jonathancanucklevine

Here's what you're going to see if you sit through the hour and a half necessary to watch this movie: You're going to see a writer/director - who's clearly too clever by half - outsmart... himself. Think of it as a road movie in which the protaganist simply encounters a traffic circle and goes around and around and around and never takes an exit to a destination, conclusion, or anything else. It makes me think of Linklater's "Slackers", because at the outset you expect some characters to stick, but he keeps moving and none of them do, so you figure out pretty quickly that the narrative (such as it is) is going to be unconventional. But that doesn't happen here. It's like he had a dream in which he mashed up "Memento" and "The Usual Suspects", but when he woke up the pieces didn't make any sense, so he went ahead and made a movie out if it anyway. But just because he made it doesn't mean you have to watch it. So don't.

Because I simply couldn't stand it any longer.

First, I'd like to point out that we have a problem here with people not knowing what the hell they're talking about. The review entitled "Good biography of a great man", for example, claims that "Steal this Book" was an autobiography. It wasn't. It was a practical how-to manual on theft and drugs and all kinds of illegal behaviour that revolutionaries find handy. How do I know this? Because I have a copy of the original Pirate edition, and Abbie signed it for me. And I have it because even though I was very young when he was in his heyday with the Yippies, I understood that you couldn't fight the battles he fought without having an excellent understanding of not just humour, but the absurd. He's meant a lot to me my whole life; I remember where I was when he turned himself in after the years underground, and I'm still deeply saddened by his death. He had a lot more to teach us.

So does this movie do Abbie justice? I don't know. Maybe I'll eventually manage to watch it through and find out. All I know right now is that there's no way on earth that I can take Vincent D'Onofrio seriously playing him, because though this isn't something that should matter, he doesn't look like Abbie, not even a little bit. And the stupid things they keep doing with his hair are just kind of insulting to a true Jewfro. Dustin Hoffman would have been rather long in the tooth in 2000, but I'll be he could have pulled it off. Or maybe someone younger who looks Jewish... or is named Hoffman. I'll have to think about that. But this one, so far, just doesn't work.

Sorry, but even Ben Kingsley can't save this one, and I'm kind of amazed that he'd take on a turkey like this, but I guess a brother's gotta pay the rent.

The problem here is the premise: Remote viewing, which is 100% woo-woo hokum. Because the entire plot revolves around this imaginary device, I couldn't take it seriously from the start. But I actually found this reaction to be a little odd, because at its root there's no difference between remote viewing and a simple premonition of the sort that drove The Dead Zone, a movie that fires on all cylinders all the way through. So why am I able to set aside my normal dismissive contempt for these paranormal myths and enjoy the movie in one case and not the other? Because of all the other stuff that isn't that: The narrative arc, the character development, the pacing, direction, and the acting. Cronenberg had a Steven King story and an absolutely top-flight cast (and I always make a point of acknowledging Nick Campbell's character, who ends in one of the creepiest scenes I've ever seen in my life). This thing? It had a bunch of stuff... and Ben Kingsley. Next!

Exactly. Even for someone who can dig splatter and exploitation, this one really was a waste of film stock and everyone's time. As others have noted, it's based on the Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton, and yet again we're treated to the fiction that it takes place in the US (yes, it was filmed in New Mexico, but so what?) because... because why? Because they don't want to shatter everyone's belief that all Canadians are *nice*? Trust me, they aren't - I've been in a room (twice, in fact) with Kevin O'Leary. But I'll not go off on that tangent. The point is that they could have stuck closer to the actual story and probably improved the movie, because it really wouldn't be possible to make it any worse. Some of the facts of the case are much creepier than they portrayed, such as the Pickton farm actually being very close to the populated areas that had grown around it rather than way out in the country as suggested in the movie. And everything about where he lived and what he did was far more squalid and creepy than portrayed, as much Ed Gein and Texas Chainsaw Massacre as forensic procedural, as the poice and MEs spent *years* sifting through the muck in search of DNA traces of the dozens of women who had been killed. It's as though the filmmakers chose to pick the least interesting path through the entire story. I dunno how Graham Greene got roped into this.

