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Gojira vs. Biorante (1989)
Needed more Biollante
"Godzilla and Biollante aren't monsters. The real monsters are the humans who created them."
Fantastic creature design in Biollante, just wish we had seen more of it. The plot even to get to Godzilla being resurrected felt too convoluted as well, between the various international factions and their covert operations, though it was interesting to see the perspective shift in the Americans being among the terrorists. It just felt like there were too many ideas crammed in here - the psychic, the bioengineered daughter, the blackmail plot, the "anti-nuclear bacteria" and what it could mean for the world order (something that's never followed up on), etc. Meanwhile, the film insists on repeating things like the Godzilla threat level when it should have spent time on its characters, and the soundtrack seemed to want to channel Star Wars, feeling too intrusive. The final battle scene was great, but it was kind of an odd ending with the way a creature was dispersed, a human death was glossed over, and further spy action was tossed in. With all that said, the overall message is solid even if a trope (scientists, beware of playing with nature), and the monsters are undeniably appealing (especially Biollante), so you may enjoy this more than I did.
Hamlet (2000)
Underrated
Shakespeare's immortal words spoken in places like a Blockbuster video store worked better for me than I might have thought they would, and I liked how the film was true to them, even if it meant awkwardly referring to the CEO of the Denmark Corp. As "king" sometimes. Ethan Hawke is a favorite of mine and he nailed the title role with brooding energy and emotion, and the rest of the cast each seemed to bring a little something to their respective parts. Unfortunately Bill Murray wasn't all that successful as Polonius; to me it he always just seemed like Bill Murray doing a first reading of the words. Loved the inclusion of Thich Nhat Hanh though, and how his principle for interbeing contrasted Hamlet's soliloquy.
L.A. Confidential (1997)
A fine modern noir
A fine modern entry in the film noir genre, served up good and dark. The plot has twists but it's understandable, and the moral shades of gray in three detectives shift nicely over the story, so if you're looking for something gritty, this may be your film. Police corruption, politicking, and brutality are all front and center, with my only complaint being that strongarm tactics to those being interrogated were embraced just a little too much. The script is otherwise very entertaining and tight, even managing to get a little humor tossed in. Unfortunately the femme fatale was replaced here with the old "hooker with a heart of gold" trope, underwritten for sure, and moreover Kim Basinger resembled Veronica Lake in hairdo only (similarly for the appearance of "Lana Turner," though it was a funny moment). There is still a lot to love in the male roles though (Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and let's not forget James Cromwell), which are all complicated roles because of the way the investigations go, and each actor turns in a fine performance. Lots of fun with this, and considered a higher rating.
God Told Me To (1976)
Goes to strange places
"People who are too god damned religious make lot of trouble for everybody."
I would never have guessed that 1930's screen legend Sylvia Sidney and 1970's offbeat comedian Andy Kaufman would have been a film together, but they were here, and it was a treat. She was 66 but far from the end of her career, and has a nice, meaty scene, easily giving the best performance in the film. Kaufman was at the beginning of his career and plays a cop who suddenly begins at others during a parade before being shot himself, so it's more of a novelty than performance from him.
The premise early on to God Told Me To is that mass shootings like the one from Kaufman's are being inspired by whispered advice from God, and as these events have only accelerated in gun happy America over the past five decades, it's one that's painfully relatable today. Where it goes from there is quite bizarre though - alien abductions and psychic powers are woven into a story steeped in Catholic imagery, and that's all before the offer from a hermaphrodite to have sex to begin the start of a master race. Larry Cohen said the film was inspired by the (dated) writings of Erich von Daniken, a discredited pseudoscientist, as well as the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament, and it shows.
I liked the pace of the film and its sense of realism in the streets of New York with how it was shot, but the script over its second half was too ridiculous for me to truly like it. You can do worse in a B movie though.
Shock Corridor (1963)
A grab bag from Sam Fuller
Like an edgy Twilight Zone episode with sociopolitical commentary tossed in, this film from Samuel Fuller has camp appeal, but ultimately its depictions of mental health were dated and silly to the point of creating frustration over six decades later, in this viewer anyway. The premise is outlandish yet intriguing: a reporter feigns perverse attraction to his sister (in reality his stripper girlfriend) to get admitted to a mental hospital so that he can get the scoop on the unsolved murder of an inmate. He then meets a menagerie of patients, each of whom give him tantalizing clues, but his own mental health begins suffering.
