goaltenderinterference Reviews

Tulip Fever (2017)

Like tulip bulbs, this film needs to be stored in a cool, dry place

[4/10 · 18 September 2017]

Tulipmania is one of Europe's weirder historical events. Unfortunately, the movie barely touches on the tulip market craze, except as a deus ex machina to bestow sudden wealth and/or loss on characters who we barely care about and who do nothing to deserve it.

The main problem with the film is that the love triangle that is supposed to be the main story appears out of nowhere -- one of the characters simply looks up pensively, as if he just solved a riddle, and declares, "I'm in love!" Up until that point, he had shared maybe 60 seconds of screen time with the object of his affection. How can we care about the contrived swings in fortune of such shallow people?

Making things worse, this love triangle movie has five main characters, leading to underdeveloped characters, repetition of ideas and unnecessary subplots.

I loved the sets and I thought that Christoph Waltz, Holliday Grainger and Jack O'Connell did great jobs with the little they had to work with.

Séraphin: Heart of Stone (2002)

"Quebec's Titanic", ie sentimentality without characters or plot

[3/10 · 28 October 2014]

The review on the DVD proclaimed that this film was "Quebec's Titanic". That was about right: a film using sentimentality and a historical setting to distract from a weak plot and wooden characters.

The premise of the film is that pre-1960s Quebec was a miserable, oppressive place where the Church and the wealthy controlled the peasants like some sort of Catholic Iran; this allows the wealthy bad guy to brtualize the poor hero and heroine with impunity. No doubt, this had some historical accuracy (certainly in the minds of Quebec film-makers), but it isn't very interesting to watch the main characters flail about helplessly, unable to overcome their lot in life, while some bad guy manipulates them.

Compare this film to the much better "Louis Cyr", where a man growing up in the same time period and subject to the same low status overcomes his obstacles and becomes an inspiration for generations.

The actors are some of the best that Quebec has, but each main character in Seraphin was so unidimensional that it almost felt like a parody. The rich bad guy is obsessed with money to the point where I confused him with Scrooge McDuck - he literally died with gold coins in his hand. The heroic lumberjack is so heroic that at one point he starts cutting wood in doubletime to pay off the rich bad guy. The damsel in distress is so distressed that I had to ask how a human being can reach adulthood without a backbone -- the one redeeming feature of Titanic was that the heroine took some control over her situation and tried, at the very least, to not die, something that Karine Vanasse's character wasn't up to attempting.

If our cable was working, I wouldn't have watched it to the end.

Man of the Year (2006)

A flimsy plot connects some on-liners, like an overly-long SNL sketch

[3/10 · 24 September 2014]

This movie was believable neither as a political satire, nor a political thriller. Some of Robin Williams' dialogue, which he possibly wrote himself, is funny; but like an overly-long SNL sketch, it had nowhere to go after the first few minutes because of the flimsy plot(s) and boring characters.

The first premise of this movie is that Robin Williams is a comedian running for president. The only reason he gives for running is that an audience member suggested it, and that he doesn't like either of the main political parties; we are never given the impression that he cares about the outcome of the election. When the main character has basically nothing at stake, why do we as the audience care if he succeeds or fails? Worse still, the story breezes through every obstacle that makes it difficult in real life for an independent to run for president: the getting-on-the-ballot process is explained away in a one-sentence narration; his unrealistic inclusion in the candidates' debates is glossed over; and he attracts substantial support without any campaign spending because...?

The movie then completely changes premises to become a "thriller". We find out that Robin Williams' election victory was due to a computer voting system glitch that misread the candidates' names. When whistleblowing voting system employee discovers the glitch, all of the stereotypical thriller devices come out to play: the evil multinational conglomerate cover-up (apparently computer companies have henchmen on retainer), the betrayal by the trusted confidant, the hideout discovery, the parking lot altercation, the car chase, etc., etc. Of course, the whole thing falls flat because I'm pretty sure that computer voting systems have more rigorous checks for coding errors than my grade 9 introduction-to-programming class.

I guess the two parts of the movie are supposed to gel when the whistleblower is able to get to Robin Williams -- and only Robin Williams -- and tell him about the glitch. So he has to decide on whether to be the good guy and tell the world, or be the bad guy and be sworn in as president. That *might* have saved this movie if they had actually shown Williams struggling with this issue, but instead it is completely deflected: (1) because the evil multinational has apparently done such a good cover-up, his struggle becomes over whether to believe the whistleblower or not (and we get no explanation as to why he ends up believing her); (2) he doesn't really care about power, as he uses his president-elect status for jokes and publicity stunts. So it comes back to: why would we care if the main character doesn't?

Requiem for a Killer (2011)

Hard to create suspense when every character is clueless and boring

[2/10 · 20 March 2014]

Right from the first scene, not one decision by any character made any sense. Instead of creating suspense, each new plot twist forced me to ask: "Why would anyone do that?" It felt like a bad Agatha Christie novel, where every character had the common sense of Inspector Clouseau.

Worse still, the characters didn't seem motivated by love, duty, guilt, fear, self-preservation, their careers or anything (except maybe ennui). So when their laughably silly plans go awry, the characters don't seem to really care, and neither does the audience. When a major reveal happens in a murder movie, one kind of expects a stronger reaction from the main character than saying, "I'm too old for this." So by the end of the movie, I didn't really care what happened to any of them.

This gets two stars rather than one because some of the actors are good looking.