Change Your Image
davesteele-1
Reviews
Across the Universe (2007)
A Travesty
I've got an idea. Let's take some of the greatest songs ever written, suck all of the wit, irony and originality out of them, have them performed by second rate performers, create some cardboard "characters" to "sing" these songs and act out a "plot" cobbled together by the original songs' supposed "meanings." Brilliant!
When I first began playing music as a teenager, I began with songs from bands like the Eagles, Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, etc. It was only after I had been playing for about five years that I truly attempted to learn the Beatles' music, and, when I did, their timeless songs opened up whole new musical horizons for me that I am still exploring to this day. I am convinced that the Beatles' music will still be widely shared and enjoyed 200 years from now. Their songs were of a certain time in history, but their meaning is timeless.
This movie is horrible. It's an outrage. It's the film equivalent of taking all of Picasso's work, hacking it to little bits and having those pieces rearranged by a far lesser artist into some hackneyed "interpretation" of what someone thinks Picasso was trying to "say." Now, one might argue that the Beatles' music are pop songs, not great art, and therefore are game for this kind of "homage." Fair enough. But if you truly love the Beatles like I do, forgo this bomb of a movie, and, instead, pop on some headphones and listen to their music. Close your eyes and let your own imagination paint a picture of the songs' meaning.
The Departed (2006)
Luckily I didn't have to pay to watch this tripe.
This movie was one of my local Blockbuster Video's "it's in stock or it's free" titles. I came to the store the day after this movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture and it was out of stock, so I thought "what the hell" and got a voucher for a free rental, which I redeemed a week later.
I can't ask for my money back since I rented this movie for free, but I wish I could have my 2.5 hours back. This was the most pretentious truckload of tripe I've sat through in a long time. I am a big fan of HBO's The Wire and other well made crime dramas. But I'm also a fan of movies that have a point. This movie had no point except to portray some laughably fake version of the "gritty reality" of Boston's crime scene and to pop off the main characters through one contrived "plot twist" after the next.
A lot has been made about the acting in this movie. I think all the big name actors in this movie delivered highly-energetic, but completely boring performances. That is to say their idea of character development in this movie basically consisted of constant shouting. Nicholsen was cartoonish, acting less like his character and more like, well, Jack Nicholsen. I never believed him as a crime boss, and I never believed Damon, DiCaprio or Walberg in their roles either.
A lot happens in this movie. A lot of people die graphic deaths and a lot of people swear a lot. A lot of people say "Boston" things like "Boston" people say them. A lot happens in this movie, but nothing interesting happens. I find it interesting that many of the most negative reviews of this movie come from real life cops and others who actually have some firsthand experience with the "gritty" urban life this movie purports to portray.
Whiteboyz (1999)
Great Idea, Poorly Executed
Someone needed to make a movie like this, a commentary on how white suburban teenagers have latched onto hip-hop and "ghetto" culture, and made it part of their identity, when in reality they don't have a solitary clue of what it means to be Black in America. Someone needed to make a movie that made the point that white America's affinity for Black culture rarely translates into actual understanding of Black people as actual human beings, or into an understanding of their situation. Someone needed to make a movie that showed hip-hop-as-consumed-by-white-kids as what it is: a new version of a very old theme in American popular culture -- the Black man as dirty savage, cunning and dangerous, yet stupid and witless at the same time.
But "Whiteboys" is not this movie. The movie can't seem to decide if it's a comedy or a cutting social commentary, or both. So it fails as both. The central problem is that the main characters are stereotypes themselves, the East Coast-imagined version of what someone in Iowa is supposed to be like. It's impossible to believe that Flip and his gang are for real. Flip especially comes off as a delusional mental patient, not as a misguided, out-of-touch kid. The images of farm life were as cartoonish as the images of hip hop life the movie was mocking. Perhaps this was part of the point, but all of the overlapping of targets of parody just made the whole matter confusing.
The movie would have been much better off if had ditched the whole Iowa-farmer theme, stopped reveling in stupid images of kids rapping in farm fields, and instead focused on a group of kids in Any-Suburb USA, the kind of kids that we all have met -- privileged white kids who are drawn to the false glamor of ghetto life presented on TV, utterly oblivious to their own privileged station in life.