Change Your Image
vladimir-137
Reviews
Isn't Life Wonderful! (1953)
Life with (an English) Father
For anyone who is wondering, this movie is an attractively photographed film in still-crisp colour ("by Technicolor") that can be summed up as England's answer to "Life with Father".
That is to say, stuffy-character actor Cecil Parker plays the lovably opinionated, semi-tyrannical head of a household. He has only one child, a son, but has also to deal with his extended family's black sheep Uncle Willie, played by Donald Wolfit (who steals the picture, such as it is).
The film (set in 1902) benefits from lavish production detail, period costumes and sets, but suffers from the "fourth wall" breaking narration of 10 year old Peter Asher (fashion model and actress Jane Asher's brother). He isn't especially engaging as a performer, sad to say.
Episodic and not very funny, but also short enough to be possibly worth a look on a rainy weekend at home.
Not I (2000)
Not "Not I". Not Beckett. Not good.
Let me say first that I agree with the commenter who found the "minimum" length restrictions - in commenting on a Beckett work - ironic here. I would have preferred the subject line of this comment to have stood as my entire comment.
There are several problems with this film, as with all of those in this series that I have seen. Firstly, and the main one, with all of these films, is very poor direction. Julianne Moore gives a ghastly "emotive" performance, entirely at odds with the work; as with much bad acting, the blame lies with the director who allowed it.
Second, the tricksy "cutting"; this is purely to show off and for effect; again, nothing could be less true to the work.
Third, what on earth was the idea of having Ms Moore walk on to the set at the start? Again, more "cleverness" for no purpose.
As Billie Whitelaw says in her memoirs (and who would dare contradict her!), if you scrap the Beckettian staging, you don't have Beckett.
Fourth, Julianne Moore's teeth are too perfect, too attractive for this work; they needed some making-up at least if she was to play this role. Seriously.
Finally, a general complaint that this work was filmed here at all. The 1970's version elicited from Beckett one of the (apparently) very few comments he ever made on a performance of his work. It was only a word or two, which I won't dare to quote from memory (my copy of Miss Whitelaw's memoirs is not at hand); but the substance of it was evidently (in my interpretation and memory) that he was astonished by how perfectly his vision for this work was realised.
At the risk of repeating myself, why then ever film it again?
Once again I regret that we're only allowed to go as low as "1 out of 10".
Zero out of ten; zero out of a hundred.
Orchestra! (1991)
Simply the best
This series gets my vote as one of the two or three greatest televisions series ever made.
Dudley Moore and Sir Georg (pronounced "George") Solti, week by week take us through the orchestra, section by section.
There is also an episode dealing with the piano as an orchestral instrument, featuring Dudley and Georg at the keyboard together in a dazzling display of musicianship.
In another episode Dudley takes up the baton to explore the role of the conductor under the hawk-eye of the professional, Sir Georg.
Highly entertaining throughout and informative: this series shows what television can do at its best.
Sunshine (2007)
Hard-to-follow rip-off of classic sf movies
Spoilers spoilers spoilers ahead
I went to see this movie because I'd heard it was 'in the tradition of 2001' and that Rose Byrne played the captain of the ship. Wrong on both points.
Faults? Where to start! The actors don't look like astronauts, for one thing. As others here have said, they don't talk like astronauts either. I can't imagine Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick hunched over a typewriter writing as dialogue for *either* Frank Poole or Dave Bowman: 'I f***ed up! I f***ed up!!' etc.
Also, what are we supposed to think: that the navigation officer got out his slide rule and a seven-figure book of logarithms and calculated the new orbit on a really big piece of butcher paper? When they've got a quasi-sentient computer on board? That does not compute, and as soon as a movie departs from the sort of 'science fiction logic' that tells us the computer would have calculated the entire rendezvous orbit, orbital insertions, burns etc, and, yes, adjusted the necessary filter angles etc, even a mainstream (ie non-sf-hardcore) audience knows it's being sold a pup.
My heart sank when I saw the meal-eating scene: ie such a blatant ripoff of ALIEN. When it got to 'we're outside and haven't got enough spacesuits etc, so let's fire the explosive bolts and get in that way' I was tempted to say out loud to the person I was seeing the movie with (a fellow 2001 nut): 'we've seen this before'. (I never talk in the movies, and neither does he; and nor should you.) What else? Oh yeah, they had one spacesuit prior to their 'let's all hold our breaths' scene, so what was to stop one of them from going across, space-suited, and bringing back extra suits? Or did I blink and miss something here?
Finally, where was the Icarus One? In space? I'm not 'calling' a fault here, I'd just like to know. Watching the movie I thought it had crash landed on Mercury; in addition to all the other faults I simply found it a hard movie to follow.
Rose was pretty, though, I'll give it that.
