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Reviews
The Last Song (2010)
It's a late teen summer romance chick flick, but well executed.
I brought my 13 year old daughter to see this - expected it to be pretty bad, given the low rating on IMDb. It started out fairly predictably, and there were no big surprises, but it was well executed. The kid brother stole all the scenes, and the expected "serious twist" gave the film some depth. There were even some tears shed by my otherwise cynical 13-year-old daughter. It was a refreshing change to see the lead girl not portrayed by a plastic blonde with perfect teeth, although the lead guy was probably too good-looking and perfect. Turns out the guy's older brother got the lead in Thor, so that gives you an idea of what he looks like. I give it a solid 7, if only to balance out the Miley Cyrus haters.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Luckily Lucas only had two franchises to ruin... so now he can stop.
Yup, George Lucas strikes again. I had such high hopes for this late-hitting sequel to the Indiana Jones movie and TV series... I should have known. Where to start? I might as well start with what worked... the entire opening sequence was great, high-energy, fun, and Harrison Ford pulled it off, until the, er, atomic bomb. I don't want to spoil the film for you folks, but Lucas was so gung-ho to throw in some 'fifties relevance, he didn't just bring in the McCarthyesque FBI goons... he also showed us a nifty atomic bomb test, complete with mannequin families hanging out at the barbecue. Thank goodness old kitchen appliances were lead-lined and equipped with shock absorbers. Oops, I strayed into the stuff that sucked, which was pretty much the rest of the film. Good... Harrison Ford. Old but good. He made the action stuff look easy. Great: Cate Blanchett. She's like Michael Caine with cheekbones - she is incapable of sucking in any role she plays, no matter how awful the movie. Hmm.. the good... Well, that was it. Now to the bad and worse. Bad Dialogue: stilted and awkward, as only ole George can write. The Indy and Marion stuff is almost physically painful to witness. The Indy and Mutt (no joke, the kid's name is Mutt...) dialog is also pretty weak. Characters: one-dimensional and... not true to themselves. Since when does Indy pontificate on the differences between quicksand (mud) and quicksand (sand) while sinking into the stuff? And Marion spent 20 years raising a love child in England and never told Indy? Action Sequences: too long, too much and wow that car chase scene through the jungle made it seem like the cars were on actual roads! How did they do that? Oh... of course, one of the trucks had tree-cutting blades on the front. And come on George... 10 guys in a truck driving right next to another truck all shooting AK 47s on full auto... and they hit nothing? Must have been using blanks. The whole feel of the car chase in the woods was that of a console game. I guess the game probably has the same scene in it. Ants: Holy crap, those were big CG scarabs - er - ants. Scarabs were in another movie. Crystal Skulls: what the hell? How does a 180 million dollar movie end up with a magnetically-charged elongated crystal skull as the driving force behind the plot? Who writes this stuff? Mysticism: George won't rest until we're all atheists, I swear to God. Remember Star Wars? Remember The Force, that mystical energy, generated by all living beings, that Jedi could use as a powerful ally? He turned it into parasites called Midichlorians that lived in a Jedi's blood. Midi-what? You're an idiot! Now all I need is a Jedi blood transfusion, and I can fly to Skywalker Ranch and zap George with lightning. So... in the previous Indiana Jones movies (except the second one, I guess), George takes a reverence for ancient Judaic relics and gives us the message, over and over, that God is Huge, and you don't screw with God - everyone who does screw with Him gets his head melted or exploded. So why on Earth in this train wreck of an action pic, wou8ld he now say - "screw all of you! There is no God, just... (SPOILER HERE)
... Extra-dimensional aliens in a flying saucer". Yes, not just from another planet, but Extra-dimensional, as told to us by one of the characters, who was driven mad by this knowledge (presumably when he read the script). Why one Earth do they have to be Extra-Dimensional if they're aliens anyway?
Oh, yeah. This film had it all, except a cheesy wedding at the end. Oh, no, I was wrong. It had a cheesy wedding at the end. If you're into mindless, overblown action with weak plot, little character development, poor dialog and floating cars going over successively bigger waterfalls (Qui-Gon would have said... "There's always a bigger waterfall!!")... you should avoid this film like Typhus.
Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Awesomely Skadooshilicious
Kung Fu Panda is both a send-up of and a tribute to the kung-fu genre, and it works. Innocent eyes will goggle at the beautifully rendered characters, break-neck action, and gentle humor; more experienced viewers will laugh at loud at all of the kung fu movie clichés... a hopeless loser that goes from zero to hero in about one day of intense training... a promising but evil student who turns against his master... the wise, ancient master... the prophesy... the various forms of animal-style kung-fu practiced by actual creatures of the correct type... it's all there, without any wires, and without the awful dialogue you would expect from a chop-sockey film. Jack Black entertains, and shares some excellent dialogue with Master Sifu, voiced by Dustin Hoffman. The Furious Five, a group of powerful Kung Fu warriors, is voiced by various big-name actors, but somehow, they rarely seemed to get enough voice-time to justify those big salaries - particularly Jackie Chan (Monkey), who had about three lines of dialogue. Presumably they based Monkey's movements on some of Jackie's more inspired moves from the past. This is where the film lost a point. An honorable mention should be given to James Hong, who voices Po's (Jack Black, the Panda) father's voice - apparently, PO is the son of a goose who owns a noodle shop. Ian McShane also deserves mention as Tai Lung, the immensely powerful evil Snow Leopard kung-fu master who must escape from prison and return to the valley in order to fulfill PO's destiny. See this movie. It brought awesomeness back to a genre that has seen a lot of crap in the past 5 years (anything with Star Wars in the title, anything starring Jackie Chan, anything directed by the Wachowski Brothers...), and it's even clean enough to bring your kids to. And to any naysayers, I say to you... SKA-DOOSH.
Caché (2005)
Yes... it will be challenging to stay awake.
Films that are action-packed to the exclusion of dialogue, pacing and plot development are bad, great box-office receipts be damned. So does that mean that films with nothing happening, some neat dialogue, poor pacing and inexplicable plot are good, low box-office receipts be damned? No. Good films lie somewhere in the middle.
Caché was extremely pretentious, and those who say you have to have a deep knowledge of the Algerian war to get the movie are missing something. Let's face it. 6-year-old Georges wants to get rid of an unwanted challenge to his solo rule of the house. This is allegory for France's collective guilt over its horrible treatment of Algerians, and let's face it, Arab immigrants, for the past 60 years? You don't have to look that deep. Watch Banlieue 13, and you'll see what France is like for these marginalized people. With Action! Obviously, you can't compare Caché to Banlieue 13. You also can't get art snobs to admit Caché is overblown. So let's look at other stuff.
Awkward and stiff camera positioning. Poor lighting, reminiscent of home movie-quality filming. Distant action in which it is difficult to see what's going on. Long scenes in which nothing happens. Opaque story with extremely weak links.
The camera work kept bringing me back to reality. I kept thinking - is the camera by itself on a tripod in the corner of the room? Is one of the actors going to rush around the camera as soon as someone yells "coupez" to turn off the camera? The long scenes of nothing were that - disguised as the "spy footage", they seemed to be there to fill gaps. They sure didn't add much to the tension. The flashbacks are so simple you are left looking for deeper meaning.
Spoiler alert The throat cutting bit was shocking (the chicken thing too) and seemed out of place in a slow-moving movie. Was the whole movie a set-up for this bit of squirty action? If so, it was a lot of YAWN for a bit of HOLY! Honey, wake up! In the end, purists will say "but harmon (sic) it didn't matter who made the tapes. The tapes are a psychological surrogate for the shame of France after killing all those Alegeirians (sic) before." I say that's a bunch of bull. If the tapes were made, someone in the film had to make them, and the filmmaker should have made it possible for us to figure out who might have done it. A clever filmmaker would make it ambiguous so that we can talk about it afterward.
Anywhoo... I did not like it. Art for art's sake, yecch.
Banlieue 13 (2004)
Great social commentary about the marginalization of immigrants in France
What looks like a really nifty Parkour action film is actually a thinly-veiled commentary on how the French government has spent the last 50 years marginalizing immigrants, particularly Arabs.
The movie is set in a very near future in which troublesome suburbs have been walled off to keep the "scum" from getting to the upscale parts of town. The main difference between that dystopian look at society and reality? There is no wall there today. But there might as well be one.
France is currently going through some serious upheavals - poor people in these suburbs won't put up with their virtual separation from the rest of France any more, and it's showing in pop culture movies like Banlieue 13.
A Must-see! Even if you don't care about the social commentary.
Mad About Mambo (2000)
Samba, not Mambo
Mad About Mambo... an interesting, light rom-com about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks falling for the rich girl. It was all right in its own way, but....
... at no time did anyone ever do the mambo! They did lots of Samba and some Rumba, but never was Mambo in it. Strange titling for this movie. I guess Sick For Samba would not have grabbed as well.
The film seems to be a neat look into the lives of Belfast residents, but it's not a serious dance movie.
For some serious dancing, you'd do a lot better with Dance With Me, or Shall We Dance.