Sulaco72 Reviews

Frag (2008)

Stop whining and get a real job.

[5/10 · 16 January 2009]

Frag had me until about three quarters of the way through when it became a character assassination of Angel, the head of the video game league. Maybe he deserved it, but that's not the point. The point is the doc changes direction on you very suddenly, and it feels like the filmmakers drew you in with the first three quarters of the doc only to ambush you with their own personal agenda toward the end. Furthermore, their case against Angel appears largely based on hearsay and rumors with few established facts, and Angel is given little to no chance to respond to the accusations. The best part though is the end in which the sad piano music plays and a somber narrator intones about how the tournament winners don't get their prize money and how being a pro gamer is HARD and there's a lot of PRESSURE and it's no longer FUN. LOL! Hey, he could be describing my job! But you don't see shouting from the rooftops about how unfair it is. I agree the winners should get the prize money they are owed, but it's hard for me to gather much sympathy for people who think they are owed a living for playing a video game! Did they really believe this was a viable career choice? It's going to be a laugh when these kids realize they'll have to work for a living like everyone else. Are they going to bring their sense of entitlement to the workplace too?

The Brave (1997)

Half baked.

[4/10 · 16 January 2008]

I watched this movie because I loved the premise. I still do, but unfortunately the execution was poor. I felt like this movie was released before it was ready, that it still needed further refinement. It has several scenes that do nothing to meaningfully develop the plot or characters, and one or two plot lines that go nowhere. I liked the character of Johnny Depp's ex-partner in crime, but I didn't see the point of the plot thread involving him. Also, the movie progresses at a snail's pace. Ostensibly, the movie chronicles a week in the protagonist's life. It must be the longest week anyone has ever lived! This movie should have been at least a half-hour shorter. I can think of at least half a dozen scenes that could have been painlessly dumped. And the ending felt like a cop-out.

The movie was atmospheric, which I liked. It's unfortunate Johnny Depp didn't spend more time polishing this movie, because it had potential.

Inside Man (2006)

Dumb movie.

[2/10 · 6 January 2008]

This is a dumb movie. Maybe my judgment wouldn't be so harsh if the film didn't promise so much, but I just felt like this movie cheated and played me for a fool at every turn.

I didn't have any beef with the acting, but I thought the characters were awful. The movie starts off with Clive Owen's character telling us what a criminal mastermind he is, and how he planned the perfect bank robbery, something he frequently reminds us of later. Oh yeah, he also tells us he's in a prison cell, although that turns out to be a dumb metaphor. Any idiot knows that the best bank robbery is one where a minimum number of things could potentially go wrong, and you're long gone before the police show up. But Clive Owen's scheme requires hanging around the bank for hours - for no reason but to stalk around and look scary as far as I can tell. He also has to control hostages, negotiate with cops, and most fantastically of all, perform a This-Old-House job on the bank's stockroom and hide out there for a week (I hope he brought enough food, and a bucket to pee in) and then sneak out again. Yeah, that sure sounds like the perfect crime to me, Clive! This plan has so many moving parts that the only reason it didn't fall apart was the screenwriter said so.

And then there are the many unexplained details: Why were the cops so convinced that the crooks had accomplices among the hostages? Who the hell is Jodie Foster's character, and why is she so important that she has the mayor at her beck and call and she doesn't have to tell Denzel Washington her agenda because "it's above his pay scale?" How dumb are these cops that they can't figure out one guy speaking in a foreign language for hours is not the sound of a criminal gang planning a robbery? How did the robbers slip away, and why did Clive Owen stick around for a week? How did they find out about the bank chairman's past, and the number and contents of his safe deposit box? Why the hell would Clive Owen let in Jodie Foster or the cops? Since when do they make toy AK-47s that look real up close? How the hell do you bug a pizza box, anyway? How did Clive Owen manage to sneak out of a secure area of the bank during working hours, undetected? Did this dispassionate criminal really feel bonded enough to this cop Denzel to slip him a diamond?