In the Wake of the Bounty (1933)
even giants start small
This film combines documentary, travelogue-style footage with dramatic 'reconstructions' of the mutiny on the Bounty.
Much of it is silent, ie with music only, as I recall. It's very much a primitive sound-movie, in which the director is still working with silent movie techniques, although not in any sophisticated way.
The acting in the dramatic scenes is uniformly abysmal; very 'stagey' acting even by the more experienced performers. The only interest is in seeing Errol Flynn in his first movie role. He's dreadful: very wooden delivery; as stiff as a parody of amateur theatricals, with no star presence whatsoever.
But I find it of interest for this very reason. It shows that even a superstar like Errol Flynn didn't hatch from the egg fully formed, and that however bad you are to start with, there's still hope ...
Stiff (2004)
bor-ring
Wenham is excruciating: the man can't act, he can only inflect his voice affectedly. Steve Bracks gave a better performance; at least he didn't say anything, which was an improvement on Wenham.
The script is excruciating: talk, talk, talk, and all the 'jokes' unfunny.
The mystery is about up to the standard of a sub-par episode of Scooby Doo; why didn't someone call the cops?, who would have solved the crime in less time than this telemovie takes.
Typical of Australian television that we have to have a fake show of multiculturalism from an entirely Anglo project, in which even the Turkish love-interest girl is played by an Anglo actress. (Couldn't have had Wenham falling for a *real* Turkish girl, of course!)
This crock belonged on the ABC (government television). Nuff said.
Airport (1970)
old-fashioned entertainment
Airport (1970) is an unexpectedly entertaining movie, which benefits from a cast of veteran pros (Dean Martin gives perhaps the weakest performance, although even he has his good moments) and a remarkably well-constructed story. Forget all the send-ups and sequels and your own preconceptions: just watch it and enjoy.
The Green Mile (1999)
one very long mile
POSSIBLE SPOILERS
The Green Mile happens to be the only movie I have ever walked out on in protest. I walked out after what seemed to be ten -- or perhaps fifteen -- minutes of watching Darabont's loving recreation of a botched execution. Now THAT'S entertainment, Frank!
Last Sunday, years later, I got to tune in and pick up where I'd left off, and having seen the whole movie, I think that mid-movie execution scene to be even more misconceived, in what is an otherwise entertaining movie.
SPOILERS APPROACHING
There is too much implausibility here though, even for a fantasy flick: the ease with which they smuggle Coffey out, for one thing, the general saintliness of one and all, for another, the fact that they can show Coffey a 'flickershow' inside the prison, without notice or preparation, as soon as he asks to see one, and so on and on.
The end is worth waiting for, but the final line is a little ironic after 3 hours plus: "the green mile can be awfully long". Indeed.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
swashbuckling space opera
Wrath of Khan is almost a genre to itself. Certainly space opera has never been so well done in the movies. Never. Gene Roddenberry set out in the original Star Trek to do something along the lines of C S Forester's Capt. Hornblower -- in space! Here, at last, that original idea was realised: grand battles between starships in far-off space, with a gloriously scene-chewing villain and heroes to match. Let them eat static!
Big Trouble (2002)
ghastly homage to strangelove
Where to begin? *POSSIBLE SPOILERS FORTHCOMING* How about the stupid, irritating and utterly unfunny noise that the bomb makes whenever jason lee picks up the case or puts it down? Maybe it made Sonnenfeld's sides split; but it made me feel as if some idiot was slapping me on the back of the head every 3 minutes. How about the utterly miscast Mr Tucci? He looks every inch an LA liberal, but is supposed to be someone who voted for Pat Buchanan. How about any movie, anywhere, ever, that thinks 'Martha Stewart' jokes are funny? What about that revolting toad puppet? And what about ... but why go on? The cinema chain that I saw this at wasn't even bothering to include it on their daily advertised schedule. I came in a few minutes late and thought I was the only person in the cinema; there was one other -- so (in total) two people in Melbourne saw this movie that day, here on its first release. People know what to stay away from, you can give them that.
Redeeming features are very few. Dennis Farina has some good scenes, with the cigar-smokers; with the would-be muggers. And there's the always-wonderful Janeane Garofalo, of course.
One or two good things don't make a movie, though.
Barry Sonnenfeld's favourite movie is Dr Strangelove (my source is the new york times) and this was an obvious attempt to pay homage to it. Ugh! What an unworthy imitation!
Mr. Symbol Man (1974)
life and work of a maverick
This is a short, 47 minute, Australian-Canadian documentary about the late Charles Bliss. Trained as a chemical engineer, Bliss survived Buchenwald and lived in China for six years before emigrating to Australia, where he developed a universal symbolic language, Blissymbolics. Bliss recounts his life and explains some of his work, and this documentary tells the story of how Canadian health workers in the early 1970s taught his symbols to children with cerebral palsy, enabling them to communicate their thoughts and feelings.