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Reviews
Age of Consent (1969)
With a first leading role for Helen Mirren, she absolutely nailed it!
What completely stood out for me in this film was Helen Mirren's acting. Sure it's a famous film for her nudes and she and they are beautiful, I can't get over how she carried the film through playing her character so intimately and thoroughly. She took a cute coming of age film and transformed it into a movie about what it means to want to escape and while doing so remain sane surrounded in both beauty and pain. It felt like a film where everyone else's acting was a 4-7, her performance was an 11. She said so much with just her eyes throughout the film. Not seeing any of her early work, I now completely understand how she went on to be in so many films.
I Am Your Father (2015)
A dear homage to David Prowse but....
First the good- -Great idea for a documentary.
-David Prowse could have and possibly should have been the man behind the mask when the mask was revealed.
-George Lucas is a jerk for blaming Prowse for info that was leaked by someone else on his crew. Good to oust George for that.
Now the bad- To say at the beginning of the film, you intend to shoot the scene over with David rightfully playing Vader, and then never deliver said scene which you film, is a horrible horrible act. Horrible since you can now sit right next to George in the jerk chair, since not once but now twice were denied David acting that famous scene out, once by Lucas's, and two by yours, the guy making a film to right a wrong....which you failed miserably at.
If Lucas says no, then don't shoot it, but of course you manged to get me to sit through the film which is far too long than it needs to be, only to be disappointed as I'm sure everyone dumb enough to sit through the film will be.
All you had to do was say up front, we filmed it anyway, but only got to show it to a small audience in Spain and I honestly might have stayed through it, if for nothing else to listen to their emotional reactions.
I was almost in tears at the respect this man was shown, so you as the director had me as a viewer in the palm of your hand, and you completely blew it!
I'd give this movie a 1, except that wouldn't be fair to David Prowse since he acted well in this film, and as Vader in Star Wars.
Don't stop making films, but do listen to your audience. The promise promise promise followed with the sound of crickets chirping isn't the way to go. Major fail-
Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2015)
Pretentious well-to-do people downsizing a difficult thing to empathize with...
Having spent the last two-and-a-half years living on a 25 foot long sailboat, I am in a position to say a word or two about minimalism. And it could be said that in the realm of living a minimalistic life people who live on boats have been doing it for a long long time, much longer than what these filmmakers propose.
What I appreciate about the film is that it does propose a great many good thoughts for conversation on how life can be more full with less stuff.
Unfortunately where this film fell quite flat for me was in that most of the interviews are with people who are well- to-do making six-digit incomes and deciding that they don't want a big house instead choosing to live a minimalistic life which is fine. But a great many people choose to live minimalistic lives that are not as wealthy, and are simply working-class folks.
And as some of the reviewers here have pointed out a film about minimalism should be perhaps much shorter and to the point, so here is mine on the advantages of a minimalistic lifestyle.
I am asked often what it is like for my life on my small sailboat and the answer is that I have found stuff creates anchors. Like the death with ten thousand small cuts these anchors are each and of themselves so tiny, so small, so insignificant, that one does not notice them but in totality they wind up creating a sort of quicksand trapping you in place, doing a thing so that you may hold on to these things.
And that a life where your identity is deeply embedded in the things around you that are yours is in fact an extremely hollow form of existence.
As it stands for the warmer half of the year when I arrive home from work if there is wind, 15 minutes later I'm out sailing with very few anchors trailing behind.
I'm glad someone is saying these things about minimalism, I'm just not so sure these guys did the best job of it.
Kung Fury (2015)
Embodies what's wrong with Hollywood, in the form of an awesome thriller
Old enough to remember when movies had amazing scripts that challenged ideas of the day. Sci Fi films like Rollerball (the original), Zardoz, Blade Runner, 2001, and so many more, Hollywood today only creates mindless films with wild special effects. Films challenging humanity on the whole are all but gone.
Having said that, this is why Kung Fury is simply amazing and epic, for it does three things multitasking while showing us all great film making. The script though lacking any questioning of mankind is brilliant and entertaining. The film makes fun of modern day Hollywood, and again it does it flawlessly. And third, it ushers in possibly an entirely new form of film, one where comedy, campy, action, and parody all come together purposely and by doing so, entertain the crap out of us.
