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oliver9184 · 01-18-2011, 03:28 AM

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 7/10 is a Western with Clint Eastwood. Josey Wales is minding his own business one day when the Civil War happens, and his family is murdered and his house burned down by a Union militia. Because of this he joins the Rebels and when they lose the war he refuses to disarm and pledge allegiance to the Union. His comrades do but are immediately murdered in cold blood by the bluecoats; Josey escapes and becomes The Outlaw Josey Wales, eventually teaming up with a crafty old Cherokee (Chief Dan George) and confronting his pursuers like only Clint can. It's not as stark and empty (and boring) as the Dollars films from the 60s and High Plains Drifter, but it still was a bit of a chore to watch at times as it feels quite long and has the sombre mirthlessness common to lots of 70s films.

Jawbreaker (1999) 4/10 is a dumb high school comedy whose main occasion for laughter is an accidental murder. Murder can be something to laugh about in a film given a good enough script, acting and treatment. This has none of those. As something to kick off the plot murder needn't even be particularly distasteful. It is here. There are no laughs. It does everything that Heathers (1989) did right, wrong.

Total Eclipse (1995) 8/10 is a pre-Romeo + Juliet, pre-Titanic, vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Although aged 21 or 22 in real life, he plays 16 year old genius poet Arthur Rimbaud. A fantastically bald-wigged David Thewlis plays an older poet whom Rimbaud visits and manipulates. It's Paris and it's the 19th Century and yes: absinthe is quoffed, non-textbook lusts are statisfied, and behaviour is unpredictable and decadent and always bad. Leonardo is as brilliant as he ever has been since - always imperious but also allowing fleeting glimpses of his character's fragile core. (Not a film that you should watch with Boss Hog, Nobby and Gutrot.)

Other People's Money (1991) 7/10. Danny DeVito is 'Larry the Liquidator', a Wall Street Scumbag who loves to dick around with companies, buying up their stock for cheap and then cackling and rubbing his hands together while dismantling them with big $ instead of eyes. He bites of more than he can chew with Gregory Peck's New England Wire & Cable though, and the stage is set for a grand showdown at the company's AGM at which both of them give brilliant speeches. Danny DeVito has been a rock solid, totally dependable comic star since for ever and nobody but Peck could have given stubborn industrialist Andrew 'Jorgy' Jorgenson that gruff and pompous yet sympathetic dignity.

Mars Attacks! (1996) 5/10 and Independence Day (1996) 9/10. The story's complete bilge, there's no tension or drama and the effects look awful now so absolutely the only thing going for Mars Attacks! is its cast. And it's totally wasted as every single one of the film's characters is little more than a jokey cameo. Some of the stars have waned since 1996 (Glenn Close, Martin Short, Michael J Fox) while some have got bigger (Jack Black, Natalie Portman) - and some were always were huge and always will be (Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito in their fifth and last collaboration as actors). I suppose the whole of Hollywood must have been clamouring to work with Tim Burton, who had probably slightly more credibility at the time than he does now. Regardless, every single actor in the film is wasted on a stupid character who it's impossible to care about. My favourite - no joke - performance in the film was Tom Jones playing himself. Independence Day has a less showy cast but a capable one that's used to bring life to characters who service a proper story. Again, the story is that aliens come to earth to fuck things up, big time, but it doesn't feel trite and deliberately outdated like Mars Attacks!. Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Will Smith all do great work and each of them strikes exactly the right balance between fun and seriousness that the movie needs. Pullman seems out of his depth sometimes as the President but I think that's intentional and he completely allays any doubts with his Independence Day speech. That speech, along with the USA saving the whole world (again) and those hilarious depictions of other nations trying to thwart the invaders have been a reason to sneer at and trash this film. It's easy to be cynical and laugh at it not with it, and say it's too jingoistic; I'll concede that it is that, but not too, and certainly no more so than lots of wartime propaganda films.