The patients the reporter meets in the hospital are created and played with great earnestness, but unfortunately, they're pretty comical. The men suffer from various delusions which cause them to behave almost like actors in absurd situations, but who can snap into moments of lucidity to either channel Fuller's sociopolitical messages or drop little tidbits about the murder.
There's a guy who acts out scenes from the opera Pagliacci and stuffs gum into the reporter's mouth in the middle of the night. There's a guy who believes he's a Confederate general, but who we find out began his descent mentally when he turned to communism while fighting in Korea because his uneducated southern parents "fed me bigotry for breakfast and ignorance for supper," and that they "never, not once make me feel proud of where I was born," a mix of progressive and conservative messaging typical of Fuller. There's a black man who carries an anti-integration sign with the N-word on it and then dons a KKK hood before spouting vile racism. In his moments of clarity, we find he had been the victim of such racism while struggling to remain in a school forced to integrate. He points out "the irony of it is that many Negroes are mulatto, and integration is well-established down South," one of the more cutting observations in the film. There's a genius physicist who worked on atomic weapons whose mind has now reverted to childhood. Fuller was obviously using these insane characters to show the strains of America's insanity, but they all felt forced, not real.
Meanwhile, the women are literally all nymphomaniacs and present to spur a little sexual fantasy, in case the stripper girlfriend's performance wasn't enough, either on stage and in miniature form in the reporter's dreams. We get the first inkling of this when an attendant quips "I used to work in the female wing, but the nympho ward got too dangerous for me." Later, the reporter inadvertently enters a room full of women, and we hear him think "Nymphos!", which was unintentionally hilarious. After a rather attractive one walks brazenly over saying "He's mine" repeatedly, the group then circles closer and closer to him before ravaging him on the floor as he screams in terror.
I liked how the B-list actors threw everything they could into their performances, even if the script called for them to do silly things like this. I always love seeing Phillip Ahn, and was again impressed with Larry Tucker, who I had also liked in Blast of Silence (1961). As for Fuller, he was more effective in his use of shadows and in creating a sense of claustrophobia than in letting us in on the interior thoughts of his characters, especially when they prefetched lines of dialogue. (e.g. (thinking) "Now it's time to ask me about voices." / "You hear voices?"). In addition to his jabs at racism, he also highlights the barbaric use of ECT (at least in its early forms) for a cross between "treatment" and punishment, but unfortunately too much of what he was trying to do felt stilted, and the actual investigative journalism and "mystery" was unsatisfyingly skeletal. That part needed to be ramped up, and the "crazy people" caricatures needed to be toned down for me to truly like this.
Guarding Tess (1994)
Awful
A miserable viewing experience for me, goodness did I disklike this film. The first hour of it is incredibly dull and unfunny, consisting of the secret service agent (Nicolas Cage) and his team guarding the ex-First Lady (Shirley MacLaine). The things which happen are mundane to say the least, like the agent engaging Tess in a staring contest over her sitting on the proper, more secure side of the backseat in a car, her falling asleep at the opera, or (horrors!) the current president deciding not to attend a dedication to her dead husband's Presidential library. The worst part of it is that she's such an unpleasant character, entitled and cranky. The agent tries to get out of his assignment or instill some discipline with her, but she just calls the president who then calls the agent and chews him out, rinse, lather, repeat.
The last half hour injects drama first via a health issue 71-year-old Tess is dealing with, something that felt like was present only to elicit sympathy, since it never went anywhere. The real escalation is an abduction which honestly felt rather expected, and the way it was handled was both melodramatic and saccharine, set to an awful soundtrack. I lowered my review a half a tick in reaction to the agent's strongarm tactics in a hospital room, literally shooting a suspect's toe off to get information out of him, and he was never portrayed as anything other than the hero to his country and knight in shining armor to Tess. It was disgusting, and the film was also very lazy in trying to create the tender moments between the two leads at the end. Just a terrible script and a waste of these actors.
