lorne-2

It's not quite fair to say this short film is "inspired by" Jeunet & Caro's 1991 classic "Delicatessen". There's more aspiration than inspiration here.

The filmmaker clearly aspires to create a crumbling, past/future, post apocalyptic dystopia very much in the style of "Deli". Unfortunately, the audience is given so little information about what we're seeing that the only thing we know for certain is we're seeing something that's supposed to be a lot like "Delicatessen".

Having said that, the film is definitely very successful in re-creating the gritty look and atmosphere of the earlier film. As a calling card for someone showing off their film-making chops, "Found Objects" is a huge success.

And maybe that's all it was ever intended to be. If you hang in till the end waiting for some revelation that will snap everything into place, it ain't gonna happen. There's apparently an escape at the end, something about "freedom", I guess. But the final shot is so at odds with everything else we've seen, and spliced in so abruptly, that it seems like found footage. I have to think they had something else in mind, but couldn't afford to shoot it. So instead they filmed an old man riding a bike off a cliff into a lake.

So wish Mr. Birnbaum well as he shops this around the industry. This is a nicely produced little showcase, but there's not much else to take away from it.

As a huge Futurama fan I have been looking forward to this release for years. So it's with some sadness that I have to admit "Bender's Big Score" just isn't very good.

It starts out well enough with a fan-pleasing broadside at Fox for having canceled the show prematurely, but the story is soon hijacked by three unpleasant and unimpressive villains who use spam to take over Bender, Planet Express and the Earth. It's a very frustrating and unentertaining storyline that just won't go away. Then they discover a binary code on Fry's ass that makes God send a glowing ball that lets Bender travel back in time to steal things. Gee, there's some great speculative fiction: Deus Ex Machina literally pulled off a character's ass. Also Leela falls in love with a bald dude from the head museum which sends a jealous Fry back to the past where he learns the true meaning of love from a lonely narwhale. I am not making this up.

Oh. And there are songs. Awful, indifferent songs that seem to have been crammed in as an afterthought.

It's all a huge mess and not particularly funny. There's little of the cleverness and snarky science that we all loved so much. This is not the Futurama of "Roswell that Ends Well". It's more reminiscent of the weaker episodes in the final season, in particular the maudlin "Jurassic Bark".

I know a lot of fans will be rallying behind this to support the franchise, but there's no denying that this is a huge letdown. I still love the show and want more of it, so I'm hoping next year's DVD releases will show a lot of improvement improvement.

Oh my god! I remember this show! But just barely. Woody Allen was in it? Who knew? I was 8. I don't really remember him. I remember Joanne Worley because I'd seen her on "Laugh-In", and I remember Jonathan Winters, but Woody? It's hard to really judge the quality from my smattering of memory. It was supposed to be educational, but in a very sloppy way. They'd pose a question like "How do they make cartoons?" and then they would have a bunch of people giving "wrong" answers before showing you how it was actually done. I guess this is the reason I learned early on that pencil leads aren't really lead (not that the knowledge was particularly valuable). I guess it must have been entertaining enough, but I would have to question the educational value of their methodology. In the show on cartoons, one of the "wrong" answers was that cartoons were filmed using "people in costumes". I think this misinformation may actually have been spoken by Allen himself. I remember thinking at the time that this was quite unlikely, but I gave it an undue amount of credence because the source was a seemingly rational adult on TV. So to this day I believe cartoons are films of people running around in costumes. Thanks, Woody.

Curious little thriller with an interesting cast. Never quite as clever or deep as it wants to be. The late-60s op-art backdrop and nihilistic attitude is potentially interesting, but it's horribly undercut by the overly familiar (and hopelessly square) Universal Studio production values. The only spookiness in the movie is delivered by Simone Signoret, who floats effortlessly above the thing and projects an aura of dangerous mystery that produces the only suspense. Jimmy Caan is all right, in a pre-Godfather sort of way. It doesn't help that his character is poorly written and ultimately just makes no damn sense. Katharine Ross is breathtakingly lovely, which just makes the actions of Caan's character all the more illogical.

