harald Reviews

A Hole in My Heart (2004)

Movie-making gone bad

[4/10 · 19 October 2004]

This movie seems mostly to want to make the audience feel bad.

It also seems to want to make audience never want to see a pornographic movie again.

Its style is you peeking into the production of a pornographic movie, where you get to know the characters through very harsh effects.

All the characters have life stories with varying degrees of bad pasts, and certainly they've hit rock bottom since they are in this story.

The characters are good, the acting is good, the technical style of the movie is intentionally made home-video-like, and this is also done in a good fashion.

The story is simple. The people in this "family" have lives gone bad. (You may well reflect that the world has gone bad since there is an audience for this movie, or for the movies they are making in this movie)

You get the point after fifteen minutes, there is very little development after that. You get deeper into the minds of the different characters, and the story is cemented over and over - but after half an hour I was longing for the end - not only because of the at times disgusting scenes, but also because I felt I'd got the point (if I got the point at all). The only reason for staying is to push your own limit to what you can stand to see on a movie screen.

Hellborn (2003)

Entertaining but cheap

[3/10 · 5 January 2004]

If I have to give this movie a score on a linear scale, then I have to give it a low score 3/10.

But it was entertaining, and there are several good things to say about the movie.

The psychiatrist candidate James Bishop is assigned to St. Andrews Hospital for his resident, and is exited and eager to "change the world".

From the beginning of the movie you know that the hospital is hiding an evil truth, but James thinks he can make a difference and doesn't recognise this evil.

The story builds fairly well, you know all the time that there is a truth in what the patients are telling about some resident evil, and wonder when and how James will discover this. Also when the break comes, James is in a way hunted by the evil, and you feel some suspense until "the fight" is over.

Add an innocent beautiful girlfriend that arrives at the worst possible time and other standard horror elements, and you get the picture.

The character buildup is actually fairly good, you are introduced to most of the people that gets killed, some of them you "get to know".

The film sets an unpleasant scene, this is also done fairly well. There are mysteries that are unveiled - in an acceptable way.

The main character, James is very believable - the story about an eager student starting to work is good in this setting.

What kills this movie is: * Stupid special effects - a modern version of "Plan 9 from outer space"-type bad (the evil monster looks like a red scarecrow) * Some bad acting (or probably very few takes when filming) - The main characters sometimes acts badly, and somtimes good. * The sound is at times very cheap.

I kept thinking "I could make a movie like this with my home video camera" throughout the film.

The Sea Change (1998)

Surprisingly nice movie

[7/10 · 4 January 2003]

Before watching movies on the TV I often check IMDB to see if the movie is worth while watching.

I was not expecting too much when I saw the score of 4.8 at the time, but I read the reviews, and decided to watch it.

Movie summary

Rupert is an achieving and hard working business man, trampling on everyone at work, and without the capability to be nice to the one he loves. But from the beginning you get some indications that he is a nice man underneath.

Alison is a more relaxed and nice woman who somehow has fallen in love with Rupert.

Rupert decides to go to Barcelona to close a deal, on an important day for both Rupert and Alison. He gets stuck on his way back, and is stuck with "common people", and he is not able to hold his promises to Alison.

The rest of the story I leave to watchers of the movie, but the main story holds few surprises.

Very quickly you get to know the characters, some of the characters are maybe a little bit unrealistic, but you get the point for their roles. You also feel for all the main characters, and you do want to know how the film ends.

The film has a very "cheap" look, it is obvious that it doesn't have a high budget. The music score is maybe the worst part of the production, some of the dialouge is bad. But the most important parts of communications are ok, I particularly liked the character Chas (Ray Winstone), save the over-common clothing.

The film has a light mood to it, and is 100% not Hollywood. It has a resemblance to a farce on theater, but its story is serious enough.

I very much enjoyed the movie, and recommend it to everyone, it is probably not a movie for action-loving youth.

It was first after watching the movie, when I returned to IMDB to give my score of 7 that I discovered that the weighting system of IMDB has been very unfair to this movie. It has (at the time of writing) a score of 4.8, and a arithmetic mean of 7.3. I never hesitate to watch movies with a score around 7, but below 5 is not normally my movie.

Too Smooth (1998)

Fair try, enjoyable movie

[6/10 · 24 November 2002]

The movie is like a short-story, almost like an episode in a standard romantic/funny series. One episode is described, very few characters.

The plot is about a guy who is stuck in his old tricks when he really falls in love with a girl. You can guess the rest of the story from that sentence.

Some reviews I have read tells this is a guy sweet-talking a girl to a one-night stand, and afterwards falling in love (the standard story). But I like to take what happened in the beginning as "a fact", a girl meets a boy, they are interested in each others, the boys character and history complicates the situation.

So, it is not really a very complicated or enriching or anything, but it is a fair try to make a romantic movie.

Most of the main characters are built good enough. Both Danny (Dean Paras) and Peter Angelo (David DeLuise), along with other people from Danny's past are described through a look-back which works. They both play their roles well. Tim (Stefan Brogren) is presented as a mix between a heterosexual gay person, a strange artist, a looser and an a**hole. He is a bit too weird. Corey (Katie Wright) is an adorable "normal girl", by other reviews accused of being naive - but she isn't really.

Renee Weber (Neve Campbell) is a former girlfriend which Danny tricked in high-school, and she is obsessed with that still. I think Neve Campbell is playing badly in this movie. Her character is much less believable than the others. Jennifer (Rebecca Gayheart) is the most shallow character, I think it is not the actor as much as a problem with the script that makes her performance feel bad.

The progress of the film is fair enough. It starts with the background stuff, continues with a romantic sequence where the characters shows themselves, and sort of climaxes just before the end, after interference plots has played their part to affect the outcome of the film.

So, if you want to see a movie played well enough, at least as good as a standard TV-series, with a beginning and an end, with a romantic and somewhat complicated story which makes you feel good at the end - this movie should work for you.

I recently saw the 2002 version of The Count of Monte Cristo - a film where the filmmakers has destroyed a moderate story by making the last half of the movie a dull listing of on who (not even how) the Count takes his revenge (and of course a stupid happy ending), and saw that it has a 7.5/10 user rating.

This movie does not try to pretend to be much more than it is, and it certainly is a better movie than that movie. I don't feel like give it 7.5, but in its class I feel it deserves 6/10.

Event Horizon (1997)

Too unpleasant?

[6/10 · 29 April 2002]

The movie is a good movie, with a plot that builds fairly well, and with many standard horror-movie ingredients. The main characters play well enough too.

I still hold back on the scoring, because the movie didn't give me enough back for the unpleasantness it presents.

One standard element for horror it uses is playing mind games on the characters - this works (maybe too?) well, especially in the first half of the movie. It also uses graphic and sudden gore, this also adds to the unpleasant feeling. Another standard element is isolation, and the element of being trapped.

Of course, a Horror/Sci-fi is not supposed to be pleasant, but you should have another feeling than just "I am glad the movie is over".