rimsey-2

I saw the trailer for this film while i was at the movies with a group of friends recently and the violence in that deterred everyone else in the group from going to see it. However i've always been a bit of a Coen brothers fan and i'd read the great reviews this movie has garnered and i was determined to overcome my general squeamishness in the face of unrelenting violence so i went to see it on my own. As it turned out the cinema was full of people most of whom i guess had read the same reviews as me. Or perhaps they'd decided to escape the unrelenting Adelaide heat by spending a few hours in the tranquility of an air-conditioned cinema. I have to say at the end that I think there was a general air of disappointment from everyone in the movie theatre. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what Tommy Lee Jones role IS in this movie. He could have been left out altogether and it would make no difference at all to the film. The ending where he describes his dream sequence is a terrible letdown. How many people enjoy listening to someone describe their dreams?Its about as interesting cinematically as it is in real life. When he finished I think everyone was hoping that this wasn't going to be the end of the movie...and then the credits began to roll. The movie does contain some wonderful quirky dialogue and some great acting from Javier Bardem. There are suspenseful moments while Josh Brolin in on the run and this is no formula driven plot where you can tell what is going to happen from one moment to the next. What it lacks is a coherent narrative and a sense of conclusion. Or is there a "No country for old men 2" in the offing?

The most amusing review of this movie i saw for Sin City described it as a masterpiece but warned viewers of excessive nudity. I think the reviewer was being serious though i suspect he must have been about 15 years old and i think that's probably the demographic that this movie is aimed at. Looking at the breakdown of voters on IMDb, the highest rating came from males under 18, the lowest from females over 45. There's no doubt that the visual style of the movie is brilliantly done. I just have a bit of a problem with Bruce Willis saving an 11 year old girl's virginity from a paedophile only to have him come back and finding her after 8 years during which she's been writing to him because she loves him. So its supposed to be OK now because she's 19? And wasn't he supposedly approaching 60 at the time he saved her? Ewhh...tacky. Yeah i know its meant to be a comic. So that means anything goes right? We can express all those subconscious desires we normally keep locked up in a closet somewhere. All the women are hookers and the good guys speak in dry one liners while performing various amputations on the bad guys. In my opinion some things are best left in the closet.

A movie in which a 42year old Woody Allen dates a 17 year old (who actually sounds about 12)...is that tacky or what? Even without knowing about Woody Allen's subsequent real life involvement with his step daughter it just seems inappropriate (and that's putting it mildly). If it had been a movie about a gay older man having a relationship with a teenage boy i'm sure that it would have caused outrage and i can't see why it should be much different just because its a heterosexual relationship. And then to realize at the end of his movie that the 17 year old is really the love of his life..i mean..ewwwwwwwwwwwh...pass me the sick bag. Diane Keaton we're meant to believe is some sort of really intellectual but just seems a moronic insult to women with her vacuous prognostications. I'll give it a few stars for the cinematography and music score and another star for a few throwaway woody allen one-liners but really this movie is just an embarrassment.

I'd seen the Royal Tenenbaums and thought i'd give Wes Anderson another try, especially as i'd read some good reviews about Rushmore. I think i'm over Wes Anderson now. I never need to see another of his movies again. His characters are so forced. They're trying oh so hard to be so quirky and funny but they're neither funny nor believable. I've always found that the movies i love the most are the ones where the characters seem so real that you feel you know them so well that you've met them and you're interested in what they're doing or thinking. There's none of that here. I didn't care in the slightest what happened to the hapless hero Max and his quest for the elusive Miss Cross. I just sat there cringing as i waited for the next "quirky" moment to come up. Nothing at all in the movie rings true and nothing works as comedy.

Having read all the gush this movie engendered and being somewhat of a fan of clint eastwood i was quite eager to see this movie but i have to say i was sorely disappointed. Why? Well....i hate to say it but it boils down to another lame attempt at a Hollywood tearjerker. Maggie's hillbilly family are so caricatured that they were laughable. Her mother commits the ultimate sin for a Hollywood movie -she's overweight. I don't understand how Maggie could have lost her million dollar fight. Surely her opponent would have been disqualified? But of course that wouldn't fit in well with the sympathy we're supposed to feel for her. Also, i was at the movie with a couple of people who are physiotherapists and have experience of quadriplegia and they found the hospital scenes unbelievable. The movie seems to be full of scenes and depictions which serve the sole purpose of being plot devices and which have no grounding in reality. For me this detracted from the movie as a whole. So while it was an entertaining enough story it certainly wasn't the masterpiece that some have made it out to be.

