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Reviews
Mr. Brooks (2007)
Good, at best, mediocre at worst
There's nothing really bad about Mr. Brooks, but there's nothing really great about him, either. Say what you will about the main character, he does manage to be a likable persona on screen, whether he's stabbing, murdering, or dealing with his box company.
The plot seems basic on the surface: Mr. Brooks, a psychotic businessman in Portland, Oregon is having trouble keeping his bad side under control. But, as the movie goes along, it adds a few twists and turns, such as a pregnant daughter, a suspicious investigator, and Mr. Brooks' own private fan.
While the story is good enough, the film is lacking. Fairly dull cinematography, flat dialogue, struggling characters and a boring soundtrack all add up to severely soften the blow that the film should have had. This is not to say that Mr. Brooks is without its moments of genius, which include the scariest gunshot noises I've ever heard, a very inventive shootout, and a harsh stabbing scene married to a mellow song.
Still, not even such nuggets of brilliance can save Mr. Brooks from it(him?)self, and the film falls flat; perhaps, in the hands of a more able director, things would have been different, but that is not the case.
Overall, while missing the zing of similar and better films (see: American Psycho, Falling Down), Mr. Brooks is worth watching.
7/10
Meet the Hollowheads (1989)
Bright, colourful, inventive, scary, and nauseating.
I wouldn't have given this movie more than a five if it hadn't been so inventive. The mother and daughter both gave fabulous performances, but I can't say the same for the rest of the crew. The sets were overcolourful and far too "Saved By The Bell" for my tastes. I would have liked this movie even more if we'd been allowed to have seen more of the world in which the Hollowheads live in. There were a few moments in this where I just had to fast-forward because nothing was happening (the Splatspray game, for instance). Very inventive, and a few good lines. But for the most part, the awful oversaturated sets and nauseatingly bad acting just kind of brought it down. A few moments made me feel as if I were riding a bad haunted house.
This would be an interesting movie to remake with better production values.
Alexander (2004)
Molasses-drenched and truly annoying
Alexander was one of the dullest, slowest films I have ever seen. I can handle slow films. Many slow films are true masterpieces- (insert here some great examples that have yet to pop into my frontal lobes). Ooh, kind of like Alien. Slow, slow start, and then picks up the pace. 2001. Finding Neverland. But this was just...gah. It plodded along at a cold-molasses-in-tar-pit-in-ice-age speed. Much of the plot was incomprehensible. The pink fight scene was irritating. I actually wandered off and poked in on other films and played some of the games in the lobby. By the time I crashed back into the theater I swear, honest to god, that Alexander was still on the same sentence. When the film's credits finally creeped along the screen, many people were asleep, being shaken awake by family members unlucky enough to have held consciousness through all five thousand hours of nothing.
I felt guilty about spending half an hour in the lobby playing pinball and gorging myself on popcorn refills, so I bought a second ticket and saw the film again with one thought: "I am going to sit through this thing if it kills me." So I did. Of course, not much of it was spent in consciousness- scenes jumped ahead for no apparent reason until halfway through I realised I'd been asleep in bits. I managed to stay awake through the remainder of the film, surviving my gnawing my knees off. I could barely remember any of the film, it creeped along so slowly. And I left the cinema depressed that we've evolved thousands of years and we land ourselves with this.
What was bad about the film? Well, for one thing it was...s....l....o....o....w....w..... Even the action sequences were s...l...o...w... Hell, the sex scenes went something like "p...e...l...v...i...c... t...h...r...u...s...t... a........h.......h......" Second, bad acting. Terrible. I don't know what they were doing on screen, but it seemed like everyone had drunk five gallons of Robitussin and then ate snails off of the streets of Las Angeles before filming. Then, we have the rather bizarre pink sequence where everyone on screen is dying and Alexander is dying and the audience is dying or having acid flashbacks of pink elephants. No joke, you actually see pink elephants in this film.
What was good? I'm going to cliché your intestines out your ears, but it's true- the ending. It felt like I was a man who'd been tortured for five days straight and then was pumped full of marijuana. It felt goooood.
And the nap did me well, too.
The Office (2005)
Not as bad as I thought it would be, but...
When I found out that they were making an American version of The Office, one of the most heart-stoppingly good situation comedies, I thought, "Why?" I thought that it would be simply awful, like many Americanised shows. I found a link for the Myspace pilot. I started it, and it actually wasn't too bad. It really wasn't. I really enjoyed it. It was really good. One of the funniest bits was where Mr. Brown got the little card that said "black" (I won't go further than that, and the show didn't go too far into that anyways, but it was really funny just seeing that). To be honest, it was one of the most excellent Americanisations of a British shows. There were some great moments, like the east Indian woman coming back into the room and the boss going "Hallo! Welcom to my stor! Vuld yu like sum gooki-gooki? Tri my gooki-gooki!".
However, I felt much of the time that the characters were rather lifeless. You couldn't really feel for them. They weren't as deep or real as the original BBC characters, to whom you could relate even if you'd never been in an office. The boss just wasn't good enough for what the original set the bar as (the David Brent character going down in history as "most annoying boss"), although he tries, really hard. One never really gets into Jim, who was originally Tim (good one, NBC). Pam (aka Dawn) isn't quite as well-played as Dawn's character. And the hideous syncophant (Gareth) has been replaced by a simply-annoying Dwight.
But what really makes the show a lifeless slug is the running time, which is barely twenty minutes. The whole thing seems far too rushed, and there just isn't enough material to satisfy the typical BBC-Office-watcher. The jokes aren't quite as good as the original, and there are so few of them. The pilot never really goes into anything, although the real show may prove different. However, a good feature in The Office is that NBC didn't spring for a laugh track, which would've ruined the show.
All in all, The Office is a feeble shadow of its British counterpart, but it still manages to please.