Missing (1982)
Great film
... in which we see a true story confirming yet again, that despite all the rhetoric about freedom and self-determination, the principles most important to America relate to business interests and maintaining power, pure and simple. This film tells the story of those closest to Charles Horman, an American who's gone missing in Chile in 1973, searching for him desperately amidst the horror of military rule just after the coup. Bodies are found routinely dead in the streets, books are being burned, there's regular gunfire at all hours of the day, and people are being rounded up for interrogation. As such, it's a film that might be kind of tough to put on, but I was glad I did.
One of the things I really appreciated about Costa-Gravas's direction is that he brilliantly underscored America's complicity and downright culpability in all of this, both in the coup as a reaction to the socialist leader Salvador Allende, freely elected but who seemed to Nixon and Kissinger like he was on the other side of the Cold War, and also in not protecting Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, then giving Horman's family the run-around as they tried to find him. As their frustrations mount amidst dangerous madness, we see signs for products like Pepsi and Texaco, subtle foreshadowing of the moment when the American ambassador finally begins speaking the truth to Horman's father, and comments on the "3,000 U. S. firms doing business here," saying they're "American interests - in other words, your interests."
Of course, to Chileans who endured 16 brutal years of Pinochet, with thousands and thousands disappeared or tortured, there is a much larger story which we only get glimpses of, but what we do see is horrifying, and this is the story of Americans caught up in it all, told from the perspective of Horman's wife (Sissy Spacek) and father (Jack Lemmon). I think the focus was wise.
Jack Lemmon is fantastic, really demonstrating his range, and part of what keeps the film so interesting is the arc of his character. He comes down to Chile clearly on the other side of the "cultural divide" of the period, ready to defend America against the younger generation who "may try to tear it down with their sloppy idealism," but is gradually disillusioned with what he finds, and grows closer to his daughter-in-law. He initially defends America's "damn good way of life" but has his eyes opened to what those in power do in the world believing they are preserving that way of life, and together with the emotions of losing his son, it provides a meaty part for Lemmon, who handles it with dexterity.
Aside from the personal story of loss, what makes the film so powerful to me lies in it being such a shameful bit of history, and certainly not isolated. It's even more disturbing to recognize some of the patterns in the radical right in America today - the embracing of strongarm tactics with the belief that the "ends justify the means" towards the sanctity and reverence of "our way of life," with the underlying principles being big business and the preservation of power, damn everything else. It's amazing to me that this was made during the Reagan era, less than a decade after the events and before information had been declassified, and while Pinochet was in the middle of his regime. Great film, bearing witness and well made.
Gueule d'amour (1937)
Loved the leads
Lady killer meets man killer, and suffers what he's made his past lovers suffer - to be head over heels in love with someone who only wants you some of the time, when convenient. It's a tough story to truly enjoy, and it comes with both an awfully convenient coincidence with his friend and some old school morality judgment meted out against the woman, which was unfortunate. On the positive side, Jean Gabin dials up the emotion and Mireille Balin plays the "kept woman" with breezy seduction and cold pragmatism well. The mother and servant characters also provide some amusing moments in a scene of great tension, and it was in moments like those that the film shined brightest. As for other supporting characters, I think too much is read into his feelings towards his friend, to me it simply reflects another time and culture, and if anything the male camaraderie reinforces the tones of underlying misogyny. Regardless, the way this played out left a bad taste in my mouth, marring an otherwise atmospheric drama.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
Watch it for Hepburn and Taylor
Not exactly subtle, but that's par for the course with Tennessee Williams, who dials up repressed memories, an insane asylum, the growing practice of lobotomization, a mother/son attachment bordering on incest, homosexuality, and rape in this story of a wealthy woman's attempt to use her power to stifle the truth about her son's life, and his death.
In its strongest moments, Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor are allowed to shine - the scene where Hepburn describes the savagery of nature and likens it to "seeing God," and the one where Taylor is finally able to tell the truth, breaking down as she does so, really stand out. Unfortunately, Montgomery Clift, while earnest, was less powerful in his performance, no doubt impacted by his personal issues at the time and (apparently) some shabby treatment from director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Darkness pervades this story, and in the threat of institutionalizing women who are "inconvenient," it certainly draws from a deep historical well. I also liked its criticism of the wealthy vis-à-vis their exploiting the less fortunate in other countries, and using their power to bend those around them to their whims. I'm not sure the central aspect of using a beautiful woman in a wet, transparent bathing suit (formerly his mother!) to lure young men or boys for homosexual encounters really made sense though, and aside from the ease with which the repressed memory is brought forth, the ending to it felt not only overwrought, but xenophobic. Cannibalism, really?
