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robastyk
Reviews
The Power (2023)
Spoiled by Some Cheap Shots
I am a fan of both Toni Collette and John Leguizamo so starting to view this series was something of a "no brainer". Unfortunately, the script seems to have been an actual "no brainer" at times. Let me say that I have not read the book so I may be too harsh on the script writers who are currently on strike, a strike which I support on principle. I just hope that the downtime of the strike allows the writers to reflect on their silly, lazy and cheap plotting.
It isn't all bad. I find the basic premise that women the world over awake one day with the ability to electrify the world out of their own bodies is brilliant. Seeing it play out in the lives of a diverse group of people is generally handled well. Unfortunately, the script writers (the author?) are inclined to be very thoughtless at times.
Is there any American actor who does smarmy as naturally as Josh Charles? I'm not sure that there is. His Daniel Dandon is kind of the love child of Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz but he's just unmitigatedly awful. There's no depth to his obnoxious straw man. Charles is a much better actor than that. I'll return to him in a minute.
Toni Collette is not an actress to be denied, thus her Margot Cleary-Lopez, while set up to be the good angel to Josh Charles' bad, can play more complexity as thoughts cross her face than the script gives her.
In a story of women achieving extraordinary power in a world heretofore ruled by men, Toheeb Jimoh's Tunde Ojo is a shining light in the series. He is the guide for old, ossified, cis gendered men like me through this new world of women with The Power. He fills that role exceptionally well, embodying the confusion of men caught up in this sea change.
Zrinka Cvitesic' Tatiana Moskalev is perfectly steely. Above all, she is the character I would least like to meet in person. We get a scene with her mother that is colder than a Greenland January before global warming. Yet, the subsequent scene of the romp with her hairdresser is fraught with the certainty that things will not end well for that other poor girl. Also, her ascension to leader following the "untimely" and well-deserved death of her husband the "president" is unexplained, simply taken for granted and more than a little bizarre in a culture that treats women like pinky rings. We needed a scene explaining why General Miron doesn't inherit the top office and Tatiana as well. We do get the cold, steely Tatiana a little later, dealing with potential rivals to her power with the help of her rebellious sister. I don't know about you but I am already worried for her sister.
The greatest complexity of motives and actions falls to Halle Bush's Allie/Eve. Eve becomes a cult leader whose first friend, in the community where she finds shelter, becomes her conscience and fiercest opponent. It remains for future episodes to show us whether Eve surrenders to her conscience or to the rather questionable "voice of god" in her head.
The Roxy Monke story line is very important but is also mostly a total set up. Roxy is a thug in her father's mold and the first of the major characters to intersect with another major character. Her story line is still in development and. Consequently, the hardest of which to speak intelligently.
So having run down some of the major characters and their plot lines, I will return to the biggest mess the writers (author?) have made, that of Toni Collette's Margot.
Margot's got a complex family which is getting more complex with each episode. She has a very public profile as the mayor of a large city who decides to run for an open senate seat against the governor of her state, Josh Charles' Daniel Dandon. This brings her to the notice of the story's stand-in for Q-Anon/Fox News, Urbandox, and brings her upset, wounded and insecure son to the notice to that wheedling seducer to the darkest side of the story's politics. This seduction of Margot's son, Matty, is at best problematic but is also amazingly well handled by the writers. The personification of evil is rightly called "the Father of Lies". Matty feels that his mother has abandoned him for her career and that his father, John Leguisamo's Rob, isn't "man enough" to protect him. He's ripe for the picking by a male chauvinist and fascist seeker of low hanging fruit, his surrogate Father of Lies.
In contrast to the well written seduction of Matty, we are given a season ending cliffhanger that insults the audience's intelligence and undermines Margot's character. A couple of episodes before the season finale we see Margot privately endure literal torture orchestrated and observed by Daniel Dandon. She passes without a flaw, yet when confronted in public by Dandon with a fact that her chief of staff arranged without Margot's knowledge and concerning her family only peripherally, she cannot contain herself and makes Dandon's case for him. When, as a boy, I watched television and movies with my movie buff mother, she would view some melodramatic ending only to dismiss it with the comment, "Ain't that DRA-MAT-ic." The ending of The Power's 1st Season certainly was DRA-MAT-ic, but it was utterly inconsistent with Margot's character.
I shall probably be back for the 2nd Season of The Power but my "willing suspension of disbelief" has been irrevocably made unwilling by the cheapest of cheap shots. I'm still a Toni Collette fan which is why I'm angry with the writers and/or author for requiring her to play a scene that is antithetical to the Margot she's already created.
The English (2022)
Fine Acting but Lousy Writing
Though I have no direct insight into the process of making this series, I have the distinct feeling that the original plan was for more episodes. Whether they ran out of Emily. Blunt's money or the BBC decided to withdraw support for more episodes, I cannot know but the failings of this series lie with Hugo Blick, the writer and director.
The reason I believe that there were supposed to be more episodes is the multiple continuity problems with the script and the hurried, puzzling rush to the conclusion.
In the first episode Cianán Hinds' Richard M. Watts tells Emily Blunt's Cornelia Locke that "'he' knows you're coming". Locke has identified Thomas Trafford as the person she is hunting for killing her son. Thus we get the impression that Hinds' character is acting as agent for Trafford yet we subsequently learn that Trafford has nothing to do with the death of her son. Further, we never have any inkling of why or how Watts has been hired to dispose of Blunt's character. With the person Blunt's Locke is hunting "a month's ride" away and nary a single telegraph pole in sight the connection to whoever has given the orders for her murder is a never resolved lapse in storytelling.
I have a rule that consistently proves itself true: the more scenes of running, driving, riding through the set/landscape are included in the film, the thinner the script. In early episodes there is a good deal of Blunt and. Chaske Spencer riding through some gorgeously bleak landscape. The cinematography is beautiful but the landscape doesn't play a significant enough role to make those rides a significant story element. They become just pretty pictures and a measurable waste of time.
