RicardoTheWonk Reviews

Taken (I) (2008)

Awful beyond belief

[27 January 2009]

From the opening sequences full of obviously expositional lines all the way through the formulaic and unconvincing fight sequences, and reaching the final, predictable, inevitable and thoroughly boring Hollywood ending this film was a disappointment. I confess that I have high standards for films, and I expect a little effort in the scriptwriting department.

For people who have one or two brain cells to keep their ears warm with, this film is very boring. The film equivalent of paisley wallpaper.

For those who just want a mindless action film masquerading as a thriller, go for it, but don't expect anything that hasn't already been done a thousand times since the mid 70's. Stephen Segal has done the same stuff for years, and in a more entertaining way.

The Lorax (1972 TV Movie)

A classic cautionary tale about failure of property rights enforcement

[3 October 2008]

Since I was a small child I have always enjoyed this little political message about the fallacy of not having a suitable rights-enforcement body ensuring property rights of individuals in their jurisdictional area are upheld.

The Lorax was clearly the sole caretaker/maintainer/improver of the land, fauna and flora and therefore the proper owner of the idyllic setting the Onceler came across. Rather than attempting to negotiate agreeable use of the land and resources in exchange for recompense, the Onceler just moved his gang in to systematically steal and destroy the Lorax's property (this is revealed in the first 5 minutes of the film).

Clearly this was an anarchic state with no specific judiciary or security forces to enforce property rights. The Lorax, lacking independent power to protect his property had to resort to negotiation, which the Onceler - with greater numbers, finances, and physical resources, and in the absence of any property rights enforcement bodies - was able to safely ignore.

My children love this story. They can appreciate that human rights include property rights, and they see that things would have been better for both the Lorax and the Onceler if a properly constructed rights-enforcing framework had been in place at the outset. Alternately the Lorax could merely have been in possession of a semi-automatic weapon.

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004)

Press "Delete" to continue

[20 January 2007]

I have watched "What the Bleep do we Know", and there's really not much I can say about this film, except that it is complete rubbish. It is a pack of popular misconceptions, misunderstandings and outright lies and intentional misdirection away from honest science. This is packaged as truth and used to support the most ungrounded wishy-washy and vaguely defined "new age" philosophy, which is complete nonsense that is impossible to base a life of reality and reason upon.

The film contains what is worse than a complete misunderstanding and intentional misrepresentation of science, in particular, Quantum Mechanics.

Now, I have a degree in physics, and I can see that almost every time someone opens their mouth in this film, something completely and fundamentally wrong comes out of it. It's a complete farce. It makes your ordinary garden-variety farce look like the blueprints to a battleship by comparison. I can't even begin to describe how wrong this film is. I am flabbergasted. How did this nonsense ever get made? What sort of people are conned by it? Who wants to con them and why? The uncertainty principle is misrepresented. Thermodynamics, especially entropy, is ignored. The atomic model is used in an abusive and dishonest manner. Various bits of junk science are represented as undisputed fact.

What a waste of time. Stay away from this film. It lies to you.

Vanilla Sky (2001)

Average CInema

[2 November 2006]

This film reminds me of the following conversation:

Guy1: You are so predictable...

Guy2: Wibble floob splunk norp floopity snork... I bet you didn't expect me to do that.

Guy1: Something like that.

Vanilla Sky is exactly what you would expect from Hollywood when it tries to be "Alternative". It seems that Hollywood does not understand what makes up alternative cinema, so it takes nonsense, drivel and unconvincing story and plot, and then wraps it in Hollywood glitz, adds a good cast, and says "There you go, I bet you didn't expect me to do that!"

Well, I expected something like that.

This film was barely watchable, annoying, depressingly expected (though not entirely predictable), and unlike similarly styled films such as Memento, Primer, and Run Lola Run, does not bear a second viewing.

It will, however, delight viewers of "Switch Your Brain Off" entertainment for the morally bankrupt middle classes to make themselves feel oh-so-good that they are not like those horrible narcissistic rich people. How nice for them.

