Q: What do you get if you cross
sin
with an
enema?
A: Cinema
I am a bloke, so I apologise to women who might
see a movie I recommend and think it is total
rubbish. Conversely women might enjoy a movie
I ruthlessly slag. This is because the sexes
have mutually exclusive tastes in movies. A
review written by a female tells me only if
other women might enjoy the film. Isn't that
sensitive and thoughtful romantic comedy super?
No it bloody isn't! Well not unless he's a homosexual.
(That remark wasn't intended to be as flippant
and distasteful as it sounds: homosexual males
do tend to have tastes closer to those
of women than heterosexual males. That is precisely
my point: there can be no universal judge on
whether a movie is enjoyable or not). Of course
it works the other way around. Ooo! Cool monsters!
Breasts! Cool cars! Action! Explosions! Why
does she look so
bored??
Needless to say, gender isn't the only factor
in movie (dis)appreciation, age counts too.
Kids have infinitesimal attention spans as any
fool know. Kids need action:
sonic-million-miles-per-hour
in-yer-face-amphetamine-pumped hyper-action.
Cue hideous MTV style editing that substitutes
fast-food-style splurge for art and quality.
Most kids are into enjoyable movies like
Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones &
Lord
Of The Rings. But they can also dig turkeys
like
Blade 2,
Mission
Impossible 2,
Scream
3 and
Charlie's
Angels to name the tip of a monumental iceberg.
Well OK, maybe not Scream 3.
No one
likes Scream 3.
Older types like me (I'm already in my early
thirties - sigh!) have seen it all before and
know it to be shallow (but still fun, in a way).
We older gits enjoy action, but we also prefer
a splash of psychology in our movies. We appreciate
a smattering of atmospheric scenes - even intelligence!
eeerk! We like to provide our more sophisticated
cortices (on a good day) with at least *some*
nourishment. We dislike most manufactured Hollywood
movies, just as we begin to appreciate the finer
art of Independent cinema. Many of us even enjoy
foreign movies. Hollywood doesn't give a monkey's
toss about us of course.
So different people will appreciate different
movies. I don't even try to be cool or to
suck up to the trendy yoof and at the same
time I do not dismiss crap if it is crap that
is sprinkled with a bit of flair. I have no
delusions about being a worthy critic, I know
bugger all about movies. And yes I do agree
that reviewing movies on the web is a bit
sad. I only see movies occasionally and of
those I tend only to review the more notorious
ones. (The reviews add up over the years).
I write about movies in the spirit of a throwaway
post-mortem analysis rather than out of pretension
born of false grandeur. Now if
that
wasn't a sentence full of pretension born
of false grandeur, then I do not know what
is :)
I wrote this in my review of
Minority
Report, but I make no apologies for repeating
my rant here.
The blatant product and brand placements in
Minority Report pissed me off
no end. I spend my life trying to avoid ads.
I feel deeply affronted when I fork out the
high cost of movie tickets only to be forced
to watch what are effectively ads in movies.
It makes me feel cheated - after all I have
already paid my hard-earned, yet I must watch
ads in a movie for the sake of tacky commercial
gain. The gratuitously blatant product placement
scenes as parodied in the prescient
The
Truman Show are becoming a horrible reality
- if anything the reality is actually becoming
worse. There was no reason (other than superfluous
greed) why real brands had to be used in
Minority
Report, which is a movie set over
fifty years in the future. When I see commercial
products placed in movies my suspension of disbelief
is shattered: I think of shyster movie execs
in meetings with admen. Shoveling product placements
into a movie is a great way to taint it. I call
it ad pollution.
End of Ad Rant!
I present a central mystery of Hollywood movies:
the aesthetic beauty of sex and nudity (done
tastefully of course, as opposed to porno) are
are virtually absent from our oh-so-prudish
movies these days, whereas ugly, copycat-murder-inducing,
blood-splattering, psycho-spawning, bone-crunching,
psycho-gratuitous violence is ubiquitous. In
an example of Hollywood thinking, they baulked
at Trinity, from
The Matrix,
saying "Dodge this, motherf****r",
and edited out the expletive. (Which isn't a
bad thing). But the darling was shooting someone
in the head at the time. The
shooting someone
in the head was seemingly not as offensive
as the swearing. O what a strange, backwards,
skewed, immoral institution the movie industry
is. (The USA is the worst offender in the West.