The series contains a great deal of gratuitous death. If the point is that trios of murderous marauders pepper the western landscape, it's made the point following the attempted stagecoach robbery. Yet we get trios of murderous nomads - and they are always trios - ready to kill for money, food, pleasure, racism roaming the landscape and scenes that exist solely to demonstrate something that is or might have been a plot point.
The stagecoach robbery shows us that Chaske Spencer is very quick and accurate with a Winchester, a plot point that is only significant in the future gunfights. The next marauding trio exists solely to show us Blunt's skill in archery, a skill which is never used again. The final marauding trio, a cavalry detail, finally brings us to the great villain of the story and gives some coherence to Blunt's character's revenge quest.
Then there is the sub-plot of "the boy", White Moon. Is he killed in The Buffalo Gun Episode? Evidently not. When Spencer's Will Whipp asks Locke, "when you see the puff of smoke, pull the boy out" is the boy's dead body being used as a shield or is he being saved of further injury? Is he the burden of Locke's mount then being used as a pack horse? Probably but the silhouetted scene as they ride into Flathead Jackson's camp doesn't clarify the matter. The first inkling that he is actually alive comes in conversation with Jack Klaff's Jackson almost as an afterthought.
Because Hugo Blick is both writer and director, this mess is stuck on the soles of his shoes. He directs a scene (the ride into Jackson's Camp) in deliberate, obscuring silhouette and then withholds essential plot information. He also omits a scene between Locke and young White Moon that would prefigure the series coda.
As noted already, we first hear of Thomas Trafford as the object of Cornelia Locke's revenge quest. We learn that he is innocent of the motive for that quest and then he's just a pointless appendage that gets dealt with off camera in a scene that merely emphasizes how irrelevant to the story he truly is.
The first scene at the drill rig, that incomprehensibly is the initial image in the title artwork, the site is teeming with workers yet when the principles arrive for the denouement, all but an idiot go-fer have disappeared. Are the deployed in the surrounding hills protecting Melmont? They aren't but we get no explanation of why and where they have gone.
What we have is a story that has lots of illogical, obvious red herrings and weird omissions which may simply be incompetent rewriting. Blick gives us some moments of lovely photography but fails to integrate it into the story line. He gives us multiple subplots that expand the story but usually tell us little that we didn't already know about the characters. He gives us a landscape full of psychopaths and barely any decent people.
Now that I have trashed Hugo Blick's work, I must say that the actors fare much better than the script and direction. Emily Blunt is beautiful and excellent as usual. I do wish that her admission that, "I'm already dead," had been given more weight rather than thrown off as part of the urging on of her horse. Chaske Spenser is excellent as well. His reserved delivery and underlying decency and anger reminded me of Steve McQueen. Valerie Pachner.delivers a fine performance in the supporting role of Martha Meyers. Stephen Rea's Sheriff Marshall, a name worthy of. Joseph Heller, is the laconic hub of decency around which the corrupt, sociopathic, murderous American West revolves. As fine a performance as Rea gives, Rafe Spall's eclipse's everyone. Spall's Melmont reaches the psychopathic heights of Robert DeNiro's performance in the remake of Cape Fear.
And one final accolade: their armorer got the guns right.
I started watching this series because I was otherwise bored. I called up the second episode partly because I was still bored and partly because I thought I might have been too critical. I continued watching because of the acting and because I could not imagine how the series would resolve all its muddles. After that I continued watching because I refused to believe that the muddles were not resolves either in writing or direction. There are so many fine actors and fine performances in this cobbled together mess that I recommend that you see it for their work and do your best to ignore the framework they are stuck in.
Three Pines (2022)
ACTING BETTER THAN STORY
There are some fine performances in this series. Alfred Molina is excellent. Tantoo Cardinale is excellent as always. The minor characters usually are well fleshed out by their actors. Unfortunately the plots and red herrings are tissue paper thin. I lay the blame for the obvious murderers and thin plot to. Louise Penny, the author of the novels on which the series is based, and to the script writers who, in their defense, are making the best of their source material. Ms. Penny would do well to read and reread and maybe memorize Raymond Chandler's essay The Simple Art of Murder before giving her readers another rather lame mystery so transparent that it could qualify as a Windex commercial. I obviously have not read Ms. Penny's novels and, after viewing this series, I simply don't intend to when there are much better writers to whom I can devote my time.
What rescues the series is the collection of mostly stock characters Ms. Penny has written into her stories and the fine acting that.the cast pours into their roles. There's one significant exception to that general truth, however. Sarah Booth's Yvette Nichol is supposed to be the comic relief but simply comes off as a paste-in. Ms. Booth deserves better than this barely 2-dimensional character who simply doesn't manage to be funny. Stupid and annoying with ineptly grafted on insights, yes, but funny, barely ever. If you want to see a truly funny character thrown into a mystery, give Peter Lorre's character in The Maltese Falcon a look sometime.
I've watched 6 episodes so far. I will continue to watch future episodes. Come to Three Pines for the actors. Stay for the acting and try to be distressed by the creaky, transparent plotting as little as possible.
Mr. Deeds (2002)
An Abomination
Let me confess at the start that I don't like Adam Sandler. I don't think he's much of an actor. I don't think he's funny. This rewrite of Frank Capra's 1936 classic, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town misses the whole point of that wonderful film. I have given it 1 star simply because any film with John Turturro in the cast deserves at least that much. Winona Rider is a middling good actress at best. She is no Jean Arthur nor will she ever be. She turns in a very passable performance but nothing memorable. She peaked in Heathers, Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice and hasn't been extraordinary since. Sandler is no Gary Cooper and not even the Jerry Lewis that he claims to admire. Sandler is simply a plodding, 3rd rate talent who is liked by a lot of people who don't know any better, who haven't ever watched comic masters like Chaplain, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Bros. or Buster Keaton. Sandler is only funny to those who think that a fart joke is high comedy and aren't bright enough to understand how funny a contemporary comic genius like Phoebe Waller-Bridge truly is.