So why a 2 instead of a 1, which is the lowest rating I use (I won't do 0 because they aren't counted)? Nudity. The braless cop was a treat and the victim with the pierced nipples was impressive, though I'm pretty sure those were prosthetics. See? I can be cerebral and shallow at the same time. Anyway, I watched this one so you don't have to. There are other movies based on this story that are worth the time.

Sure, it's introspective and wistful and touching and oh, so Canadian, but so what? There's nothing new in the idea of a story about a character who gets life-changing news and decides to go off in search of himself and the meaning of life, and if this hadn't been stitched together with a Canadian travelogue (and only somewhat more than half of the country, I might add) it'd have been produced by Lifetime and nobody would have noticed. In fact, it probably wouldn't have been produced at all, which means one can take a rather cynical view of it as playing on the emotions of people who have been to that big goose or sat on that giant Muskoka chair; you may feel a personal connection with it, but that doesn't make it a good movie. And since I couldn't give a toss for hockey, about the only thing I found remotely interesting was Gord Downie's appearance, purely for the irony (given the movie's premise and their dialogue) of him still being seven years from his own terminal cancer diagnosis.

I made a point of watching this movie after hearing positive reviews of it on CBC radio, and was deeply disappointed. For a minute I was going to give it a 2, but decided it needed to lose an extra point for its clumsy, stupid, lazy, and woefully ignorant pastiche of reality.

I wasn't there (at RIM), but I'm of the computer R+D world and of the same age as the characters in this movie, so I have some understanding of the reality, and the reality this was not. It may be, (very) approximately, historically accurate in the overall arc of the story, but they screwed the pooch in all the details, with the result being a huge insult to the actual culture of the time *and* the professionalism of the engineers and programmers who did the work. As a rule, those guys know how to *grind*, not just play video games and give each other horsey-back rides until Michael Ironside rolls in and cracks the goddamn whip.

This is because the screenwriters and director opted for a cartoon portrayal of the people and their working relationships and environment rather than something reasonably representative and accurate. It's easier to fall back on the cliche of the "culture clash" between the freewheelin', game-playin', movie-watchin' nerds and their starched, stiff, humourless, suited "bosses". The fact is that designing products like this is *hard*, the hours long, and the work - though ultimately (one hopes) gratifying - arduous and intolerant of small errors. This makes for great books (I continue to enthusiastically recommend Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" more than 40 years after its publication because it captured it perfectly), but lousy movies and TV shows (like "Halt and Catch Fire") because viewers' attention spans are short and it's easier just to tart up the script with nonsense to keep their attention for 90 minutes. So that's why Lazarides is a portrayed as the very model of a clueless geek savant unable to find his own zipper who finds himself with one foot uncomfortably in the business world, rather than a serious designer spending days, weeks, and months staring at the screen of a CAD workstation, and Balsillie an insufferable, explosive prick. The nuanced truth is boring as hell to watch, so just tell the actors to go all the way over the top, all the time.

I haven't read it yet, but my suggestion would be that if you want to learn the story, that's where you should probably go, because there's absolutely nothing of substance to be drawn from this sad excuse for a "docucomedy", or whatever on earth it's supposed to be.

This is an absolutely terrible film, and now joins that doc about the German "free diver" who crippled himself as one of the two worst documentaries I've ever seen.

It was made by, and with the participation, of people who are utterly credulous and unquestioning about this unfortunate young man's predicament. Imagine, if you will, exactly the same documentary being made about someone who claims to be terrorized by fairies that only he can see, and that the only way he can protect himself is to hide under a blanket. Would anyone make a deeply sympathetic film about him? Of course not. He'd be regarded as the mentally ill person he is, and urged to get psychiatric treatment. The two cases are exactly the same; the only difference is that, while most people agree that fairies do not exist, most people are also grossly ignorant about the science and engineering of what's broadly termed here "radiation". For example, the doctor who visits him compares the "old, natural radiation from the earth" to "modern radiation" as though they're of the same kind, clearly demonstrating that he doesn't understand the difference between ionizing radiation and electromagnetic radiation. So best not to take his word for anything.

