stuit

I had high hopes for this series after the first episode, which set the story up in a way that was an interesting contrast to the film. Alas the second episode of the party at the estate was an hour-long indulgent attempt at highbrow, witty repartee that had nothing almost nothing to do with the central plot. That second episode stands as one of the most unpleasant TV episodes I've ever watched. By the end, I hated all of the characters, and was just worn out from the writer's attitude to be able to continue.

I might go back to this in a while to see if it gets better. But after watching those two episodes, I quickly went back and watched the film again, so I could experience great storytelling over great indulgence.

I paid $10 usd to see this movie at a matinee. The eye candy made the price worth it. That said, eye candy is almost all this experience offers. Most everyone involved in this film seemed like they were sleepwalking when the action stopped. It doesn't matter - everything in this picture is done for style points. There's barely any story here at all, and what story exists is so thin that it could be told in about 2 minutes of this 169 minute film. The remaining attempt to tell a story is so full of holes supported by bad acting and bloated style that it would have been a much better film just to leave it all out and just show a montage of fight sequences.

The Marquis character never shows the ability to do anything except sneer in an outrageous French accent and surround himself with dumb lieutenants. The Bowery King and the Harbinger characters are trotted out at the beginning and the end of the story just to to provide some atmosphere.

Rina Sawayama's acting ability is confined to contorting her face in into pithy expressions in response to her character's father's philosophical meanderings.

Even though small arms fire fills the air and bodies pile up on the road, cars continue to drive around the Champs-Élysées as if nothing is happening.

The same thing happens during the disco scene, where perfect 20-something bodies continue to obliviously dance away while axe killings splatter blood all around them.

The DJ drops the needle on a record to start a song (bad sign for a DJ), while the old reel-to-real tape keeps spinning...just because they look better spinning I guess.

This isn't really a movie; it's more like a moving painting. I'm grateful for the resolution at the end of the film, because I feel sorry that the actors and the characters they play have to keep living out this drivel.

This could have been a classic film but for one fatal flaw: casting Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was born in Indiana, and lived in Michigan, and was a pure Midwesterner of his day. Pacino came off like a trained method actor from Brooklyn who studied Hoffa's mannerisms, but could never capture the spirit of the man. DiNiro and Pesce stepped out of their traditional personas and inhabited the core of who they were portraying. Pacino's performance was interchangeable with every other real-life personality he's played in the last 15 years. It felt like Scorsese cast Pacino just because he had never worked with him and wanted to check that box on his career list.

Given the talent brought together by the filmmakers, this is among the worst movies I've ever seen. Both of the mystery plot lines are resolvable within seconds. Characters inexplicably come and go with no contribution to the story, a sure sign that all of the actors involved did their takes in a few hours, and were there for a quick payout. This film was shot in Georgia and Italy, and it shows: the sets don't even remotely look like anywhere in Texas. The people of Texas are so stereotyped that the entire population of the state should sue for defamation.

This film isn't even good to watch for amusement as a bad film. Avoid this stinker at all costs.

The first hour of this series showed so much promise. The acting is incredible and the production is excellent. Alas, the story in this serious just gets more and more absurd as it progresses. The main character openly congregates with her imprisoned abductor and abuser while police co-workers and family merely frown at it. Violent mobs materialize out of nowhere whenever it serves the storyline. The only stable, competent, and uncorrupt police officers are pushed to the fringes or killed off.

...and in the last hour all of the storylines are wrapped up using details that were never hinted at earlier in the story. The whole thing winds down into a pulp detective novel.

The makers of this movie had a specific story they wanted to tell, and they definitely made a movie that told that story. Unfortunately, they took advantage of the people the chose to profile in the film to tell that story, and ignored anything that would have distracted from it.

Anderson, Indiana has a rich history in professional auto racing, which still happens there to this day. Alas, sharing that fact would have gotten in the way of the slanted story the directors wanted to tell.

This could have been a great series - the photography is excellent, the interviews with drivers and crews are fun and informative, and the exploration of the differing technologies within the competing cars is fascinating. Unfortunately, the series was ruined by moronic, reality-TV style narration and editing. The insincere, melodramatic tones of the amateur narrators that are piped through "small radio-speaker" sound filters made me cringe every time I heard them. The choppy editing speeds up and slows down cars to try to create more drama, and draws attention to itself and away from the race. This series is a huge disappointment.

I was really disappointed in this film. It plays more like a historical TV-drama that you might see on PBS in the United States. It's great that the film makers worked to be historically accurate, but that's not enough for the cost of a movie theater ticket. The dialog was stiff, the sound and lighting were cheap, and many of the scenes felt like they were being rushed through.