With any luck Sandler's lousy movies will be forgotten in another decade or so and we won't be bombarded with any more of his films until he passes into a much deserved obscurity.
The Lost City of Z (2016)
Ultimately Unsatisfying
The acting and directing, the evocation of the period are all of high quality. However, the story of a man who makes a discovery only to be dragged away from it by events beyond his control is a worthy subject. Had the script spent more time on the events leading up to the initial discovery and then told us briefly of the frustrating ending there might well have been a story with some dramatic impact. Unfortunately the last third of the movie simply carries us down hill to a conjectural ending that might better have been a closing title. Sienna Miller gets far too little screen time. Her role as the rock holding a family together would have made a fair movie better had she been more significant in the story.
As I watched this film I kept thinking of the nearly contemporary Endurance expedition of Ernest Shackleton. It too was a mission frustrated by failure. Still, the story of the return from that failed mission is infinitely more dramatic than the mission itself. The returns from the Amazon jungle might well have been equally interesting but they had no place in this movie.
I am glad that I know a little about Percevale Fawcett. I could have learned as much in a brief story on the Internet.
Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976)
Better Than Average Fun
I caught this movie on television after not having seen it in 40 years. I ran it for 2 weeks while working as a projectionist in a second run house in Connecticut at the time. First, you have a wonderful cast. Not only the four principles but it's hard to imagine a bad movie with Charles Durning, Jack Guilford, Val Avery, Leslie Ann Warren and Burt Young in the supporting cast. As improbable as the script is everyone seems to be having fun.
We are in the realm of the classic door-slamming bedroom farce comedies mated to the caper movie with a couple of lovable losers involved in machinations they cannot hope to understand. Consider it as a double bill with Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks. Michael Caine gets to hone a role as comic villain that will find its fuller expression In Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels. Basically, Harry and Walter is good, silly fun. If you want a great caper movie, Watch The Sting or Topkapi.
If you want something that will occasionally have you spitting popcorn while laughing, try this movie, sit back and enjoy yourself. just remember,
Nobody's perfect.
Nobody at all.
Robin and Marian (1976)
The Most Sublime Robin Hood Movie That Will Ever Be Made
Several reviewers have noted the superb cast all of whom were working at top form in this film. Robin and Marian is, in my opinion, the best Robin Hood film ever made or that ever will be made. I would refute the criticism that it is for an older audience. When I saw it first I was 27 tears old and working as a projectionist in a theatre that ran the film shortly after release. Forty years later the sublimity of its vision has only deepened though it was apparent right from the firs. Let us now, however, consider its director, Richard Lester.
No director has ever had a career of perfect films but Lester's has a few more than many.Starting with The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film that showcased the antics of the Goons (yes, folks, there was a predecessor to Monty Python) and The Beatles' two movies, Lester built a style and competence in storytelling with a mix of humor, drama and great humanity. His The Three and Four Musketeers remain the best Musketeers movies ever made and Juggernaut is the sole disaster movie made in the late 1960s and 1970s that remains worth watching decades later. Add to those Petulia, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, How I Won the War, The Knack and The Ritz and you have a body of work of which any director could be proud.
We may love Errol Flynn's Robin Hood or Alan Rickamn's Sheriff of Nottingham but no prior or subsequent film is anything like as beautiful as this film. The whole film is worth watching for the scene between Connery and Hepburn when she discovers the battle scars on his body or for Robert Shaw's disdain of the ignorant noblemen who've come to him from Ian Holm's sniveling King John. Like the arrow shot from Nicole Williamson's bow in the final scene this film rises up into the sky and simply never comes down.
I don't care how old you are or at what stage your love for another has reached you do yourself and your lover a disservice if you do not sit down and watch this along with what I consider the rest of the eight most romantic films of all time: City Lights (1931) It Happened One Night (1934) The Philadelphia Story (1940) The Princess Bride (1987) Moonstruck (1987) Il Postino (1994) Afterglow (1997)
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
Could be better
First, let me point out what's good about the movie.
BB-8 is a clever re-imagining of the R2D2 we have long known and loved.
I think that Daisy Ridley will be a fine Luke Skywalker.
John Boyega gives a good performance. He plays a soldier out of his element and unsure of everything that's happening to him well.
Lupita Nyong'o's Maz Kanata is the a great addition to the pantheon of memorable Star Wars characters. I hope that we see more of her.
I was very glad to see Max von Sydow in the opening sequence.
The special effects are expertly executed and J. J. Abrams keeps the action rolling.
If you're getting the idea that this review is going to damn the movie with faint praise, you're correct.
I was very hopeful when I heard that Lawrence Kasdan, who was responsible for the best script in the first three movies, The Empire Strikes Back, was going to be one script writer. The biggest problem for The Force Awakens is that the script is thin on ideas and character, long on action and the worse for it. For example, Han and Leia are now an old married couple. They are separated but still love one another. In the first three movies they expressed their love through a fusillade of shouted insults. In this script the fires that made their romance so delightful aren't just banked, they are thoroughly doused.
In the original three movies the Millennium Falcon was as much of a character as C3P-0 and R2D2. It was the bucket of bolts under constant repair. Han and Chewbacca did their best to keep from damaging it. In this movie the Millennium Falcon bounces off snowfields, wrecked spaceships, and miscellaneous other obstacles without any deleterious effects. The Falcon has suddenly become Supership, stronger than steel, faster than a speeding boson and it loses in the process. And, yes, there are two repair scenes but none after any of the scenes in which the ship should reasonably be damaged.
What we have is essentially a rehash of the original Star Wars script from 1977. There are a few variations and permutations but essentially, it's the same story. Supreme Leader Snoke fills in both for the Emperor and serves as the Dark Side's anti-Yoda.
