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CinemaRian
Member since 5/12/2008, last signed in 2 days ago.
""The living's in the way we die!""
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Silent Running
Silent Running (1971, USA, Doug ...
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"Silent Running joins Soylent Green in a duo of ecologically minded sci-fi films from the early 70's. Both movies are about the end of the natural habitat on Earth, and serve as a warning to us that we need to care of the environment and not take it for granted. While few can disagree with this message, this film needs to explore it more. The picture works best at the very beginning- Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is one of a crew of four on a legion of spaceships that maintain the very last of Earth's forests. He lectures the other men on what the planet has lost- organic beauty, the pleasure of watching things grow, harmonzing with nature. The others just laugh at him. One day, the group recieve a message that continuing the forests is no longer economically viable. They are ordered to destroy the biomes and return home. Lowell cannot stand to see the last surviving planet life from Earth destoryed, so he kills his fellow crewmembers and goes on the run from the company's ... "
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Kurt & Courtney
Kurt & Courtney (1998, Great Br ...
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"Nirvana and the memory of Kurt Cobain exist in that horrid netherworld of hip- too old to be new, but too new to be retro. The band's influence on popular music was huge, and Cobain was to become in death a rock and roll folk hero on the level of John Lennon or Jimi Hendrix. But right now, it's just not cool to admit that yes, the band was really, really great. With the exception of The Sex Pistols, it's hard to think of another band who had such a huge influence with so small a catalog- Nirvana's entire recorded consists entirely of three studio albums, a rareties collection, two live albums (one released posthumously) and a box set of substandard outtakes for hardcore fans. I give this introduction to defend the idea that Cobain is worth making movies about- he was a serious artist and was a great chronicler of his time- no other audince in any medium captured the horrors of early 90's world as strong as he did. Nick Broomfield's documentary, however, is not about Cobai ... "
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Dance Party, USA
Dance Party, U.S.A. (2006, USA, ...
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"No, I was never a part of the social group portrayed in this film, but I knew it existed, and I hated it. I hated it for because I saw that it was self-destructive and damaging and I also hated it because admission into it meant social acceptance, something that I could never really have in high school. The world portrayed in Dance Party U.S.A. is not the typical one portrayed in high school movies, where the kids spend a lot of time worrying about pressing issues such as Prom King and Queen or winning the big football game. It's not an entry into the Heathers genre either, about the revenge of the outcasts. It's a movie about normal people, the people you forgot after you graduated. The characters this film are neither smart nor stupid. Like most high school studends, grades are not that important to them, but the social scene is. That scene is packed to the brim with sex, alcohol and pot, and for some, stronger substances. They are all still figuring themselves out, but they know ... "
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Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008 ...
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"Well, it starts like a Star Wars movie- "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…" and then the familiar crash of the title card and theme music. But then instead of the majestic expository crawl the movies are so famous for, we get what sounds like a 1940's radio announcer racing through a lot of stuff about the Old Republic and the Separatist Army on some planet we've never heard of. I've seen Attack of the Clones twice (and I'm not sure what that says about me) but I still didn't get what was going on here. In fact, most of the expository scenes in this movie are so rushed and incoherent you'd need a PhD in Star Wars mythology to get most of the references. Anyway, we eventually get to the planet were we find our friends Obi-Wan Kenobi (voice of James Arnold Taylor) and Anakin Skywalker (Matt Lanter) trying to hold out against a bunch of robots until reinforcements arrive. Despite the fact they are currently in the middle of a war zone, they find enough time to m ... "
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The Straight Story
The Straight Story (1999, USA, ...
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"The Straight Story (1999) Now here’s another movie where the director makes all the difference. Based on its screenplay, The Straight Story would be in precarious danger of becoming a dreaded Clever Comedy. Virtually everyone in the film is in some way quirky or eccentric, and a lot of the humor is based on the strange things they do. But The Straight Story is directed by David Lynch, who at first glance does not seem right for this material. His films tend to be about the dark underbelly of humanity, with a lot of content that might be considered to be creepy. There’s nothing creepy in this movie, but there’s a lot of great stuff. The movie is based on a true story of Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), a 73-year old Iowa man who learns one day that his brother (Harry Dean Stanton), who lives in Wisconsin, has had a stroke. The brothers have been estranged for years, and Alvin knows that he must see him and make amends, as he may not have much time l ... "
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Hamlet
Hamlet (1948, Great Britain, Si ...
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"Sir Laurence Olivier's Hamlet is a brilliant, difficult, and to a degree, unreasonably dark movie. It's hard to deny that the picture works, but by the end, you wonder if the journey was really worth taking, as this must be one of the most effectively gloomy films ever committed to celluloid. It's impossible to watch Olivier's film and not compare it to the numerous other screen adaptations of Shakespeare's most famous play, most notably the 1996 masterpiece by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh is not a better actor than Olivier (only Marlon Brando could possibly hold that title), but he made a movie that was brimming with the energy of life, one that fully explored the metaphysical concepts in the original play. Olivier's goals are more mundane- he's most interested in the psychological and archetypical elements of the play, so the movie is far shorter than Branagh's and its smaller in scope. More than one critic has referred to the settings as claustrophobic. It's as if these characters e ... "
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Geheimnisse einer Seele
Secrets of a Soul (1925, German ...
