Change Your Image
imkerho
Reviews
Death and the Maiden (1994)
Mr. Polanski?
Mr. Polanski also has a troubled history.
It is ironic that, in this film, the Doctor could have been Roman Polanski himself.
Runaway Jury (2003)
Personality
The hero in the film is manipulative, he is a confidence trickster, and he cannot be trusted.
But he uses these negative traits to, as the story goes, turn a widow into a fabulously rich woman.
One deduces that the relationship between the hero and the heroin ends up in marriage / a permanent union. But if the hero continues with his I-will-win-this-argument-at-all-costs approach, then the relationship will eventually fail; the personality of the hero is ultimately not that of a role model.
Jason Bourne (2016)
Basic layout of he moves
This story is of the genre where the good guys do nothing right, and the bad guys do nothing wrong. And during these events innocent persons die like flies.
Some high-level detective work / intuition would have been welcome.
Chicago Fire (2012)
Immense work to create fire scenes; sme further comments
I want to start off by saying that creating a series on firefighting is probably the most difficult of all, because every fire scene requires extensive mock-ups, as well as fire trucks of some sort (real or mock-ups) to complete the scenes. I salute the teams who create this series, and this is the background to my further comments.
1. Almost total absence of water: This has been mentioned before, and I assume it has to do with the cinematography of the scenes - that it spoils the effect if there is water also spraying around. But one sees, in the series, firefighters entering a building, and walking around and creeping around and breaking open doors, and everything burns and the fire gets worse by the second, but not a drop of water.
This does not correspond to practice, where the water hose is the firefighter's no. 1 piece of equipment - both for the people inside the burning structure, for the building itself and for the firefighter.
2. The "facial hair" on the faces of the firefighters. I assume the idea is to give each firefighter some sort of "character" through his funny beard, droopy moustache, stubbles, etc.
But in practice firefighters are expected to appear professional, neat, dapper, and such type of descriptions, and lieutenants always having a 3-day stubble would be problematic.
And also: Kelly Severide indicated his immense emotional attachment to Leslie Shay. But when a special ceremony was held to honour Leslie and everybody was fitted out in full uniform, we see Severide still being unshaven, and looking decidedly scruffy. In practice one would have imagined that such a person would have taken 5 minutes extra that morning to shave, this as part of his honour to his soulmate who passed away.
3. And then something that will definitely differ from viewer to viewer: the promiscuity of some members of Firehouse 51. Sexual relationships between persons working together, whatever the industry, are always a source of stress for a manager, especially if it involves persons from different ranks. (This last action has, as we recently learned, been prohibited in the Mc Donald's food group.) The impression is created in this series that firefighters basically do 3 things: They are at work, they are in a bar, or they have sex.
4. In this series the members of Firehouse 51 are a perfect team, and everybody else happens to be jerks.
But I think all of us must see Firehouse 51 as representing all the Chicago fire stations, indeed fire stations in general. So all the stories that happened everywhere else are condensed into this Firehouse 51, therefore everything stays central to Firehouse 51.
Harry Brown (2009)
Differetn enfing required
Films with Michael Caine as an actor are always worthwhile to watch.
Michael Caine is, with the movie "Harry Brown" his usual brilliant self.
But I have some mixed comments about the film itself:
The first ¾ of the film is top class, but in the last ¼ the storyline becomes messy and loses the finesse that one associates with Caine. The scenes of extreme violence towards the police are not needed.
Another type of last part could have been: Brown collapses next to the water and pushes the pistol into the water. The female detective Alice Frampton, who had the correct insight all the time, has a friend who does scuba diving and she convinces him to dive at the spot where Brown collapsed. He finds the pistol. Frampton then contacts a colleague at the ballistics laboratory who studied with her at the Police Academy - she signs out all the bullets that were recovered from the various corpses, convinces him to do ballistic tests afterhours, they clean the pistol and gets it working again, do the tests, and this tells her that all the bullets were fired from this gun.
In a pre-last scene Frampton and Hicock arrives unexpectedly at Sids house (some pre-detective work by Frampton), Hicock is wounded by the gun of Brown which is now in the hands of the bad guy, and the rest can be basically as it happened.
Frampton meets up privately with Brown, and he confesses everything to her. She is now satisfied in knowing the truth. She tells Brown that this will not stand up in a court of law. She reports to her superiors that her idea that a lone pensioner-vigilante was responsible for all this is, in fact not correct, that this was inter-gang rivalry, and that the snub-nosed revolver with which Brown shot Noel was probably just another illegal fire-arm lying around in the house.
The film ends, as it does , showing the underpass now without gangsters. Frampton then phones Brown in his dilapidated flat and invites him for a cup of coffee.
How to Get Away with Murder (2014)
Interesting concept
Interesting concept where all of the main characters are dishonest, and they will do anything to pervert the cause of justice. This story is how many people regrettably view the legal establishment.
So when you look a this series - remember that is how lawyers should NOT be acting.
Oh, and all the main characters are oversexed.
The Juror (1996)
Good and bad.......
Excellent: Demi Moore, cinematography. The suspense-parts are generally well done, for example where it is not clear whether the boy on the bicycle will be killed or not.
General plot: Unfortunately the genre where the good person does nothing right and the bad person does nothing wrong. And innocent friends also get killed in the process. Then suddenly in the last 5 minutes the good person amasses incredible logistics and action, and the bad guy dies. Better would have been some more intellectual input throughout the film from the heroin, such as that she gradually finds out where he hid microphones, and realises that he has her address list, and so warns her friends what is going on.