I was also disappointed that Redford chose to use so many classically trained British/Irish actors in an American historical drama. James McAvoy always looked confused and without commitment, and never really came across as someone who had been a soldier critically wounded for the Union side. His accent in the film was more like a modern US English style speaker, rather than a Northerner from the mid-1800s. Couldn't Redford have found some American actors for these roles...or at least someone with a stronger commitment to the history of the time?

Why bother spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars making a movie, if you're not going to tell a story that hasn't been told before? The story in this film has been told thousands of times before, and it's been told thousands of times better.

Even with all of the opportunities for doing something different that were presented by the technology and the subject matter, we still get a movie where the helpless natives are saved by the "chosen one" in the form of a white, American Marine.

If you're looking for eye candy, this film will give you all you could ever want. If you're looking for a great story for the 21st century, look elsewhere.

Every character in this film defines much of their personal worth around a corporate job or a superficial relationship, and when they lose the job or the romance, they act aggrieved and devastated. In real life there are people like this, but there are also people that have established enough self-esteem that they can handle change without being a victim of it. If just one of the later type of person had showed up in this film, it would have been a much more meaningful story.

At the end of the film, the screenwriters have a couple characters attempt to share that their families are what's most important, but it comes across as an escape hatch in a film that established its cynicism in the first 10 minutes.

My wife and I walked out of this movie 45 minutes before it was over, along with a lot of other people in the theater. This could have been a wonderful film: the characters are delightful and rich, and the story is very creative, and very funny. Unfortunately, all of this got covered up by a director who threw too many gimmicky ideas at the film: shooting the film in grainy, black and white super-8, blurring the borders of the screen, crass sight gags, and layers of sampled sound effects played at a volume that sometimes bordered on the painful.

This film could be really enjoyable if it was re-edited to get rid of all the visual and audio doodads, so that the story could shine through.

This movie is a little over two hours, but I can be summed up in three sentences:

"This movie is a horrible."

"How do you know this?"

"I can feel it..."

Yes, indeed, the Matrix Reloaded has a lot of fun eye-candy. The special effects are worth the price of admission alone. Unfortunately, all the excitement is layered over great heaping piles of stereotypes over what the "future" will be like.

Like a large number of other science fiction and fantasy movies, such as Strange Days, The Crow movies, and many others, the Matrix Reloaded shows us a future that takes place in a sweaty, dense urban cavern, where nearly everyone is perfect looking, between the ages of 20 and 35, 90% of whom have their heads shaved or have long dreadlocks, and break into ecstatic, sex-fueled dancing whenever music starts playing. When some insightful, philosophical-sounding dialogue is needed, and older person is trotted out to recite it.

There's also a stale love-triangle plot involving the fearless prophet Morpheus, who's partner left him for an incompetent, pointy-headed bureaucrat who somehow became leader of the "defense" of Zion, but who does little else in the movie except whine.

The first Matrix film was about waking up to things you didn't know. This film is so full of itself, and so completely immersed in the past, that there can't possibly be anything new to wake up to.

This film could pass as a made-for-network-TV biopic of Frida Kahlo. Underneath all the pretty imagery, there's very little there. It looks nice - the film displays some well done imagery, just like Julie Tamor's other film, "Titus". Unfortunately, the imagery doesn't support any meaningful expression. The characters in this story are paper thin. The film provides no insight into their politics, relationships, or why they "must" paint.

When Rivera has his famous confrontation with Nelson Rockefeller, he declares that he "must stand by his principles." Up to that point, the film has never introduced us to any of Rivera's principles, or whether he had any principles at all.

There is a lot of reference to Frida Kahlo's pain after the trolley accident, but no insight into how this may have influenced her life and art. In fact Selma Hayek rarely shows Kahlo as being in pain at all, unless it's convenient to the story line.

This movie felt like the film makers expected us to be impressed by all of the already well-known details of Frida Kahlo's life: her accident, her relationship with Rivera, her art, her various affairs with Leon Trotsky, and others. So what? Without any insight into why these events are important, there is little to this film other than gossip.

I really appreciated the things this movie sought to express, but I thought it completely missed the mark in the manner it chose to communicate. A great poet, musician, or artist can express in a moment what this film took two hours of cognitive gymnastics to accomplish. Waking Life gives us a look at enlightenment only through the eyes of the western intellectual establishment: numbing amounts of talking, thinking, and effort, when silence and meditation are the spaces in which real learning can happen.