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EmperorNorton47
Reviews
The Cave (2005)
Bad Science Makes for A Bad Plot
The Cave showed promise: scientists discover an elaborate subterranean cave system beneath Romania's Carpathian Mountains (home of Dracula). At the beginning, a troop of Englishmen ventures down and is never seen again after they demolish an abbey squatting upon the mouth. Later, a crack team of Americans and Romanians goes down into the cavern, meeting strange creatures at every turn.
What attracted me to the film was the promise of a group of explorers going deeper and deeper into a new realm filled with unexpected monsters, an undiscovered ecosystem beneath the ground. Peril could exist at many turns as it has for explorers entering new country for ages. But the improbable parasite element ruined the film for me. What I wanted was probable peril, science fiction rather than creature-feature fantasy. The film failed to yield this for me.
We're told that the albino mega-fauna they find down there is the result of a parasite that transforms the host into a darkness-loving predator. The parasites look like microscopic jellyfish which, in one scene, attack a grain of pollen. We're not asked to suspend our disbelief: we're shown scientists vomiting cryptobiology and pseudoscience.
The meanest of the creatures turn out to be the English explorers. They have the parasite, of course. Rather than making them look like gigantic versions of human beings (like the parasites turn everything else in the cavern into grotesque parodies of their original forms) the people have turned into jabberwock-like bat men. Instant evolution and mutation. Horns that look like claws on their noses. These creatures hound them to the very end when the whole cave system collapses.
As does the movie.
Titus (1999)
It gets worse and worse....Just like in Shakespeare
Believe it or not, Titus is faithful to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus which is based on old Roman legends such as the Rape of Philomel and the origins of the House of Atreus. For years, it was among the most popular of Shakespeare's plays: people just couldn't get enough of the gore. (How little things change!) Anthony Hopkins, like the title character, undergoes an interesting change in the course of this film, beginning with a performance not unlike that of the butler in Remains of the Day and ending as Hannibal Lechter, complete with chef's hat and white coat.
Jessica Lange as Tamara, Queen of the Goths, plays her villainess so well that it shocked me. Yet her performance at the beginning of the film as the captive mother who must watch her first born son die is convincing and sets the stage well for the revenge tragedy that follows.
By the end of Act II, when Lavinia has been raped and mutilated, one of her brothers killed, Tamara's son killed, the emperor's brother killed, and two more of Titus's sons destined for the chopping block, you tell yourself "But it can't get worse than this!" But it does.
Qui a tué Bambi? (2003)
Hitchcock Would Have Preferred This
American films of this type show lots of blood and gore. The French take that off screen. Americans cover up. The French realize that nakedness is part of life.
Consequently, when Americans watch a sophisticated European suspense film, we're unable to engage it. We believe that the only terror comes from popped veins.
Why can't we be more like the French? Hitchcock would have preferred this to the usual fare of slasher pics that come out of the American movie establishment.
The title is such a delicious tease....
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004)
Disappointing Adaptation
This was a disappointing adaptation of a very fine book. Robert deNiro seemed out of place as the Archbishop, a character which I don't recall from the book. There were many fine performances such as that of Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates, and F. Murray Abraham, but what ruined the film for me was the addition of an Inquisition that did not occur in the book.
The whole point of the book is that we cannot tell why bad things happen to good people. With the simple-minded Catholic bashing that was appended to this film, that message became distorted. (It is not, as the film suggests, heresy for Catholics to hold this view.) Better editing and a truer-to-the-book script could have saved this film, even with Robert deNiro as an archbishop. They managed to save the fine opening and ending of the book by putting them into the mouths of some of the characters (such as when the archbishop delivered the eulogy for the dead at the beginning of the film). But the addition of a biased perspective against Catholicism at the beginning of the film ruined this for me. When they burned the monk at the end, I reached to the floor and felt a distinct vibration: Thornton Wilder was spinning in his grave.
Escape from Alcatraz (1979)
More imaginative fiction about Alcatraz
Frank Morris may have had an IQ of 135, but he didn't show much for it. He was in Alcatraz because he had robbed a Lousiana bank of all its small change and he was still carrying it around when they caught up with him. The film also misrepresents the Warden of Alcatraz at the time, Olin Blackwell, who was hardly the sadist portrayed by Patrick McGoohan. Did they escape? I doubt it....This film adds to the sentimental fiction about the neverending conjecture about the whereabouts of this trio.