This is one of those movies I keep coming back to, hoping I've been too hard on it. I'm always disappointed. I like the idea of this movie and some of the performances are fantastic, notably John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Treat Williams (watch that bipolar psycho trick when he wipes the frown off his face). But overall it's a mess. There are too many subplots that don't pay off (the longer DVD version helps a little) and too many scenes bustling with performers mugging desperately for "big comedy". The biggest problem may have been the timing of the film's production. The 1940s sensibilities clash with the '70s irreverence (it compares quite unfavorably with Bob Clark's "A Christmas Story", which was set in the same era). The (ill-advised)effort to make this a WWII Animal House is further impeded by weak performances by Bobby deCicco and Tim Matheson as the "wacky" free spirits.

Not only is this a great Canadian movie and a touchstone of '70s culture (stubby beer bottles!), it's one of the best movies made anywhere about the working poor. The low production values and laidback acting work to good effect. It spawned plenty of awful imitations, but few were as rawly heartfelt and honest. Essential viewing for Canadians

Offers a rare look at Stanley Kubrick at work, for which the world owes Vivian Kubrick a debt. Probably only his daughter could have that kind of access, though true to form, Kubrick Sr. is the only principal who doesn't submit to a sit-down interview. We do get to see him at work, giving notes to Jack Nicholson, sniping at Shelley Duvall, telling Danny Lloyd to look scared.

Unfortunately, we don't get much more than that. This lacks the insight of Eleanor Coppola's "Hearts of Darkness", which was a full-scale memoir about the making of an important film. Ultimately this is just a home movie that happens to be on a Kubrick set. The only real revelation about the making of the film is going backstage at the hedge maze set. But the main reason to watch it is Nicholson, who never met a camera he couldn't charm.

I first came across Tom Green on college radio in Ottawa, when he had a Friday midnight show called midnight caller. He'd call up donut shop workers to ask them strange questions, or make fun of the giggling teenagers who dared each other to phone in. When he moved his act to local community access TV, I figured he'd hit the end of his rope soon... But I guess I'm wrong about a lot of things. His early cable show was a lot like his current MTV show with taped public weird-out segments, but it was an hour long and actually attempted to be a talk show, with real guests and a guest band in-studio each week. The oddest talk show moment came the week his guest was the editor of Canada's libelously satiric magazine "Frank", and the band was the True Grit Band, a garage band composed entirely of Liberal government Members of Parliament (including Julian Reed). The editor looked genuinely alarmed to be wedged between Green and all those MP's. Green was wise to downplay the talk show angle. Nobody wants to be interviewed by someone who's just smeared blood on his head.

The idea of people living in a spaceship for generations until they forget they're on a spaceship is not a bad concept. The idea of having them divided up into completely separate domes with our heroes traveling from one to the other made good sense for episodic TV. But doing most of the special effects with chromakey (an early blue-screen technology that wasn't even ready for TV weathermen in 1973) was a disastrously bad idea. Even stupid children who loved Godzilla movies in 1973 knew this looked cheap. Still, Canadians of a certain age remember it with enthusiasm, if not fondness. Why doesn't someone do a big budget remake of this instead of Lost in Space?

Around the 4th or 5th time that Frank "Pancho" Sampedro looks knowingly into the camera and asks how they can possibly capture "20 years of craziness in a few little questions," you get this urge to slap his hippy ass back to Mexico or wherever he came from with that bad moustache and nickname. Aside from these moments of Spinal Tap verite, you get Jim Jarmusch's idea of a rock and roll movie: long dull interviews and long dull performances. I like Neil Young and his music. I like Jim Jarmusch and his films. But unless you relish the idea of watching 3 middle-aged men standing in a circle hitting their whammie bars for 5 long minutes, stay home, put on "Rust Never Sleeps" & "Stranger Than Paradise", and have some of what Pancho's having.

What really sets this movie apart from other bad films is the makers' utter lack of embarrassment at the disastrous technical execution of the film. It isn't just that the monster is an old carpet, the exterior of the spaceship appears to be a garage door, and the editing is so incongruous it seems almost abstract. These shameless idiots actually lost or destroyed or never made a soundtrack, so they substituted bad narration (complete with weird pseudo-psychological non-sequitor explanations of characters' motivations), random dubbing of snatches of dialogue ("My god! What is it?"), even more random music (startlingly awful music) and under-mixed sound effects. You must see it. It's so bad it commands your attention, but the pacing is so slow it can only really be watched in fast forward.