60 second film reviews (yes, goddammit, i'm lazy. so sue me)

SIXTY SECOND FILM REVIEWS

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

***

You have to love the humor behind this film. The editing's bad, the humor's crude, and the dialogue's engaging. this tale of King Arthur and his Knights is truly the Mother of all Farces. This film, and others in the "Python" series, have spawned numerous spoofs; such as the "Naked Gun" series, and a number of Mel Brooks movies. "The Holy Grail" gave birth to that inevitable result of every movie suddenly being ripped off for the sake of humor. Everything from the French to Biblical psalms ("they're sooo depressing) is fair game. So, to this one I say "NI"!

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Bram Stoker's Dracula

***

What is it about this film that makes me love watching it? The visuals are great, and Gary Oldman quite frankly freaks me the hell out to this day. This adaption of the 19th century novel is visually extravagant, but forget this one if you're looking for great acting. Not even Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins really save it in this area.

By the way, for those keeping track, this is only the second movie to stay with the book for a great extent. "Nosferatu" was the first, and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake was just as good as the original silent. Beware dubbed copies. The 1979 "Nosferatu" is in German, not English.

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Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

***1/2

Am I seeing more than I should? I hope not. I see a really great and intelligent spoof of the sixties. You know the decade. That's the one that no one remembers.

Written by and starring Mike Myers, this one's about a secret agent frozen in the sixties to do battle with Dr. Evil in the nineties. Both awake completely out of sync with reality (kind of like the sixties) and the film proceeds to point out how stupid the bad guys were in the old Bond films. "Now I'll put you into the water with this unnecessarily slow dipping mechanism. I'll just close the door and assume everything went according to plan".

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Austin Powers: The spy who shagged me

*

This one was just wasn't very funny. I tired of the constant bodily function jokes which all seemed aimed at topping the famous "hair gel" segment from 1997's "There's Something About Mary." Not nearly as good as 1997's "Austin Powers." There are a few points separating this one from its predecessor. First, "Austin Powers" was original. It was a spoof of the 1960's, and spy films. It features a villian and a hero who are completely out of touch with reality. The film points out the fallicies of the James Bond films. Secondly, the cast of the first Austin Powers knew that the movie was a big joke. As a result, they took their characters to the full hilt. Elizabeth Hurley was a great casting choice. She's known to have always regarded her sexuality with humour, and she illustrates it in her role. By contrast, Heather Graham doesn't seem to get this. As a result, she's acting rather than overacting. She's not a "straight man", because a straight man is in on the joke. She seems to be working above the joke.

The moral of the story is this: wait for video. It's not that great. In fact, you'll lose nothing if you never see it.

Menace 2 Society

****

Many who remember this remember Boyz 'n the Hood. This is better than that. Menace has no good guys. While Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a nice guy in the hood in Boyz, Menace doesn't have anything like that. It has Caine. A gang banger who's a product of his surroundings. He's violent, a thief, and he eventually becomes a killer. He lives by stealing and selling drugs, and he doesn't care whether he lives or dies. Like many others in his neighborhood, he knows that one day he'll pay for what he's doing. However, he learns that maybe he's doing something wrong, that there's a better way to live. By the time he gets a clue that he can have a better life, it's too late. This is something you need to see to understand fully.

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Night of the Living Dead

****

Creepy. Filmed on a budget of less than $50,000, this movie sticks out as one of the most gruesome films, without being truly gruesome. It's about a bunch of zombies who are around because of outerspace influence (radiation, not aliens). It primarily shows a bunch of people stuck in a farmhouse. What makes this one great is that it doesn't just show us a bunch of zombies, it shows us a great picture of human nature. All the crap we're capable of, that is.

What else can I say except for see it. and see it during the day.

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The Exorcist

****

This isn't about Satan. I hear a lot of criticisms start like that. People never give this film a chance, saying it's just some disgusting horror film. It's not. It's about a belief in something good, and its ability to keep us out of evil.

I also hear a lot of criticisms starting out as "too gruesome", or "it's disgusting". That's called realism, for starters. Secondly, the only really strange thing we see is the make up done to Linda Blair. There's very little blood, and even less violence of the conventional sort. People just seem too hung up on religion to have a good time. As I leave you on this, I remind you of Karl Marx. "Religion is the opium of the masses".