And we are shown a number of inconsistencies that further indicate that our subject has failed to learn about the things that, were his malady real, he could do to further minimize his exposure. For example, why would he listen to music from CDs, when CD players contain high-speed digital circuitry used to read data from the disks and convert it back down into sound? His parents have a turntable, and listening "analog" to LPs would completely eliminate the CD player as a source of EMR. (Before you ask: The Fairport Convention and Lindisfarne CDs he listens to were both originally released on vinyl, and for anything that wasn't or isn't, playing a cassette tape copy of a CD would also eliminate the CD as an EMR source.) Also, at the end of the film, we learn that he now has a phone via optical fiber, and the same argument applies: A fiber-capable phone (interface) contains complex, high-speed digital circuitry... where an old-timey POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone like your parents and grandparents had is a completely passive device that contains no active electronics generating high-frequency signals. Those are both dead giveaways that his sensitivity is imagined, because in both cases he's chosen the high-frequency-EMR-generating option over the one that isn't.

All of this means that the filmmaker ignored her responsibility as a documentarian to find the facts, opting instead for sympathetic agitprop with a lilting soundtrack. There is no evidence that "electrosensitivity" exists, and this is no different than any other paranormal phenomenon in that proving (or disproving) it via controlled experiments is a well-understood thing. So whaddaya got? A sick man who waves a little buzzing box around as "proof" that "there's something there"? Trust me, that means nothing. There are always hucksters and charlatans ready to cash in on people's gullibility and desperation, and being able to sell a little hokum meter for a thousand bucks is a strong motivation - no different, really, from those goofy Scientologists' E-meters.

So mark this down as a documentary that remains to be made by serious people who are ready to bring in scientists, engineers, psychiatrists, and paranormal debunkers to provide the background and expertise necessary to place the story in its proper context.

This is the fourth review. The first three were all ten out of ten, leading me to believe that they're less than legitimate. "Amazingly plays both sisters! I didn't see the original!" "Perfectly portrayed seamlessly! The Jeremy Irons film!" "A freaking genius... the writing is so awesome!"

Enough already.

The original was a David Cronenberg film, not a Jeremy Irons film. Yes, Irons did an excellent job in it, but make no mistake - Cronenberg wrote and directed it, and it's entirely his disturbing vision, so it's disgusting that these three gushers don't even mention his name.

What I've learned over the past few years is there is absolutely no depth to which the utterly-desperate-for-content modern streaming production houses (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc.) will not stoop to debase themselves and utterly violate the great (and let's face it, not so great - they don't care) movies of the last half century. Catch-22. Three Days of the Condor. True Lies. Westworld (alright, that was a lousy movie that was remade as a pretty good series). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Dead Ringers. The list goes on and on. Sometimes it's so obvious that they've cast the entire show to as closely resemble the original actors as possible that it hurts. Other times they think they're doing a hip gender (or racial) updating, as with this one.

What's next? Citizen Karen?

Someone. Please. Stop. These. People.

"Osho" = the guy we used to call the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and who ran an infamous cult in Oregon most noteworthy for using the money he fleeced from his Believers to buy a record number of Rolls Royces. Seriously, look it up. 93 of them. Yes, you can read that again: 93. And he had his business act together, alright, as one of the cult's sub-entitites was the Rajneesh Modern Car Collection Trust, whose sole purpose was to deal with the acquisition and rental of Rolls-Royces. Oh - and the other thing that's perennially popular with cult leaders, which is having sex with as many of their followers as possible, sometimes limiting it to women, others not so picky. In other words, you probably don't need to watch this if you're looking for insight into Just Another 20th Century Cult, because it's pretty much like the others. It's about greed of all the usual flavours.