For reasons that no one has explained the weak reestablished Republic is still an underdog fighting an inexplicably resilient empire. In real life we have our own difficulties keeping down resurgent fascism but it is a discredited, fragmented and derided force seventy years after World War II, not a force with vast clone armies and star destroyers patrolling the skies.
Does anyone in Hollywood have enough imagination to come up with some motive other than teen angst and rebellion against one's parents as a motive for a child turning to evil? At least Adam Driver has some acting talent unlike the execrable Hayden Christiansen but there are much more interesting possibilities to explore than Ben Solo's current motivations for becoming Kylo Ren. Thin script and little imagination again.
We always knew that there had to be someone who'd trained Palpatine to become a Sith lord and emperor. Snoke comes out of nowhere. Why? Isn't there enough evil in the hearts of men already to feed a near infinite number of dark sides? I understand that we've embarked on a saga that will see the redemption and probable destruction(when you have the script from Return of the Jedi already why write a new one?)of Ben Solo but wouldn't it be more interesting if we got a different story this time around? We expected to see R2D2 again but the script also fails us when R2D2 awakens. Why? If Luke Skywalker as a King Arthur figure sleeping on the Isle of Avalon until his people are in the direst need, that's fine, but put it in the script, please? Cutting one or two explosions to for some snappily written exposition might help.
I would love to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the physics of a planet sized Death Star that either had to move through space (with what motors?) or risk running out of nearby suns to consume. Just because one can imagine a thing doesn't make it plausible and that goes double when the thing you imagine has to conform to basic physics.
And what's with Oscar Isaac's Poe Dameron? Isaac is a perfectly adequate actor but his character in this film comes off as the proverbial teats on a bull. He shows up early on, disappears for great swaths of the film and then reappears to no great effect or consequence in the last third. Huh?
My current feeling is that J. J. Abrams is the unseen Jar-Jar Binks of this new series: the embarrassment that we all will wish would just go away. He knows how to handle action and CGI but can't properly direct actors. Without believable connections between the characters the series is going to fall flat.
So, if the new Star Wars saga is to become that wonderful continuation of a story we all love it needs a director who has some real interest in getting performances out of actors and a coherent and interesting script. Those things The Force Awakens does not have. I wish it did. I would hate to see the Star Wars franchise peter out because we never get to love Rey, Finn, Poe and even Kylo the way we did Luke, Leia, Han and Darth because there needs to be another crash or explosion.
The Muppets. (2015)
In mourning for The Muppet Show
Last night ABC revived The Muppet Show and shouldn't have.
I LOVED The Muppet Show original. it was a brilliant mix of satire, comedy, variety and just plain fun intelligently written and acted. If you don't remember the old show, just take a minute or two to go to YouTude and watch the very great Zero Mostel in the show on which he was the guest star.
Anyway, the ultra right-wingers have gone nuts (can they be anything else?) about some of the sexual innuendos and other more adult humor included in the show. the charge that it doesn't promote what some bigots consider to be "family values" is as imbecilic as it is predictable. That's not what was wrong with the show. Last night's offering was dull, utterly without pacing and largely mean-spirited, things which should have recommended it to the political far right. My guess is that Sam the Eagle's brief segment was the best bit of satire in the show and definitely offended the ultra right and fundamentalists.
Of course Kermit isn't really Kermit any longer. With Jim Henson dead, Kermit can't be the same but even Statler and Waldorf hadn't much heart. Frank Oz is no longer Miss Piggy. In fact almost no one involved in the original show appears in the new version. About the only joke they gave to Gonzo was so obvious and labored that the punchline was whatever comes after an anti-climax. Miss Piggy was reduced to being a garden variety diva instead of the over-the-top caricature of a diva we laughed at originally. It's been nearly 35 years since the original Muppet Show went off the air. In that time with caricatures of human beings like the Kardashians and Donald Trump it's become harder to go far enough to satirize human behavior but it's still not impossible. It does seem to be impossible for this new Muppet Show's writers. The sequence with Scooter and the guest star, Elizabeth Banks, wasn't funny and was simply out of character for Scooter.
The original Muppet Show captured the back stage frenzy of putting on any sort of show, the malfunctions, instant judgments on performances, ad hoc solutions to accidents and failures. Something was always happening and something was always happening on top of what was already happening. This version just seemed like another tired sit com. It reminded me of the story of the Marx Brothers during the filming of A Night in Casablanca, their last movie together. Groucho, Harpo and Chico were filming a scene where they were supposedly hiding behind a wall from Sig Ruman's villain chasing them when, as Groucho told it, he turned to his brothers and asked, "Why are we doing this? I don't want to do this any more." A Night in Casablanca was the last of the Marx brothers' films and a fairly sad coda to the great fun of their great films like Monkey Business, Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera. This rehash (I cannot call it a revival given that it was so lifeless) of The Muppet Show was a pale and sad reminder of how much we lost when we lost Jim Henson. It is not a thing to love as was the original.
I will keep watching a bit longer partly out of nostalgia and in the faint hope that someone on the writing staff may go back and watch the old shows and bring back some of the joy and pacing that made that original great so long ago. I have little expectation that this new version will rise to that sublime level but I'll continue to hope until this version's inevitable cancellation. Would that it were not so.
Once Upon a Time (2011)
Jumps More Sharks than Evil Kinevil Jumped Buses
I am a storyteller who's been immersed in folklore, myth and fairy tales since boyhood. The collected tales of the Brothers Grimm, Alexandr Afanas'ev and others over the last 2 centuries are the way we convey the wisdom, beliefs and ethics of the past to the present. That said, I'm not a purist. The Grimms' tales had been revised many times to make them comport with the prevailing religions and mores of the tellers' changing times. I dearly love re-imagined classic material such as Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) or Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). The only versions of such tales that I truly despise are the Disney versions. Give me Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) any day over the sickly sweet Disney version. That said, after a weak start, I tried with all my might to allow Once Upon a Time to grow on me.
