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scartol
Reviews
The Sunset Limited (2011)
Great performances, unpersuasive thematic exploration
I was really looking forward to this, since I love Jones and Jackson and McCarthy. I enjoy Shakespeare and philosophy and movies like _My Dinner with Andre_ and _Mindwalk_.
Alas, this movie left me feeling unsatisfied and annoyed. I'll admit right away that I don't have any sympathy for the humdrum bleak existentialist reasoning expressed by White in this movie. If (as he says) the hope of human civilization was extinguished in the gas chambers of Dachau, then it was resurrected in the revolt of Treblinka. If the horrors of the human slave trade and the Middle Passage obliterates the nobility of our species, then Harriet Tubman reorients us to the possibility of ourselves and shows us the true face of prophecy.
Joseph Asagai answers White's pessimism in _A Raisin in the Sun_ by dismissing the notion that he and others like him are "realists". Trapped in a cycle of limited vision and despair, they refuse to see the good and progress of humanity as any kind of counterbalance to the evil, and yet they get to pretend that theirs is the one true honest understanding of who we are. Piffle! With blind Christian faith as the only response to White's solipsistic nihilism, we have a very articulate and entertaining straw man. Throughout the movie I kept imagining worthwhile responses to White's claims, and felt thoroughly discouraged by the inadequacy of Black's dialogue.
I'm glad I saw this movie, but I cannot go along with the glowing perfect-score reviews dished out by my esteemed colleagues on this forum.
RoboCop 2 (1990)
Worst sequel EVER
This is the worst sequel ever. The characters are cardboard, the plot is
ludicrous, and the brilliant mesh of social commentary with SF storytelling is all but gone. What was Frank Miller thinking? There really isn't much else to say about this insipid tumor of a movie, but apparently I have to write ten lines in order to have my review posted. So let me say that what some people refer to as the "heart" of the film (ie, Murphy's struggle to reconcile his cyborg nature) is pathetically weak at best. It's as if the filmmakers took all the most superficially successful bits of the first movie (Murphy's memories, the eyeball twitching in the shot-out socket) and screwed them up in an absurd attempt to stretch them out into a movie of their own.
And the less said about the mass murderer's brain used for RC2 and the drug- dealing little kid, the better.
Stare at the wall for two hours -- it's a much better use of your time.