I'm not sure why Tennessee Williams criticized all this, as it was in his source play as well, and Elizabeth Taylor was one of best things about the film, both beautiful and talented. Regardless, despite the good things it had going for it and how it kept my full attention, it finished in a way that left a bad taste in my mouth, lowering my rating.
The File on Thelma Jordon (1949)
A little soft, but Stanwyck shines
"Maybe I am just a dame and didn't know it. Maybe I like being picked up by a guy on a binge."
This noir from Robert Siodmak has its issues, but Barbara Stanwyck, as always, is gold. She plays a woman in distress who meets an unhappily married assistant district attorney (the somewhat bland Wendell Corey) who is out on a bender. The two hit it off and soon begin a torrid affair - well, as torrid as the Production Code would allow - but trouble comes when her rich old aunt is killed one night. Things get complicated when he tries to help her by botching her prosecution, but learns more about her past, including a shady guy she says is her husband.
(spoilers)
Aside from the film bogging down during the courtroom scenes, one of the issues is how unlikeable the A. D. A is, and yet how the film softens his character. When we meet him he stays out all night on his anniversary getting hammered just because he doesn't like his father-in-law, throws himself at Stanwyck, and then drives home drunk. He's made out to be a sympathetic character despite all this, and we get two scenes of him declaring his deep love to his wife which don't fit at all. When she does question whether there is another woman, she's essentially understanding, her feelings subverted. Later we see him display a moral backbone despite the things he's done personally and professionally, and an allusion to starting over with her.
I had the same issue with Stanwyck's character. Instead of a depraved femme fatale, she's softened and feels guilty, leading to that ridiculous scene at the end (albeit well played by Babs). Joseph Breen's fingerprints are all over the treatment of the two women here, and a darker tinged noir even under the constraints of the period would have been much more satisfying.
Despite my grumbling, the film is certainly solid and entertaining. The plot doesn't venture off into nonsense and the mystery about what's happened is sustained for most of the film. And then of course there's Stanwyck, great in all of her scenes, my favorite of which was when she looks up into her lover's arms and says this:
"I only know that I think of you all day and all night. What I'll wear so you'll look at me with that look in your eyes like now. What I'll say to you, you can't see me anymore. And what I'll do the next time you take me in your arms."
Watch it for her, especially if you like the genre.
Irma la Douce (1963)
Fades in second half, but entertaining
Despite Billy Wilder's usage of the tropes of a hooker with a heart of gold (Shirley MacLaine) meeting a straight-arrow, virtuous cop (Jack Lemmon), the first half of this comedy sizzles with both its humor and its innuendo. The Production Code was still in place but the writing was on the wall for its demise, and the depiction of prostitution in Irma la Douce was certainly one of the signposts along the way. From the start it's openly shown with sympathetic characters here, as well as police corruption, going so far as to allude to policemen not only taking money but sex as part of their "fringe benefits," including a weekend jaunt to Deauville with "18 girls and 3 policemen."
The story initially takes a rather surprising turn when the cop loses his job, and then gradually some of his moral stiffness as well. Unfortunately, the film also begins losing its charm and its tightness at about this point, leading to an overly bloated, less enjoyable second half. The turn in the story that has Lemmon's character dressing up as a rich Englishman is not only contrived, but quickly doesn't make a lot of sense either, even for a comedy. Somehow the film remains buoyant despite the scenes of the pimps, including Lemmon when he starts to play the heavy, almost all of which were off-putting to one degree or another. A part of that is likely due to the ever-present sexual overtones, an example of which was MacLaine's character trying to solve the Englishman's impotence by conjuring up fantasies involving exotic women while he lay in bed, eventually submitting to her seduction.
MacLaine and Lemmon shine as you might expect, but it's the bartender character (Lou Jacobi) who sometimes steals scenes, voicing pearls of wisdom like "Shows you the kind of world we live in - Love is illegal, but not hate. That you can do anywhere, anytime, to anybody" and "Life is total war, my friend. Nobody has a right to be a conscientious objector!" It's a strong cast, but it's also fascinating to think of Marilyn Monroe in the title role, as she apparently was initially the target for the part. I also wish Wilder had pared this down and written a sharper second half, but you can't have everything.
