ablewuzi

What an embarrassment! Yet another Royal Nonesuch. Actors, indeed, almost anyone except the director and editors can be forgiven for being involved with this ridiculous dog of a movie because they have little idea about how bad it is going to scan when it comes out of the cutting room.

What's wrong with it is that it stretches credibility until the movie becomes pathetic and laughable. Need specifics? Well for one, imagine a dwarf impersonating Frodo Baggins every day for five years in a high security private school by simultaneously a) single-handedly applying prosthetic makeup to himself good enough to fool all the students, administrators, teachers and secret service agents for five years running and b) being an top-notch hot-shot impeccable empathetic computer science teacher.

Imagine he does all this so he can kidnap one student from the class, for the sole purpose of tricking a second student from the very same class to expose himself to a second completely different, but wholly ad hoc, drive by and snatch kidnap plot.

He seems to be a complete loser except for pulling this plan off, for which he has no apparent motive, and appears to have a million dollars worth of security equipment stashed in his apartment. Oh, and he has a yacht. When James Bond went up against Specter, the Specter gadgets were always unbelievable but, because it was a big well-healed outfit, it was possible to suspend disbelief, but a loser wearing buck teeth and a wig---come on.

Or how about the explosive charge the kidnappee happens to find hidden behind the intercom face plate in her otherwise featureless cell, padded like the confinement room in an insane asylum.

And that's just for starters. I kept expecting Martians to teleport into the inside of the police revolvers and sabotage the firing pins--at least we were spared that!

It might be good, it might not.

You can't tell when the production is so incompetent that you can't hear the dialog. You'd think a director would know that when the actors mumble or whisper and the music is turned up loud that the audience won't be able to hear what is said. You' think a director would know that when the audience can't hear what's said, the audience can't tell what's going on. You'd think. I guess it was a bunch of amateurs shooting to hand-held consumer video cameras with the music coming off a boom box behind the camera man. But I can't tell. Maybe it was maybe it wasn't. Like the film, you just can't tell.

Cameras have become so easy to operate that even trash can look good. This picture proves it. Kudos to the camera engineers. Now there is a new way to put lipstick on a pig.

This picture is nothing but stereotype, but its old stereotype. So old that it looks new to the youngsters who just show their inexperience when they babble about there being a new idea here. It wasn't even new decades ago in the Andromeda Strain.

Monsters is the unimaginative descendant of hundreds of low budget science fiction flicks from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. That was a time when special effects were expensive yet unconvincing. Directors solved the problem with dialog--not quite talking heads because the talkers walked around on the campy sets. In short fill the movie with dialog about the aliens, the invasion, the plague or catastrophe and never actually show the thing. Exactly what happens here, but with better cameras.

When the team lacks science fiction imagination, but is bent on calling the output science fiction, it compensates with science trappings flung around the set. And they always add a love story--because there has to be some story. Unfortunately, the campy trappings undermines the love story by making the lovers look like idiots. Occasionally the formula could be made to work, in the Outer Limits for example although that show had the advantage of a 45 minute format and way better acting, writing, editing, and direction.

In this picture, there is so much empty time to fill up that the director resorts to showing the heroine relieving herself. Was once enough? No, its a recurring theme, and completely sexist, evidently the man can hold it. Yuk, enough!

Figure this for a spoiler.

The film is basically another Mulholland Dr. but without the gratuitous and shocking sex scenes. This director lets the audience in on the secret, that the point of view is from an unreliable character, a bit sooner.

There seem to be two subtexts. One about modern white collar life in China. They other about the United States lecturing China. There are even a few flashes of the surreal to remind me of Fellini.

For me there were two disappointments. The first is the flabby Kevin Spacey. It is not flattering to America, but I guess its deliberate and part of the "lecturing" subtext. The other is the fairy tale blitz out. You go the whole film thinking "this is going to end bad" but at the last moment the fairy godmother steps in and clears everything up. I think that is deliberate too because the director makes it so obvious. So there might be some hidden subversive third subtext lying underneath it all.