The Outsiders (1983) 6/10 was made slightly before Tom Cruise became a star with Risky Business - he's in this film but he's someone's brother, he hardly has anything to do and he's barely noticeable. It's a borning melodrama about rival gangs of youths in a small town in the 1950s and apart from Cruise being in the background the only reason to watch this is Matt Dillon's typically obnoxious character Dallas Winston.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) 6/10. Another one of Kevin Smith's would-be daring sex comedies, sounding like it was written years ago and looking like it was made no later than 1990. There are perhaps five or six funny lines but it's mostly people speaking to each other rudely, and unlikely things happening to facilitate the creaky plot. And, of course, stuff about Star Wars awkwardly crowbarred in wherever it will (won't) fit.

Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980) (TV) 8/10 is a two part TV movie about Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. Being a TV movie from thirty years ago this feels dated and the video quallity isn't up to much but Powers Boothe in the title role gives a riveting performance. Boothe was always one of those shady actors on the sidelines of my awareness - I knew about him and remembered him mostly because of his brilliant (and real) name. He always struck me as a man who got things done without needing to say very much. This part was his big break; he went on to star in Southern Comfort and Sin City, and he played Alexander Haig in Nixon. Jim Jones was a preacher who started his own church called the Peoples Temple in the USA in 1955. Over the next twenty years the church became more and more of a cult and Jones became more and more deranged and in 1974 he and hundreds of his congregation went to pioneer a new life in the 'jungle paradise' of Guyana. There Jones founded the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project - aka Jonestown - a self-sufficient commune patrolled by armed guards - Jones was paranoid about infiltration by the CIA and about treachery from within. In 1978 at the behest of concerned relatives of Temple members who gone with Jones to Guyana, a US congressman visited Jonestown with some journalists to see if there was any truth in rumours of people being held against their will there. The visit provided the spark to ignite Jonestown: the congressman was shot dead and more than 900 people at the commune committed a mass murder/suicide by arsenic poisoning, overseen by Jones, who then apparently shot himself. The film's first half shows Jones' childhood and early life in detail as he gets fired from the church he works at (for welcoming blacks into the congregation) and then builds up his own church. He's clearly a zealot but apart from that he seems to be a fairly decent guy, doing good deeds, helping poor people, and so on. As the years wear on and his popularity grows he becomes less nice. My only criticism of this film is that there's too sudden a change with not enough motivation. How does a genuinely devout man of God become a lecherous, vain and dishonest dictator? Just because a lot of people paid him a lot of attention? There was clearly something of a cult of personality about him and Boothe brings this across very well - he looks like an actual dictator from the 1970s, with his aviator shades, and his voice brings to mind both Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter) and the Darkness character in Legend (Tim Curry).

Everyone Says I Love You (1996) 6/10 is a Woody Allen musical starring him, Edward Norton, Drew Barrymore, Alan Alda and Natalie Portman. Some rich Manhattan people worry about themselves and their families. They speak to each other about these worries, and occasionally burst into song. The songs are entirely forgettable and without merit. Tim Roth shows up as a gruff newly released convict.

Twister (1996) 6/10 is about tornados and some daring, exciting, interesting scientists who chase them. The two chief ones are Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. I have trouble buying someone as boneheaded as Bill Paxton as a scientist. He's also pretty wooden here opposite Helen Hunt. They have a whole band of supporting scientists who are supposed to be a ragtag band whose lives revolve around tornados and each other, and they include Philip Seymour Hoffman (never worse), Jeremy Davies, and a dickheaded Alan Ruck. What cameradery there is between these secondary scientists feels wholly artificial and I cringed whenever any of them said anything. I found myself occasionally rooting for the baddie scientist (Cary Elwes) with his convoy of black trucks, who's only bad because he's in the twister business for the money as opposed to a noble love of science or tornadoes.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) 8/10 is a lot more fun than its prequel Gremlins. Here the Gremlins are unleashed in a New York skyscraper where Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) now works, having moved from Kingston Falls to further his career. The building is HQ of Clamp Enterprises, a huge octopus of a corporation which seems to be taking over the world. It's a modern hi-tech building (for 1990) meaning it has its own intelligence which controls the doors, lights, heating etc. In Christopher Lee's laboratory at the top of the building the Gremlins are unleashed and one of them drinks a brain potion which immediately makes him very clever and able to speak (with the eloquent voice of Tony Randall). At around this point the film, which has been by no means sane from the outset, reaches its craziest. The Gremlins actually manage to stop the film itself, causing Hulk Hogan to get up from the audience and give them a piece of his mind.

