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Posted: |
Jan 19, 2014 - 4:57 AM
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By: |
Francis
(Member)
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Wyatt Earp
Director Lawrence Kasdan bites off a little more than he can chew in this overlong but still watchable western from 1994. Kasdan proved himself a fine director of drama in the 1980's with Body Heat, The Big Chill and The Accidental Tourist but I don't think directing large scale action is his thing (though I have not seen Silverado, so I may have to retract that statement in the future). Kevin Costner has the title role as an ambitious young man who wants to fight for his country and follows his father's advice to complete work at home before moving on to bigger and better things.
Many familiar faces pepper the cast with small roles. Betty Buckley, Isabella Rossellini, and yes, Martin Kove playing yet another bully who gets what's coming to him. I also enjoyed seeing Jobeth Williams and Adam Baldwin. Costner is basically a one-note actor for me. His read-off-the-page acting style can grate at times and this film came near the end of his hot streak just prior to his precipitous fall from Hollywood Grace (perhaps Waterworld sealed his fate?). Dennis Quaid does well as the tubercular Doc Holliday and Gene Hackman is convincing as the patriarch of the Earp family.
I'm going to watch the film again to more properly judge JN Howard's score. It certainly fills the gaps and supports the lovely cinematography throughout. It has one big centerpiece theme that I liked. The next viewing I'll pay more attention to the more subtle aspects of the score. I hope it convinces me to buy the soundtrack from LLL.
The film has a certain flatness when it comes to the action set pieces. Shootouts and gunplay are expected in this kind of film and there is certainly no shortage here, but they have little oomph to them. Even as the big confrontation between the lawmen and the Clantons builds to a bloody climax there's nothing we haven't seen before in better films.
Overall I'll give the film a 7/10 rating, as it is well made and has a satisfying enough ending. I would trim a good 20 minutes out of it to tighten it up a bit, though.
I saw it yesterday, unaware of the running time and it did drag on. There is a lot in the movie that I feel contributes little to the story nor character of Earp and I agree, half an hour could have easily been cut out to make it a better picture. Compared to Tombstone and Silverado, Wyatt Earp feels flat overall, so much so the formula of the western here becomes tiresome and predictable. As Earp goes from one place to the other, the same events occur and I'm not sure why this journey or this character is so compelling to spend 3 hours on.
What I did like about it is the Doc Holliday character and I didn't recognize Dennis Quaid! Excellent performance. The score by James Newton Howard and its main theme are great and there are moments that are genuinely beautifully scored BUT there are also the odd moments I felt the music did not work and felt over scored.
I'm giving it a 6/10, still worth checking out but not the best western I've seen.
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MikeP: Re: Oblivion - 5/10 - as mentioned above, the first hour was excellent, but at the halfway point once the "big reveal" happens, the remainder of the movie just felt ... ordinary. Cruise sure can sell onscreen... for me he continues to impress.
The irony is that I happen to feel just the opposite about Oblivion, that it actually gets better in its second half. Although I have the Blu-ray, I happened upon it just getting started on HD cable, and, as usually happens, couldn't pull myself away, and find myself becoming almost thrilled by it. I keep mentioning that I cry at the end, and I certainly did again today, and I've also said that it is sic-fi with a heart, and I fully believe that. Ironically, several hours later I came across the film nearing its end and re-watched the last 15 minutes again, and, like clockwork, the tears came when Cruise's character #52 finds the woman at the heart of the story. I'm very close to writing that I LOVE it, and I think that it's a triumph for writer/director Joseph Kosinski.
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Blue Jasmine
I just watched this and think that it is the worst Woody Allen film I have ever seen, and I've seen almost all of them. I simply hated it. And who in their right mind would think that it's a comedy? Perhaps … if you also think that "Schindler's List" and "Sophie's Choice" are comedies! I usually like Cate Blanchett, but she plays this dipsy character whose late husband had embezzled people's life savings, including those of her sister and brother-in-law, and she is now dependent upon the kindness of strangers and that sister is one of the few people who are still willing to go out of their way for her. I found myself screaming at the TV and there are characters I can't stand talking non-stop about things I have no desire to hear, most notably Blanchett's character, who is falling apart. This is such an unpleasant movie that I feel they should have paid US to see it! Simply horrible.