Anyway, not having Chinese sensibilities, I am sure I missed a lot, and have to give it only a 7 out of my own inability to understand well enough.

Smarmy from front to back. All the principals are despicable. Nothing is visually interesting. The score is bad. It's slow talking, slow paced, slow to get ended. They could cut 45 minutes and omit nothing. Miserable lighting in most of the movie--feels like cavemen putting on a show. And why on earth would anyone pay the entrance fee when the light is too dim to see the magic. Magic isn't believe-able when it can't be seen. There is all too much of "it must be so because the movie says it is so" no matter how utterly preposterous it is in today's cinema -- Ocean's Eleven is another example.

It's all in English but the deliveries are so bad that it is often impossible to make out what they are saying. Instead of shooting a scene again to get it right, they just write a repeat into the script so you can get it the second or third time it happens.

Yuk---I want my money back. A Royal Nonesuch through and through.

I can see why it is soooooo important to check the spoiler box on the review when the only reason to see a movie is to get a few moments of disgust at the end of the film when at long last the Scooby Doo moment finally slouches onto the screen. Please leave Scooby Doo to Scooby Doo -- he is so much better at it.

This review gives everything away, so see the movie first.

It is neither allegory nor satire, the two finest categories in both fiction and cinema, and yet it approaches perfection anyway. It is of a nature I have no name for, but it is a nature that reveals truth and undermines falsehoods.

Nothing is more cloaked in falsehood than the victor's depiction of past wars. It is especially true of the children of the victors--especially the children of US WWII veterans, like myself.

We get our view of the war from movies like Audi Murphy in To Hell and Back or Saving Private Ryan. Nothing but praise for our heroes and cheers for killing the enemy.

But QT exposes this hypocrisy by engineering a film where we are disgusted first by the excesses of the enemy and then by the excesses of our heroes. That is the first instance. The hypocrisy is slammed home in the second instance where we are first disgusted by the sight of American after American being shot dead by by a German sniper hero and secondly brought to revel in the butchery of several hundred enemy at the hands of our heroes. Tit for tat.

It fits the pattern of praise for our heroes and cheers for killing the enemy, but because it is presented both ways the hypocrisy becomes self- evident. This is why so many people hate the movie--even if they fail to realize it. High art, true art, 10 of 10.

I have to wonder if the other reviewers actually watched the movie seeing all the inaccuracies in the plot summaries. Here is what actually happens. Mason is a loser in New York resorting to a life of petty crime. But he is a failure at even that, and has been getting by ratting out other criminals to a detective he knows. But even the detective treats him like slime. Mason turns the tables on the detective when he is sent into a crime den with $7000 to make a buy. Inside he is dumped on as usual, but he comes out and sends the detective in to make the bust as if he had set the criminal up as planned. Whereupon he steals the money and flees to Miami--flying first class and trying hard to enjoy it. He irritates the traveler sitting next to him in first class by lighting up a stogie. Just seeing how much air travel has deteriorated since those days is worth the full price of admission. The detective is up the creek for losing the money. The detective can barely keep his job, but manages to have the incident suppressed while he pursues Mason on his own time. Not only does he have to drive, but he gets victimized by one of the notorious I95 gas stations in Georgia, and again by a Georgia cop. This gives Mason enough time to get dumped on over and over and finally run into a plain Jane from long island who has been dumped on herself. They hit it off. Their unlikely romance is good for both of them. But finally, the detective catches up. But the money is gone. After a lot of failed attempts to get the money back, the detective decides to ripoff local drug pushers. This plan actually succeeds, but Mason has been truly saved through his new found love. Roles are reversed, the detective is now the criminal and mason is reformed--he won't even take the $100 the detective offers to help him get set up (the detective is content with the heroin and expects to make a killing back in NYC).