I never watched Lost seriously. I found that show more pretentious and self-involved and just confused, never deep. I was always afraid this show would fall prey to similar script problems. Even so I had to give it a try.
That the first episode was weak isn't entirely a fault. The whole hour was exposition. We had to get from the story books to Storybrook before the real action could begin. The second episode actually had good transitions from past to present. I also wanted to be impressed the 3 main lead women.
And though I despise Disney-fication of fairy tales, I must say that turning Jiminy Cricket into a psychiatrist and a possibly corrupt one at that is a stroke of brilliance.
Ginnifer Goodwin's Mary Margaret Blanchard/Snow White isn't much of an actress sadly. She seems to have escaped directly from a senior class play onto the set of this show. I think it was Dorothy Parker who criticized Katherine Hepburn as having an emotional range of from A to B. Ms. Goodwin is much less gifted. Lana Parrilla's Mayor/Wicked Queen struts angrily about the set and snarls when she's not whining. She's neither wicked enough to be a wicked queen nor pathetic enough to gain sympathy. Her tragic back story is just a cliché. Ms. Parrilla needs a script and a verbal dope slap or two from her director if she doesn't give us a richer, more nuanced evil queen yet all she has is horrible, flaccid, clichéd writing. I knew that the show was in trouble when the writers' love affair with psychological; gobbledygook explained Lana Parilla's character as a poor, misunderstood victim of a more evil mother and thwarted love. I think the writers decided that she really does care for Henry and can't be all bad. But a fairy tale must have a focus of evil against whom all other must strive. Making Regina wishy-washy necessitates Barbara Hersey's Cora as the ultimate evil. Even this duplicative mess hasn't taught the scriptwriters a lesson and we're in danger of having Cora excused as an overwhelmed mom just trying to do right by her ingrate daughter.
I like Jennifer Morrison. Her Allison Cameron on House was one of a very few actors who weren't blown off the screen by Hugh Laurie. Her Emma Swan in the initial episode was one of the best things in the hour. However, she has no script worth playing and she's fallen into the trap of lazy actors who rely on standard expressions, mannerisms and deliveries if their directors aren't pushing them or they aren't pushing themselves. Unfortunately the writers haven't given her much with which to work. The crux of her problem is that there's just no chemistry between her and Jared Gilmore's Henry.
I've been a fan of Barbara Hersey's work for decades. Her best hope in this series is for Cora to find a quick death so that she escapes further embarrassment.
As for the men, what is Josh Dallas doing on camera at all? I understand that the show needed a pretty boy for Prince Charming he started the show in a coma and as far as I can see has never come out of it.
Robert Carlyle's Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold grabs the camera the moment he enters and holds it until his but too often descends into a lot of scenery chewing. Still even he can't work from the vast emptiness that passes for a script.
I've kept watching for about 2 and a half years hoping week in and week out that this show would grow into something extraordinary but I've given up. Just because these fairy tale characters are archetypes doesn't give license for them to be as flat as the pages of a story book. Rather it offers the opportunity to show us ourselves through them. The greatness of fairy tales is that they deal in absolutes. There is definite evil. There is definite good. Usually the hero or heroine of the story must make a journey of discovery from which he or she returns wiser, more mature and more powerful. Upon the main character's return he or she is equipped to overcome life's obstacles. There is precious little ambiguity. All clouds hanging over the characters clear and the couple, if there is one, can love "happily ever after" exactly because they have the experience to overcome difficulties that are far more petty than those they have already faced. Once Upon a Time founders about in a sea of ambiguity and bad writing and has just become unwatchable. It is infinitely less interesting than Grimm on NBC which also has far better writing. And it's a lot less go-for-broke exuberant and edgy fun than SyFy's Lost Girl. ABC needs to toll the bell, close the book and snuff the candle to exorcise this turkey from its roster even a second hour of the gawdawful America's Funniest Home Videos would be an improvement.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Pacing II
So now we reach the end of Harry Potter and the Tortuously Extended Franchise with the final installment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Pacing. Who is at fault? Certainly not the actors young and old who give very serviceable performances despite, in most cases, being given next to nothing to do. Director David Yates can manage some serviceable pacing when he needs to. I rather think that the fault lies less with an unimaginative director than with the author and producers of whom Rowling was one. Ultimately I attribute this film's failings, as I did in Part I, to greed. Deathly Hallows, Parts I & II might make a very good 2 and a half to 3 hour movie. Instead they combine to form a deadly dull 4 hour and 36 minute snoozer. Take just 1 scene as an example. Harry, on his way to confront Voldemort, uses the Resurrection Stone, one of the Deathly Hallows that he obtained in the preceding film. The ensuing scene is utterly superfluous. It does nothing but slow the action. At a moment when we need desperately to get on to the confrontation we are stuck with a convocation that does not include all the people who have been closest to Harry and spends minutes that pass like hours in soulful looks and some babble that we and Harry all knew already. It is a waste of celluloid or disc space or whatever medium is appropriate at the moment. Even Rupert Grint and Emma Watson are given precious little to do in this film but I'm not sure that is a fault as much as I enjoy their acting. This film is, after all the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort, the moment toward which we've built over the 7 previous films. It's more than time to focus on Harry and Voldemort to the exclusion of most of the rest of the cast. Still, that's not what we get. We get much tying up of loose ends with interjected back stories that only contribute to the deathly pacing. We learn things that we should have learned in Half-Blood Prince and several other movies. Though those interjections may have been part of the 7th book they simply interfere with action of this film. We also get boxcar loads of exposition to explain plot twists for which no one ever laid the prior groundwork. The movie is a mess that completes the story but becomes a disservice to to the actors and fans. At one point late in the film Maggie Smith's Prof. McGonagall casts a weary, quizzical look in medium close up that seems more to say, "What am I doing here if not for the paycheck and how fast can I get back to the set of Downton Abbey where I actually can display my talent and craft." I feel for her. I do blame the directors to some extent but the producers and J. K. Rowling even more. From the start of the series the money people made great casting decisions and then put their wonderful actors in the hands of hacks like Chris Columbus and David Yates while giving fine directors like Alfonso Cuaron the boot after a single episode. Perhaps, one day once J. K. Rowling passes on to some other worldly Enchanted Forest, someone really competent who loves the stories will hire an elderly Daniel Radcliffe to play Albus Dumbledore in a really good remake of the series. I surely hope Harry Potter gets better treatment one day. He deserves it though he didn't get it here.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (2010)
