videos involving birds, cats, dogs, children, and our own US Military.
I love fps games. They are my favorites, but I prefer a movie that has a plot. This movie needs a plot. Any cemetery will do.
The Counselor (2013)
A Punch Bowl with Floaters
This is the movie for you if you like to ask things like who is this guy, why are they doing that, and can we leave early.
A bad guy does something bad, and it turns out bad, and the bad guys he deals with decide to do bad things to all the bad people who helped the bad guy.
That sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?
Somehow, it gets turned into 20,000 interconnected stories of which you only see a little of each and you have to guess who the characters are and what their motivations are.
The one bright spot was seeing Brad Pitt speechless.