So the movie is about the redeeming power of love; the frailties and humanity in everyone. Mason is unmistakably Mason. It suffers from low budget. If the writing was a little better and the sound tracks were a little better, it would be a classic. Today it also suffers from having the wrong sixties stamp on it--films without much finish were fashionable then, or maybe people preferred their entertainment less flashy and more cerebral. Or more moralizing.

It is Mason's version of On the Waterfront.

This is a disgusting film filled with offensive feminist propaganda from front to back. Show this to children you hate; children whose minds you wish polluted and whose growth you wish stunted. It is basically hate.

It is astonishing that this drivel isn't banned outright.

I have to re-evaluate the work of Don Rickles, Pierce Brosnan and Gary Oldman in light of their revolting contributions to this vile film.

Cheap animation, cheap music, production values and creative content about the same as Felix the Cat. Sounds so much like a Felix the Cat film that I suspect common creative talent--but don't care enough to actually find out.

Husband and wife in difficult circumstances on an African farm, which I first took to be in South Africa, but must actually be in Rhodesia, are condemned to a zombie-like existence in Hell because of their perverse monomanias. (Or, it is a feminist tract, and I just don't get it.)

Allegorically all about white ruled Africa. And it rings true all these years later.

Very difficult to watch. Unrelentingly harsh. I'll bet the book is equally hard to read.

Some award-meriting performance. Sun Tsu tells us the the best generals go unrecognized because they achieve victory in sure, quiet ways. Perhaps the best acting is also overlooked.

Hercules becomes amnesiac after drinking from the waters of Lethe. For years, the beautiful queen Omphale has been abducting warrior men who become amnesiacs off to her exotic paradise island where they give themselves up to sexual pleasures until the day she tires of them. That's the day they die, only to be immortalized as statuary in her garden of conquests. Hercules soon finds himself abducted and like all the others he is her completely willing slave.

But this time her soldiers bring back Hercules' traveling companion Ulysses, who has saved his life by pretending to be the hero's deaf-mute body servant. Ulysses continues in that role during Hercules' captivity and by keeping Hercules from drinking more of the magical water, restores his memory.

'I've been tricked by the gods.' is his summation of the situation. After all, he had been on an important mission of state with his wife the virtual hostage of a madman when all this happened. Of course he gets away, the first of Ompahle's slaves to escape her net. She statue-tizes herself over the lose and the movie moves on to its conclusion.

All Sons of Hercules movies have this same plot: Hercules falls under the sway of a powerful, beautiful and evil woman but comes to his senses and saves the day. At its core it is about sex and the taboo predilection of men to seek this enslavement. This plot is not fashionable any more. Too much sexual freedom in modern society has robbed it of its power. But it had power (over men) in the sixties, and this film exploited it expertly.

This movie came in a box of four CDs with four movies on each. A bargain at under $20 for all sixteen. The surprise is that many of them are quite good. If Hollywood's version of the Trojan War (vapid CGI, stars that can't act, gratuitous sex, ten years of war compressed into two weeks) leaves you disappointed, you might try fare like this --- well recommended by its lack of mass appeal.

In this case.

True story, strong conflicts, real motivations, real complexities, real trains. The first derailment is positively the real thing. If you ever wondered what a derailment might look like, then this is it. The final derailment off a bridge looks real too, although can't be sure. If it is a model it is way better than the crummy model-based train wreak in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

If you ever wondered what life was like in eastern Europe in the thirties, here is a little window, better than the Sound of Music, in this regard.

And you get a glimpse at train killer's motivations and techniques as well as the police's.

One of the nice things about this fine movie is that there is nothing else like it. It pulls you into a world once real and now almost entirely forgotten. I particularly like the interlude where Bogart and Jones stroll along a vast, empty Italian balcony overlooking the sea so far below. Another nice touch is when they come up to the ship they took to the lifeboats from, not sunk at all, just like in Lord Jim. It is too subtle for today's tastes, and that just makes it all the more delicious. Very fine. If you like Chuck Norris or Steven Segal stay away from this one---you won't like it. But if you like Gene Wolf, well, it feels very much like that.