Most people's opinion of the USA is formed from
movies: if I were American then that would scare
me). Hollywood is locked into an unnatural violent-Disney
mentality. I would argue that if you are going
to have violence then you should throw in sex
and nudity too, otherwise what is that boring
but pretty "love interest" [sic] doing
there?
Just to rehash an earlier point, Modern Hollywood
cinema is unusually fast paced. Most non-Hollywood
(I can speak mostly for
European)
movies are far more contemplative, and not scared
to linger on the characters so we may learn
about them. This is why many people brought
up on a fattening diet of Hollywood fast food
are bamboozled by European movies, they have
been raised on caffeinated, hyped editing, and
anything remotely more tardy leaves them feeling
edgy and uneasy. They interpret this emotion
as boredom, which in a sense, it is. As modern
Hollywood is aimed at kids with short attention
spans, rather than adults, that industry is
doomed to churn out nutrition-free movies that
satisfy the former, and starve the spirits of
the latter.
Finally, there would be droves more negative reviews
on my site if i saw many movies instead of the
ones that tend to interest me. I might inadvertently
see a crap movie if I am in terminal need of
winding down and nothing else is on.
Best
films reviewed
Run Lola Run
Lord Of The Rings:
ROTK
Iron Giant
Memento
The Matrix
Lilja 4-Ever
Lord Of The Rings:
TTT
Snatch
Amelie
Shrek
Moulin Rouge!
Galaxy Quest
Peter Pan (2003)
The PianoTeacher
Lord Of The Rings: FOTR
Insomnia
Worst
films reviewed
I try to avoid the worst movies (I successfully
dodged
Forest Gump, Gigli
and
The Postman for
example), but sometimes I manage to inflict
real horrors upon my disbelieving brain. As
most movies are rubbish, it is inevitable
that I will end up watching monumentally dire
crap now and again. One would do well to avoid
the following abominations:
Charlie's Angels:
Full Throttle
xXx
Star Trek: Nemesis
America's Sweethearts
Blade 2
Scream 3
Lake Placid
Final Fantasy
Mission Impossible
2
Prince of Egypt
Paycheck
Godzilla
Matrix Revolutions
Avoid also,
Men In Black 2,
it truly sucks. The first was was good though.
watchable
Actors (recent)
Most of the finest actors are the obscure guys,
usually based in theatre (especially classical/Shakespeare) and outside of Hollywood generally.
They may turn up as the character actors you don't notice. The loathsome baddie
takes more skill to nail than the good guy, which is why stars usually make
lousy bad guys. Ironically, one exception is Arnie Schwarzenneger, who
plays a bad android more convincingly than a good android :)
Stars, on the other hand, are usually paid not
to act, but to be their star persona. There
is overlap between stars and acting talent,
but, as Hollywood's greed takes on monumental
proportions, this convergence seems to be on
the wane. Think manufactured star: manufactured
pop group. We are increasingly stuck with the
likes of J-Lo (just say J-No) although that
might end after Gigli, a "star vehicle"
that IMDB members voted to be the worst movie
of all time. So by most-watchable actors, I
am overlooking a myriad of non-English/non-American/obscure/brilliant
actors that you, and I, have never heard of,
and many that we have. So my crippled list of
recent watchable actors is:
Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Spacey, Hugh Laurie,
Sean Connery, Tim Robbins, Jude Law, Peter O'Toole, Guy Pierce, Philip Seymore Hoffman,
Jeff Bridges, Steve Busceme, Nigel Hawthorne, Ian McKellen, Jeremy Isaacs,
Jack Nicolson, John Tuturro, Jabba the Hut -
who played himself so well in
Phantom
Menace. Stellan Skarsgard, Ben Kingsley,
Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, F. Murray Abraham,
Billy Bob Thornton - and all those skilled and
often unsung "supporting" actors who add quality/depth/interest
to anything they are in.
watchable actresses
Gillian Anderson (I don't often watch The X-files
but - Oh What Joy when Agent Scully utters scientific
psuedobabble while dissecting an alien corpse.
She invariably does this whilst all alone in
a creepy, darkened morgue, talk about a class
act! She
can act too. A bit.)
Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert,
Rachel Hurd-Wood and Kate Winslett.
overrated, untalented and/or irksome Actors
Adam Sandler, creepy scientology idiot Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Jar Jar, Ashton Kutcher, Joe Pesci, Ben Affleck, Mos Def, Johnny Knoxville, Quentin Tarantino, Vince Vaughn the entire cast of
Matrix
Revolutions.
unwatchable,
apalling actresses
J-Lo (obviously), Julia Roberts (horrible
gob), Maria Pitillo (
Godzilla),
Natalie Portman,
Halle Berry, Cameron Diaz now she's skinny.