As soon as you know the title of this movie you have a fair idea of what its going to be about. I started watching it because i thought i'd read some positive reviews and i'd seen sarah polley in 'the sweet hereafter', a movie which i liked a lot. I've also generally liked the movies that i've seen with Mark Ruffalo so that was another thing going for it. I was hoping that it would avoid the clichés and maudlin sentimentality which this theme could so easily lead to. I detected vapid stupidity in the first few minutes when Sarah Polley goes to the hospital for tests and an uncaring staff virtually ignore her need to pick up her children from school and a doctor does his own ultrasound (do they do that in Canada..i don't really know but i find it hard to believe) and within a few short minutes diagnoses cancer in both ovaries which has spread to her stomach and liver and oh yes..she has about 2 months to live. Now i'm not a doctor but that just doesn't seem believable to me and a plot contrivance designed to deliver maximum pathos. I hate plot contrivances. After about 30 minutes i found the whole movie too achingly cute and pretentious to put up with any longer and gave up. Which actor said that you should never make movies with cute dogs or small children? I think he should have added attractive young women with fatal diseases to the list. I suppose the 'weepie' is a valid movie genre though it would be nice to see one that was tackled with intelligence. Sadly this one was not. I started reading the user comments on here and i'm amazed that so many people seem to think its wonderful. I can't believe i was watching the same movie but i guess if you like tear-jerkers about beautiful young women with terminal diseases accompanied by a good sound track then hey..this may be the movie for you.

Firstly, let me say that I watched this movie on a DVD without subtitles and if Scottish is not your first language then you'll certainly miss some of the dialogue. Now that i've got that out of the way i'll also add that this is one of the most drearily dull movies i've forced myself to sit through. It seems to be one of those movies beloved of the cognoscenti but which the rest of the hoi-polloi are induced to watch under the belief that its 'Art' and will do us good. Getting over the premise that a ditsy check-out chick is going out with a guy who just happens to write a brilliant novel and then tops himself because "it just seemed to be the right thing to do" (Clearly a disturbed young man and that can be the only reason he's going out with a vapid person like Morvern)the movie then takes us through a series of adventures(I use the term loosely)in Spain with her idiotic girlfriend. This movie was shown in a local art-house cinema. I learned that it had the shortest run of any movie shown for the year in which it was screened. So perhaps art-house movie-goers felt the same way about it that i did. I don't care how good an actress Samantha Morton is, she's not enough reason to go and see this rubbish.

Well..ok, i got sucked in. I like mafia movies and i thought this one would provide some entertainment. I was wrong. I found the plot horribly confusing. In the end all i knew was that if i waited a few minutes there's be another round of explosive sickening violence. Clearly there's a market for this sort of thing judging from some other comments i've seen on here but i'm not one of them. I actually like a semi lucid plot with my movies rather than seeing a group of totally unlikable characters taking turns at blowing holes in each other. I actually watched it on dvd, which had the movie as an R rating for 'medium level violence'. Yikes..if that's medium level, what has to happen to get a high-level violence rating?

So i must be one of the last people on earth to watch the Deer Hunter. It was OK in parts..but it was WAY over long. going for almost 3 hours, a lot of which i thought was taken up with very boring sequences (I thought that Russian wedding was never going to end). As for the Vietnam bits, I can understand why this film has received some criticism. The only Vietnamese men in the movie are bloodthirsty savages who wager on a (fictitious) game in which people commit suicide (and the few Vietnamese women in the movie are prostitutes). I was asking myself 'what's in it for the guys pulling the trigger???'. I think Michael Cimino went from this movie to making "heaven's gate" which is widely recognized as one of the all time big-budget clunkers in American movie history. But quite frankly i can see the seeds of that in this movie. I think the only reason it got so much recognition in its day was the immediacy of the vietnam war.

there's one thing that REALLY irritated me in this movie and that's the notion that a diabetic in need of an insulin shot needs to be given sugar. If she needs an insulin shot its because her blood sugar is high and needs to be brought down not increased. Sugar is useful for diabetics who have overdosed on their medication and need their sugar levels brought up. Its just such a fundamentally stupid error to have in this movie..which on the whole i thought was pretty fundamentally stupid anyway. I mean i can suspend credibility to some extent in a movie but sometimes enough is enough.

This movie is an example of historical revisionism at its worst. It has Jim Carrey, who has moved from being offensively irritating as Ace Ventura to being equally irritating in his good ol' boy straight roles, playing the innocent victim of a HUAC witch hunt at the height of the McCarthyite hysteria in the US. Lacking the courage of its convictions (and undoubtedly with an eye to increased box office sales) Carrey's character is shown to have been unfairly harassed because instead of being a communist he was simply a 'horny young man' following a lustful trail to a meeting at which he was unaware of the political content. Even today it seems that we can't have a hero in an American movie who is shown to have had any hint of a communist link in their past. The inhabitants of the town of Lawson where Carrey finds himself after his accident are all the sorts of wonderful people that we are supposed to believe are the real spirit of America. Supporters of the constitution one and all. Defenders of liberty and free speech. Funnily enough they seem to have been rather short on the ground during the McCarthy era and this is at the heart of the historical revisionism that I find most offensive in this movie. For me the biggest joke though (and presumably unintentional) are the scenes where Carrey as the scriptwriter has to endure meetings where his scripts are radically altered by greedy studio executives to make them more marketable. "There won't be dry eye in the house" says one of them after suggesting a cynically saccharine manipulation of one of the scripts. The irony of all this is that the script for this movie seems to have been written by just such a committee.