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Great start, dragged down by misogyny
This epic from Sergio Leone certainly evokes the era of the 1920's and 30's, and I thought it was at its strongest in the scenes from the childhood of the aspiring gang members. With the Manhattan bridge in the background of several iconic moments, they skip along the streets of New York, running their various rackets, endangered by a powerful rival. The scene where "Noodles" (Scott Tiler) meets Max (Rusty Jacob) is strong, and the one where a gang member is lost is memorable. As the film spans the decades to the 1960's and is told in an interleaved retrospective, the younger actors are soon replaced by their older counterparts, and I thought the pairings were well chosen.
At 229 minutes this is a beast of a film, and unfortunately at about the 120 minute point, it started going downhill. There's a silly scene involving mixing up all the newborn babies at a hospital in order to gain leverage on a cop that should have been excised completely. We're also supposed to believe that this gang acts on behalf of the working people via its involvement with a union leader. Without spoiling it, while I liked how the main characters grew apart because of their differing levels of ambition, I wasn't at all convinced about the double deception that takes place - it just didn't seem likely. Lastly, the final 30 minutes of the film were weak, with two meetings that take place in the 1960's going on too long.
On top of that, as many have noted since the film came out 40 years ago, the treatment of women is terrible. The protagonist we're meant to sympathize with throughout the entire film commits a couple of r*pes, the first of which is signaled as "consensual non-consent," the second of which in the back of a car is unequivocally awful. While we see the disdain from the chauffeur afterwards, the fact that the victim (Elizabeth McGovern) later has scenes with De Niro's character which completely ignore this event is repugnant to say the least. Meanwhile, the first victim (Tuesday Weld) goes to work in a brothel and when later confronted by the gang, is made to attempt to identify her rapist by examining their four members, eventually falling in love with one of them (good grief). It's not that the r*pes happen per se, it's how they're treated afterwards that gets me. I'm also not sure why the audience needed to see 13-year-old Jennifer Connelly's backside when the younger version of De Niro's character watches her undress, or why the other childhood friend was written as a wh*re throughout her life. It kind of made me feel like Leone was as stunted relative to women as the characters in this gang, and in any event, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It's unfortunate, because the film had such promise.
School Daze (1988)
Revels in the college experience
The "Wake up!" bit at the end shows Spike Lee ahead of his time as usual (where "woke" is a positive thing, as it should be), but I would have connected to this film more completely had it been a little more serious in tone in what came before it. School Daze revels in the college experience at a historically black college, the representation of which for 1988 was even more important than today, but it was too scattered for my taste, and I struggled to connect to the characters or subplots like the fraternity hazing, which got far too much time. Here you'll also find college kids being college kids, with things like rallies, football games, and sex. There are some old school Hollywood type musical numbers thrown in, as well as a performance of "The Butt" ("when you get that notion, put your backfield in motion.") I think the trouble is its more of a film about representation, less one that tells a compelling story. The themes of division within the black community based on skin color, hairstyle, education, and level of political activism against South African apartheid gave it some weight though, and in the call to divest and debate about how far this should be taken by students, it's impossible not to see the parallel to activism for Palestinians today. On another night I might have rounded up a bit, but I just felt this was too long and sprawling, and the energy of the cast didn't translate as well as it could have.
Shake!: Otis at Monterey (1987)
Gone too soon
"This is the love crowd, right? We all love each other, don't we?"
There's an angle Pennebaker uses from behind Redding during his song Respect that produces such feeling - the spotlight haloed around his head like an aura, his breath visible in the surrounding darkness, and the flares of light rain looking as incandescent as his energy level. Backed by Booker T. & the M. G.'s, Redding made the most of the moment during a star-studded festival in June, 1967 that also saw breakout performances from Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. The film is as short and sweet as Redding's set, just five songs (and unfortunately before he had penned (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay), and of course as short as his life, tragically ended in a plane crash just six months later on a winter night in Madison, Wisconsin. I loved the footage of the crowd taken from other points of the festival during the final song, Try a Little Tenderness; despite putting this together two decades later, Pennebaker captures both the artist and spirit of the festival here.
