cinevox

The WWII life of Wladyslaw Szpilman could have been even more fascinating with forty minutes cut from the film. With attention spans being what they currently are, modern audiences may squirm uncomfortably from this series of long scenes with few dialogue and very little background music. And yet, these scenes we're subjected to are important and dramatic in a realist sense.

The piano playing sequences are breathtakingly dramatic, being what they are in this, Polanski's most personally directed film to date.

If things go a little slow for you, watch half of The Pianist one night, and the other half when your nerves are back to normal. It is genuinely a fantastic film, far better than "Schindler's List."

I love most disaster films, don't get me wrong. But...

'Comet,' 'Meteor,' 'Asteroid'... there's generally nothing complex about them, so don't make of them more that what they're really worth. Sure, they're usually entertaining and largely exciting to watch, but 'Armageddon' is not one of them. Neither is 'Deep Impact,' its sister film.

Armageddon features way too many reels invested in the 'planting the bombs' end sequence (snore-whistle-wheeze-snooze!!) so how's this supposed to keep us glued to the events. Just land, plant the explosives-or-whatever, and get the hell off the-thing-hurtling-towards-Earth...sheeesh, its not that difficult to anticipate! And movies like this one should never run longer than 90 mins. unless they're rrreeaaalll good story-wise.

You don't need to know anymore than that... and I'm not a fan of Bruce Willis either so, understandably, I took several naps during the course of this movie. ZZZZZZ

I saw this movie last month (March 2003) so forgive my lateness...

Raimi's "The Evil Dead" is not entirely bad (heavy influence here from Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes," and Carpenter's "Halloween"). It has a worthwhile script, make-up effects and camerawork, but the Rankin/Bass-like stop-motion ending is just too much… and we can sense the 'tongue' slipping out of the 'cheek' and trying too hard to 'touch the tip of the nose.'

Five friends (two romantic couples and an extra girl) set out to spend some r&r at a Tennessee cabin. Soon they discover a forbidden tome in the cellar that, when its contents are read aloud, has the power to release an evil, demonic force on the world.

Irritating are the demonic cackles and the occasionally sloppy production values. But this is, after all, an 8mm production.

Raimi since directed the 2002 Spiderman movie, but Bruce Campbell's career appears to have come to a grinding halt.

In the working stages, this post-grad project was known as "The Book of the Dead." The two sequels (done that) are best left 'in the cellar.'

Yes, the original was far superior to this 1976 version! And the original was in black-and-white too! But you gotta hand it to these guys (the filmmakers led by Dino De Laurentiis) responsible for resurrecting the "King" and once-again letting him loose on N.Y. civilization.

There are some interesting special-effect moments, especially the water-fall sequence in which the big lug assists his bathing beauty.

Actress Jessica Lange (ex-model) cut her teeth by starring in this one, and it hasn't damaged her career one bit. Unfortunately, the other actors aren't as interesting to watch, and there combined sum 'outweigh' the star gorilla itself.

Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) is working on yet another remake, but, in these post 9-11 times, we'll probably see Kong return to the Empire State Building.

Again, this is yet another film in the 'I expected a whole lot more' school of audience anticipation department. Face it, the television commercials appeared to promise something else entirely...

Four latent psychic friends (taught their unique art years ago by an emaciated idiot-savant friend) reunite annually at their cabin in the Maine Mts. What they encounter their amounts to little more than what King fans have encountered in a few previous novels.

Some of the set pieces here (their value ending up less than what the commercials may have led us to expect) are nevertheless interesting to watch. For instance, the marketing dept. for 'Catcher would have us believe that the squatting figure seen in theater trailers and movie posters was something far more esoteric in nature; the figure, female, is no shaman...or whatever...she's just suffering from the latter stages of parasitic alien contamination.

Without further hairsplitting, King manages to cannibalize his own material and forces us (through the usually adept hand of Goldman) to watch what probably didn't sound interesting to read about, let alone sit through in a darkened theater to see with our very own eyes. Not to sound prude, but potty humor reaches its zenith in this film (can you say "alien suppositories," folks? eeeeewww!) restoring our faith in the latest filmmaking trend to include as much flatulence and bowel movement jokes imaginable, and not harming the creator's artistic (?) reputation one bit.

As already known to the public at large, Dreamcatcher is a take-off on previous King efforts... namely "Stand By Me," "Tommyknockers" and especially "It."

My best advice to you is to watch this film with an open mind, a steady heart, and a willingness not to over-analyze it to the ground.

With all its artistic and literate attributes, I still think that the role of Virginia Woolf should have gone to a truly homely actress, but then isn't that what acting is all about: making us believe that Nicole Kidman is a frumpy poet instead of a statuesque siren.

