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Furzele
Reviews
Songcatcher (2000)
Good story, great music
We recently found out that friends of ours who share a love of music by real singer-songwriters (say, Richard Thompson or Iris Dement or Loudon Wainwright) had never seen this movie. Hooray, an excuse to watch it again! If for nothing else but the chance to see Iris Dement (the headliner in the cast as far as we're concerned) act as well as sing.
The wonderful contrast between the very white bread muzak version of Barbry Allen at the beginning and the much more human one by the folks who passed it down later on in the film is for me what the movie is all about. Seems to me that several prior reviewers just didn't get it at all, and should repair to their Osmonds-Welk culture bunker to avoid further psychic damage and confusion.
War of the Worlds (2005)
Achingly bad
This movie is bad not because they didn't have a huge CGI and effects budget, but because of a disjointed story line, wooden extras with improbable reactions over-played to the point of campiness, an Aussie dressed like an episcopal priest and talking crapture like some evangelical minister fixated on Leviticus and Revelations, illogical situations, and bad science to boot.
More than anything this seems to be the cinematic equivalent of those quicky paperback "ripped from the headlines" books. It's mind-bogglingly pathetic, so if you need to up your wince quota, have atcha. I have to admit I kept watching just to see how bad it would continue to be, and only in that regard I wasn't disappointed. Imagine a 1950s Albanian drive-in movie and it all falls into place.