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Reviews
The Hunt (2020)
A fun satire featuring a unique super heroine who just doesn't give a damn
Major spoilers alert.
This film is great escapist fun that also satirizes the our bizarrely extreme cultural divide. It is refreshing to be able to bring gonzo humor and over the top gore as a way to step back from the mindless anger and group think. On top of that, Betty Gilpin's brilliantly played Crystal Creasy is something unique to film. While ostensibly written as a familiar Mary Sue able to kick any ass and beat down any threat, Crystal is a sardonic participant in a mad mad world. Highly intelligent yet without affectations, she really does not give a damn why everyone is trying to kill her. She is also the one character in the movie who does not comfortably fit into the extreme left or right stereotypes in spite of all the superficial appearances to the contrary.
I also credit the writers Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof for being willing to subversively skewer their own. Their sharpest barbs are reserved for their fellow Elites while the Deplorables are mostly just one dimensional cartoonish characters rarely provided with more depth than the aptly hilariously named Yoga Pants or Shut Up Gary.
On the other hand, the elite hunters characters are fleshed out with many little details and conceits familiar to those who travel in similar circles. Athena babbles on tritely and unoriginally about the singular importance of cutting tomatoes with a bread knife and using Gruyere in her grilled cheese sandwich speech which takes place in the mansion she keeps insisting is NOT A MANOR! She and her compatriots toss off Animal Farm Snowball references as a sort of intellectual adornment, insult, and shibboleth while revealing that they understand next to nothing about a book they were probably once forced to read in some boring English class.
The film's conflict originates with one of the Elite characters being found out sleeping with his wife's oncologist which leads to his dismissal from his charitable foundation. Another talks about his dubious devotion to a peasant lover he has inconveniently knocked up. They all look down on the hired hand Sargent Dale who is only allowed the smallest modicum of respect for having a small part in the Bruce Willis movie Tears of the Sun - "why is the sun crying?". Even the choice of having the action set in Croatia in something of a inside joke as that has recently been a preferred destination for the fashionable set seeking to avoid the common company of the hoi polloi.
The movie starts with a turtle and ends with a hare mirroring the awesomely twisted and violent bedtime story that Crystal says her mother used to tell her. That story serves as a sort of explanation of her uniquely detached outlook and her singular ability to spot deadly threats based on the smallest of tells.
At the film's conclusion, Crystal echos the story arc of the Napoleon Animal Farm character. She transforms from her deplorable self by donning Athena's signature red bottomed stiletto pumps, slipping into her stylish black dress, commandeering her plane, while tossing back Athena's prized champagne and caviar.
Why it's a Cinderella story!
Highly recommended if you have a sense of humor and can enjoy a stupid fun movie.
The Nativity Story (2006)
Wonderfully understated filmmaking. My favorite Christmas movie.
I think this is my favorite Christmas movie – one that I would love to see become classic for Christians. The film is much too understated for that to ever be likely. It is from the film's restraint and realism that much of its power flows. Mike Rich (writer) and Catherine Hardwicke (director) assume their audience is both intelligent and very familiar with the story. This allows them to often portray major plot points and character developments with great subtly. They are able to eschew much of the heavy handed techniques so often used to pummel the audience into knowing exactly who are the good and the bad, and what to fear and what to hope for. It is jarring, for instance, to contrast the understated approach this film uses to tell of the start of Christ's life with the overbearing approach used in the Passion of the Christ to tell the story of His death.
The handling of the character Joseph is a good example of the film's craft. This is probably the only film I have seen where his character all but outshines that of Mary. The film does an amazing job of revealing his remarkable character. After all God did not only carefully select the mother of the Messiah but also the man who would act as His earthly father. Joseph is handed an impossibly crushing situation when he discovers that his beloved and pure wife is pregnant. He handles this torment with great grace choosing a course that will save both the life of his seemingly unfaithful wife and her unborn child. Throughout the story Joseph is shown coming to the aid of others often at considerable personal cost while avoiding credit for his good works. His intelligence also shines in the deft way that he foils a pair of crafty thieves who prey upon the unsophisticated and exhausted country travelers arriving in the big city of Jerusalem. The film wonderfully portrays how his very young and uncertain wife comes to fully appreciate the man she was told she must marry. In the process Mary falls deeply in love with him.
There is a prevailing sense of kindness to this film. While the three Magi are used for some comical relief, there is also a clear sense of the depth of love these men hold for each other. This is shown by the initially grudging support Balthasar and Gaspar accord Melchoir for the year long quest he devised based upon his largely inscrutable readings of astrological signs and prophesies. All are overjoyed and overcome to be present at the birth of the Messiah, but Balthasar and Gaspar are also shown having a deep appreciation for what this glory means to their beloved friend.
There is also the touching story of the very old, solitary, and kindly shepherd who shares his fire with Mary and Joseph telling them how his father said "We are all given something, a gift. Your gift is what your carry inside." Mary asks him "what was your gift?". "Nothing" he responds sorrowfully. Not long after the shepherd is present when the angel Gabriel announces the birth of the Messiah telling him to "rejoice – I bring you good tiding of great joy
.". Mary encourages him to lay his hand on her newborn baby. In this way the filmmakers use this humble shepherd to represent all of mankind. His role helps to underline that Christ is a gift to us all.
8MM (1999)
8MM my eye
The 8MM film reel appears to be twice the width of an actual 8MM reel. The projected movies show a degree of grain that is much more consistent with 16MM film. It is distracting to the point of being goofy for the title of this film to be so obviously wrong.