Token mention for irksome factor: Ditzy,
cookie actresses are basically troublesome to
watch. Any "actress" from "
Friends",
Sandra Bullock, Lucy Liu, and
Meg Ryan. Any chick in CSI first series (from what I've seen on DVD). Etc.
don't be fooled
by the glitter, hollywood (MPAA) is an evil
corporate anti-freedom machine
Hollywood tries to seem cool to kids, releasing
shit like xXx to grab the teen $$$. But this
is how Hollywood
really
treats teenagers, and it is not pleasant.
Also in the links section below is some info
on how Hollywood is busy buying Congress to
destroy your rights. Update - justice prevailed and our hero, Jon, beat the bastards.
To conclude, be highly critical of Hollywood/MPAA and its buying of laws from congress to cripple our freedoms in the name of anti-piracy.
Also campaign to have those irritating and offensive copyright warnings in movies and DVD's etc eradicated, or at least skippable.
Links
|
|
Some movie sites and related links
|
|
|
| Hollywood
bullies teenager (again) |
The
real, mean, nasty Hollywood, picking on
kids. |
| Hollywood
(MPAA) is destroying your rights |
Laws
proposed by the MPAA (Motion Pictures
Association of America) would "permit
cable TV companies to 'limit subscribers
to using only certain brands of VCRs and
could ban TiVo in favor of their own proprietary
PVR technologies". Here is an alarming
discussion. |
| IMDB |
The
Internet Move Database: vast wads of movie
info. Very commercial, sycophantic and
tacky. |
| Critics |
A
site for comparing multiple critics (has
annoying pop-up ads, best viewed with
a browser
that gives you the option of preventing
pop-up ads) |
| Roger
Ebert |
A
famous yank critic. Despite this handicap he actually makes insightful points, but his lefty agenda seems to bias his reviews. |
| Ain't
it Cool News |
A fat,
dense, inane, morbidly egoistic Hollywood shill's movie news + reviews (sycophantic raves of Hollywood tat). Huge readership. Used to be strangely addictive back in the late 90's heyday mainly for the sardonic talkback comments by those in the know. These days the site is a playground for retarded children and astroturfing Hollywood PR hacks. |
| Clint
Eastwood |
[Insert
cliched Dirty Harry quote here] |
| QE
Movies |
movies
directory site with links to "hundreds
of sites" no less |
| Razzies |
Golden
Raspberry Awards: inoculation against
the nauseating oscars |
| VideoLAN |
Movie player software. "Videolan
Client OPEN SOURCE. Works under MacOS
X, Windows, and Linux. Does DeCSS automatically.
Somehow always starts playing the movie
immediately, skipping over the annoying
FBI commercials and lame pre-movie commercials.
Does subtitling, plays flawlessly under
Linux, is GPL, plays DivX format videos,
and is just, in general, a great moving-video
playback device. As another poster pointed
out, hardware players are a crapshoot,
but VLC is just about guaranteed."
(Text from slashdot) |
| GDiVX |
Movie player software. "Basically,
Global DiVX Player is a Multimedia Player
used as a player primarily for DiVX Movies,
but technically for almost any video format
including as an Avi Player. The Global
DiVX Player uses MUCH LESS CPU Resources
than Windows Media Player (and other media
and avi player programs). Capable of loading
*.ASF, *.WMV, *.MPEG, *.MPG, *.DAT and
AVI" Another excuse to stop using
Windows Media Player (which is poisoned
with spyware). |
| Linux in Hollywood |
To quoth the site: "It seems ironic that Linux dominates at studios known for building secret proprietary technology to gain competitive advantage."
|
| Movies |
Full
list of my movie reviews on this very
site |
|
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One
day good movies will make as much money as the
crap ones. Then people will once again bother
to make them.
Add your comment to this page
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| From: |
Guess who? Exactly! | Subject: | 2000-11-19 03:54:28 |
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| From: |
Jim | Subject: | 2002-12-08 18:38:56 |
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| From: |
matteus corpus | Subject: | 2003-03-25 21:33:51 |
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| From: |
Melanie | Subject: | 2004-02-08 11:59:45 |
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| From: |
Jeff King | Subject: | 2004-02-15 07:29:43 |
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| From: |
pip | Subject: | 2007-09-05 09:04:59 |
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