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"Based on the title, you should expect a lot from Secrets of a Soul. After all, hasn't mankind been searching for the secrets of the soul since time immemorial? But alas, the "secrets" we find are actually just a lot Freudian psychobabble. A better title would be Secrets of the Id. According to the helpful special features that accompany the Kino DVD, Ufa studios and director G.W. Pabst were genuinely interested in making a film based on Freud's theories and even tried to hire the shrink himself to be a consultant on the picture, but Siggy declined. They did manage to convince his disciples Karl Abraham and Hans Sachs to serve as consultants, and, according to some sources, even rewrite the script. I find that idea plausible as the movie is structured more like a case study than an actual narrative. After an intertitle informs us that "no important factual information has been changed", the story begins. Martin Fellman (Werner Krauss) is a seemingly typical middle aged chemist who i ... "
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Man of a Thousand Faces
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957, ...
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"The life of Lon Chaney, Sr. does not easily lend itself to a biopic. For one thing, a great deal is not known about his personal life, and little of what we do know is not dramatically interesting enough to make a movie. The actor was genius, perhaps the greatest of the silent era, and certainly it's greatest makeup artist, but he apparently had enough self-awareness to not believe his own publicity and buy into the movie star myths that destroyed the lives of so many other stars. The fact that the life of a man so talented could be apparently so mundane is a problem for a biopic, so Man of a Thousand Faces feels free to add typical biopic cliches and pointless subplots. It milks the two really interesting things about the personal life of Chaney (played here by James Cagney) for all their worth. The first is the fact that his parents were deaf, which was certainly helpful in the training of a silent screen actor. The second is that his first wife, Cleva (Dorothy Malone) attempted ... "
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The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight (2008, USA, Chr ...
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"The Dark Knight is easily the best superhero movie ever made, surpassing even the original Superman. It manages to walk the tightrope of having a weightiness of tone and purpose without falling into the ridiculousness often found in comic book movies that take themselves too seriously- and very few summer blockbusters are as serious (or profound) as this one. I believe that with this picture Christopher Nolan is asking a question regarding the nature of goodness. There is no doubt that the Joker (the late Heath Ledger) is evil, but is the Batman (Christian Bale) really heroic? Or is the real hero D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckert) who uses the law to capture the bad guys, in the open, and who is also capable of carrying on normal relationships with other people? The fact that the Joker is evil does not mean that he is a one-note character. There has been a lot of talk about Ledger getting a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance here, all of which is certainly deserved ... "
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Mark of the Vampire
Mark of the Vampire (1935, USA, ...
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"The auteur theory was made for movies like Mark of the Vampire. Taken as itself, it’s a mediocre horror movie with a few effective moments. But seen as entry into its director’s larger body of work, it gets really interesting. The movie is a sound remake of Browning’s 1927 hit London After Midnight, perhaps the most famous of all lost films. It’s considered by most to be the first American vampire film and featured a brilliant makeup job by Lon Chaney, Sr., which can still be seen in stills. It’s obviously impossible to make any real comparison as the quality between the two films, but the basic plot of the original maintained. Another Browning film we do have left to compare is his 1931 masterpiece Dracula, which also stars Bela Lugosi as a vampire (here he’s called Count Mora and has a vampire daughter named Luna, played by Carroll Borland). David J. Skal and others have argued that Browning was disinterested in the Dracula project, and so ... "
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The Cameraman
The Cameraman (1928, USA, Buste ...
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"The Cameraman is regarded by many scholars as the last great Buster Keaton film. It was the last movie he made where he had a majority of creative control over the project, even though his new contract at MGM meant the studio was already causing problems (there are no dangerous stunts). But, to my surprise, I found the film to be very good, but not one of Keaton's masterpieces. The director's credit is given to Edward Sedgewick, but it's pretty obvious who the auteur of this movie is. I have a feeling that, like most of his pictures, Keaton handled the scenes that he felt were important, and left some of the more basic expository stuff to his buddy Edward. But unlike so many of his work, this does not flow like a perfectly constructed Bach composition. It seems more like a collection scenes, strung together by a very basic plot outline. The basic plot involves still photographer named Luke Shannon (Keaton) who develops a crush on a girl named Sally (Marceline Day) who works as ... "
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Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D
Journey to the Center of the Ea ...
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"Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D is the first movie that I can say gave me a headache, but is still good enough for a recommendation. Unlike some of the other movies that made me break out the Ibruprofen (Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, Time Bandits), with Journey the problem is with the format. In other words, it's the 3-D. To be sure, there are a couple of 3-D shots in the picture that are cool- a guy at beginning extends a tape measurer suddenly, a translucent fish jumps out the water during an action sequence. But a lot of the other times the 3-D just doesn't work. Objects at the edge of the screen sometimes only register in one eye, and other times the editing causes momentary confusion. The process doesn't really add anything to the experience of the film (which is also being released in some theatres in regular 2-D), as you just get used to once the novelty wears off. But the movie itself is good. It's pretty much what you would expect from the trailer, although th ... "
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