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The Great Gatsby (2013) - 9/10
I never had the pleasure of reading The Great Gatsby in school. Though I recall clearly certain classmates walking around with it, I never considered reading it. When I first saw the trailers for "The Great Gatsby" I was not particularly enamored by what I saw. The glitz and glamor at the heart of the story became the center of the advertising. For a time it was rumored that Jay Z would be doing the music, which meant I would never watch the film in theaters. What if it was just some big wasteful party film filled with hip hop?
Thankfully, though it has short snippets of extravagant party music, it does not get over-used and is always used tastefully. Many of the songs central to the film are much more elegant, along with the music by Craig Armstrong. Armstrong's score captures the outward appearance of royalty Gatsby portrays while also exploring the softer emotions hiding beneath.
Though I can't say how accurately the film portrayed the novel, I found Baz Lurhmann's portrayal to be enchanting. The true story is revealed in bits and pieces so that the unfamiliar viewer is pulled along wondering what little details will come out next. Leonardo DiCaprio's powerful performance only serves to sweeten the allure.
Perhaps the marketing department relied on enough people knowing the true story under the shiny trailers. However, the marketing that was meant to lure in those without a clue simply served to push me away. "The Great Gatsby" is a fine film that is especially important to watch given the similarities between the time portrayed and recent times. I highly recommend it.
The main plot of the book is captured and about the only real change is that Jordana and Nick don't have a relationship.
I liked this version and the Redford one as well but what I really enjoyed about Lurhmann's is THE SCALE of it all and the one thing that never really touched to me on the book but worked in SPADES in the film is the EPIC SCALE of Gatsby's desire to relieve the past.
He moves DIRECTLY across from Daisy and throws WILD parties to which all are invited and he does so again and again hoping on the off chance she herself might show up all because society and rules deem there no way for Gatsby and Daisy to meet up as she is a married woman.
JACK RYAN - SHADOW RECRUIT -- 5/10
An action movie this is not because one car chase and a fight isn't enough is it? Certainly not a suspense movie because other then a sneaking into a buliding and leaving in the nick of time and concluding with a ticking bomb aren't enough to make for a suspense film right?
Well, that is exactly how many "moments" the new Jack Ryan film has and they are all rather brief and really small in scale and this whole thing felt nothing like a movie and all like a TV Pilot and mind you, it is indeed well made and well acted but it is so BEYOND average that I wanted to rate it lower but I can't because nothing was AWFUL, it was just flat, boring, and tame.
Also, where the hell is the score everyone was RAVING about?! I like Doyle but nothing stood out and I was actually listening because of the praise it has gotten here at FSM.
47 RONIN -- 6/10
No where near as HORRIBLE as the critics have made it out to be and a the story was fine but the pacing was a little "off" if not slow. The second half of the movie however really picks up and the finale is well done. The violence is tame and the international cast certainly takes stage as does the wonderful score and the lush and beautiful costumes and sets and locations.
However it isn't nearly as epic as it wants to be and I'm not too sure if the film would or wouldn't have worked better without Keanu Reeves who while the "star" is really more of a secondary player.
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Posted: |
Jan 25, 2014 - 2:53 PM
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By: |
Ralph
(Member)
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Blue Jasmine
I just watched this and think that it is the worst Woody Allen film I have ever seen, and I've seen almost all of them. I simply hated it. And who in their right mind would think that it's a comedy? Perhaps … if you also think that "Schindler's List" and "Sophie's Choice" are comedies! I usually like Cate Blanchett, but she plays this dipsy character whose late husband had embezzled people's life savings, including those of her sister and brother-in-law, and she is now dependent upon the kindness of strangers and that sister is one of the few people who are still willing to go out of their way for her. I found myself screaming at the TV and there are characters I can't stand talking non-stop about things I have no desire to hear, most notably Blanchett's character, who is falling apart. This is such an unpleasant movie that I feel they should have paid US to see it! Simply horrible.