Everyone involved in this dramatic trilogy is fantastic, and you don't have to be a woman to understand its full potential either. My mouth dropped slightly twice, proving to myself that there's still intelligent life out there in screenwriting land.

An interesting urban thriller thanks to Larry Cohen's playful talent, a creative filmmaker who doesn't take himself too seriously. Phone Booth delivers a few good B-Movie sequences that warrant its belated appearance in theaters (Cohen played with the idea of this particular script about thirty-years ago).

However, this thriller requires a bit more suspension of audience disbelief : nobody with half a brain would even bother answering a public telephone! It's just too risky nowadays (at least in the movies) to answer any anonymous callers. Rule of Thumb: Let your machine take a message, or just walk away from the ringing.

Actor Whitaker is truly a man of many talents as well but, frankly, he should stick to directing. Yet here he manages to come across as just another actor who agreed to play a formula "Columbo" (that thing he 'does' with his eye) without the forced naivete, or the characteristic patience required to endear the audience to his character. It would have been far more interesting to see him play the man trapped in the booth, and have Scottish actor Farrell play a gung-ho officer.

Note to future directors/screenwriters: Phone Thrillers are definitely a thing of the past. Neve Campbell (Scream) and Colin Farrell are the only ones doing this particular type of thriller lately. And Cohen, let's bring back your "It's Alive!" babies with plenty of digital-effects so that we don't have to worry about whether we should be picking up an anonymous phone call (who even cares, really!)

Lastly, how can you feel sorry for the main character? He's a pathological liar and a weasel, among other things, so one can't help but feel he had all of this coming to him. Stu, you got a cellular phone, for cornsake!

***MILD SPOILERS*** The opening credits may remind us of the television series Love Boat with its music that may turn into a Volare car commercial, if we didn't already know that we are supposed to be out at sea. Of course this is really a horror film for the 21st century. It's been called "The Shining meets Dead Calm".but who remembers "Dead Calm" anyway. Don't be fooled by this or any other Ghost Ship review, the film is yet another Ten Little Indians. except the 'indians' here are 'sailors.'

Still, there are enough shocks and minor suspense scenes in GS to keep you interested until the end. even when the bilge buckets appear to be all too overflowing with blood. Nothing I've read about this 2002 Halloween film has mentioned the fact that it probably was inspired by a forgotten 1980's Italian (?) gialo film of the same name (or was that one called "Ghost Boat"?). I believe this earlier film starred George Kennedy, but I could be mistaken.

Room for improvement: Get rid of the most irritating characters first to spare us unnecessary torture. You know the ones, the ones with the most attitude ("Grow up!!" and the 'we're-all-gonna-die-anyway-so-let's-start-losin'-it' behavior). And who ever told Gabriel Byrne he was talented. He's a second-rater who's been doing this type of stuff for more than twenty years...give it a rest. I'm glad that his character in Ghost Ship ends up floating in a saltwater tube.

Finally they got the disaster film formula right! The script is literate and somewhat thought provoking, and although we, the audience, may not totally believe a small crew of terra-nauts could ever expect to successfully journey to the center of the Earth, the audience is not treated to an excess of melodrama (the writer at least gets most of the science right).

The drama is believable, however; it is "Armageddon" meets "Apollo 13" but without the excessive obsession with rescue scenes (as in Armageddon).

In 'Core' there is no hodgepodge of lame set pieces, tired dialogue and thick-n-syrupy romance. The pace of the film is brisk and satisfying (although we are treated to yet another special-effect-destruction of world monuments as previously seen in similar visually appealing spectacles such as "Superman--The Movie" and "Meggido--Omega Code 2."

The actors are pleasant enough to watch for as long as this adventure lasts, even the villain is not really a villain at all, just initially too self-absorbed to know better, but eventually pulls through for the rest of the film. Alfre Woodard is always a welcome addition in almost anything she agrees to appear in, and Hillary Swank is tolerably charismatic as the perfectionist who commandeers the bunch to the core of the problem.

Make sure you watch this one in a really huge theater equipped with state of the art sound... rumble, rumble, rumble... Oh m'gosh, is that the whole of Rome collapsing!!

Ok this musical was enjoyable but, apart from a few somewhat-memorable musical numbers, it was not as memorable as I thought it would be... and certainly not winner material for 2002 Best Picture...sheesh!

Latifah has already been referred to as the Pearl Bailey of the 21st Century, Zeta-Jones managed to squeeze yet another film out before squeezing out another baby for hubbie Douglas, Gere proves he can do a decent picture every once in a while, and Zellweger did better than I expected (especially since she's the least trained of the bunch).

Watch for Chita Rivera in a word-less cameo as a weathered prostitute who doesn't look as lucky as the lead female characters.

To say that Chicago is a wonderful film-musical is belated at best. The Broadway musical has been around for at least, what, twenty-five years or more, and even I can learn to make a top-knotch film if anybody is willing for me to sit on material that's been around that long!