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Gods and Monsters

***1/2

This film is awesome, but pretty much only for the lead performance. A fictional portrayal of James Whale's last few months is a creation of a person. Ian Mckellan's James Whale is not a character in a film. The treatment given to James Whale by Mckellan creates a person. Fully 3 dimensional and living. This is Mckellan's movie. He overwhelms and carries the film. Brendan Frasier does all right, and doesn't ruin the film. This film is one of the best of 1998.

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Beavis and Butthead Do America

**

While the television show sticks to simply showing two idiots on a couch, the film serves as a social commentary and satire of youth and parenting in this day and age. Beavis and Butthead are latch-key kids on the extreme, whose parents have obviously been too busy to take care of them themselves. As a result, they use tv to teach them, and their minds are mush by the time we meet them. They stumble through the world completely unaware of anything not related to sex. While it is something which can grow old, it is both a funny film, and something which shows some intelligence tastefully hidden behind two idiots doing what they do best. Unfortunately for Mike Judge, the film soon drops to the level of cheap bodily function-related humor, and the films originality is soon something I'm clinging to for dear life. Think "Southpark."

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Analyze This

***1/2

Quite honestly one of the strangest and most humorous movies I've seen in a while, this is the story of mob boss Paul Vitti, who's having anxiety attacks. So he goes to a "shrink," played by Billy Crystal. You haven't laughed til you've seen Robert DeNiro cry in the Florida bar scene. Nicely directed by Harold Ramis, who also directed 1981's Caddyshack.

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Ronin

***

One of the more interesting uses of the Hitchcockian "MacGuffan", the object(s) which move the plot, we see a basically a group of hired killers brought together by the IRA to obtain a briefcase being held by (Who knows?), and bring it to them. This film was great for it's action sequences, but don't bother looking for a plot, the film isn't driven by one. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Oh, you wanted to know what was in the briefcase? Probably whatever was in Marcellus Wallace's briefcase in "Pulp Fiction."

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Alien

****

Even after 20 years, no sci fi experience has topped this 1979 film about a ship who answers a distress call on a planet and pick up an alien who gestates inside a living host, grows quickly, and has a vicious mean streak. Although criticized for it's slow pace throughout the first half of the film, this first half does something now never seen in movies of the genre; it introduces us to the characters and allows us to sympathize with them when the pace does pick up.

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Aliens

***1/2

Although inferior to the original, this film holds as a truly unsettling experience, and one of the better examples of a film which exists wholly in itself, this is a continuation of the 1979 "Alien," and has Ripley going back to LV-426, this time with a crew of Marines. Notable also as being the only James Cameron film that doesn't just irritate the hell out of me.

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The X Files: Fight the Future

***

As a pure film, this is a real success. However, it requires a dozen prequels and sequels to wholly explain something, and I have a feeling that not even watching the show will explain everything. David Duchovny is a fairly gifted actor, and he shows some range here as Foxx Mulder, an FBI agent called "Spooky" by his coworkers for his pervasive belief in a worldwide government conspiracy, which turns out to be true. As an occasional viewer (VERY occasional) of the show, I know that he's seen these conspiracies unfold before, but the film has something which is only occasionally pursued in the show: the main focus.

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Armageddon

NO STARS

Good Christ, I never thought I'd ever see an action movie in such a shambled mess. It's poorly written, acted, and even edited. Much of the movie's special effects are only seen in the dark, so we aren't supposed to get a good look at how shoddy it is, but it's so bad that even the weakest of us can see it. Bruce Willis has done some bad movies, but he is generally on my good side because of his technique, which is to generally downplay everything. However, here he just irritated me. This is being written shortly after "Breakfast of Champions" is released, and I fear that I'll have the same thing to say in that case.