Many agree with you, but I’d like to cast the movie is a slightly different light. Here goes:
Cate is Ruth Madoff doing Mia DuBois. There’s never been anything near this kind of full fledged heavy duty crackup in any of the Woody’s movies and while fascinating and scary, it’s also foxy. He ricochets the perturbations in Williams’ illustrious play to aim a damning assessment, using Blanche and her instability as subtext to mirror the psychological war he and his former familial associations have been and apparently still are engaged in. That’s a loaded assertion but the interpersonal emotionalism well-nigh supports it. Didn’t easily spot this during the movie — nor was I looking for a link — but I became aware that something’s not jelling at face value because Cate eclipses mere tribute to Williams and the lovelies who’ve played Blanche, and Woody doesn’t have a deep history of making movies filled with purgatives. Lifting the Madoffs is great cover initially — providing filler for motivations, acknowledging the suffering of friends who were rooked — until the altered Williams slashings turn into a venting process, primarily tho not exclusively by Bobby Cannavale, doing an exasperating straight version of his exasperated cop in “Will & Grace.” Protective illusions are replaced by knifelike accusals; there’s little kindness, not even from strangers. I could charge myself with reading too much into Cate’s tour de force, or accept that Woody transformed involuntarily. But he does nothing unwittingly; he calculatedly tags Mamma Mia the whacko presaged in “Secret Ceremony.”
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The Social Network (2010) - 8/10
I finally got around to watching this one last night with my husband. We had both skipped it in theaters for various reasons when it came out and we were both surprised we waited this long to watch it. I was glad I got to enjoy it with subtitles though because they do talk pretty fast (so fast the subtitles might let you fall behind if you aren't careful).
I thought the acting was phenomenal and the score wasn't as bad as everyone made it sound. It certainly wasn't a big orchestral masterpiece but it was fitting and more enjoyable than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
EXACTLY!
The score perfectly fits the film!
If people dislike the score then fine and more power to them but I really wish more people on this form would at least give it the RESPECT it deserve. It has a central theme and is largely atmospheric and soundscape all while still maintaining a presence. For a film mostly about TALK it actually manages to hold it's own. The CD... that I'll admit doesn't really work on a stand alone listen but personally I found enjoyably as I'm a NIN fan.
THE KINGS OF SUMMER 8/10
Two friends and a third kid who just is there [you have to watch] decided to live together in the woods and strike out on their own. Weird, funny, and at times beautifully directed, this was a refreshing take on a film about teens and independence.
LOOPER 5/10
I'm going to hear the audio commentary on this film to make sure the wrtier/director knew what he was doing but honestly...the film is a mess.
Starts off strong about a looper who kills people for the mob and his victims are sent to him from 30 years in the future where making people dead is difficult. Loopers do this until they kill themselves and thus close the loop on being witnesses themselves and our lead Joe messes up when his older self gets the drop on him. He tries to fix this before he's killed by his people.
So far so good and then it shifts gears and we realize Old Joe's mission: In his time a man known as the Rainmaker is killing all loopers and killed his wife so he's going to kill young Rainmaker and prevent his wife from dying. Young Joe finds this kid at a farm house and decides to protect them and wait for Old Joe to come to him.
When the film reaches the farm house, it looses all of it's energy and shows us a kid straight out of AKIRA. Add to that some first draft problems that give our lead and the little boy WAY TOO MANY SIMILARITIES that it would appear the child and Joe were one in the same in an earlier draft of the script.
The action picks up the pace towards end in a grand violent fashion but it's too little to save the movie which is a shame. A frustrating piece of work to rank along side DISTRICT 9, SOURCE CODE, ELYSIUM and MOON in the Sci-Fi genre which start off strong and just go off the rails.
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THE RAID - REDEMPTION [Unrated] 9/10
Balls out blood, fist, and wall to wall action and damn good fun. Plot is light, action is plenty and well directed, choreographed, and a exhilarating.
Looking forward to the sequel!
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EAT PRAY LOVE
And, strangely enough, I didn't mind it. What's happening to me? 
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Posted: |
Jan 26, 2014 - 12:14 PM
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By: |
Michael24
(Member)
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Safe House (2012) - 4/5
Plotwise, it may be on the routine side. But it's the performances by Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds that make it a compelling watch. Particularly Reynolds, whom I think, quite frankly, steals the movie out from under Washington, giving a terrific serious, non-jokey performance as a hero-in-the-making. I found the personal journey his character goes through to be fascinating, watching him grow from a bored "office worker" to a more than capable field operative. Good supporting cast, although I wish most of them had a bit more to do, and despite the very title, the safe house setting is mostly abandoned after the first act. Which is a little strange. But otherwise, while it's nothing groundbreaking, it's a technically well-made and satisfying popcorn flick that features a few creative touches here and there, and is boosted by two solid performances.