Harry Potter and the Deadly Pacing
I suppose it was inevitable. As J. K. Rowling became a phenomenon her books got less and less editing though they needed it more and more. With the cynical, money-grubbing decision to make two films out of the last book a similar thing has happened. The triangular friendship and love of Ron, Hermione and Harry provides the personal, human tension of the over-all story but we all know that it can't be resolved until the last chapter/reel. The consequence is this movie bloated with empty calories to deprive us of the price of a ticket bought more to say we've seen the whole epic rather than because we've been truly entertained. We get a few loose ends tied up and a brilliant animated sequence telling the back story of the Deathly Hallows. Unfortunately more of the movie than any narrative line can stand consists of the three young people wandering the English countryside to no particular purpose except to pad out the space between opening and closing credits. At best the film is an over-long trailer for the final installment. Poor Harry and his friends haven't been this badly served since the series wisely, thankfully jettisoned director Chris Columbus and his attempts to drag the series down into the hell of Home Alone with witches. The best I can say of this film is that someday, in order to sell more copies of the series, someone may re-cut the films and combine Deathly Hallows Parts I & II into something like a watchable film. I have no confidence in that, however. The fashion is to add scenes that were left on the cutting room floor and, usually, should have made it to the cutting room incinerator. I am a father of the children of the Harry Potter generation and thus once removed from Potter-mania. Still I also have a deep affection for Daniel Radcliffe's and his Harry, Emma Watson and her Hermione and Rupert Grint and his Ron. I have watched them grow as I watched my daughters grow. Thus it's partly out of fatherly affection that I dislike this installment as a great disservice to three young actors who have worked hard and deserved better.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)
Wanted to Buy: Competent Writers
The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has always been fluff. After all, what can one expect from movies derived from an amusement park ride? Given that genesis the first two movies were a rather entertaining ride. The over-long sequence of Jack in the bleached out desert from which he must be rescued in the third film served as an extended metaphor for the life that was visibly draining out of the series. Now we are into a "walking dead" continuation of Capt. Jack Sparrow's biography as it moves from bang to whimper to bleached skeleton.
As a filmed amusement park ride the basic premise of the Pirates films is stringing together fights and chases like (black) pearls on a slim filament of plot. Unfortunately for On Stranger Tides the filament is absent. What we get is a disjunct pile of, to be kind, faux pearls. Each action sequence is brief fun but they all seem to be rolling around independently. First Mate Gibbs is back but only as a creaky plot device. The same is true of the male half of what becomes the couple in love sub-uh-plot that vestigially fills the gap left by the absence of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley.
Rob Marshall's direction isn't much to write home about but it sometimes serves which is far, far more than I can say for the script, that missing filament. It starts out promisingly enough with picking up the teaser from the end of At World's End about the Fountain of Youth and even manages to end on the same theme for the most part. In between though we have hackneyed cliché after hackneyed cliché and nothing near as imaginative as the "fruit kebab" or water wheel sequences of past films. In the course of this attempt to construct a coherent movie the writers senselessly rip off past literature and movies from The Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen to Moby Dick and even Splash. I searched in vain for a writer involved in the script who had a single original idea. In fact, even the the 3-D seems tacked on and the Spaniards who open the movie seem like an accidental afterthought.
Take, for example, poor Ian McShane's Blackbeard. He appears to have some magical control over his ship through the cutlass he carries at his side. We don't get any explanation even in exposition for this power. Does this power belong to Blackbeard? To the sword? Is it imparted by the ship to is captain? We never know. There's a reference to Blackbeard having been beheaded at some point in the past. It's there in the movie but it's one more loose...ah...pearl rolling around the pitching deck without a filament to make anything coherent of it. And Ian McShane is no Bill Nighy. There's as little energy in his Blackbeard as there is in the script itself.
Though the direction is pedestrian - deadly for an amusement park ride - and the script an incoherent mess that doesn't stop the actors from trying to inject some life. Johnny Depp minces around and tries mightily to extract some wit from the not-quite dialogue with which the alleged writers have afflicted him. Geoffrey Rush is a wonderful, delightful, talented actor despite the fact that he's been shamelessly ripping off Robert Newton from the first film in this series onward. Had there been some real point to his presence in this movie I'm sure that he could have delivered the kind of performance that made us so glad he'd returned in for At World's End. Penelope Cruz, besides being beautiful, is also a wonderful actress, just watch her in her films with Pedro Almodovar to confirm my opinion. In this movie she's mostly window dressing and the main attempt to replace Keira Knightley. Ian McShane is the actor for whom I feel both the most and least sympathy. He does what he can with the script pages he's given but I couldn't help wishing that he too had more of a chance to break out of the prison to which the lack of a script condemned him. Then I think that he could have made more of an effort. Perhaps it's McShane's fault but I think he could have done much better.
On Stranger Tides is worth the price of a matinée on a rainy afternoon. Johnny Depp is fun. Geoffrey Rush is fun too though less so. Penelope Cruz is beautiful and delivers the line which will undoubtedly become the quest and McGuffin for the inevitable fifth film. Still, unless Disney can find a good writer(s) for the next script and an imaginative director, I'll wait for Pirates of the Caribbean: To No Real Purpose to show up on cable before I watch it.
Fool's Gold (2008)
Talk about disaster movies!