The Miracle Woman (1931) 8/10 and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) 7/10 are a couple of old Frank Capra films starring Barbara Stanwyck. In the first she's a dissilusioned preacher's daughter who falls in with a conman and becomes a famous Miracle Woman - pretending to use God's power to cure people - and then she falls in love with a blind man who can't be cured because he's really blind which makes her question her life. The Bitter Tea of General Yen is set during the Chinese Civil War. Stanwyck arrives from America to marry her childhood sweetheart who's a missionary in China. But before they can be wed they get separated whilst rescuing some orphans. She's 'rescued' by General Yen (played by a whitey) and taken to his summer palace. What happens from this point is pretty vague and obfuscated, but certainly involves a degree of miscegenation which in 1933 must have been quite a daring place to go for a mainstream Hollywood movie.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) 4/10 is the latest and worst film in a very bad, very tired and very boring franchise. Watching any of these films always makes me wish I was watching Indiana Jones, whose films I also don't like except by comparison to these ones. Indy might be a dick and a swine but at least he looks the part and doesn't speak and act and look like Brendan Fraser. The best entry in The Mummy series was The Scorpion King because it starred The Rock instead. In Tomb of the Dragon Emperor years have passed and Brendan's wife Rachel Weisz has either left him or been magically changed into by some other (worse-looking, worse-acting) woman. They have a son and guess what? He's grown up to be an even more c!ntish archeologist than his father was. Of course the story requires Mum and Dad to come to China, where Son's doing some loud and arrogant digging, and help him out with some bullshit. Because both father and son are Grade A shits, there's a running joke where they try to out-do each other with their weaponry before fighting baddies. I wanted this senseless dick-swinging contest to turn out bad: perhaps Brendan would accidentally shoot off the top of his boy's skull, not killing him but making him a feeble, gibbering, dribbling retard still just about capable of shooting things but not of dinstinguishing between the baddies and his own awful family. Or maybe a faulty weapon would explode away both Brendan's tongue and his hair so he'd no longer be able to speak nor have his grievous centre-parting flop about to provide the only animation to his otherwise vacant face. None of that happens but such thoughts kept me amused during the endlessly weary fight scenes that are absolutely impossible to pay attention to or remember even a second after they finish. I think there were Yetis and Dragons in this film too, as well as lots of mummies. I can't definately remember; but I'm sure that IF there were, they were shit and boring and forgettable as Yetis and Dragons should NEVER be. It's just that kind of film. I knew that going in but I still couldn't help myself.

Also:

The Hills Have Eyes II (2007) 5/10
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) 8/10
New York I Love You (2009) 7/10
The Princess and the Frog (2009) 8/10
Never Let Me Go (2010) 7/10
The Strawberry Blonde (1941) 9/10
The Human Centipede (2010) 7/10
I'm Still Here (2010) 6/10
Green Zone (2010) 8/10
Greenberg (2010) 8/10
The Straight Story (1999) 8/10
The Hole (2009) 7/10
Love Actually (2003) 5/10
Narc (2002) 6/10
127 Hours (2010) 8/10
Empire of the Sun (1985) 8/10
The Road (2009) 9/10
Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010) 8/10
Spider-Man (2002) 8/10