This movie purports to be at least based on the story of George Jung, the man who is credited with introducing cocaine to the US. Jung is portrayed here as a hapless victim. The love of his life (another drug runner incidentally) dies tragically young and he is betrayed by his friends and associates, his screeching harridan wife and ultimately his own daughter. Sorry..but i have a lot of trouble sympathising with a person who boasts in the movie about being the main supplier of cocaine during the 70s and 80s and who made 10s of millions of dollars from the trade in the process. The movie is so intent on a sympathetic portrayal of this essentially amoral person that i half expected an appeal for donations at the end of the movie to help pay his legal fees. I got the feeling watching this that Demme had made it as a tribute to an old and dear friend. We're told at the end that his daughter Kristina has not been to visit him in prison as though she's some sort of heartless offspring of a dear old man. Is this somehow meant to make her feel guilty if she sees this movie?

The acting performances were satisfactory but none of the characters were people i had any interest in...apart from hoping they'd soon be behind bars.

What impressed me so much about this film is the intelligence with which it treats its audience without compromising a terrific story which absorbed me for the length of the movie. I've never thought much about Anthony LaPaglia as an actor before this (either positive or negative) but he was just perfect in this role. On the night I went to see it the theatre was packed and you can tell when the audience is connecting with a movie and they were certainly connected with this one. In the scene where LaPaglia goes jogging and bumps into a fellow jogger half the audience seemed to jump in the air at the jolt of the impact. I've seen some disappointing Aussie movies that had pretty big build-ups recently (Mullet and La Spagnola to name two) and I was almost at the point of boycotting Aussie films because I sometimes feel like critics try to give them big build-ups and bludgeon us into seeing them from a sense of patriotic duty. Lantana has restored my faith. Its a good film -period.

Giuseppe Tornatore has attempted to created a poignant coming-of-age story and I think he's been trying a little bit too hard. The characters are 2-dimensional and the situations are cliches. Perhaps the director is attempting to show how things appear through the eyes of the child Stefano who is infatuated with the beautiful Malena but the result is one of those movies where I just sat there bored and felt like jumping up and telling the director what he should be doing to make this movie better. I've seen some glowing reviews of this movie but as far as I'm concerned its a Disney story for adults. The idea of a father (especially one as strict as Stefano's as portrayed in this movie) taking his teenage son to be initiated by a prostitute in 1940's Sicily is mind-boggling. The end result is a movie that tries to manipulate the emotions of its audience and lacks intelligence.

Words like over-rated and pseudo-intellectual come to mind when I look back on this film. Its overblown philosophising was lost on me long before it ended and I was not in the least surprised that its highest popularity in the IMDB ratings comes from males aged under 18. This demographic is of course renowned for its ability to look deeply into and appreciate the philosophical content of movies. This film seems to have developed a cult following but not, I suspect, for reasons its director intended.

This is such a bleak and plotless film that unless you are looking for a reason to slit your wrists its probably best avoided. Through a series of brief vignettes in a surreal Australian landscape we are acquainted with Lola and her unfortunate daughter Alice both of whom are destined to be forever betrayed not only by the people they encounter but also by each other. The unrelenting grimness is even reflected in their sexual encounters with a succession of squalid and unsatisfying relationships.

I tried very hard to fall asleep during this movie so that the time would pass more quickly but failed miserably and had to endure it to the end.

I don't normally try to characterize movies with cheap epithets like "Chick Flick" but in this case I thought it was appropriate. I found the initial premise of the film interesting and it soon drew me in (i.e. children discovering a hidden side to their mother's after her death). What initially put me off was discovering that Meryl Streep was meant to be Italian. I have great admiration for Streep as an actress but for the first part of the movie I kept trying to work out which country her accent was meant to be from. I decided eventually on Russian. Blow me down if it doesn't turn out that she's meant to be Italian. My parents are Italian and I've heard a lot of English spoken with Italian accents in my life but none of them sounded like Meryl Streep. To compound things even further she later tells Clint Eastwood that she's from a "small town" in Italy that he would never have heard of. She eventually tells him that this small town is called Bari and learns to her great surprise that he has not only heard of it but has visited it and was so entranced by what he saw that he broke his train journey and stopped there for a few days. Now I know that Americans are notoriously ignorant about other countries but Bari happens to be a large urban centre and while it has some sites worth visiting it is hardly the picturesque small town that seems to be suggested in the movie. From that point on the movie began to lose me more and more. I found it generally dull and thought it was exploiting its viewers emotions. A pity really because I thought that some of the portrayals of a marriage that were shown had great insight. I left before it finished. My wife stayed.

