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Reviews
2002 World Series (2002)
One of the greatest World Series
You'd never know it by this DVD, but this is one of the great World Series contests in baseball history. To think that a pitching-poor underdog that NO pre-season forecasters had expected to even make the playoffs were facing the juiced-up monster-masher of his era, you'd think it was over before it began.
This is an average DVD compilation which glosses over the real drama like pablum in every instance. There is a distinct bias toward making everything about Bonds and Dusty Baker. The Fox announcers paid much less attention to the Angels - until they won Game Six. When Barry Bonds hits a homerun in his first World Series at-bat, the announcers act like we have just witnessed the risen Christ. When Angel Troy Glaus accomplishes the same feat - they are still gushing about Barry. Again, you'd have to get the game broadcasts to see this, the hindsight herein is laughable.
Spoiler: When Dusty Baker hands Russ Ortiz the Game Ball as he leaves the mound, the mojo is completely reversed and the Angels mount the greatest comeback in an elimination game in sports history. You cannot analyze that with sabermetrics! --Reverend Halofan.
Gosford Park (2001)
Zzzzz
Cardboard characters. CHECK! English mansion. CHECK! Upper classes. CHECK! Servant classes. CHECK! (and like David Duke says about the segregated South THEY ARE HAPPY THAT WAY)... And the classes are separated, Upstairs/ Downstairsstyle. CHECK! Dull pace. CHECK! Contrived dialog masquerading as banter. CHECK! Impassioned servants speaking wise philosophical analysis bordering on proverbs. CHECK! Ugly people having sex. CHECK! A murder in oder to make people pay attention to otherwise useless drivel. CHECK! Maybe this is not the worst film of all time, but with Robert Altman's imprimatur, it is the most overrated film in my memory. Watch this after you watch McCabe and Mrs. Miller and you will get the strange feeling that Robert Altman went soft on everyone.
Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000)
As good or better than LOLA
This is a rich, layered film with characters behaving in believable, realistic manners. There are no holes I could find anywhere in the film, and no clichés either. A fresh script that revisits the CUCKOOS NEST asylum setting with a woman as the anti-McMurphy - she is employed there but thinks it may be time to leave.
The man she encounters in a harrowing little moment underneath a semitruck is the trigger that allows her to confront the life she has in comparison to the one she may want. But the only way she can know for sure is to meet up with this stranger once again.
Coincidence as a theme plays heavily in this director's oeuvre (Lola was based entirely on the premise of what is needed for no coincidences to have occurred). But the plot is much deeper after initial relationships are laid out.
Fat Albert (2004)
Family Postmodern Gehtto Sci Fi at its best
For a movie aimed at kids, this is pretty fantastic. I don't have kids, but I went to see this out of nostalgia for the teevee cartoon I loved.
The film basically makes surrealism literal - it answers long-ignored questions about why cartoon characters cannot exist in our world when they are often facing the same situations as us. So many parameters of the cartoon/reality continuum are challenged and the film arrives at perfectly comprehensible solutions.
If it were a science fiction film, every geek would be crawling through broken glass to see it, but the anti-reality set will poo-poo this flick because of its childish precepts and ghetto roots, but it is closer to Salvador Dali than anything else that tried to tackle the surreality of cartoons confronting the reality of our world.
And the actress who plays Lori was fine.
Another State of Mind (1984)
Sloppy Nostalgia
Some of the concert scenes took me back to my late-70s/early 80s SoCal childhood in an intense way. There is way too little concert footage though, and way too much talking heads (not the band, the blabbermouths). With 22 years hindsight it sounds like so much spoiled suburban brats and less like rebels. If I hear the phrase "just getting out aggression" one more time as an excuse for thuggy slamdancing i would have stopped the movie right there. Kids practicing there stagediving in their swimming pool - hmm, a swimming pool, eh?
One problem is that the punk look adopted by these kids is ubiquitous throughout mainstream media and suburban life nowadays - you get no sense of how radical a kid shaving his head was back then.
About ten percent of this film is brilliant, especially watching the creative process of Social Distortion (primarily Mike Ness) slowly compose the song ANOTHER STATE OF MIND (one of the band's best early classics). But these scenes are almost lost in a sea of the pompous Sean Stern pontificating (although he does get blamed for being an egomaniac by mutinous crew members). The film is downright boring whenever Sean has to talk on and on about punks being apart from society. ZZZzzz. Stern seems to have calculated that his band needs a great headliner for the ill-fated tour ahead - sort of like a lousy Presidential candidate, Stern finds his charismatic VP in Social D and uses them to further the name of his lousy Yoth Brigade.