The byline is "Bunker investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, and follows the process of building and selling these structures to the wealthy and not-so-wealthy alike." In fact, there's no investigation, and no following of any process(es). This is one of those documentaries in which the filmmaker has chosen not to narrate or provide any background whatsoever on her subjects, presuming to let them speak for themselves. Now, this isn't in itself a flaw; one can do quite well with this technique in the form of an "oral history" - but only when the interview subjects provide all of the material necessary to form a *complete* picture. But we don't learn anything of their opportunities, investment, or effort, and it's highly presumptuous for these men's lives to be described as "lonely", when there's no such evidence presented e.g. Their back stories. And where it might be easy to dismiss these men as paranoid survivalists or luxury condo-hawking opportunist developers, living underground (or "earth-sheltered") is in fact a very reasonable and particularly energy-efficient thing to do - especially if you can get it prebuilt for a small fraction of the tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars the government originally put into it. Take the case of "Ed of Subterra" - he comes across as a hippy-dippy, peace-love-and-understanding kind of guy who's made his former-missile-silo "castle" as homey as any cabin out in the woods of Oregon, so why not actually tell us about him and the people in the photos? Instead, we're left with "presented without comment" and more questions than answers. I'll be waiting for the director's cut with an extra half hour of *meaningful* interviews with the subjects so we can learn what they're really about, because, based on the descriptions (as I haven't seen them) of Perlin's previous two efforts, I think she's capable of dealing with complex historical material like a grownup.

I think Smoove's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" character - Leon - is terrific, so I made the mistake of thinking that, because he's a comic actor, he's also a comic. Nothing could be further from the truth. He touches on a lot of subjects, and completely fails to find anything funny in any of them. With enough props perhaps he could be a "prop comic" (the least-respected form), but even there he only shows up with a T-shirt, a chair, and a mike cord. I mean, he gets some mileage out of that mike cord, but prop comics have a little more obligation to be creative and bring something *zany*, no? Standup specials like this one really just make me ask one question: Where on earth do they find an audience full of people whose standards for comedy are so low that they can sustain an hour of laughter and applause in the face of Nothing. Funny. At. All. ?

Seriously. Is it free tickets? Free booze? Beats me. I didn't laugh.

Not too much I can add to what's already been said - I was a big fan of Andre Braugher in Homicide, and Alec Baldwin does a low-key, non-psychopathic version of Freddy Frenger. But to be honest, the biggest thrill I got out of this was discovering that Joey Altruda had contributed songs to the soundtrack (credited in the titles, but not here, so I'm going to see if I can add them to the movie's IMDB entry). Altruda was in a great unknown 80s L. A. jazz/punk band called Tupelo Chain Sex (along with a couple of Zappa alums, so you get an idea of the musicianship). I saw them a handful of times, and they never failed to burn the house down. So what a treat to see him credited here in a soundtrack of mostly cool jazz.

Here's the problem: "Ford vs. Ferrari" was damn good, and set a high bar for a story about the development of these cars - and the clashes of competitive personalities - in the 60s. So when "Lamborghini..." fails to develop any of the characters at all and draw the viewer in to engage with and pick sides in the rivalries, we're left watching a handful of cartoon characters in which we simply aren't invested. While I've never seen any footage of Lamborghini (and thus can't comment on the accuracy of the performance here), Grillo played him like a soap-opera central-casting Italian. And aside from the pure animus between Ferrari and Lamborghini, engineering a new thing is actually very exciting - it's difficult and arduous and maddening and exhausting and incredibly rewarding. But did we get any of that? Not really, only a few clips here and there of a motor and a couple of body panels and almost nonexistent characters who - in real life - would have sweated bullets in doing what they did. The whole thing comes off as a pastiche, and just makes me want to read the book upon which it was allegedly based to find its heart and soul. And we didn't even get enough great car porn to boot.

Because for the most part I have no use for modern C+W, I wouldn't have given this a second look if not for Trace Adkins' appearance on Real Time and Maher falling all over himself with praise. But to be honest, we barely made it through the opening credits before it was clear that it was going to be a sanitized, cookie-cutter, Hallmark-worthy torture session whose every moment made me want to watch the Righteous Gemstones instead. Maybe I shouldn't even be writing this; there's probably some unstated rule about how much of something you actually have to see before dismissing it as junk and putting on something else.

We know that Susan Sarandon still has it - she rocked Ray Donovan. So unless the age ceiling for Hollywood actresses that we keep hearing about has suddenly come down on her hard, I can't for the life of me figure out why she'd sign on to this turkey. Or maybe the producers, desperate to attach the name of an actual "serious actor" (rather than just an array of Nashville twangers), made her an offer she couldn't refuse.