The Dead Zone (1983)
Episodic but entertaining
The series of psychic insights a man coming out of a coma has about people he comes across are little short stories unto themselves, including a murder investigation and the forewarning of possible harm to children. I can't say they're incredibly deep even with the draw of Christopher Walken, but Stephen King and David Cronenberg save the best for last in the story of the ambitious and amoral political candidate (Martin Sheen). It allows them to imagine the age-old scenario about stopping Hitler before his rise to power, and the way in which this plays out was eerie given the recent attempted assassination of Trump. One wonders what he would have done if he could have used a baby as a shield, but I digress. I liked the little twist at the end, even if overall this felt all over the place.
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Fantastic
I had a lot of fun with this one, a gleeful grindhouse effort from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. QT makes quite a sociopath, and it was amusing to see his foot fetish on full display in scenes with both Juliette Lewis and Salma Hayek. Maybe I'm the only viewer ever to have seen this without an inkling of what was coming, but I found the dramatic shift in genres absolutely delightful, even if it probably turned into too much of a splatter-fest in its second act. George Clooney seemed a little unlikely both as a brother to QT and as this type of character, but I liked him nonetheless, and Harvey Keitel turns in a masterfully restrained performance. Overall very entertaining, even if I wish it had taken another turn towards the end.
Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
Entertaining and artistic
"I can bark too."
Loved Scorsese's dizzying use of lights on the streets of New York at night, the frenetic pace, and Nicolas Cage's performance, which surely has to be among his best. Not quite as enamored with the less than enlightened portrayal of those with mental health or substance abuse issues, the stereotypical minority roles, and how everything is exaggerated to show just how far out on the ledge Cage's character has been pushed. When you're doing that and dropping in little one-liners to be cute, it begins to erode the better parts of the film. I still liked it though. The vision of the girl he couldn't save is haunting, and the subplot involving the ethics of prolonging life leading up to the ending hits hard.
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Fantastic
"You're an orphan, right? You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?"
An all-time favorite, so well written, feeling so authentic in its characters from Southie, and touching on so many themes which resonate, the deepest of which were childhood trauma leading to issues in relationships, coming from the lower middle class, and having more potential than friends, but also including elements of baseball, math, and a soundtrack featuring Elliott Smith. The scenes between the therapist (Robin Williams) and Will Hunting (Matt Damon) are all brilliant, and the one in which he breaks through by repeatedly saying "It's not your fault" never fails to make me emotional. For a set of actors in the cast with lengthy filmographies this feels like peak work for all of them, and Gus Van Sant balanced the various tones the films took very well. I never get tired of watching this.
In Dog Years (2019)
A tribute to our faithful friends
"To live in this world
you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go."
-- Mary Oliver (In Backwater Woods)
This film was probably a little too short, but in honoring these ten elderly dogs (starting with 20-year-old Mango, who suffers from dementia) and in hearing brief anecdotes from their owners, Sophy Romvari touches on universal feelings and tugs on the heart. We are all mortal beings who will one day decay and pass away, but to see this process on a compressed timeline for the dogs we're lucky enough to have had in our lives, creatures who are such innocent, faithful souls who simply want to be with us, is devastating, and this film taps into that at a time when owners can see the end coming, and are grappling with their emotions. Despite a topic that might cause the viewer to well up with tears, somehow the film manages to be buoyant, maybe because of an underlying acceptance that this is the natural way of things, and these profound relationships with our dogs are to be celebrated for having happened, not mourned when they're gone.
Twinsters (2015)
Adorable
"I have like five different types of moms, and that's OK, and I love each and every one of them. And I love my birth mom too. I don't know her, and still love her. Family's what you make of it, there's no definition."
I don't think you'll find a more adorable or heartwarming documentary. I kind of wish it had probed a bit more into the Anais, the European twin being introverted in contrasted to her American sister Samantha, and how that might relate to stresses in her environment growing up (no siblings, and apparently a less tolerant neighborhood), but maybe that was self-evident. Regardless, a fascinating and engaging story. Look for the ten year anniversary update on YouTube too, which aside from the usual types of updates, shows a more self-assured Anais, and a blending of personas over the past decade.
