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rralleigh
Reviews
The Departed (2006)
Scorsese has lost it
This movie, and Gangs of New York have shown me that the master is on the wane.
Both movies are watchable and hold your interest, yet both lack that essential spark to make a great movie.
Partially this could be attributed to the actors, who are good, but will never be as good as Robert De Niro, but I would tend to blame the director, because the actors put on some good stuff sometimes. There are many scenes which should have been reshot, with more understatement from the actors.
Leonardo Di Caprio is surprisingly engaging, he was almost excellent, if he hadnt overplayed his "Do they know?" intense nervous glare. With a mug like that, Nicholson would surely have got rid of him long ago.
Secondly Matt Damons character is not explored, we have no idea about his motivations. He didn't have enough screen time, and his character suffered from that. we didn't see him develop any conflicts. And his character was stupid to the extreme, jumping on the phone to his "Dad" after every meeting. Not to mention leaving that envelope around (a crude directorial ploy. Couldn't he have thought up a more subtle way for him to find out?) I think Scorsese has just given the film to Di Caprio and Nicholson, because they put on the best performances. Thats bad directing, or actually lazy directing. Thats whats missing in both these movies. They're not perfect. You look at goodfellas- not one scene, nor any aspect of that movie could have been improved. It was a perfect movie. Same goes for Raging Bull, Taxi Driver.
This one is good but not great.
The final straw for me was the rat on the balcony. What a terribly crude way to end the movie. It was a cheap, dumb, and insulting end. And whats with all the stupid plot twists? Personally, I prefer an ending where the characters have to live with something, or simply leave things unresolved.
Everyone getting shot in the head just makes one feel deflated.
Babel (2006)
Goes nowhere
Although it builds up nicely from an interesting beginning, the movie goes nowhere.
The stories are so disparate that there is no point really linking them. Why is there this need to link disparate stories anyway? If they don't really relate to each other then its arbitrary and unoriginal. Its annoying that every film that comes out which does this since Magnolia is apparently a masterpiece, but its not. Magnolia was a good film and original. This is not.
This film has some interesting characters but in the end, they don't really do anything. The last hour could have been cut out. It was so easy to guess how it was going to end that I just ended up getting impatient.
Robin's Hood (2003)
Very low budget but worth a look
A decent story, good characters and the actings not bad either. The look of the film is very TV, and unpolished, but it retains interest if you can overlook that.
Its more of a love story than anything else, and not a mystery at all, the previous comment was misleading. The two women who play the main characters carry the story well, and Clody Cates, who plays Brooklyn, definitely has something arresting about her. The dialogue is spare, and minimal, but has a certain charm. Its very down to earth and real, sometimes uncomfortably so, but its well written and the drama is not overdone like so many Hollywood movies.
Given a bigger budget, this could have been a great movie.
Le locataire (1976)
overrated
Despite a good beginning, the film descends quickly into farce. Maybe this was the intention, but by the end we aren't scared or paranoid, and we lose sympathy with the character. It wasn't believable, but there were a few memorable moments. The whole Stella character contributed nothing to the narrative, and seemed to be just release from the intensity of the apartment. The neighbours popped up randomly and acted very strangely, yet we never saw anything of their lives, and they weren't very menacing either. Polanskis acting is passable, but jars sometimes. And the dubbing on the version I watched was ridiculous. Disappointing.
Garden State (2004)
Atrocious film
My god, what a piece of crap. Did people actually buy this script? The whole film was unbearable to watch, embarrassingly bad. and completely unbelievable to boot. The acting by that girl was annoying to the extreme. She is a pretty poor actress anyway, but to be fair, the script was so bad to start with.
I hate films that try to be "deep" but actually have no soul. If you fell for it you are a sucker I'm afraid as it is an "intelligent" film for stupid people.
I admit though i had to switch it off at the bit when he finally revealed his big trauma, that he accidentally pushed his mother or whatever it was. Come on! As if theyd put a kid on Lithium for the rest of his life for pushing an adult one time. Please. Its absolutely ridiculous. And if my "friend" led me on a merry dance all over town when I could be getting jiggy with my new girlfriend on my last day, only to give me the necklace he stole from my mothers grave, I think Id batter him, not get all sentimental with him.
Also how come all the people in his home town recognised him instantly even though they last saw him when he was ten? And why were they so buddy with him? The whole thing is rubbish- I know at least two people who agree with me...surely there must be more out there?