There was no movie I was more prepared to love than this and I am thoroughly disappointed with the results. One day the Decline of Western Civilization (the original) will be released and trip like this flick will pale in comparison to that masterpiece.
One last thought - comparing the cross-country bus commune of ASM to Tom Wolfe's Hippie Opus ELECTRIC KOOLAID ACID TEST might tell you all you need to know about the very early Southern California punkers.
Heaven (2002)
Fabulous
From the director of RUN LOLA RUN, this film's protagonist wants desperately to blink and re-do what she did, but cannot. Fortunatley, the compelling motivation for her crime enraptures a young cop and off they go in an intelligent evasion of the law, and a vigilante style revenge, which she does feel quite guilty for, and yet they run.
Beyond the plot is a great style of moody precision, and plenty of air to breathe as you sit in the room alone with these two. The pace shifts from intense thriller to ephemeral fleeting love, but keeps everything believable. While the young cop plans things in a Tarantino-like manner, the protagonist plays along, not believing what she has done and not believing her good fortune. Her disbelief in love is unpeeled slowly, brilliantly, in a great film.
Videodrome (1983)
Sums up the mindset but misses the true cause
Let's recall the flood of hype surrounding the release of this abominable turkey. Every character in the film is suffering the effects of classic drug addiction but is in denial about - all with a lingering suspicion that television and video are causing their wretched slip into the abyss. If anything sums up the culture's refusal to examine its own excess as a cause of its misery, VIDEODROME is the illustration of what everyone was going through back then.
If you were too young to remember, this film is an excellent document of what people were really wearing doing and saying back in 1983, except that everything they freak out about over VIDEODROME wouud have been due to the partying with narcotics that was rampant. But Anthropology is not art.
But I gave it two stars for Deborah Harry, too bad she didn't put in cameos every year or so in mid-sized indie films.
The Day of the Locust (1975)
Wistful and then Holy sheez-it there is a riot going on!
A period piece that navel-gazing Hollywood needed to make to instill a sense of history into what it does, the illustrations of complex ideas that come across in a novel are often flat and forced together in this wandering epic. But style emerges victorious, as the sense of exact replication of mid-30s Los Angeles overwhelms one (especially if you have spent time in Southern California's older neighborhoods, such as Los Feliz). I dare say that Billy Barty is at his thespian finest and almost steals the show, but Karen Black never had greater breadth of making a shallow callow character as sympathetic. And this might be the only film that make you feel pity on a character enacted by Donald Sutherland. Burgess Meredith is better here than in his ROCKY roles, and halfway thru the film I blurted out - about the lead actor - it is the dude from GHOSTBUSTERS who had the beard.
And the final scene is terrifying after a lazy walk thru two hours of yesteryear dawdling.
Big Fish (2003)
An inspiring and profound optimism
In a literal culture, metaphor withers. Once in a while it bubbles up to the surface and gives us hope that something can exist free from the stifling demands of logic-bound slave of the tangible and known. A fabulous example of this occurring is Tim Burton's BIG FISH, a simple tale of one man learning that his father's being prone to exaggeration was a way the man honored ordinary greatness. The stark contrast between the hopeful fantasy life of the father and the dull real world of the son are a perfect illustration of the world where people accept the mundane without challenging it, while dismissing the ordinary as boring without ever appreciating it. The film inspires one to follow their own path with an optimism that appears earnest and simple, but is actually profound in its bottomless well of imagination.
The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)
So bad it is good
It is pretty easy to obtain if you really want it and search around the internet for 25 seconds. You should really be more than a casual fan to have the patience required to make it through the Wookie family having an argument about who will take out the trash. The opening credits are perhaps the best way to describe it: they start out with the litany of Star wars characters -okay so far so good- but then reel off a list of Z-List 70s television personalities that are surpassed in their inane ubiquity only by the randomness of their assembling in association with THE FRANCHISE. And there is absolutely NO payoff for your patience of sitting through skits and sketches that try the patience and insult any idea Lucas ever had - it is a dull beginning, middle and end. Still, it is a fabulous study in how network executives have the ability to screw up even the greatest creative content delivered to them on a silver platter.