egasulla Reviews

The Monkees (1965–1968)

I should have known better...

[1/10 · 31 August 2019]

I never cared much for their music. Growing up in Argentina where the Beatles were huge, we all cared little for their music, which was stuck in the Beatles' very early pop years (as early as 1965, they have already turned into a top adult band, with jewels like Yesterday and In My Life, so the Monkees were born already obsolete). But as I had never watched the show, I decided to watch one episode ("Monkees On The Line") in Youtube.

Huge, huge mistake.

The thing is not as bad as I had assumed: it is worse. The canned laughter, the fake youth exhuberance, the jokes as old as dust, the truly dumb guys pretending to play a dumb guy... it's not that I can't enjoy 60s American TV; some things are more than watchable. But certainly not this one.

Idiocracy (2006)

With a 2018 perspective...

[7/10 · 25 January 2019]

... it's impossible not to see that this "fantasy" movie was, sadly, prescient.

Mike Judge placed the action some 500 years in the future. Looks like his clock ran free for a while -for it's been only 12 years, and we're almost there... Suffice to say, if a real life Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho ever runs for President, I'll have to give him a minimally serious consideration.

But no electrolytes for me, thanks.

The Florida Project (2017)

American cinema is alive!

[10/10 · 25 January 2019]

Once upon a time (and before there was CGI), some (not all) American movies dealt with real people, with real problems, and (again, some of them) did not need to sugarcoat their lives.

A never ending series of mind numbing flicks starring superheroes, gooey murdering aliens and car chases buried all that pretty deep. But every now and then, a brave director digs in the ground and rescues that kind of human drama for the current viewers.

Welcome to "The Florida Project".

Without including any spoilers (the movie deserves so much support, even if it comes years after its release), I can say that the characters are absolutely human and deeply interesting, even when they are being disgusting, and that having crazy talented, lovable kids in front does not hurt.

Please support movies like this. They are relatively cheap to make it, so they don't need to compete with the latest blockbuster to allow their directors and producers another shot: just earn a modest profit.

Unbreakable (2000)

Yet another Shyamalan horror (of a movie)

[2/10 · 25 January 2019]

The good thing is, there's no way this review contains spoilers. Because I could not watch it till the end.

The only Shyamalan film I watched complete is "Signs", because one of my kids must have liked it and bought the DVD. The movie was bad enough, but the ending was beyond bad. So I crossed him off my list of "want to watch" directors. However, Xfinity was nice enough to reward viewers with a "free movie week", so I gave this flick a try.

I like films where I truly care for the characters. I don't mind if they're starkly realistic or crazy fantastic: I have shed a tear for a stop motion corpse (The Corpse Bride). In "Unbreakable", I could not give a flying piece of you-know-what for the fate of the characters.

So David Dunn is invulnerable? Great for him. And Elijah Price is fragile, and harbors a deep resentment for it? Boo-hoo. Had the characters both exploded halfway through the movie, I would have celebrated it, assuming maybe now we'll focus on David's kid, or his wife, or Elijah's mom. But nope: we keep hearing them preach about... the importance of comic books. And I thought "Ready Player One" was dumb because it shamelessly appeal to video crazed kids, making them feel their gaming is truly important: turns out comic book fans already had their "feel important" movie. And it was just as awful.

A Quiet Place (2018)

Blame it on Tim Burton

[4/10 · 22 January 2019]

Imagine waiting in line to see a Hitchcock movie in the 1950s, and hearing somebody walking out of the theater saying "the ending reminded me of Charlie Chaplin's The Fireman".

Not very promising, right? Thankfully no Hitchcok movie fits this description.

However, after watching A Quiet Place, it's almost impossible not to be reminded of Tim Burton's Mars Attacks.

And a quack, funny parody is not a good companion for a horror film.

The movie itself is pretty well made, tense, and up to the ending it pulls few punches: in the first few minutes it shows no mercy towards a child, something few movies dare to do (the much better The Mist comes to mind, but in a very different sense).

However, after lead actor and director Krasinski is killed too, the problem remains, what to do with his surviving family. And the solution is just too dumb to be even tolerable. Although I already checked the "spoilers" box, I feel bad about writing a detailed account: suffice to say, if you watched Mars Attacks, this ending is logically identical, although the tone is (or tries to be) somber.

In today's world, where movies are made by a small army of people, it's impossible to accept that not a single one point this to Krasinski, assuming he had not watched Mars Attacks. So why did he keep it? Let's assume a uniformly bleak -a la The Mist- ending was unacceptable to him and/or the producers (after all, The Mist was produced with a B movie budget because of that ending, that director Frank Darabont and writer Stephen King refused to change). Fine. Can you leave an open ending? Can you think of some other solution, something like the also far from great, but tolerable ending of Bird Box? Anything would have been better than revisiting -albeit involuntarily- an absurd comedy based on 1960s children's playing cards through a horror movie filter.

