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voidmind
Reviews
Diarios de motocicleta (2004)
An engrossing and dangerous story
An engrossing, adventurous story told well, with beautiful cinematography. However, the much troubling aspect of this movie is that it must exist in the context of the real world. Inasmuch as it not only deals from a basis of real people and their life events and transformations, but as well only reveals this to the uninitiated at the conclusion, and in the blandest and most whitewashed of terms (two short paragraphs of heavily selective description), it is a dangerous piece of fictionalization. Even if all scenes shown in the movie were to have happened as depicted, the dangerous part is again the thoroughly heavy selection of what is portrayed. In the film, Guevara seems a nice guy who starts with deep convictions to some ideals (like total honesty) and develops others throughout the course of the story. None of the troubling genesis of who he truly became is shown, as exhibited in his writings. He was no Gandhi, but a bloodthirsty revolutionary who, while fighting for his ideals (whatever they truly were in a much larger scheme not shown in the movie), warped his philosophy and methods to terribly brutal, evil execution (so to speak) throughout the rest of his life. Those who see the film come away with no idea whatsoever of the scope of his later tyranny. I can only desperately hope that the mention in the end of his real-life existence and role in Cuba causes enough curiosity to engender further investigation by the viewer.
Wo hu cang long (2000)
A Witless Waste of Time
Crouching Dragon, Whizzing Tiger is one of the most asinine movies I have ever seen. Full of itself and the overwrought, throwaway "wisdom" of the characters' cherished Wudan art, the film grates without relent.
The melodramatic fools portrayed in the film spend more time running their fatuous mouths than they do at any actual attempts at "fighting," to use the term very loosely. Particularly annoying is the silly galumphing about in the air that some of the characters do when they aren't flipping around in the dirt missing each other repeatedly with flailing, ineffective blows.
Further, their weapons are practically useless in most combats, due to their vast inability to even touch flesh with them, much less pierce it. With all this supposed training, couldn't their "warriors" be taught to use a damn firearm? A few well-directed shotgun blasts would dispatch the wallowers in short order. Ang Lee needs to take a cue from Tarantino.
Other terribly improbable inanities of the plot include a paralyzation technique performed by some jabs in the ribs, a young girl falling in love with her robber and rapist, a governess who moonlights as a murdering martial arts master and who has wanted posters of her image in many local hands but whom no one can recognize when at her day job, and a poison that supposedly makes the heart pump blood backwards. (What? It makes the heart valves turn around in the vessels? Yeah, right.)
Perhaps the most disturbing delusion is the ornate wardrobe and lavish residences in which these creatures of utter fantasy exist. Were the film to show the slightest resemblance to reality, the dire poverty of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants, the utter filth and disease and death with which they live every day, would be shown.
The one positive thing I can say about the film is that the writers for the English overdub were skilled at creating a phonemic pattern of English dialogue that matches somewhat closely the mouth movements of the actors speaking in Mandarin. The English is a creative expression of most of the concepts in the original tongue.
The Color Purple (1985)
Can you say, "syrup"?
You may consider a couple of facts in the discussion to be spoilers.
I'm sorry, but Spielberg didn't deserve to win any Oscar for this piece, and I think the Academy was right in that vote. (Other Oscars for best actor nominations and such... that I don't know about. But it would be hard to justify, given what they were told to do and what you see in the final product.) The way Spielberg directs this is so contrived, so meddlesome. While watching this movie a distinction made during a Film as Art course I have taken was screaming at me: "Sentiment is honest emotion honestly rendered. Sentimentality is sugary and unreal, a false view of life." This is over-the-top sentimentality. When in real life to two people ever begin to read out loud in synchronicity, as Celie and Shug Avery do when sitting on the bed going over the letters from Nettie they have found? There are examples of this type of faux behavior throughout the film: all the men crowding around Miss Millie's car and then jumping in unison like a flock of birds taking off when she goes to drive away; Harpo falling through the roofs of various buildings he's working on (a cheap slapstick gag); the whole troop of revelers heading from the Jook Joint en masse to the chapel, as if magically entranced by the choir's singing... on and on. Nothing rings true. I even wondered if Harpo's name was chosen purposefully because it's his wife Sophia's real name, "Oprah," backwards. Spielberg isn't above such "cuteness."
It's not that Spielberg is incapable of honestly rendered action and emotion. Schindler's List was amazing, deeply touching for me, and I greatly admire Saving Private Ryan too for its realism, even if the story is a bit contrived.