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The Matrix

***1/2

No matter what, I can only think of Keanu Reeves in one way. He's a bumbling idiot who obviously keeps stumbling onto good fortune. I liked it when the unobtrusive Forrest Gump did it, but when this guy does it I just feel like he should be trained to apologize whenever he makes a movie. However, "The Matrix" is different from anything he's ever done (or should I say screwed up) before. It's a smart and terse thriller which ponders such questions as "Why does everything taste like chicken?" However, this intelligence is absent in the final act, when it goes down to the level of an action thriller. I give the film 3 and a 1/2 stars because this final act was done in ways I've never seen before, but the fact that the film did this is enough to receive an amount of distaste.

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Mississippi Burning

****

If nothing else, this film gives the audience an opportunity to see film legend Gene Hackman show audiences his full range. Chronicling the true story of 3 civil rights workers who disappear in the south, and then the subsequent FBI investigation.

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Starship Troopers

**

Now this is a truly odd film. It's obviously aimed at 10 year olds who want cheap thrills, but there's so much gore that it's rated R. No plot that matters, this one challenges you in a new way. It dares you to shut up and forget you were born with a brain.

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Jaws

****

This is one of filmmaker Steven Spielberg's more notable films, and it's one of the best of its genre. A shark starts hunting off the coast of Long Island, the film shows us not a cheap series of the shark hunting and killing everyone, but about how its very presence initiates terror and irrational behavior among the residents of the small island community. The first 45 minutes are used solely as a means of showing the characters, and we don't even see the shark til this point. Nice Touch. Too bad it was unintentional

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Jurassic Park

***

We see here director Steven Spielberg's attempt to go back to his roots, which we saw in "Jaws." Sorry, you missed. Rather than allow us a believable story about why some characters would be hunted by genetically engineered dinosaurs, we're pushed into the action only 18 minutes into the movie. Therefore, the characters exist only to be hunted by the dinosaurs. An entertaining film nonetheless.

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The Lost World: Jurassic Park

**

The first film was a monster movie, and this is along the same lines. Oohs and Aahs abound for the more realistic dinosaurs, the humans exist only as a source of food for the dinosaurs. This time around we don't even get to know the characters through the course of the film, and they constantly do cliched stupid moves I haven't seen since an 80's horror movie. There's a little girl along who seems to be there just to get in trouble and to introduce seemingly invincible pieces of technology ("I want to go someplace HIGH"). She also proves that, whenever a person is introduced as having a talent, that talent will somehow be put to use to save the people in danger.

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Slaughterhouse 5

NO STARS

Further proof that you can't adapt a Kurt Vonnegut novel. A bore. And this from a guy who professes the novel to be one of his single favorite books...

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Superstar

NO STARS

Why does Lorne Michaels wish to punish us? I have a feeling that his only desire is to turn every skit, no matter how bad, into a "feature film" (although the length barely hits 80 minutes). Of course, the skit being "enhanced" this time is the most annoying I have ever seen, from a comedian who is tied with Cheri Oteri as the single most irritating and droll I have ever had the displeasure of knowing about.

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Psycho

****

Sympathy for the Devil. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is someone with pent up rage. He's mad at mother, but he loves her. He even cleans up after she murders a girl he likes (Janet Leigh). If you're breathing, you know that Norman killed his mother long before the movie starts, and dresses as her to carry out the dirty work. That is, when he has feelings he knows his mother disapproves of, "mother" comes out and gets rid of the problem. Perkins is spectacular as the villian who's not a faceless beast, but someone who we sympathize with right up until the end. Gasps around the theatre when the car wouldn't sink. We just can't bear the thought of Norman getting caught.

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Psycho (1998)

*

A shot by shot remake of the 1960 classic. Proof that it's not the words or the shots, it's what the characters do with those shots. Anne Heche, in the Janet Leigh role, does too much. Nervous twitches on her face tell us the guilt she is feeling, and it simply wasn't necessary. William H. Macy is the only one who seems at home in the movie as the private investigator Pendergast.

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Stargate

*

Only in a movie this bad can someone travel millions of miles to an unknown planet, and have only this to say: "What a rush!" Boring.

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The Haunting (1999)

**

Visually impressive, but don't expect to think about anything. Acting subpar.

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The Mummy (1999)

***

This one was a lot of fun, a true pleaser and a nice addition to its genre. It's goofy, campy, and it knows it. I talk about this more on my page about Deep Blue Sea.

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