Yes there are more plotholes, but most sail through the convincing, well made horror of the first half. It is the ending that elicits a loud "give me a break!"

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)

What a waste of time... a whole lot of it.

[2/10 · 21 September 2017]

This hideous thing lasts more than three hours, and allegedly exceeded production costs by a lot. I guess an unfortunate way the producers chose to cut the bleeding was to hire the script writers for a regular 90 minutes movie. Therefore, the dialogue of the second half of the movie consists mostly of inarticulated shouting and yelling. Some of the many (way too many!) actors in the cast do OK with this, such as Ethel Merman who made a career out of overacting. But people like Sid Caesar, Milton Berle or -most of all- Spencer Tracy are completely out of place here.

Stanley Kramer directed a grand total of one comedy -this one. It's not difficult to see why. Speaking about his "serious" movies he said "Instead of relying on star names, we pinned our faith in stories that had something to say." Hard to believe this is the same guy who crammed a lot of stars together in this movie and had them yell "aaaghh!!!" every time a car or a plane is about to crash (basically the entire movie).

The Intouchables (2011)

French hypocrisy is as good as American

[3/10 · 21 September 2017]

Poor, pot smoking black guy from the projects takes a job -against his initial intentions- as live-in caretaker for a wealthy, paraplegic, highly educated white man. Under his rough street savvy skin, the black dude has a heart of gold. The white dude is uptight and shy, but also has a heart of gold. They teach each other to live a better life and part as friends.

I didn't try to make it any sappier than it actually is. The whole movie is a long collection of clichés which would make it hideous if shot by an American. For some reason, some people think this one should be better because... it's French?

For the record, the initial sequence is funny and promising. It all goes downhill from there. So watch the first 10 or 15 minutes, then throw it away.

I Am Legend (2007)

Rape of the original book

[4/10 · 2 August 2017]

If this wasn't based on the book by Richard Matheson, it would be just another silly sci-fi flick. Still a very bad one, but one of many.

Problem is, it is based on the book, a great one, but the message is fully reverted. It's not just an adaptation, it's a complete 180 degrees turn, almost as if the script writer hated the novel and purposely set on destroying its message.

No spoilers here, suffice to say that even the title does not make sense in the context of the movie, while it is central to the book.

I wish there was a law against adapting books without carrying the basic message more or less untouched. Turns out not only there isn't, but movie adaptations have the power to make boatloads of money, so I guess Matheson made some nice bucks from copyrights, and thus he might have been happy with the outcome. As a loving reader of his great story, I'm not.

Nebraska (2013)

Talking about family, the one in the film or yours

[8/10 · 11 May 2017]

The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami said that great films are the ones that make you talk about them, no matter what you did during the show. So, they may be boring, poorly executed or openly bad, yet if there is something you feel the need to talk about afterward, they were worth it. On the other hand, films that neatly wrap up themselves, presenting a cleanly completed arc that leaves no room for further elaboration, are not significant even if you had a great time watching them.

Nebraska is pretty well executed but a tad boring at times. But if it does not make you think about your relationship with your father, nothing else will. The father character is not particularly lovable, and it's clear that his son (as well as his brother) are not that close to him. So the movie is a continuous questioning of how do they approach their relationship. Maybe it's not even worth pursuing it -go your own way and screw the old man. Or maybe the golden moment of total father-son loving reunion is around the corner (no spoilers here). But either way, what's important is the need to talk about it. The characters talk during the movie, the viewers after it ends.

This is a small movie by all counts. The plot stays small too -no soap-opera like spectacular revelations, no twists, no real mystery. We should thank the makers for that. The basic premise is simple yet more than powerful enough to carry the movie, with no need for distractions.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Are there that many great 2000s films?

[10/10 · 11 May 2017]

I just realized that three of my favorite films ever (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Broken Flowers and this one) come from a three-year period. And I've been watching movies since the 1960s. You would think 2004/2006 was a golden period in the history of movies -yet I feel there was a whole lot of crap too, these three were just jewels in the mud.

LMS is, in many ways, like many other indie movies. Characters are dysfunctional, weird, losers -in other words, ordinary humans. There is a lot of comedy, some drama, and some variable material that can make you laugh or cry depending on your mood. Family members hate, ignore and sometimes tolerate each other. And then comes the unlikely, improbable, crazy happy ending -one that must have seemed so ridiculous in words, in a script, that I am amazed a crew of directors, actors and producers made it into a movie, no matter how indie minded they were.

And yet it is believable in a way a group embrace and a chorus of tearful "I love you!" would not be. It is screw-it-all liberating, something that rarely ever comes out that neatly in real life. But it is heart warming as very few other movie endings, yet crazier than most. If the standard Hollywood recipe for losers-turned-winners is just silly, and the most common indie "it is what it is" finale is typically bleak though believable, this one broke the mold. In a good (great!) way.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

An original romance movie? Can't be possible!

