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tetanurae
Reviews
El laberinto del fauno (2006)
A shallow gore-fest
I was very excited to see this film. It got excellent reviews and looked incredible from the previews. The previews lie the the reviewers lie. There is nothing in this film worth seeing; unless of course you like gratuitous gore.
The film begins with young Ofelia and her pregnant mother Carmen traveling to a remote mill in rural Spain in 1944. The Spanish Civil War is officially over, but the fascist government is still fighting guerrillas in the countryside. They are traveling because Carmen has recently married a officer in Franco's army, Captain Vidal.
Early on in the film several characters are rather transparently labeled as "good" and "evil." We see Mercedes, a maid in the household, rather clumsily helping the rebels. And we see Captain Vidal brutally murder a farmer.
Vidal's men captured two farmers who were hunting for rabbits. They are interrogated, and then accused of being Communists. When the younger farmer pleads innocence, Vidal smashes him in the face with the bottom of a wine bottle. After two blows, the farmer falls out of the shot.
This where the film and I parted ways. Instead of continuing to show Vidal beat on the man just out of the frame, we're treated to a close up of Vidal smashing the bottle into the man's face at least ten times until nothing is left but a bloody pulp.
Vidal's men can look away in disgust. Why can't the camera afford us the same courtesy? After this gratuitous brutality, we're treated to a later scene where Mercedes, finally discovered by Vidal, pulls out a paring knife that she had hid in her dress, cuts the ropes that bind her wrists and then attacks Vidal. She doesn't kill him of course, she just stabs him in the back, in the stomach, and then cuts a gash across his face giving him a "Joker" smile. We're again treated to close-ups of this wound while Vidal's men look away in disgust. And then we're treated to an excruciatingly unnecessary minute long scene of him stitching up his cheek, and then drinking a shot of liquor that creates a great deal of bleeding (aparently for comic effect).
Ofelia's fantasy world (which is what the movie trailers claimed the movie was all about) account for possibly 15% of the entire film. Many people have claimed that the fantasy land is a metaphor for what's going on the real world, or her way of coping, yet Ofelia never witnesses the brutality of her step father.
In the end Carmen dies, Dr Ferreira dies, Vidal dies, Ofelia dies, and I couldn't really care.
Apocalypto (2006)
Very good in parts, and very very bad in parts
I saw Apocalypto yesterday afternoon because I was genuinely curious what the movie would be like. I left conflicted as the movie is really good and really bad at the same time.
The Good: 1) Acting in general was quite good and it was exciting to see so many native actors.
2) Costuming was also quite impressive, detailed, intricate, and diverse. It's honestly award-worthy.
3) The scenes in and around Generic Mayan City were incredible, believable, and amazing. This is the first and only time I can say I've had a genuine feel for what a Pre-Columbian city in Central America would have actually been like, despite having visited some, seen tons of dioramas, and Discovery Channel CGI. If these were real sets (I imagine a lot of it was CGI), they deserve awards.
The Bad: 1) No one in Jaguar Paw's village seemed to know anything about the fact there was a huge city full of hostile people less than two days walk from them. They seem genuinely shocked that they were being attacked and genuinely curious as to where they were going. This would be akin to people in Anaheim being unaware of the existence of Los Angeles....
2) The scenes of human sacrifice seem to be much more in line with what actually happened in Aztec cities, not Mayan, and even then on these types of sacrifices happened on extremely rare occasions.
3) The Maya were arguably the best astronomers in the pre-scientific world and would have known an eclipse was coming. It probably wouldn't have surprised the crowd and certainly wouldn't have surprised the priests.
4) After Jaguar Paw escaped he ran, and ran, and ran, and ran without stopping for literally 36 hours. And he was shot with arrows. Twice! And he jumped off the top of a waterfall at least 50 feet high! If he's such an invincible superman, how the hell did he get captured in the first place? 5) The scenes of Seven and Turtle Run (Jaguar Paw's wife and child) trapped in the well are superfluous, and well... silly. Add to that the fact that a few hours of rain causes the well to fill up with 6 to 8 feet of water despite the fact that it was empty when they went down into it.
6) The gore was overdone. I'm not saying this as a person who is afraid of blood (although if you are afraid of blood, do not see this movie), but someone who can see the line between necessary and excessive. Hunting, human sacrifice, and animal maulings are all real things that really are really bloody. But do we need to see a jaguar chew a man's face off? For three scenes? Does blood rhythmically squirting out of a wound really need to be seen? After the gore-fest we've endured Jaguar Paw finally kills his main tormentor with a blow to the head, but it just seemed cartoonish and over the top it caused the entire theater to erupt in laughter.
7) AND THEN THE Spanish SHOW UP! Talk about anachronistic! The decline of the classical Maya civilization happened almost 600 years before the Spanish arrived in Maya lands, and the great cities with the stepped pyramids were abandoned and overgrown with jungle at that time. Shall we have Elizabeth I and Shakespeare talking on cell phones in movies from now on? I could live with this movie if it was about the decline of the Aztecs, and the last days of Tenochtitlan, as almost nothing would have to be changed, but forcing the Maya into this framework just sinks the movie.
Crash (2004)
utterly unwatchable
If I could score this movie a negative eleven, I would.
Look, I get it, racism is bad. We all get it. Most people actually aren't racists. It's true! Racism still exists, but guess what, no one forgot.
This movie is nothing more than a series of vignettes with no central story. There is a theme, of course, and that theme is racism. But no story. Just an hour and forty-five minutes of being bludgeoned to death by the unsubtle writing acted out by one-dimensional characters in a morality play that makes "Reefer Madness" seem level-headed.
What the writer and director (and apparently a lot of IMDb reviewers) don't understand is there's a rather big difference between "in your face" and "being hit in the face with a frying pan." Don't see this movie. Don't buy into the hype. Don't waste your money. Just turn your TV onto any "very special" episode of Blossom or anything on the Lifetime Channel, and you've already seen this movie.
Jurassic Park (1993)
Big bad dinosaurs go after little stupid people
I honestly liked Jurassic Park in 1993, and I still like it now. That does not mean that it is not without its major (I mean MAJOR problems), the first of which is that:
1) The human characters are poorly developed and appear to be escapees from a mental institution rather than "paleontologists," "mathematicians," "lawyers," "bazillionaires," or "computer programers" because any human being with even a deminished mental capacity would know that being trapped on an island with many multiton predators is a very very bad idea, and that instead of going on "the tour" they should have been going to the heli-pad. [though I know there wouldn't be much of a movie]
2) The dinosaurs looked like crapola. Now I realise that this goes counter to all the information you've previously heard or stated yourself but 99.99999% of the accuracy reports were from non-paleontologists. Now you're getting one from a paleontologist. For starters the Velociraptor were about 3x as large as the largest Velociraptor specimens found to date. There are fragments of Velociraptor relatives about as large as the JP Raptors, but again, they looked nothing like the JP Raptors. Speilberg did this just to make them scarier. The Dilophosaurus on the other hand was far too small, and DID NOT have that skin frilly thing [nor did it spit anything].
There is so much more wrong with this movie's dinosaurs, but I do not want to bore.