There are some legendary movie disasters. Some of them don't deserve their awful reputations. For example, Ishtar does have some moments worth watching and Heaven's Gate in the long, uncut version is a flawed work of great genius. Fool's Gold, however, is Ed Wood awful without any of the charm. From its imbecilic and derivative screen play to the drooling, slack-jawed direction and on to the execrable acting, from everyone including, incredibly enough, Donald Sutherland, this movie is a cold, drying turd that everyone should avoid stepping in. It is a laugh-less, humorless comedy and a plodding, somnolent adventure film. I'm sure that some recycler could make something out of the master, prints and various iterations of this movie; no one involved in its creation did.
San Pietro (1945)
The story behind San Pietro
One reviewer commented that he didn't know how this film ever got released during World War II. It almost didn't.
First, you need to know that Hollywood actors, directors and producers were heavily recruited by the War and Navy Departments (the Defense Dept. is a post war innovation). These celebrities got to know a lot of the senior military personnel through their activities in Stage Door Canteens, the USO, recruiting and bond drives. Few were closer to the military top brass than Orson Welles, a close friend of Houston's.
Welles told this story on, I believe, a Dick Cavett Show in the late 1960s or very early 1970s. I repeat it as I remember it.
According to Welles the War Department censors did not want San Pietro released. They felt that the film was too graphic and that it might have an adverse effect on support for the war. Through Welles' personal friendship with General George C. Marshall he and Houston arranged a private screening at the Pentagon for Marshall, his staff and the censors. Following the screening Gen. Marshall stood up and ordered that the film be released. He said that it was an accurate depiction and that war was horrible. He felt that the American people needed to know that horror lest they romanticize war and become fond of a monstrous act of inhumanity.
So San Pietro was released. If Welles exaggerated his role, I can't say. Certainly Houston didn't contradict him. If I have misremembered the tale in some particular, it does not change the fact that San Pietro owed its release to the intervention of Marshall.
Even today San Pietro is worth seeing. As has already been suggested, it is a good complement to Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front. I would suggest that it also ranks with two other great movies whose subject is World War I. Those movies are Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. And, although it doesn't quiet rank with the three films already mentioned, Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts belongs in the insanity of war film festival we seem to be constructing here. Finally, I would point out that earlier wars are often stand ins for the more recent one as in M.A.S.H. Korea stood in for Vietnam.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Over-rated Schlock
When this movie came out I listened to the hype for quite a while. I've loved horror movies most of my life though I gave up on them when they sank into special-effects gore-fests and expressions of very personal paranoia in the 1980s. I finally gave this film a try when it came to a second run house in my city that charged 99 cents per ticket. One can see anything for 99 cents. When I left, the manager asked what I'd thought of the movie. He knew that I was a regular and that I liked films generally. I told him I thought he owed me at least 98 cents.
In summary, a group of young people with video equipment wander out into the woods on the Maryland/West Virginia border. To characterize their combined I.Q.'s as "super 8" would be too generous. The area in which they get lost in the woods is rural but not the Amazonian rain forest or the wastes of Siberia. Walking for less than an hour in any direction would bring them to a road, a task that is far from impossible to accomplish. Still they get lost. Once they are lost they descend into fear and get, as if such a thing were possible, even stupider. In the end the alleged Blair Witch does us all the great service of removing these self-indulgent idiots from the gene pool. The really bad news is that the witch takes about 90 minutes to accomplish that removal. She's just too darned slow.
This movie does not have the utterly misguided and endearing incompetence that make Ed Wood's films like Plan 9 From Outer Space a guilty pleasure. It's not even worth renting for the pleasure of throwing popcorn at the screen.
The Late Show (1977)
A sweet and unsentimental masterpiece
As many who have left comments before me have observed, this film echos the detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s. I would go a little further and suggest that the premise of the movie is what would the case be like if Philip Marlowe were roped into a mystery when he was pushing 80? Howard Duff's scene early in the film and even his character's name evoke The Big Sleep while Chandler allusions continue through the film. Art Carney's superbly underplayed Ira Wells is unquestionably an avatar of Marlowe surviving into the late 1970s and into his late 70s. He's a bit deaf, a bit slow, a bit more crotchety but he's still that one moral man walking down "these mean streets" of L.A.
Benton has done some extraordinary work, but this is his elevation to the sublime, a movie that one can watch again and again. It's a minor masterpiece. If producer Altman's own The Long Goodbye had been as good a Raymond Chandler film as this is, Goodbye would have risen to the level of the other two incomparable films of Chandler novels: the Howard Hawkes, Bogart and Bacall The Big Sleep and the Robert Mitchum Farewell, My Lovely.
Shi mian mai fu (2004)
Pretentious Mess Wrapped in Pretty Ribbons
It's not really the actors' fault. Ziyi Zhang is beautiful, talented and does the best performance as a blind person that I've seen in a long time. Still this may be the most pretentious bit of tripe since The English Patient. Ultimately there isn't any plot. All we have is a thin, watery broth with a few separate scene/won-tons floating in it.
The "echo game" scene is beautifully choreographed and photographed but it ultimately hasn't anything to do with the story line. The fight in the bamboo forest is similarly beautifully photographed and a bit creepy when the soldiers begin scurrying down the bamboo like armored beetles, but it is a stand alone piece that exists more for its own sake than for any sense that it makes in the plot.
As witness to my contention that the whole film is a mess, we have a scene in which Takeshi Kaneshiro's Jin tells Andy Lau's Leo that they don't need any further attacks to establish his credibility with Ziyi's Mei. So the next scene is an attack in a field. Subsequently we get a scrap of dialogue between Jin and Leo to cover for the crappy script but the real reason that attack in the field is included is that Yimou Zhang needs it to stretch out this minnow so that it looks more like the whale he has in mind.
I have no objection to using nature to poetically heighten and punctuate a scene, but the blizzard during the last battle seems, like most elements of this movie, grafted on like an extra leg on a badly designed Frankenstein monster.