In the end, it doesn't matter why. It has been seen and cannot be unseen. And if it goes on to earn praise from country music fans, it will, as a point of reference, tell you much more about them than about Monarch.

There's not a lot I can add to the other reviews except to say that you're going find all kinds of screwy references thrown into the mix. Right off the top, when the president appears with his cadre of staff, you get the prominent Coke machine and general with the metal hand. Tell me both of those aren't nods to Dr. Strangelove.

Do you really think it's going to make a good documentary?

For half a century "American Pie" has been one of the worst examples of 70s classic-rock AM top-40 moon-spoon-June stream-of-consciousness songwriting, second only to "Stairway to Heaven" for the speed at which one has to turn it off when an automated radio station's programming algorithm that doesn't know any better cues it up.

McLean once answered the question "What does it mean?" by saying "It means I'll never have to work another day in my life."

He should have left it at that.

Which is why I'm only giving it five stars. If it weren't a shot-by-shot copy of "In Order of Disappearance", right down to all the Helly Hansen and bad guys driving Jeeps - with a few tweaks to satisfy wimpy Hollywood sensibilities - I'd rate it quite a bit higher, but it really doesn't need to exist at all.

Having said that, I'm always in favour of any project that gives actors from The Wire (John Doman, Domenick Lombardozzi) work - they deserve it. Loved Emmy Rossum in Shameless, though she's better nekkid than in a big winter coat. And it's very comforting to us Canucks to see homeboy Tom Jackson get a significant part - I once made a point of not bothering him in the Calgary airport.

And shooting on Fortress Mountain? Yeah, cool. My old stomping (skiing) grounds.

But go watch the original instead.

But I watched, I looked, and I couldn't find anything there. It's aimless. It doesn't start anywhere, it doesn't end anywhere, and in between it doesn't bother to go anywhere. Other than "but it's a young love slice of life in the early-70s Valley" - which is just a copout for not having a narrative arc - about the most interesting thing is the conflict-that-should-have-happened-but-didn't with Bradley Cooper's Jon Peters. That was hilariously manic, and seemed to presage SoCal's cocaine obsession by five or ten years.

To be honest, though, what bothered me most was that the title referred to *nothing*. I used to go to LA in the early 80s and buy a lot of records, and Licorice Pizza was one of the stores I frequented. So I'd hoped for a little selfish nostalgia and was disappointed when the store didn't feature in the movie AT ALL. So other than being an odd name to anyone not familiar with the music scene at the time, there was no reason to choose it, and I felt kinda robbed.

@christooshop, you need to check your facts. DECTalk started shipping in 1984, not 1975, and a little serious homework would inform you properly as to its internals and architecture, which I can assure you wasn't "4 bit".

The reason for his not having "upgraded" over the years was very simple: People had come to associate Hawking and that voice with each other, and he wanted to maintain that identification. So in later years, when he did upgrade to more modern hardware, he kept the old voice, which had really become his.

(That answers your question. I'll watch this doc shortly and add a proper review of it.)

Annoying child causes a car accident and winds up with a plate in her head, and upon exiting the hospital exhibits a car fetish very much like Ballard/Cronenberg's "Crash", but without the wrecks and style, and with the fluids/coupling hybrid human/automobilic. She remains difficult into adulthood and develops anger management issues and a vaguely Electra-complex relationship. Ultimately, she disappoints the audience when she fails to give birth to a Tonka truck.

C for largely incoherent strangeness. Much of this unpleasantness could have been avoided with regular oil changes.

I'm a very scientific and critical viewer (and person), and found this to be an excellent, balanced, even-handed doc. I'm able to maintain objectivity here because I'm a male who's not in or connected to the medical profession (so I don't have skin of any kind in the game) and love breasts - of all sizes.