Brilliant script, brilliant CGI, brilliant message, Hollywood take notice, your lame movies are outed by the great Kung Fury!
RoboCop (2014)
Spoiler alert - What was that?
If you watch the original Robocop, you'll find within the first 3 minutes, the movie has set the tone, and nearly defined the entire intention of the film.
The first three minutes are simply a news cast of the future, intermixed with commercials, and it's worth gold. The script is funny, jabbing a future filled with crime and disorder, chaos around the globe, and a heavy hand of law enforcement, sound familiar? Oh yeah I guess that part of the movie kinda turned out spot on. Then we're treated throughout the film with commercial breaks each and every one of them more awesome than the last. No wonder the modern Robocop left out commercials of the future, since the ones from the original are so spot on for seeing in to the future of what we have today, to tempt fate and guess what's to come further down the road might have been too much even for the hearty, things like body replacement commercials (something just reported in The Guardian News in two years to come for real, yeah for real) can anyone say not so funny nightmare?
If there was no original, the movie might have gotten a 4-5, except it lacked any value on the intention of the series, which is to examine morals of robots in our society, how cybernetics will effect that conversation, and above all what is it to be human.
And this is where the original shined, and the newer one not only fell flat, it sends a completely opposite message, or not really any message. What I did most certainly get a sense of and I'm sure will become a money maker is that I was in a video game. Mind numbing, shoot em up, plot less, pointless video game. The shoot em up scenes were about the most entertaining part of the movie, and to see the bad guys die with little fan fair, in one shot to the head kind of way, they express the movie in totality, as if to say Kill it, kill it quick and put it out of it's misery.
The acting was decent, and I'm only sorry the actors were put to such a poor script. At least the dialog was half believable, but it never got above Luke warm. The actors did their best with the lines they had, but the movie never really took me anywhere.
Yeah it was loud, yeah it was fast paced, and yeah there kind of was a message, but I felt the message was what the original was exactly making fun of and pointing to it's insanity, where the new one attempts to pitch it as a genuine great direction to go for humanity.
I really did want to like this film, and it was tempting fate by following a great film hands down, but it failed in the script, and so no matter the acting, or exciting CGI, it failed as a film which was disappointing, for I'd heard beforehand it was rough and edgy, when it was anything but.
The Running Man (1987)
Prophetic... scary prophetic only now *spoiler alert
What rating do you give a film with synthesizer music that is supposed to be the future, but isn't, costumes that date the film beyond measure, one liners that are so simple it hurts, yet predicts the United States in 2015 better than any science fiction film since 1960?
Not an easy question to answer...
When I first saw this film, I hated it, mostly because is was such fiction at the time it came out. Pre home computers being normal, pre cell phones, pre NSA spying on everyone, pre reality shows, pre daft public following the strings whichever way pulled by the news which isn't news, pre world's largest prison population, pre huge percentage of general public in poverty, this film in 1987 was an insult to viewers of which I was one.
At the time it came out, sure permanent living on the moon wasn't anything close to ever coming to reality by 2001, but people generally respected one another in speech and there was that whole middle class section that is almost extinct now, and the future was something to look forward to.
With the current nanny state, today in 2015, collectivism is the norm, cell phones and computers are tapped, cameras everywhere, and things are being done to the public today, that even this film couldn't see coming.
In short, I never ever in a million years would have guessed that this campy (though well directed and written)sci fi Running Man would ever turn out to be the closest film in the last 45 years to predict the future roughly half a century later. Even the violence which at the time was so over the top, pales to the violence on TV today (breaking bad as just one example).
How we can learn from this is possibly the most important question we face today because if we all don't stop listening to the manipulations of the media that are squarely in the pockets of the government, if we all don't start using our reasoning minds instead of reacting like the audience in the movie feeling from the hip, we're in for a future that even our worst considerations will come up short. And though we all love how movies always end with the hero winning, no such hero today would ever get any air time to broadcast any message of resistance.
The film's best line or monologue comes from Richard Dawson who plays Damon the one running the Running Man show at the end, for it completely and succinctly tells you what's Running our government in 2015. Maybe what we need to change are those things "the public want". The future is always open to change, but the change will have to come from us.