01-18-2011, 03:28 AM	#3932 (permalink)
oliver9184 Psycho	The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 7/10 is a Western with Clint Eastwood. Josey Wales is minding his own business one day when the Civil War happens, and his family is murdered and his house burned down by a Union militia. Because of this he joins the Rebels and when they lose the war he refuses to disarm and pledge allegiance to the Union. His comrades do but are immediately murdered in cold blood by the bluecoats; Josey escapes and becomes The Outlaw Josey Wales, eventually teaming up with a crafty old Cherokee (Chief Dan George) and confronting his pursuers like only Clint can. It's not as stark and empty (and boring) as the Dollars films from the 60s and High Plains Drifter, but it still was a bit of a chore to watch at times as it feels quite long and has the sombre mirthlessness common to lots of 70s films. Jawbreaker (1999) 4/10 is a dumb high school comedy whose main occasion for laughter is an accidental murder. Murder can be something to laugh about in a film given a good enough script, acting and treatment. This has none of those. As something to kick off the plot murder needn't even be particularly distasteful. It is here. There are no laughs. It does everything that Heathers (1989) did right, wrong. Total Eclipse (1995) 8/10 is a pre-Romeo + Juliet, pre-Titanic, vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Although aged 21 or 22 in real life, he plays 16 year old genius poet Arthur Rimbaud. A fantastically bald-wigged David Thewlis plays an older poet whom Rimbaud visits and manipulates. It's Paris and it's the 19th Century and yes: absinthe is quoffed, non-textbook lusts are statisfied, and behaviour is unpredictable and decadent and always bad. Leonardo is as brilliant as he ever has been since - always imperious but also allowing fleeting glimpses of his character's fragile core. (Not a film that you should watch with Boss Hog, Nobby and Gutrot.) Other People's Money (1991) 7/10. Danny DeVito is 'Larry the Liquidator', a Wall Street Scumbag who loves to dick around with companies, buying up their stock for cheap and then cackling and rubbing his hands together while dismantling them with big $ instead of eyes. He bites of more than he can chew with Gregory Peck's New England Wire & Cable though, and the stage is set for a grand showdown at the company's AGM at which both of them give brilliant speeches. Danny DeVito has been a rock solid, totally dependable comic star since for ever and nobody but Peck could have given stubborn industrialist Andrew 'Jorgy' Jorgenson that gruff and pompous yet sympathetic dignity. Mars Attacks! (1996) 5/10 and Independence Day (1996) 9/10. The story's complete bilge, there's no tension or drama and the effects look awful now so absolutely the only thing going for Mars Attacks! is its cast. And it's totally wasted as every single one of the film's characters is little more than a jokey cameo. Some of the stars have waned since 1996 (Glenn Close, Martin Short, Michael J Fox) while some have got bigger (Jack Black, Natalie Portman) - and some were always were huge and always will be (Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito in their fifth and last collaboration as actors). I suppose the whole of Hollywood must have been clamouring to work with Tim Burton, who had probably slightly more credibility at the time than he does now. Regardless, every single actor in the film is wasted on a stupid character who it's impossible to care about. My favourite - no joke - performance in the film was Tom Jones playing himself. Independence Day has a less showy cast but a capable one that's used to bring life to characters who service a proper story. Again, the story is that aliens come to earth to fuck things up, big time, but it doesn't feel trite and deliberately outdated like Mars Attacks!. Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and Will Smith all do great work and each of them strikes exactly the right balance between fun and seriousness that the movie needs. Pullman seems out of his depth sometimes as the President but I think that's intentional and he completely allays any doubts with his Independence Day speech. That speech, along with the USA saving the whole world (again) and those hilarious depictions of other nations trying to thwart the invaders have been a reason to sneer at and trash this film. It's easy to be cynical and laugh at it not with it, and say it's too jingoistic; I'll concede that it is that, but not too, and certainly no more so than lots of wartime propaganda films. The Outsiders (1983) 6/10 was made slightly before Tom Cruise became a star with Risky Business - he's in this film but he's someone's brother, he hardly has anything to do and he's barely noticeable. It's a borning melodrama about rival gangs of youths in a small town in the 1950s and apart from Cruise being in the background the only reason to watch this is Matt Dillon's typically obnoxious character Dallas Winston. Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) 6/10. Another one of Kevin Smith's would-be daring sex comedies, sounding like it was written years ago and looking like it was made no later than 1990. There are perhaps five or six funny lines but it's mostly people speaking to each other rudely, and unlikely things happening to facilitate the creaky plot. And, of course, stuff about Star Wars awkwardly crowbarred in wherever it will (won't) fit. Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980) (TV) 8/10 is a two part TV movie about Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. Being a TV movie from thirty years ago this feels dated and the video quallity isn't up to much but Powers Boothe in the title role gives a riveting performance. Boothe was always one of those shady actors on the sidelines of my awareness - I knew about him and remembered him mostly because of his brilliant (and real) name. He always struck me as a man who got things done without needing to say very much. This part was his big break; he went on to star in Southern Comfort and Sin City, and he played Alexander Haig in Nixon. Jim Jones was a preacher who started his own church called the Peoples Temple in the USA in 1955. Over the next twenty years the church became more and more of a cult and Jones became more and more deranged and in 1974 he and hundreds of his congregation went to pioneer a new life in the 'jungle paradise' of Guyana. There Jones founded the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project - aka Jonestown - a self-sufficient commune patrolled by armed guards - Jones was paranoid about infiltration by the CIA and about treachery from within. In 1978 at the behest of concerned relatives of Temple members who gone with Jones to Guyana, a US congressman visited Jonestown with some journalists to see if there was any truth in rumours of people being held against their will there. The visit provided the spark to ignite Jonestown: the congressman was shot dead and more than 900 people at the commune committed a mass murder/suicide by arsenic poisoning, overseen by Jones, who then apparently shot himself. The film's first half shows Jones' childhood and early life in detail as he gets fired from the church he works at (for welcoming blacks into the congregation) and then builds up his own church. He's clearly a zealot but apart from that he seems to be a fairly decent guy, doing good deeds, helping poor people, and so on. As the years wear on and his popularity grows he becomes less nice. My only criticism of this film is that there's too sudden a change with not enough motivation. How does a genuinely devout man of God become a lecherous, vain and dishonest dictator? Just because a lot of people paid him a lot of attention? There was clearly something of a cult of personality about him and Boothe brings this across very well - he looks like an actual dictator from the 1970s, with his aviator shades, and his voice brings to mind both Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter) and the Darkness character in Legend (Tim Curry). Everyone Says I Love You (1996) 6/10 is a Woody Allen musical starring him, Edward Norton, Drew Barrymore, Alan Alda and Natalie Portman. Some rich Manhattan people worry about themselves and their families. They speak to each other about these worries, and occasionally burst into song. The songs are entirely forgettable and without merit. Tim Roth shows up as a gruff newly released convict. Twister (1996) 6/10 is about tornados and some daring, exciting, interesting scientists who chase them. The two chief ones are Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. I have trouble buying someone as boneheaded as Bill Paxton as a scientist. He's also pretty wooden here opposite Helen Hunt. They have a whole band of supporting scientists who are supposed to be a ragtag band whose lives revolve around tornados and each other, and they include Philip Seymour Hoffman (never worse), Jeremy Davies, and a dickheaded Alan Ruck. What cameradery there is between these secondary scientists feels wholly artificial and I cringed whenever any of them said anything. I found myself occasionally rooting for the baddie scientist (Cary Elwes) with his convoy of black trucks, who's only bad because he's in the twister business for the money as opposed to a noble love of science or tornadoes. Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) 8/10 is a lot more fun than its prequel Gremlins. Here the Gremlins are unleashed in a New York skyscraper where Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) now works, having moved from Kingston Falls to further his career. The building is HQ of Clamp Enterprises, a huge octopus of a corporation which seems to be taking over the world. It's a modern hi-tech building (for 1990) meaning it has its own intelligence which controls the doors, lights, heating etc. In Christopher Lee's laboratory at the top of the building the Gremlins are unleashed and one of them drinks a brain potion which immediately makes him very clever and able to speak (with the eloquent voice of Tony Randall). At around this point the film, which has been by no means sane from the outset, reaches its craziest. The Gremlins actually manage to stop the film itself, causing Hulk Hogan to get up from the audience and give them a piece of his mind. The Miracle Woman (1931) 8/10 and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) 7/10 are a couple of old Frank Capra films starring Barbara Stanwyck. In the first she's a dissilusioned preacher's daughter who falls in with a conman and becomes a famous Miracle Woman - pretending to use God's power to cure people - and then she falls in love with a blind man who can't be cured because he's really blind which makes her question her life. The Bitter Tea of General Yen is set during the Chinese Civil War. Stanwyck arrives from America to marry her childhood sweetheart who's a missionary in China. But before they can be wed they get separated whilst rescuing some orphans. She's 'rescued' by General Yen (played by a whitey) and taken to his summer palace. What happens from this point is pretty vague and obfuscated, but certainly involves a degree of miscegenation which in 1933 must have been quite a daring place to go for a mainstream Hollywood movie. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) 4/10 is the latest and worst film in a very bad, very tired and very boring franchise. Watching any of these films always makes me wish I was watching Indiana Jones, whose films I also don't like except by comparison to these ones. Indy might be a dick and a swine but at least he looks the part and doesn't speak and act and look like Brendan Fraser. The best entry in The Mummy series was The Scorpion King because it starred The Rock instead. In Tomb of the Dragon Emperor years have passed and Brendan's wife Rachel Weisz has either left him or been magically changed into by some other (worse-looking, worse-acting) woman. They have a son and guess what? He's grown up to be an even more c!ntish archeologist than his father was. Of course the story requires Mum and Dad to come to China, where Son's doing some loud and arrogant digging, and help him out with some bullshit. Because both father and son are Grade A shits, there's a running joke where they try to out-do each other with their weaponry before fighting baddies. I wanted this senseless dick-swinging contest to turn out bad: perhaps Brendan would accidentally shoot off the top of his boy's skull, not killing him but making him a feeble, gibbering, dribbling retard still just about capable of shooting things but not of dinstinguishing between the baddies and his own awful family. Or maybe a faulty weapon would explode away both Brendan's tongue and his hair so he'd no longer be able to speak nor have his grievous centre-parting flop about to provide the only animation to his otherwise vacant face. None of that happens but such thoughts kept me amused during the endlessly weary fight scenes that are absolutely impossible to pay attention to or remember even a second after they finish. I think there were Yetis and Dragons in this film too, as well as lots of mummies. I can't definately remember; but I'm sure that IF there were, they were shit and boring and forgettable as Yetis and Dragons should NEVER be. It's just that kind of film. I knew that going in but I still couldn't help myself. Also: The Hills Have Eyes II (2007) 5/10 The Grapes of Wrath (1940) 8/10 New York I Love You (2009) 7/10 The Princess and the Frog (2009) 8/10 Never Let Me Go (2010) 7/10 The Strawberry Blonde (1941) 9/10 The Human Centipede (2010) 7/10 I'm Still Here (2010) 6/10 Green Zone (2010) 8/10 Greenberg (2010) 8/10 The Straight Story (1999) 8/10 The Hole (2009) 7/10 Love Actually (2003) 5/10 Narc (2002) 6/10 127 Hours (2010) 8/10 Empire of the Sun (1985) 8/10 The Road (2009) 9/10 Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010) 8/10 Spider-Man (2002) 8/10 Last edited by oliver9184; 01-19-2011 at 08:14 AM..