4 out of 10.

(I gave 9 out of 10 purely for production values, barely anything for the rest).

The United States of Leland (2003)

Nebulous Plilosophy

[1 November 2006]

The United States of Leyland failed to grab me. While I enjoyed films with a similar cadence and level of human drama such as Lost in Translation, About Schmidt, and Primer - The UnitedStates of Leyland did not key into my interest in the way these other films did.

I feel that the behavior of the characters was universally negative, and portrayed the world as being a vaguely malevolent place in which helpless people live their lives devoid of substantial personal integrity.

The causes of the bad behavior of the characters rely on the snippets of poorly-conceived barroom philosophy to excuse us for being flawed, and as some offering for the reason behind Leylands act. This simply does not work for me. I do not live in the depressing world this film weaves for us, and my belief that we are in control of our own actions does not fit into the films framework.

While the performances of the actors were excellent, and the production values were sound, unfortunately the story was not well conceived. I felt my time was wasted watching this film. I was waiting for a climax or conclusion that never occurred.

5/10

Syriana (2005)

Unengaging, uninspiring, lifeless nonsense.

[7 August 2006]

I want my... (how long was it?) ... 127 minutes back, and my $6 rental fee too.

The plot elements were pure fiction, so why are there so many comments on this board whose authors seem to think this was a documentary, or a news item. This movie does not in any way resemble the world we live in, so we can gain no useful information about the world by watching it.

Given that it's fiction, where exactly was the story? There was no story, just a bunch of stuff that happened -- oops, a bunch of stuff that never happened.

The character development was very poor. No character appears to have more than one dimension - a single motivation - a single track to their brain. Nobody works anything significant out, nobody appears to have any degree of happiness or fulfillment to their lives for more than a couple of lines in the film, and nothing worthwhile is ultimately achieved. Human individuals are represented as helpless disposable pawns with no valid contribution or destiny that they can choose to any benefit.

True art is meant to enhance us in some way. We are supposed walk away from the art seeing the world as a benevolent place for good and able people, and carry with us the feeling that we as individuals can create something good and worthwhile with our lives.

Syriana leaves me in despair that such a poorly intended and executed film won an award. It's nothing but totally wrong on every level:

It's the metaphysical equivalent of conning a a widowed grandmother out or her home, the epistemological equivalent of a lobotomy, the political equivalent of pornography, the ethical equivalent of a snuff film, and the artistic equivalent of Dada.

I want to erase it from my memory.

Mad Dog Time (1996)

Not your usual comedy

[20 March 2005]

I love this movie. It's wacky, funny, violent, surreal, played out in a madman's head, and definitely not your usual comedy.

If you don't find the film amusing then I guess it's just not for your tastes, so this is a tough one to write a review for.

For reference, some other comedies I love are The Big Lebowski, The Princess Bride, and Zoolander (that one only got me the second time around). There are others, but my taste is definitely for the unusual, and I am willing to accept that most people just don't tend to like that kind of thing. I make no apologies for having an unusual sense of humour - at least I have one.

The scenes and characters of this particular movie are well put together, the verbal humour is hilarious, the situations are intriguing, the acting is very good (as you would expect of the cast), though the acting demands made of the cast by the script are not particularly high. The overall package makes for fun, funny, watchable yet violent entertainment.

Nine Queens (2000)

Entertaining. Engrossing. Admirable. Meaningless.

[6 February 2005]

Nine Queens is a story about con artists. From the opening scenes there is no doubt that this will be the theme. With con artists, nothing is what it seems.

The film took me for a fun ride, but ultimately it left me empty. I got no meaning from the movie, only what I came into it with, to wit: With con artists, nothing is what it seems.

This is not a detective story, but the equivalent of a very well executed visual adaptation of those pick-a-path books some of us used to read as children. These books all had multiple endings and, based on the choices you make as you went along, the story ended in a particular, albeit somewhat random way.