Should this opinionated review survive the editing floor's garbage bin, then maybe just maybe there's still hope for humanity showing free speech may still exist, let's see.
Chef (2014)
A 10 movie if not for a few script flaws *spoiler alert
For anyone who's left a bad review, if you had any idea how hard it is to make a great movie, you might have written differently. Any one part done poorly can ruin what might be a 10 movie. Bad sound, one or two characters poorly acted, all it takes is one shortcoming and a movie can fall flat, or far more flat if that one thing had been as great as everything else the team had put together. I'd like to offer what I thought great in the film, and then offer what I felt could have made this movie a 10.
I felt the acting was great. Each character was played as best as any actor could have played their part given their lines they were given.
Cinematography was tip top, and I spent most of the film wanting to jump in and eat some of the amazing food the footage and build up generated. So to every one of the team save 1, I'd give this film a 10.
Where the film fell short, and where it fell short, it seriously fell off an opportunity cliff was in the script. It's a given you could have everything else in a movie production succeed 100%, but if the script isn't there, the movie will get reviewed poorly. And the script itself for Chef was a fantastic script for so very much of it.
I say opportunity cliff though because where many bad reviewers point out the flaws within the script, those minor flaws could have been turned in to the movie's highlights, and perhaps as viewers we were waiting for them to come out, but just never seeing them, felt ripped off a bit by the end of the film.
The gorgeous wife with overweight main character was unbelievable, and yes it was, and it was glaring. What could have made her character work though was just a minor tweak around food. If she was normal in every way except her addiction to good food, especially his food, like she hated him as a person, but was addicted to his cooking, and her struggle, could have been some great comic material. The son, who's character was too one dimensional, if he expressed a passion for social networking in ways that sounded like eating great food, thus like father to son transferring his passion but to a different venue, could have been a good struggle between father and son father wanting him to be a cook instead. If the making of the van had been realistic at all, and specifically when John Leguizamo takes the van to his friend to get it painted, the van should have come back looking like a dragon or something ridiculous spurring comic opportunity dialog, another missed opportunity. And lastly, in the ending, had the reviewer had the same addition to his cooking as his wife had shown earlier, that could have been a fun plot ending, while weaving a more realistic film. Oh one last script flaw that no one seems to have mentioned which to me was unforgivable, was this amazing chef who loves to create new amazing things finding happiness in making Cuban sandwiches over and over was so unbelievable, I was insulted. Especially since again even that could have been turned in to an incredible asset to the film if he hated making the same thing over and over but loved the freedom and his son, thus allowing in the end after their road trip to want to cook in a restaurant again.
So if the characters had been given more internal comical struggles, this film could have been an American Beauty, and almost was. How the producers allowed the script as is without tweaking it to the 10 area, is a mystery, for the script's shortcomings were few but they were glaring, and the film was great except it's lack of genuine comic material.
Now if you'll excuse this budding hope to be some day screen writer, I need to find some great food to feed what this great film completely succeeded in, making me hungry for awesome food!
Atonement (2007)
So lovely when all things come together in a film
I saw this movie when it first came out, and loved it, but forgot it's name over the years finding it again recently. What an utter masterpiece.
Great script, great story, great direction, great cinematography, sound, great acting, great set direction, great costumes, and great editing. If anyone knew how hard it is to have all these things go off perfectly...How many movies have you seen where it was a 9 but the music sucked, or one actor's performance ruins it. In Atonement, witness all these fields of their own come together to make a work of art so complete, so full and rich, you feel like you've dined on a seven course meal after watching Atonement. Bravo to cast and crew!
Forks Over Knives (2011)
Identifying the health system of food
Two years ago, I was lucky enough to have the position as the Program Director for the Alternative to Meds Center in San Francisco who specialized in getting people off non-prescription and prescription meds, and a diet with no sugar and white flour (meat was still included) had a huge effect on our patients.
I can say I've seen this simple change to people's diets along with supplying appropriate amino acids the right way completely change their attitude along with their physical health being given back to them.
Thank you so much for making this excellent documentary! It's not all or nothing, and simply shifting or reducing one piece like no caffeine or cutting down white flower or sugar by 50% can make a huge difference.