With actors like Depardieu and Richard it is really a hard task to make a dull movie. But Weber is a master in setting a slow pace and making supposedly funny scenes without any wits and depth. This movie is high on story but low on character. You never get to know any of the characters except for superficial slapstick. Unfortunately Weber has no idea what slapstick is all about. His style could be described at hit and miss. Of course some people laugh when they see someone slip on a banana peel. Weber directs his humor at this lot. It is a shame how bad he uses good talent. Many good french comedians have been wasted away by mediocre directors.
Reviews
4 Reviews
8 Women
(2002)
Beware! Big disappointment ahead!
23 February 2007
Rumor had it that "8 Women" is a great movie and the ideal vehicle for some of the most appealing actresses of the french screen. So I went to see it with high expectations. Unfortunately this film not only didn't live up to my expectations, it is in fact disastrously bad. First, you don't give a damn for the phony stock characters and you pity the talent, that had to play them. Also, you don't care who the victim was, and why he was murdered in the first place. The whole thing is an embarrassing and dated whodunit; just the kind of movie a Hitchcock would have abhorred. Funny enough, just when this thought came to my mind, on the screen there came a shot of three characters filmed through the flames from within a fireplace: something Hitchcock and Truffaut discarded as bad cinema in their famous lengthy interview. As if the director himself became aware of the dullness of his movie he suddenly throws in a singing and dancing act that has no motivation whatsoever and simply left me confused. Little did I know that the whole movie was supposed to be a semi-musical. Whenever a filmmaker is in trouble in comedy he resorts to musical numbers. For it takes wits to make a funny scene; whilst for a dancing or singing scene all you need is a choreographer. There is no imagination, no fun, no suspense, no deeper meaning. The film is enormously stagy. Not even in a theater play this sort of "wait-for-your-cue-then-say- your-line"-way of acting would be tolerated. This is clearly a producer's film. All he did was to throw in a number of stars and have a mediocre director stage them delivering their lines. Period. There's nothing more to this. Maybe you could view this movie as a model example of what film is not about.
Van Helsing
(2004)
this film wants to be a roller-coaster ride but isn't
1 January 2007
watching this flic I hardly ever found myself on the edge of my seat; it's never really funny or suspenseful or shocking or whatever. films of this kind simply steal from other movies and try to enhance the experience by giving "more of the same" plus pumping up the volume. Here you've got the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and Mr. Hyde teaming up in a story that makes no sense at all. You wonder what this actually is all about. If you want to see a good horror spoof go way back to Roman Polansky's _The Fearless Vampire Killers_ - now taking the enormous production value that went into this movie it is really a shame how little comes back to the audience. But this movie has no point. It's loud, it's always in motion but it never gets off the ground.
Logan's Run
(1976)
Lack of imagination
4 June 2005
Today this pic seems hopelessly dated. Most of the ingredients also appear in other similar movies of the time like "Soylent Green" or "Rollerball" for instance. The depicted world of Logan has no credibility to it whatsoever. No attention has been paid to detail, there's no sense of humor, all the futuristic apparatus look like rip-off from Star Trek. Yet, it's all too naive to make you feel touched by a sense of doom. Compare it to George Lucas' "THX-1138" and you know what I mean. The dialog is always straightforward, nobody - except maybe the Peter Ustinov-character - ever makes any casual remarks, the approach is so damn serious that at the end it just gets ludicrous. The very best thing about Logan's Run is Jerry Goldsmith's score. Apart from typical sci-fi-synthesizer-doodle he delivers his trademark ominous strings with piano and percussion effects that are sometimes way more dramatic and interesting than the unimaginative scenes they accompany.
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