One looks for the objective evidence, and it was here: The biochemist working for an implant manufacturer who ran the tests proving that the envelopes of even *saline* implants leached silicones into the users; Michelle's lab tests that showed those silicones were in her system; the doctor who confirmed that those compounds linger in the users' systems for *years* after removal of the implants. This is damning evidence. Rather disturbing, too, is the final shot of Dr. Rose, who, after admitting that a small percentage of his own patients suffer problems, desperately grasps about in a pathetic attempt to argue their safety. This is going to seem like an extreme comparison, but I got exactly the same sense of denial recently from watching Horst Wächter (the son of a notorious Nazi war criminal), unable to reconcile his belief in his father, the "good Nazi who helped the Jews", with the hundreds thousands of deaths he was responsible for. Fellow reviewer @workoutsmurf exhibits this sort of denial too.

The filmmakers were smart enough to not place much stock in the hysterical bookface drum circles, because those groups (online and off) exhibit every kind of bias and it's difficult to separate the real sufferers from the psychosomatics - and it's important to understand that both exist.

The reality is that these devices were invented and pushed into the market (and patients) without any safety testing whatsoever - and unsuspecting women became the guinea pigs in an experiment that's now been running for 60 years. There are a million factors to blame, from space-age techno-excitement to medical paternalism to female vanity, but the result has been that the FDA suffered complete "regulatory capture", otherwise these things would be much more strictly controlled (if not banned outright), and at very least *real* informed consent would be required where their use is compelling. Because until these materials are to a significant extent forced from the market, they'll continue to represent too great a profit center and there will be no motivation to come up with replacements that are actually inert and won't harm the users.

(Added points for the section on polypropylene string implants, true horrors that I didn't even previously know existed.)

As for Michelle, if she has the strength of character to shake off her trademark boobs, she should do the same with all those stupid glasses and switch to something that doesn't dominate her face.

Is it Brexit? Global Warming? The Russians? It's not entirely clear, and it doesn't really matter. Things are kept vague and the ending is *entirely* predictable. There isn't much development in either plot or characters; I was more interested in the Lotus than any of the performances. Not a movie I'll remember, and I certainly won't watch it twice. Not bad enough to qualify it for a "that's 90 minutes I'll never get back", but only barely.

Are you kidding? I'm not even going to bother reviewing the story - a romcom's pretty much a romcom, so don't expect art. But there's nothing about this that even tries. Women do lumberjack competitions, but they train as hard as the men and are totally badass. We're supposed to buy that this little ball of fluff is going to grab an axe and just step in? Puh-leeze.

But the part that's really offensive is that this was shot in Ontario, on the other side of the country from the Rockies. Like, 3500 km away from the mountains that are Right Behind Them all through this movie. That's cynical and fraudulent. You wanna make a movie about (something) in the Rockies? The least you can do is buy a bus ticket and go there.

I knew that some outfit named Impossible had resurrected Polaroid's SX-70 film production, but had no idea what the story was. Very well done, though it would have benefited from a little actual background on the history of Land and Polaroid, mainly for those young enough to have not been around in the mid-late 20th century.

I was deeply dismayed, though, at facebook's sudden intrusion into the narrative, and at Doc's naivete regarding the damage it's done to the world with its grotesque, self-absorbed amorality. He did his research, and is a smart enough guy to understand its meaning, but still cozied up to them. I could scarcely sit through his initial wooden, stilted meeting in their quaint little print shop, and the extent of the facebook employees' delusion shows in their considering this silkscreening curio to be the "heart and soul" of a truly evil company. That kind of money distorts everything and rarely does anyone any good, regardless of whether they humour a harmless screwball from time to time by picking up the tab for a party. I sincerely hope he's since broken with them.

Lemme tell you that if you're expecting Kurosawa you're going to be disappointed. This belongs on the same "wow, these are great!" lists as "Showgirls", and alongside "Reanimator" for the number, size, and colourful contents of the syringes alone. I first noticed Pouty Paz in "Boardwalk Empire" and wondered then whether this statuesque bit of eye candy could act her way out of a soap bubble. The answer: I don't think so. But that doesn't mean I won't be making a point of watching more of her movies - to the contrary, just seeing how often she drops the laundry, and how she strolls around the hospital like a runway model for low-cut, pencil-skirted uniforms (think General Dreedle's wife from "Catch 22") on 4" wedge heel nurse's shoes that are both ugly *and* impractical is good for maintaining this viewer's grin.

So the verdict? Terrible? Yes! Terrific? Yes!