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dhberry
Reviews
Why Study Industrial Arts? (1956)
MST3000 Fans, Oh My!
I haven't seen this particular short, but I couldn't help but notice how everyone mentions the MST3000 episode this appeared in. Apparently it never occurred to anyone that you guys weren't it's intended audience and that it was taken entirely out of context? I have no doubt it's cheesy as all heck, and probably somewhat offensive, but it's an ultra low budget educational film under absolutely no pretense of being high art. Harvey and Centron made thousands of them, it was a living for them. If you REALLY want to criticize a Herk Harvey film, why not write about his Carnival of Souls, the only movie of his he specifically filmed for wide release, and one of the all time classic atmospheric horror movies? MST3000 was a very very funny show, precisely because it would take a movie out of context, in some cases edit the movie extensively, and then exploit any incongruities and flaws that turned up in the process. That isn't a bad thing since they were witty enough for it to almost always work, but unfortunately a large number of the fans come away from the show NOT remembering the lack of context, NOT noticing the tremendous edits, and worst of all, NOT coming away with the LOVE for these movies that it's pretty obvious most of the people working on the show shared. Which results in a handful of people posting sneering critiques of the one industrial/education film that happened to end up on MST3000, ignoring the THOUSANDS of similar films and their original purpose, not realizing that they're the ones that are out of context here, not this short.
IMDb doesn't allow the posting of URLs in reviews, but if you go to the Internet Archive's Prelinger Archive, they have a whole selection of Harvey's industrial/educational shorts, as well as Carnival of Souls, available for download (since they are all in the public domain).
Girl (1998)
Great, under-appreciated movie!
After reading some of the other comments I just had to post my own review. It seems people are being oddly harsh on this film, and all I can figure is they went into it with certain expectations (be it based on certain actors' other works or the book the movie is based on) which prejudiced them towards the film. I really do think this is a great movie. Maybe in my top 10. Screw that, definitely in my Top 10 heh. And I'm not a 14 year old girl, I'm twenty and last time I checked I had male bits! I'm going to just run through a couple of the main complaints that struck me as being sort of "misguided": First of all, of course Andrea's character is wishy-washy, she's going through a transitional phase in her life. No one, I repeat NO ONE just wakes up one day and becomes a totally different person. There're always going to be missteps along the way. Also it's not like she was totally random, she was fairly consistent in her dealings with specific characters. For example she was always more timid around Cybil than she was around Darcy. I also thought the "cheesiness" of the movie was all part of the style of humor, and it's more dorky than cheesy. I mean I have very high standards when it comes to the movies I watch, so this isn't a case of apologizing for a sloppy film, I genuinely think this is a solid movie! Some of my favorite movies are Picnic At Hanging Rock, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, and the moderately obscure Crispin Glover film Beaver Trilogy, so I'm a FILM SNOB! And I thoroughly recommend this movie.
My only real complaint about it would be there's sort of a one-note joke that's repeated a couple times where Andrea will say one thing and then the film will cut to her doing the exact opposite, which actually works somewhat brilliantly the first couple of times to emphasize that she IS still maturing, and kind of has a ways to go, even if she puts on the air of maturity now and again heh. I just think it was repeated one or two too many times, as even I kind of rolled my eyes at that the last time it's done. One overplayed joke, that's it! The things I liked about the film were it's really sensitive dealings with the various characters. I really can't think of a single character that desperately needed to be developed more, which, considering how many characters there are, and the fact that this isn't an excessively long film, is actually fairly AMAZING. Even smaller parts such as Carla, where Portia Di Rossi really doesn't have THAT much to do and doesn't evolve much (if at all) during the movie, have some great nuances to them (the thing with the hair... come on, even if that's almost her only function in the film, it's great!).
Now, I haven't read the book. Maybe I should, maybe it really is that much better than the movie! If you have read the book, I guess beware that you might be disappointed in this film if you rent it. Everyone else though, there's no reason to go into this film with low expectations, or worse yet, avoid it altogether! It's not going to be for everyone (just like, I dunno, 2 Fast 2 Furious probably wouldn't appeal to most of the tea-sipping femme-folk of the world), but as far as under-recognized movies go, it truly is a stellar film.