You decide how wrong I am. Meanwhile, enjoy the fine show.

This "weird" gem is crammed with fairy tale iconographies, classic iconographies (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are Depp and Del Toro, respectively) symbols and the ever popular search for the always ellusive meaning of life.

The settings (L.A. and Las Vegas) are not incidental, but intentional. The film, to save space and time, tries to cut through all the b.s. and superficial 'dung-heap' other intellectuals try to cram down an audience's throat.

The key, the answer to all this weirdness we see in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is that there is no truth; everybody tries to be like everybody else, everybody seemingly decent that is, and nobody is really being themselves.

The 'tripping on drugs' scenes only 'enhance' our perceptions of how we mistakenly perceive human life.

Cameos include Lyle Lovett, Ellen Barkin, Gary Busey, Katherine Hellmond, Lorraine Newman and Cameron Diaz.

This one is a fantastic installment in the big-screen Trek saga with the Generations cast flying solo (without members of the original 60s telecast).

Alice Krige's performance is surrealistic and scary as the Borg Queen who libidonously (and otherwise) attacks certain male Enterprise crew members--an attempted brainwash technique--in order to infect and takeover control of the rest of the universe with Borg-collective half-machine, half organic consciousness.

Also the supporting characters are interesting to watch, especially Alfre Woodard's highly expressive eyework and intense dialogue with the Capt.

It was high time somebody did right by King's 1977 novel, but did we really need a miniseries?

Director Garris is the wrong person here, and King would've done better by trying to contact Kubrick in England before he died two years later. True, Kubrick may have botched King's original story elements and adopted them as his own, but anything would've been better than this 1997 retread.

The makers' DVD commentaries keep discussing 'behind the scenes' drivel and many plot angles and takes on domestic violence, but the supernatural scariness found in the source novel rarely surfaces in this made for television three-parter.

DeMornay and Weber are good in their respective roles, but the adnoidal child-actor playing Danny is just plain irritating--one can't help but compare Danny Lloyd's superior performance in Kubrick's 1980 adaptation.

The miniseries' last half-hour features some nifty scenes that passed muster with ABC's usual standards and practices, and make this entire 4 1/2 hour take (the total running time is not 6 hrs., when you take out all those commercials) worth watching.

Lastly, the giant 'birthday cake' mansion in this version doesn't look any scarier than the craftsman style ski lodge we saw in 1980. We're only too glad to see it burn to the ground when it does, and we can now look forward to all those fascinating commercial breaks we've grown so accustomed to.

Not since the corny, yet enjoyable prequel "Voyage Home" has the franchise turned-out anything near as good as this one: 'Nemesis' is fantastic in its escapism. So far, Nemesis hasn't made quite as much money as the people at Paramount might have expected.

If you've already seen "Star Trek--The Search for Spock," then expect a follow-up to Nemesis, because, likewise, the plot appears to be some type of set-up... a false alarm that fools nobody already use the makers of these movies who constantly try to keep the 'space' cottage industry afloat. And yet, with this installment, the audience member can rely on the 'cottage attempts in many departments (some of them all too familiar): a somewhat memorable engagement party in honor of two crew members; at least two alien-species that managed to make me squirm with unbridled fright; the obligatory explosions that manage to consistently elicit some cheers from the movie-going crowd (myself included); and, as previously mentioned, a loose end which heralds yet another sequel in the works if this movie does a better job in the DVD market.

Paramount Studios, live long and continue reaping profits.

Scorsese's best. Not too many hyper-critical reviews of this film have anything near as intelligent to say about what the director and the screenwriter had in mind when they created this American gem.

To those people that have seen it and thought it was "slow" or the pacing was sub par, they don't know what they're talking about; "Taxi Driver" is about the gradual and eventual take-over of insanity, and not about violence, action-shoot-'em-up 'slash' car chase... or whatever they expected from it. The modern audience today is expecting everything--comedy, drama, unbearable suspense, spfx--all rolled-up into one-stop entertainment... and no, I'm not anybody's grandfather, or here to tell you that movies were great in my day, but, viewers, lighten up already.

De Niro, and the rest of the cast, do a serviceable job in this micro-cosmic window into the life of Travis Bickle--a Vietnam vet--who, true, writes mind-numbing entries in his diary, leads a, for the most part, dull existance as a cabbie, and strikes out with a female political campaigner who, after Travis becomes a hero, discovers she is indeed attracted to unstable, sometimes violent chauffeurs.

The rest of this movie's story is for the less initiated viewer; decide whether you've truly become desensitized to sexual and violent content in today's films... Ah, forget it! You have to have lived at least some of which goes on in "Taxi Driver," or you've just been plain lucky in this life so far.