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boylel
Reviews
Death Sentence (2007)
stinks on ice
I have to admit that I fast-forwarded through most of the "dramatic chase" and some of the long pans, so I might have missed something, but in what I saw, I don't believe any two human beings ever interacted, or any individual ever responded to a situation, in any way resembling reality.
If your family is threatened, you don't go home and sit on the stairs with a baseball bat. You move them to a hotel or to a friend's home.
When confronted with evidence that a man had killed somebody, the police won't scold him for starting a war, they at least take him in for questioning.
etc, etc, throughout the entire badly-written shoot-em-up.
Chalk (2006)
True to life?
I rented the DVD because I come from a family of teachers, and one of them recommended that I watch the film in order to gain a better understanding of their jobs. I found it to be entertaining, but I obviously didn't appreciate it as much as teachers seem to, just as they probably don't appreciate all of the humor I find in "Office Space".
The teachers who call this "true to life" must mean this in the same sense that a Korean War veteran once told me that M*A*S*H was true to life-- as a good caricature of some of the more extreme people and situations, intermixed with some reminders of what daily life was like, not as anything close to a realistic snapshot.
I don't want to believe that there are really very many high school teachers like that. I wouldn't expect students to feel much respect for any of them.
Time for me to get back to my TPS reports.
Basic (2003)
Too bad they rewrote it (Spoilers)
**SPOILERS**
Travolta and Jackson were both fun to watch, but Connie Nielsen ruined every scene she was in, for me. One minute she has an accent, the next she just sounds like an amateur reading lines. From the DVD, it looked like there was some tension between Travolta and Nielsen. I think I can understand why.
From the DVD interviews, I get the impression that there was originally a screenplay that was internally consistent, but John Travolta didn't want to be a bad guy and somebody decided that Sam Jackson shouldn't really die.
The result is a movie that is hated by those who feel betrayed by plot twists, loved by people who love twists, but don't think too deeply about what's supposed to have happened, and also hated by those who like a good twist, but only if it all makes sense in the end.
Too many people seem to be willing to write it off as hard to understand, rather than simply wildly inconsistent.
At the end, we're supposed to ignore the blood on Travolta's shower curtain, accept that he managed to manipulate his way into being assigned to the interrogation, that a covert team somehow managed to go through an entire training program without being noticed by the camp commander or their teammate, that Kendall was both working with Travolta and was a bad guy, that people who were known on base can freely wander around town without being noticed, and many other points that just don't add up.