I did not buy the motivations for many of the central characters. For instance, the elderly widow seemed to not even know her deceased husband's nature after countless years of marriage. She acted as though she had lived a very sheltered innocent life free of real world dealings, yet had no trouble sleuthing out her husbands hidden financial transactions. She disdained cash, yet had not trouble coming up with something like $2 million hard cold one in a very short period of time. She relentlessly pressed on in a cause that could yield nothing good for herself or anyone else. After her death, her man servant did not seem the least bit concerned that he along with all his fellow workers were suddenly unemployed.
Many of the other characters behaved in equally hollow plot driven ways. Count me unimpressed.
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)
Saw it many years ago but will always remember one dumb joke
Completely dopey, but who couldn't love a movie with the following bit.
Santa is being threatened by a bunch of hostile and very green Martians. He tries to cut the tension with the following joke:
"What's soft and green and you put it on the end of a stick and toast it in the fire?.....
A Martianmellow."
I have tried to retell this joke to my wife, but go figure, it doesn't ever seem to come off. But then again she neither appreciates the Thee Stooges nor Mad Max.
You say it doesn't work for you either -- Well, maybe you would have to have seen the movie.
Deterrence (1999)
A remarkably dumb movie
In order for a techno-thriller to work, it must at least be plausible enough for us to be willing to suspend belief. This film has absolutely no feel or understanding of even the most basic features of its subject matter. It tries to fake credibility while throwing around ridiculous non-facts such as a 100 megaton bomb, a B2 stealth bomber being casually tracked by Iraqi radar, a TV communications satellite that somehow is equipped with not only a real time TV camera but one that films ground level shots. When the movie shows a clip of the B2, we instead see an F-117 which looks absolutely nothing like a B2. The super duper satellite (actually just one of a small constellation of satellites the TV network supposedly owns) seems to be able to warp back 50 years at will because it captures familiar black and white footage that is obviously from one of the early H-bomb test in the Pacific Ocean. This is more remarkable still as the explosion is supposed to be taking place in the middle of a desert.
The President and his advisors are playing out their full intercontinental nuclear game of brinksmanship in a little over an hour, and yet still have time to chat up the morons repeatedly at length in the diner. For some inexplicable reason the morons, including one gun toting one, have not been sent packing by the Secret Service but instead are allowed to butt into and sidetrack negotiations between heads of state in which tens of millions of lives are at stake. The only moron who is even mildly rebuked is a ludicrous right wing homophobic bigoted anti-Semite cardboard character of the sort only a Hollywood provincial pinhead could believe exists out there in fly-over land.
All these features seem to be in the film to give it heft and credibility so that it can go about preaching some kind of demented apocalyptic message to us. In the course of their proselytizing, the films writers have their President off handily incinerate a large city of mostly innocents in order to demonstrate what a peace loving mensch he is.
Alfred Hitchcock thought that actors were some of God's dumbest creatures. He obviously never met any of the writers, producers, or director of this film.
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Great voices and music tie together this masterpiece
This is an astonishingly detailed masterpiece. I am reminded in the attention to countless small details of the way Lucas Star Wars team would obsess over seemly insignificant matters such as the "plop" of the snow falling back from an impact crater on the ice planet. Such loving attention to the texture lends depth to the films. So it is with Beauty in scenes such as her dazzling watz though the town at the openning of the film.
Really good films are almost always marked by the quality of the voices of the leading players. This is the case with the Harry Potter and Ring movies, and is also the case here. Robbie Benson's digitally altered voice of the Beast is perfect, but then so is Langsbury's Mrs. Potts and even David Ogden Stiers' Cogsworth. Stiers (Charles Winchester from M.A.S.H) also Narrates the films evidently with some of the same digital enhancements as Benson's voice received. He does an absolutely masterful bit of work with the small but crucial narrator role. It is stunningly well crafted job that is further brought to life by the IMAX sound system.
Finally - the music is nearly perfect. People comment on the individual songs, however, what has always most impressed me is that the entire movie plays like a single musical piece. The music is almost always there to support the drama and emotion from frame to frame, and yet it never remotely takes on the character of filler music. The transitions are seemless and the music brilliantly supports the drama at every point. An absolutely incredible job.
Truly, this is the greatest animated work ever made, and the best film Disney has ever produced.
The Beast (1988)
The Use of American English by the Russians is Intentional
Nearly all the reviews here completely miss the point of the Russian characters speaking in English with an American accent. This is a clever and unique film device. It allows the American audience the film was made for to relate to the primary characters as though they were Americans. The device also allows the Afghanistan setting to seem like Vietnam to the American audience. This is not really intended to say that the two conflicts are identical, but rather serves as a tool to convey a broader anti-war message.
As the film begins, we are in an alien desert setting with the Russian tank crew speaking only in Russian and committing a series of terrible deeds. The camera tightly zooms into the speaking lips of one of the Russians whose native language seamlessly transforms into American English. The camera then zooms back out to the original framing. The audience soon begins to empathize with the Americanized Russians and begins to see many parallels between their conflict and our experience in Vietnam. Americans know very little of the Afghanistan war. This device, however, makes the war seem less distant. It helps the audience bond with the characters and better share their later suffering.
The film has the authentic and gritty feel of "Das Boot" with the tank filling in for the submarine. The detailed and realistic portrayal of the equipment lends greatly authenticity to the drama. I last saw the film about ten years ago, and yet its images and emotional impact stay with me much better than most of the films I've seen so far this year.
I give The Beast a 9.