None of these questions are ever answered. There are films that achieve depth by leaving you to wonder about events that happen off-screen, but I never felt that way about Inside Man. It felt like the scenes that explained these things were cut from the movie, or these questions never had any answers in the first place, and that's weak. Particularly annoying is Jodie Foster's character, who won't disclose what she does, but never seems to tire of reminding us how important she is. We're just supposed to take her word for it, I guess.

The only reason I gave this movie two stars is I laughed at Denzel's "taxi cab" and "pina colada" gags, and at the kid's outrageous video game. Other than that, this movie has no redeeming features.

Crossroads (1986)

Great blues movie, but not perfect

[7/10 · 13 April 2006]

I won't bother to detail the plot, because that's already been done here, but I will share my impressions of the movie: First off, the music was ridiculously good. The acting was a close second. Joe Seneca was splendid as the old bluesman, he was at his best when busting Ralph Macchio's balls for being from Long Island. Macchio himself was just okay, although he obviously learned how to play guitar for this movie. (It's Ry Cooder on the soundtrack and Vai stands in as a body double for the extreme closeups of Macchio's hands, but you can tell Macchio is playing the parts.) It was even a treat to see Alan Arbus, my favorite recurring character on MASH (Dr. Friedman) make an appearance. My favorite though were the actors who portrayed Scratch and his assistant. They both looked like the cat that ate the canary, like a couple of guys who love their job and are in on the joke. I'm going to have to go against the grain though and say I didn't like the climactic guitar duel. I've got nothing against Steve Vai, but the entire movie is about the blues, and at the end it emerges that the devil's house guitarist is a heavy metal clown, making stage moves that would look ridiculous even at a Def Leppard show. It was completely incongruous and hit a real sour note for me. But other than that, this movie is great, and a must-see for any music lover.

Victory at Entebbe (1976 TV Movie)

Great story, bad movie

[3/10 · 28 July 2005]

This is a bad movie. The real story of the Entebbe rescue was much more exciting and interesting than this. Everything about the movie, apart from the star-studded cast, screams low-budget. But even the stars can't save this movie: Kirk Douglas and Liz Taylor overact horribly. So does the guy who plays Idi Amin, but I suspect Amin was even worse in real life so I'll cut him some slack. Anthony Hopkins and Richard Dreyfuss perform well, though. The woman who plays the female German terrorist is a caricature of a Nazi. The characterization is paper-thin, though that is perhaps understandable given the number of characters. A lot of the dialogue is awful, a part near the beginning where Linda Blair is having an insipid conversation with her new beaux actually made me laugh out loud. The effort to humanize the male German terrorist was silly and pointless. I haven't seen the other two movies about Entebbe, but don't watch this one. Read a book about it instead.

Game Over (2003)

The real story had to be more interesting than this!

[3/10 · 20 June 2005]

Kasparov vs. Deep Blue is no doubt a fascinating story, but I don't think you'd know it by watching this movie. I think it focuses too much on the conspiracy theory that IBM cheated...and what does this theory hinge upon? The idea that at one point the computer made a move that "looked human". I am not a chess grandmaster or a computer scientist. And while I don't doubt that the move looked human, to me it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that the most powerful chess-playing computer ever created could make a surprising move...or that such a machine could beat even a genius like Kasparov. The movie gets way too much mileage out of this theory, and not enough out of the personalities of the people involved...that could have made it a much more interesting story. The direction also relies way too much on the conceits of a pointlessly whispered narration, and the imagery of an 18th century chess-playing machine that looks like one of those animatronic gypsy fortunetellers you see at the carnival. Also the story was slowed down by many empty shots of Kasparov revisiting "the scene of the crime". I don't doubt that Kasparov and the chess community found IBM's behavior vexing, but I don't think it's any different than you would find from any other big corporation. At the end of the movie, you are left with the feeling that Kasparov is a huge crybaby and the Deep Blue programmers are either victims or cheats. I think if the filmmaker wanted the viewer to believe the conspiracy theory (which he almost certainly did), he should have presented a lot more evidence. In fact, more evidence would have been a good idea in the first place. The whole thing left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

Chaos (I) (2002)

One word sums up this movie: Huh?

