alex6322

Just about everything in this movie is wrong, wrong, wrong. Take Mike Myers, for example. He's reached the point where you realize that his shtick hasn't changed since his SNL days, over ten years ago. He's doing the same cutesy stream-of-consciousness jokes and the same voices. His Cat is painfully unfunny. He tries way to hard. He's some weird Type A comedian, not the cool cat he's supposed to be. The rest of the movie is just as bad. The sets are unbelievably ugly --- and clearly a waste of millions of dollars. (Cardboard cut-outs for the background buildings would have made more sense than constructing an entire neighborhood and main street.) Alec Balwin tries to do a funny Great Santini impression, but he ends up looking and sounding incoherent. There's even an innapropriate cheesecake moment with faux celebrity Paris Hilton --- that sticks in the mind simply because this is supposed to be a Dr. Seuss story. Avoid this movie at all costs, folks. It's not even an interesting train wreck. (I hope they'll make Horton Hears a Who with Robin Williams. Then we'll have the bad-Seuss movie-starring-spasitc- comedian trilogy.)

It's hard to categorize this movie --- or even describe it. On the one hand, it's very bland. It's a collection of not-very-imaginative drug-induced visions coming from a hedonist journalist. Johnny Depp looks good as a bald, sweaty guy, but you know it's all a put-on from the start. You KNOW he's going to survive, he's going to have some cynical comments about the American Dream (or Nightmare), and he'll drive away wondering about it all. None of the scenes really add up to anything. It's a collection of half-hearted attempts to match "gonzo" filmmaking with Thompson's gonzo journalistic style.

On the other hand . . . no one but Terry Gilliam could put together such a visual feast. And who cares about plot? That's not the point. It's great to see a movie about drugs that's completely free of the hippie vibe. Very few movies depict drug use in this way, as self-induced psychosis. Gilliam captured the spirit of the book by making bright colors ugly, showing everyone at their worst, and essentially forcing you to watch people act the way they really do. So he gets points for honesty, but in the end the movie is not very entertaining or creative. Weird, dude.

When you watch a kung fu movie, are you expecting an intelligent plot, fine acting, and high production values? I hope not, because this movie has a very SILLY plot, lame acting, and it was made for about $100. But it's a lot of fun. The villain has a mind-control serum and a fake beard. Steve Chase assembles his team, Seven Samurai-style, to save the world. The rest of the movie is hilariously cheesy. I used to watch this flick on HBO in the middle of the night when I was a kid, around 1980. It was on all the time. When I founjd it on sale on DVD, I took a chance (these things don't always age so well, ya know?). But it's still GREAT. When it's deadly serious, I laugh, and when the characters crack a joke, it falls flat. KILL AND KILL AGAIN is the Plan 9 of martial arts movies. All humans must see it at least once! Marduk commands it!

The final Matrix movie discards just about everything that made the first film interesting. Most of the movie takes place in Zion, and it's the same old action movie stuff you've seen before. The special effects are good --- until you get bored seeing so many CG robots surrounded by explosions.

I have no idea what the end means. How, exactly, did Neo win? What was the Oracle doing in the rain if she was alive later? Like Reloaded, this movie was simply a cash-in. Characters come and go without explanation. The Trainman thing was pointless. And nothing could be more boring than hearing the Oracle do her Yoda nonsense thing. "What is choice?" "I choose to make a choice." "Choose choice, Neo." "But if I choose..." Blah blah blah.

A very 20th century movie about writer's block, sexual repression, addiction, bugs with talking sphincters, and the danger of writing well.

Peter Weller sleepwalks through it all, but then he's supposed to. Judy Davis is sexy but creepy. The real star is Cronenberg, who filmed the unfilmable and made it look easy --- with a very low budget.

Once again, Cronenberg elevates the horror film to Art (with a minimum of pretention). Each scene adds a thin layer of complexity so that, by the end, there is more than one storyline moving along, but no clue which one matters most. Is he an agent? Is it a hallucination? Is he pretending to be an agent so he can escape his hallucination? None of the above?

Probably all of the above.