There are many ways that this movie could have ended, and the final scenes concretize only what the filmmakers wanted us to see - but it could easily have been any of the possible endings at all. Since we are viewing a movie about con artists the ending only relies on the filmmakers ability to execute their chosen ending in a believable way. Sadly they fell a little short in my opinion.

While I enjoyed the movie, the impossibility of knowing how much to accept of what I saw did spoil it, though it did keep me thinking. This is a movie and not real life, and the situations are not reliably portrayed as they would occur in real life, so teach us nothing.

However, for the thinkers among you, you can be satisfied in knowing that it's still possible to put together an entertaining, engrossing admirable film without needing big actors, special effects, name-brand scores, hundreds of millions of dollars, the English language, or the United States. It is unfortunate, then, that the theme is based on deception, and we as viewers have no solid ground to observe the realities of the film until it grinds to it's unexpected but ultimately meaningless end.

I would like to see the writing and production team that created this movie deliver a detective story or a comedy, it would certainly be something I would buy and put on my shelf.

It gets 7 stars from me. I wish I could give it 7.5 - for hitting the mark three out of four times.

Keeping the Faith (2000)

Jenna spoils this

[5 February 2005]

This movie starts out well, and is entertaining... until Jenna Elfman appears. Her personality spoils the vibe of the comedy.

An actor with a more subtle delivery would have worked better for this movie. Jenna's over-expressive delivery, in this role, makes her look like a scene-stealing hack. She seems to telegraph the comedic punches, ruining the impact for the audience and overshadowing the performances of Norton and Stiller.

Perhaps the flat comedy is not Elfman's fault, but her performance definitely makes things worse. This movie rated an 8 pre-Jenna, and plummeted to a 2 or 3 with Jenna.

The Hebrew Hammer (2003)

Jokes wore thin very quickly

[5 February 2005]

I picked up this movie because it caught my eye as movie with a Jewish comedy focus - something I had not seen before.

I approached this film with an open mind, and was interested in the way it began. The opening is well put together, and the first half of the film gave me many reasons to laugh, and this is good.

However, the humor soon became repetitive, the plot became confused and strained, and I realized I was no longer enjoying the film. I have tried to avoid saying this, but the movie became rather "cheap" - not a bad thing for a comedy if the humor holds up, but it didn't. I confess that I may have missed some of the humour, not being Jewish myself, and having little experience with Jewish culture. However, considering how heavily telegraphed the bulk of the humour was in this film, it's unlikely I missed much.

The idea is a good one, and perhaps if a little more thought was put into it the film would have been watchable all the way through. I wish I could give the movie a higher rating, but strictly speaking it would have been better as a TV series or as a series of skits. There was just not enough worthwhile fresh material for a full-length movie.

One thing to say about the casting - the lead role looked as if it had been designed with Ben Stiller in mind, but I don't think the movie would have been any more worthwhile if he had been in it.

Minority Report (2002)

Hey, this film is pretty funny.

[5 February 2005]

I see lots of reviewers blah-ing about this film being "Not Phillip K. Dick's vision", or "Speilberg" that, or "Cruise's great performance" something else. This may all be true, and maybe this is what you look at in a film too -- but this is a pretty funny film in places, and I haven't seen any review so far that covers this aspect.

This film is pure entertainment. It's visually spectacular. It has a good cast. It has high production values. Importantly though, it will make you LAUGH, but don't expect it to be a comedy.

Given this, I can ignore the movie's many credibility problems. First is the inherent paradox of the plot - just how would the villain arrange this in the first place?? Think about it.

Then there are the implausible advertising methods of the future -- Would you buy products from companies who continuously bombarded you in this way? Nor would I - in fact I would probably deliberately avoid them.

The main character's narrow escapes do wear a bit thin, and quickly too (but they are entertaining). And just where is this man on the run getting all his money from? In movie-land we have been able to freeze bank accounts of wanted criminals ever since the paranoia films of the 70's.

I probably over-analyze films, but I can easily ignore these problems to enjoy watching this very entertaining and excellently produced film.