If the theme is supposed to be that people and things are not at all what they seem to be and that personal and political motives complicate loyalties and motives even more than deceptions, I've seen it done better and more coherently in most James Bond movies (except the utterly unwatchable Roger Moore ones). And that's not even to bring any of the better films of John LeCarre's novels in for comparison.
No. If it weren't for the acting and cinematography this film would barely rate a 2. Pretty Ziyi and pretty photography raise it to a 4 but no higher.
The Illusionist (2006)
Light touch and great performances
The Illusionist is set in the Vienna (not Venice) of the turn of the last century and draws on the Mayerling Affair as one of the threads of inspiration for the story on which it is based. Writer-director Neil Burger shows a superbly light touch in creating the period and telling the story. Edward Norton continues to demonstrate a talent normally associated with only a few exceptionally great actors on the order of Olivier and Orson Welles. Paul Giamatti is excellent as is the entire cast. What is most striking is the evocation of the period in the cinematography. Dick Pope's camera-work gets into the rarified realm of James Wong Howe and Sven Nyquist.
This is an exceptional movie that shows a superb writer-director, with a perfect cast and crew making a movie well worth the price of admission and the 2 hours in the theatre.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
A delightful idea spoiled
What I found most disappointing about this movie was how profoundly and completely it failed in acting, direction, script, and even art direction. You don't have to be stupid to like it, or even illiterate, but you do have to be challenged in your knowledge of the books from which the character derive and your knowledge of history.
The art directors, all 5 of them, seem to have decided that slapping a bit of late-Victorian gingerbread onto some contemporary designs served to indicate period and inventiveness. It failed miserably in both regards. The Nautilus in Richard Fleischer's 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea seemed far more Victorian and more futuristic than the outsized nuclear sub cum battleship of this film. Capt. Nemo's Cord sedan is just an embarrassment as is the situation that asks us to believe that Tom Sawyer, who's never seen such a thing before, becomes an accomplished stunt driver with no practice.
Some comic book/movies take us on a ride that, like a good roller-coaster catches us up and keeps our attention as long as it lasts. The original RoboCop (1987) comes to mind in that regard. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen telegraphs its plot and then plods about trying to make its creaky, clanky script come to life but never pulls enough juice out of the heavens to maker it seem like anything but dead meat.
Norrington's background in creating special effects is probably the biggest millstone around this movie's neck. He gets caught up in things like the Mr. Hyde battle in the climax that only bog the plot down.
The premise is a great one: what if some of the most memorable characters of the literature of the last third of the 19th Century all got together to save the world from disaster? If you'd like to see a movie that does a similar premise well, I'd suggest Herbert Ross' 1976 The Seven Percent Solution or Nicholas Meyer's 1979 Time After Time. Watched in chronological sequence with this film, I think anyone will understand why League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is extraordinary only as a completely missed opportunity.
I ended the film thinking that David Hemmings had the best part in the whole movie. His character's done for in the first 5 minutes. He got to pick up his check, go home and forget he ever had anything to do with this failure.
Pasqualino Settebellezze (1975)
Lina Wertmuller's Masterpiece
Pasqualino Settebellezze is one of the great films on the 20th Century and about the 20th Century. It is about survival in unsurvivable circumstances. It is about Life breaking through the most vicious impositions of death imaginable. It is about survival conveying a nobility that may be undeserved but is nonetheless achieved. Another reviewer compared it to Life is Beautiful but doing so both cheapens Seven Beauties and unjustifiably aggrandizes Benigni's rather pallid opus. Where Benigni travels a pedestrian path, Wertmuller soars into the sublime.
It might be a good idea to watch this movie as a mini-Wertmuller festival starting with The Seduction of Mimi, thence to Swept Away and finally to Seven Beauties. If you don't think that Giancarlo Giannini is a great actor in the mold of Marcello Mastroianni when you've done watching those three films then you need some instruction in what acting is all about.
Fernando Rey turns in the best performance he ever gave for a director other than Luis Bunuel and Shirley Stoler is magnificent. Funny, sad, and terrifying by turns. She was a much underrated actress.
Pasqualino Settebellezze ranks with 8 1/2, Grand Illusion, The Last Laugh, The Seventh Seal, Derzu Uzala and Citizen Kane as a great masterpiece. To pass it up is like not reading Hamlet or Don Quixote. It's impossible to understand film without it.
Rose Red (2002)
Fith rate rip-off by a third rate writer
In Rose Red, Stephen King rips off the very real Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, Shirley Jackson's vastly superior, The Haunting of Hill House, {which had a great film version in 1963 directed by Robert Wise}, Burnt Offerings {a truly scary film 1976 by Dan Curtis}, his own novel The Shining {that had a fine film version in 1980 by Stanley Kubrick}, and rafts of "old, dark house" films including The Legend of Hell House {1973; John Hough, director} and going back to the silent version of The Cat and the Canary {1927; Paul Leni, director}. There is not a frightening or original moment in this entire screen play. Worse, it hasn't a single idea that hasn't been stolen from elsewhere and degraded by King's limited imagination.
I know that it will get the King Fan base after me with bared fangs, but there's a reason why the only four King stories on film that are worth watching {Carrie(1976), The Shining(1980), Stand By Me(1986), Misery(1990), The Shawshank Redemption(1994) and The Green Mile(1999)} are more the work of their directors (Brian de Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Rob Reiner and Frank Darabont) than of King himself. That reason is that, while King can supply the situations, he's a Bulwer-Lytton level writer at best. Clive Barker is more original in his horrors and a better plotter to boot, though not by much.
One is left wondering what good actors like Kevin Tighe, Judith Ivey, Julian Sands and even Matt Ross (whose clichéd character, Emery Waterman, tries hard to escape those clichés) are doing in this dreadful, over-long drek, until one understands that they probably needed some ready cash too.
It would be too long at 90 minutes, but at 240 minutes, this is a trap to avoid by never watching it in the first place. It's not even bad enough to be funny. Try one of the much better films that is rips off as listed above.
Rob Astyk