My full review, for those interested.
http://michaelam1978.livejournal.com/2014/01/26/
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Footnote
Yesterday I watched the Israeli film Footnote, which was sometimes uncomfortably cerebral as well as confusing. Here is an interesting Netflix review of it:
Writer-director Joseph Cedar's last film -- Beaufort -- was set almost entirely inside a tank. Perhaps in response to those constraints, this film is filled with visual razzle dazzle. It may be set in the vicious world of academia, but Cedar has a lot of fun throwing up notes and lists. Actually, since blood is rarely shed in academia, the fights are more cutthroat and war never ends. The father and son at the heart of this film are certainly at each other's throats as only family members and scholars can be. The father is a rigorous old school scholar who labored for decades on his magnum opus, only to have a random discovery by a bitter rival undercut his life's work at the last moment. The son, it's quietly noted, became a scholar because he wanted to be like his dad. But the son is far more of a popularizer. This movie is light on its feet, wickedly funny at one moment and deadly serious at the next. Anyone with the faintest knowledge of academia -- or just office politics -- will instantly recognize the bitter festering jealousies that burst out of the blue among long-time colleagues. The added poignancy of seeing father and son wrestle with career jealousy just raises the stakes further. Both Scholomo Bar-Aba and Lior Ashkenazi are superb as father and son and they're surrounded by excellent actors up and down the line, especially Micah Lewensohn as their bete noir Grossman. The score by Amit Poznansky is especially deft at letting us enjoy the humor without ever forgetting the very real emotions at play. The comments on scholarship and the media are rich and fertile. But it's the ever-changing relationship between a father and son (especially when the father is getting old and the son is more and more in charge every day), the need to tend old wounds and not inflict them on the next generation that make Footnote genuinely moving.
I had gone to IMDb looking for other reviews that might explain something that had very much confused me about the film, and found the answer. It had seemed to me that the adult son had gotten a prestigious academic prize at the beginning, but then the movie goes back in time to show that the similarly named father had been given the prize by mistake. Indeed, at the end I thought there must have been a sci-fi, parallel universe element to the story and even after re-watching big chunks of it could not find the divergent point. But I finally discovered that the opening was not the awarding of the prize to the son but his induction into the academy, while the the actual awarding of the prize doesn't come until the very end of the film. For me, the film was sometimes interesting but mostly very frustrating because of the confusion I had from the beginning.
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Posted: |
Jan 30, 2014 - 11:51 AM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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Here's my January 2014 viewing:
Watched Justin Lin's Fast & Furious series (which I suspect I will never revisit), made my way through Ray Lawrence's filmography, watched the 2 extant films in Kieslowski's posthumous Heaven, Hell, Purgatory trilogy, the two Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movies, of which the first remains hilarious and the second is dullsville, the two Percy Jackson movies, of which both are rubbish, and made a Somali piratey double-header of A Hijacking and Captain Phillips, both of which were quite good. The To Do List was awful -- watched it mainly because the Plazas used to be my next-door neighbors. Started (re)watching Veronica Mars so I'll be up to speed when the movie comes out. What passed for Google-fu a decade ago is amusing. HTTYD is a little better than I remember, Sky High a little worse. Speed Racer remains one of my favorite films. I think that about covers it.
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I just posted the following to IMDb regarding Herblock: The Black & White:
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I simply loved this and would like to make comment on the following from another otherwise excellent reviewer:
"Herblock: The Black & The White may be a little too long for its own good. At ninety-five minutes, I am saying the exact opposite of what I usually say about documentaries and that this one would've worked better as a fifty-minute exercise. After a while, it feels we're running a track in circles and arriving at the same point even though we began on a different one. However, this is still a strong piece of documentary cinema that again profiles a person many of us may need to do more research on. Start searching."
I was probably lucky in that, because of timing, I watched about half of it one night and, a few days later, the other half, so I didn't have that problem and felt that it was ALL wonderful. And it has so much relevance to what's happening today in New Jersey! I kept thinking how Herb would have been thrilled to have been able to make his incisive comments on what's happening there as well as the recent quite chilling revelations. We need more Herb Blocks (and Paul Conrads!) today.
And Alan Mandell is simply wonderful in his depiction of Herbert Block. I just love this.
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As I wrote, I was startled by how much relevance the career of Herbert Block, political cartoonist, has to today's politics, and wish he could have sunk his teeth into the current embarrassing embroglio in New Jersey and New York!
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