Yeah I agree this is not a bad film. Its got a story that sucks you right in and it plays its hand very well but it really doesn't stand up too closely to scrutiny in my humble opinion. The plot is rather riddled with holes (do you really mean to tell me that after all those years in prison and the searches the prison guards never found a tunnel behind the picture....Puhleeease... How stupid are we meant to think those prison guards are)and it really is just a well-made feelgood movie. Look, I enjoyed the movie but after reading many of the comments on this website it sounded like it was directed by God Almighty and starred his only-begotten son. A bit of critical judgement please.

Visually interesting and an engaging-enough plot but the characters failed to arouse any emotion. Towards the end of the movie we learn that someone wanted to name their baby after Francesco and I asked myself why. He does nothing in the movie except brood and read his aunt's letters and for some reason everyone who meets him in Turkey seems to think he's Mr Charisma. All I can say is they obviously don't get out much.

There are so many tacky one-trick movies made these days (and many of them go on to earn a small fortune)that when I first saw a trailer for this movie and it described how it was about a man who finds a portal into someone else's head my immediate reaction was to wonder what sort of crap was going to be foisted on us now. But this time I was wrong. It reminds me of a quote from a book I read recently about horses and zebras. Its something along the lines that because horses are common and zebras are rare (at least they are outside of Africa) then if you hear hooves coming its likely to be horses. Every now and again though the unexpected happens and thats how I feel about this movie. From the opening minutes of this film you know you're seeing something unique and part of the brilliance of this movie is that it never slackens its pace. Surely one of the best movies of the last 10 years. It deserves the awards its already won and should go on to get a whole lot more.

Of all the things I've read about this movie the funniest has to be "it made me think..". Perhaps the people who find this piece of tripe thought-provoking would regard "Plan 9 from Outer Space" as a treatise on the human condition. This is a pure Arnie action film with a garbled plot and mindless quite graphic violence. The only thing it made me think about was why I wasted my time and money going to see it. I know that logical consistency and great acting aren't what Arnie's movies are about but there comes a point where a modest grip on reality would not go astray.

Daniel Auteil is perfectly cast for this role as a sleazy detective trying to escape a tragic past. Sure there are some cliche elements in the story but hey, isn't that why we come to see this sort of movie? The subject matter is grim and I was left wondering about the still-gorgeous Natassia Kinski's role in the story. I felt her character never really went anywhere. The twist at the end was really fairly predictable but nevertheless at its best this movie reminded me of Chinatown.

The most cliche-ridden bunch of crap I've seen for a while. Most movies have learnt to avoid too many cliches but this one is drawn to them like a jackal to left-over offal -it just can't keep its snout out of it.

The undoubtedly well-intentioned story falls into the trap of portraying all Afrikaaners as scum-sucking vermin while all the blacks are kind-hearted good guys.

I thought the 2 actors who portrayed the younger PK were obnoxious and the cutesy voice-over from the youngest PK made me wish those horrible Afrikaaner boarding students had been more successful in their efforts to string him up. The prison camp scene where the teenage PK conducts a black choir came across to me as patronising to black people (they're incapable of forming or conducting their own choir without the help of some pissanty little white kid in short pants for God's sake)

In the end I was cringing in my seat as I could predict each embarrassingly tacky moment. You don't fight racism with stories and movies like this which only reinforce the good guy-bad guy stereotypes.

Unintentionally funny movie with Marianne Faithfull astride an obvious prop as she spouts 60's philosophy about the meaning of life.(When I say spouts I should specify that its actually a voice-over which seems designed to cover Marianne Faithfull's lack of French). Lots of psychedelic love scenes and amusing shots of Marianne "riding" the bike(e.g. the bike remains perfectly vertical as it turns corners) Definitely worth a late night laugh with some mates and a few beers. Can be served as a double bill with any Ed Wood movie.

I can't remember a movie in which I found the lead characters less engaging than I found Gong Li and Jeremy Irons in this film. Li has almost nothing to say and I was perplexed as to what Irons (himself a rather mopish and unappealing person in this film) would see in her. The minor characters played by Maggie Cheung and Ruben Blades seemed much more human and interesting. As for the story - I sat there for the first half of the movie wondering when the plot was going to begin. I'd have had as much fun if I'd gone to a stranger's house and watched 2 hours of video footage of his holiday in Hong Kong. ("This was the street where I bought my t-shirt", "Here's a shot of the traffic in the street" etc -you get my drift) In a word -boring.