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Like eating too much candy
I understand wanting to connect to modern viewers, but for me Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette erred too much on the side of trying to do that, and it came at the expense of giving me a deeper understanding of this historical figure or the period she lived in. There's not enough context, the portrayal is too sympathetic, and it's also too simplistic, things that I think could have been improved without the film becoming a dry history lesson. Maybe one of the issues is that it suffers by comparison to the AppleTV series Franklin which I've been making my way through, which gets the tone and history right, beyond the beautiful costuming and location footage that Coppola gives us here. I was engaged throughout and kept hoping this would shift into another gear, to make the repeated scenes of opulence build up to something, but it never happened. Along the way, the modern soundtrack had its moments, but I Want Candy by Bow Wow Wow to a montage of a shopping spree with an overload of confections was not one of them. I can't say I actively disliked it and I can see why others would be more captivated, but it left me feeling disappointed.
The Deep End (2001)
Swinton shines
Oh, the things a mother will do for her family. It's laid on a little thick here, for example, the scene with Tilda Swinton literally doing the laundry while desperately trying to come up with ransom money, which will probably resonate with mothers who deal with various crises for both their children and parents on a daily basis. Swinton's solid in this role and the film has tension, but I wasn't sold on some of the character motivations, e.g. The body being put in a shallow cove, or the confession in the automobile. The relationship that develops between Swinton's character and that of the ominous man who shows up at her home (Goran Visnjic) doesn't feel authentic, undermining the second half of the film somewhat. It would have been better had it gone to darker places.
Citizenfour (2014)
The greatest whistleblower of all time
A compelling documentary, worth watching. Snowden is certainly a hero in one sense, as he bravely revealed just how far the NSA had gone in surveilling its citizens and those of the world. To have had this go on unchecked and in non-transparent ways long after 9/11 was certainly one of the disappointments of the Obama administration, and I say that despite my great admiration for the man. Aside from the fundamental affront to privacy and liberty, just imagine this power in the hands of a leader with authoritarian tendencies, and that's just one of the dangers. The documentary does a good job of conveying the many ways digital and analog interactions can be monitored, and putting us in Snowden's shoes as his story was being told to the world by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.
Despite the respect I have for Snowden, perhaps the greatest whistleblower of all time, the level of the classified information he took, the bulk of it unrelated to mass surveillance, and its possible damage to his country is troubling, and I think this is where the documentary fell short a bit. It never asks the hard question of Snowden or presents the other side of a very complicated situation. Too often it gets bogged down in the mechanics of Snowden's interactions with journalists or his routine in hotel rooms - an incredible level of access to be sure, but more content on the debate, less on him grooming or staring pensively out the window, would have been appreciated.
The Imposter (2012)
A fascinating documentary
A documentary of extraordinary events, reasonably well told by Bart Layton. It's hard to fathom that federal agents and the family were not immediately suspicious of the most obvious reason this could not be the missing boy, the eye color being different, in addition to a myriad other things, like the French accent, so the film may have you shouting at the TV as events unfold. It speaks to so many things - incompetence in officials like those in immigration or FBI agent Nancy Fisher, a sizable bit of gullibility, or in the case of the family, simply wanting to believe. Thank goodness for private detective Charlie Parker and the doctor who examined the imposter, both of whom immediately understood the truth. It's when the film explores a darker possible explanation, that the family were hiding a secret or maybe one of them had actually killed the missing child, that the story gets really intriguing. I just wish that so much of it hadn't been narrated by the imposter, a completely untrustworthy serial criminal over decades, and I didn't really care for how the film built viewers up with the excavation scene, only to act like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. As what really happened here is unknown, it may lead to an interesting round of speculation among viewers afterwards.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)
Feel good entertainment
"Trees. Birds. Rivers. Sky. / Running with my Uncle Hec / Living forever."
This film from Taika Waititi is more comedy than drama because everything is so softened here - the "troubled youth" (Julian Dennison) is hardly a bad kid from the start, and the relationship he forms with his initially aloof foster father (Sam Neill) has an arc you can see coming from a mile away. I found the jokes about child molestation off-putting and I don't think Waititi quite succeeded in weaving in the darker elements of the story, but overall this is a feel good film whose characters and quirky one-liners made it entertaining, if not quite fully "sweet as."