Change Your Image
gkhubbard
Reviews
L'arciere delle mille e una notte (1962)
Very silly but lots of fun.
Some reviewers have sought to compare this movie with other, far better films. That's pointless. This was never intended to compete with 'The Thief of Bagdad.'
It suffers from a plot that borrows bits and pirces from a dozen other films, and staring everyone from Shirley Temple to Steve Reeves.
This is made worse by very weak direction. As you watch, it seems as though the director was bored one day and decided to make a movie with the other kids on the playground. No pith, no crunching drama, no real threats, no direction. The kids I watched it with enjoyed the film, but they also criticized the direction. "What direction?"
HOWEVER, this film is still lots of fun. With adults, everyone had fun identifying the stolen bits of plot, and enjoying the surprisingly good use of the technicolor process, and the equally good use of real locations. With the children, they actually simply had fun, although as noted above, today's children are very observant and knowledgeable.
It was lots of fun, and never meant to be Shakespeare.
Upgrade (2018)
Again and again and again, and over and over....
Like almost everybody, I need to suspend my belief in reality to enjoy a film, particularly a sci-fi movie such as Upgrade. This means that there must be characters who are sympathetic enough and real enough for us to care about them. No matter how outlandish, the world they inhabit must also build quickly to create its own reality, so characters we find interesting have a world that we find believable in which to act out the plot.
One reviewer of this movie wrote that 'This film is basically "Robocop" meets "Death Wish......."
For me, this movie was a complete failure; basically, it's a retreading of the Matrix series, but without its ineffable charms, and with bits of 'Brazil' and other films thrown in for variety.
So my first reaction was I've seen all this before. Anyone can retread plot developments if they create intriguing twists. For example, the first Matrix was interesting. However, like so many successful Hollywood products, the executives smelled money, and they've been reproducing the formula like horny rabbits. They add variety with the death of a major character or something else they hope will be shocking enough to cover the plot's ordinariness, or worse, simply changing a few details and using the same ideas again and again.
So now we come to 'Upgrade.' Its creators simply took jolting and quirky chunks from other films - those mentioned above among others - and dropped them into a computerized cinematic blender, and presto-chango, out popped a script.
It is very, very easy to manipulate an audience. Afterall, you simply need to jump out and yell 'BOO!' Just watch 'Wait Until Dark,' with Audrey Hepburn, from 1967, or on a far, far less intelligent level, almost any mad slasher movie.
This is simply a long and not particularly interesting mad slasher movie, set in a borrowed sci-fi setting.
Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
It Is Criminal That Anyone Actually Spent Money Making This Schlock
This picture is inconceivably bad in so many ways, I wouldn't know where to begin to describe its faults.
If I could give this movie a negative number, it would be somewhere in the minus 100s, perhaps lower.
My favorite line, I believe I am quoting it correctly, is ' Members of the Lost Party were never seen again....'
Watch this brain numbing turkey at your own peril, and remember you could have done something more productive, such as counting the individual squares of tissue in you favorite roll of toilet paper.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Creepy but empty film.
This film excites its admirers in ways I do not begin to understand. Various fans have written about the exciting visions of past classical and Christian symbols and the mysteries in each scene. There are elaborate comparisons to films and television series before and since this film was made.
However, any film, whether an art film, or something less experimental, must have a core of substance, something to hang its plot on, an anchor from which to spin the tale. Then, of course, the plot must unspiral in a way that seduces the viewer into suspending their everyday world view, and experience the film almost as though they are a participant.
There are many films that do not provide the information needed to resolve their plots, and the viewers are left to make sense, from their individual perspectives, of the unsolved mysteries. Step back from the seductive Australian-ness of the cinematography, and some good acting, and it becomes clear that 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' does not have an anchoring core. The plot line of people vanishing into the unknown from a mass of rock has been used before, notably in a 1960s pulp science fiction horror story.
It is reminiscent of the plots of the 'X Files,' where creepy events became the launching points of the individual plots, but the creepy incidents were nearly all initiated by aliens. That made the plots easy to write. You didn't need any real substance, just alien 'magic' and stereotypes. A notable exception was an episode centered in a haunted house with Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner. Here, the well-written plot moves forward quickly toward the unexpected ending.
In any production, it's easy to scare an audience, just jump out, yell 'boo!' like 'Wait Until Dark.' And it is easy to write an inexplicable plot element into a script to catch an audience's attention. The challenge is to develop these disturbing incidents into a coherent plot. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' has failed to accomplish this despite sinister incidents spread over some two hours running time.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Creepy but empty film.
This film excites its admirers in ways I do not begin to understand. Various fans have written about the exciting visions of past classical and Christian symbols and the mysteries in each scene. There are elaborate comparisons to films and television series before and since this film was made.
However, any film, whether an art film, or something less experimental, must have a core of substance, something to hang its plot on, an anchor from which to spin the tale. Then, of course, the plot must unspiral in a way that seduces the viewer into suspending their everyday world view, and experience the film almost as though they are a participant.
There are many films that do not provide the information needed to resolve their plots, and the viewers are left to make sense, from their individual perspectives, of the unsolved mysteries. Step back from the seductive Australian-ness of the cinematography, and some good acting, and it becomes clear that 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' does not have an anchoring core. The plot line of people vanishing into the unknown from a mass of rock has been used before, notably in a 1960s pulp science fiction horror story.
It is reminiscent of the plots of the 'X Files,' where creepy events became the launching points of the individual plots, but the creepy incidents were nearly all initiated by aliens. That made the plots easy to write. You didn't need any real substance, just alien 'magic' and stereotypes. A notable exception was an episode centered in a haunted house with Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner. Here, the well-written plot moves forward quickly toward the unexpected ending.
In any production, it's easy to scare an audience, just jump out, yell 'boo!' like 'Wait Until Dark.' And it is easy to write an inexplicable plot element into a script to catch an audience's attention. The challenge is to develop these disturbing incidents into a coherent plot. 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' has failed to accomplish this despite sinister incidents spread over some two hours running time.