[1/10 · 4 January 2005]

What a turkey. I expected very little from this movie but even still it was a disappointment. The last movie I saw that made as little sense as this one was Eraserhead. The film is full of poorly fleshed out characters acting out of the foggiest motivations. The plot is barely there. The acting is a laugh. The film's biggest flaw though is its failure to appropriately depict the allegedly grand spectacle that is the Chaos metal circus. The whole movie hinges upon the massive success of the Chaos show, but all we ever get to see of it are a couple of half-assed motorcycle stunts and fight scenes in which nobody actually hits each other-- just a lot of yelling and then a close-up of a chainsaw throwing sparks off of metal. After the circus scenes were done I felt like I'd barely seen the show at all. After I watched the DVD, I viewed the "making-of" featurette for a clue that the filmmakers had an inkling that they were making a gigantic bomb. Nope! All I saw was repeated, laughable comparisons between Romeo & Juliet and the romance at the center of this piece of junk. Don't waste your time.

Rock Star (2001)

Airheads Without the Comedy

[16 September 2001]

WARNING!!! SPOILERS!!! As an unabashed 80's metalhead, I really, really wanted to like this movie. But I could not. Why not? Try two-dimensional characters, pre-fab plot, wooden acting, and a whole lotta lazy scriptwriting. You all know the story by now: Mark Wahlberg stars as a tribute band singer who eventually gets to tour with his idols, Steel "everyone knows they're Priest" Dragon. Their first mistake was basing this movie on a fictional band. I guess they didn't feel like paying Priest royalties. But that's a relatively minor complaint. What I found much worse was the movie's squandering of the great material it had to work with. Instead of celebrating 80's hair metal, the movie uses it as a backdrop for the most formulaic and boring of love stories...which is even more infuriating considering the lack of chemistry between Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston. Both deliver uninspired performances but they do have their moments (Wahlberg actually looks pretty good on stage. Aniston is at her best dissing the cerebrally challenged groupies she is forced to travel with.) But what little excitement the lead actors may have generated in this movie is killed by the fact that their characters are barely developed at all. The only actor that exhudes any humanity in this film is Timothy Spall (Beano from Still Crazy) as Steel Dragon's road manager. I read that the screenwriter had no prior knowledge of metal, and it shows. He treats the material with no love. It was cute to see Zakk Wylde and Jason Bonham on the big screen, but why weren't these guys hired as technical consultants as well? Then you wouldn't have scenes with Wahlberg during a show smashing up the amp of his lead guitarist for taking a solo in the wrong spot, talking about "Don't ruin the gig, man!" Uh, hello, you just killed his amp.... I was also annoyed (though this is a very music geekish complaint, I know) by the fact that in one scene the lead characters are shown listening to an AC/DC song from 1990...it's later revealed that this film takes place in 1985. Did the filmmakers really not count on their audience knowing 80's metal? It blew the continuity a bit for me. The filmmakers treated this movie as if a nostalgic soundtrack and references to Ratt and the Village People were enough to carry it. Wrong. (The Wedding Singer at least had a few yuks.) And given the subject matter, some of the soundtrack choices were downright baffling. INXS? Frankie Goes to Hollywood? Culture Club?!?? (Although the Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime" definitely hit the mark.) Even the original music was a disappointment. Blood Pollution was the only Steel Dragon song that was any good. And how about that ending? Mark Wahlberg just walks off the stage to "find his own voice" by becoming an anonymous grunge weenie in a Seattle coffeehouse. THAT'S your big happy ending? No thanks! Besides, grunge is the antithesis of metal, are we to believe that Wahlberg's character, who did nothing but eat, sleep and breathe metal for years really has an inner Kurt Cobain yearning to break free? Gimme a break. I really hope some other filmmaker revisits the land of 80's metal, because the material certainly deserves better treatment than this. This film should've been Almost Famous for 80's metalheads. Instead, it was Airheads without the comedy. My recommendation: Skip Rock Star. Instead, listen to some Judas Priest, AC/DC and Ozzy, followed by a viewing of Almost Famous.