[10/10 · 11 May 2017]

You would think that, after more than 100 years of depicting love stories in the screen, in every seemingly conceivable combination of style, tone and language, every combination would have been explored and new director would be forced to rehash something already tried.

Apparently that wasn't a deterrent for the makers of Eternal Sunshine... since they managed to come up with something truly new. Most movies dealing with memory loss and mind control focus on violence, horror, the darker side of mind. This one reminds us that there is some room for love -not the saccharine type, but one that includes bitterness, fights and break ups. I don't recall rooting so hard for any star crossed movie lovers to reunite. No spoilers here, just note that the ending is solid and believable, without feeling forced or insincere.

If the premise and the great imagery wasn't enough, there is Kate Winslet. I'm an old fashioned fan of Meryl Streep and Kate Hepburn, who tend to dismiss most of the over-hyped new generation of actresses (and actors too). I'm glad to say that Winslet belongs at the very top. She carries this movie. Not that Carrey doesn't do a good job -it's probably his best movie- but the weight of the acting is for once carried by the female lead.

Broken Flowers (2005)

Thanks for third opportunities

[10/10 · 11 May 2017]

The first Jarmusch movie I watched was Night on Earth. It was more baffling that good, but not terrible enough to hate it. Then I saw the truly terrible Dead Man and that almost did it for me.

Then Broken Flowers came out and I decided to watch it, mostly for Bill Murray. And am I glad I did.

Most people expect road movies to depict some sort of internal realization or life changing discovery by the main character. As in "I didn't know who I really was until I crossed the Mexican desert high on peyote". It was time somebody did a really good road movie that remained anchored to Earth.

Jarmusch' previous ones are this kind of road movie but fail to make any point clearly, or maybe it's me who failed to see it. Not the case with Broken Flowers. Bill Murray's tired, bored man embarks on an unlikely trip to find the son he never met (at least that's what a letter from an anonymous former lover tells him). He does not find him, and while his late actions seem to show he may have changed a bit, it's not clear what the future holds for him. And that makes this is a better -actually a great- movie. No, a road trip cannot take anybody back in time. Not all plots have to wrap up tidily at the ending, just like many real life issues remain unsolved, in continuous flow during our real lives. What's done is done and what you don't know now, you probably never will. But that's not an excuse for inaction.

If Broken Flowers has a message, it might be "try and see what happens". The goal may be unrealistic and thus you will not achieve it. But taking the trip may present you with new opportunities you hadn't seen before. At the end of the movie, Murray stands at a crossroad, the camera revolving around him from all possible directions: we don't know which one he will take, and he probably doesn't himself. But before he took the trip, he didn't even know these directions existed.

The Night Manager (2016–2025)

The spy genre is dead

[2/10 · 11 May 2017]

OK, maybe not dead altogether, but dated for sure. LeCarre worked -and subsequently became a writer- in a time before religion mixed with (or took over?) politics and suicide bombers took over suave gun-carrying secret agents. So his adventures look dated per se. Yet, his skeptical view of international politics allows him to be enjoyable by the readers, or viewers, who do not believe everything is black or white. The hallmark of a LeCarre story is, halfway through it you are still unsure of who to root for (sometimes all the way to the end) Sadly, all that is lost in this adaptation. The villains may be charming, but it's very clear they are baaaaad, and if the good guys (they are depicted in crystal clear manner too) don't get them, their own clients will. All the bad guys get is the sarcastic one liners -but in the end they are going down. It's a Bond plot without the gadgets, which are the only thing that makes Bond movies barely watchable.

It could be a consequence of the American market, where gray toned nuances have never been popular, and are soundly rejected by today's good-beats-bad, happy-ending-seeking crowd. But the fact that English actors and crew work in this one, and it was indeed premiered in Brit TV before coming to the US, seems to say that our friends across the pond have also grown tired of moral ambiguity. So, I guess a London-based superhero is coming soon to the small screen -while in the real world, people die in conflicts which are not even remotely similar to these ones.

Interstellar (2014)

Dumb and dumber

[1/10 · 29 March 2017]

Great movies make you think. "Think" as in truly ponder over issues -love, hate, science, whatever- and coming up with your own findings. Usually this kind of movie is subdued, restrained, small in scale -gives you the space you need to think. They present us with a conundrum and let us solve it -if it can be solved at all.

This movie is the exact opposite of that. Nolan movies are not known for subtlety and restraint -and this one might be the loudest, biggest, and I'm afraid dumbest of them all. The movie grabs you by the throat and slap you in the face a million times, yelling "we have serious problems here and this is the solution, and if there is a later twist I'll just give you a louder new solution, but don't you dare objecting to what you're given". Even the supposedly intimate scenes feel like instructions: when we see Dr. Cooper crying over his daughter's cruel recorded message, we almost see a cue card in the background "... and now, dear audience... cry!".

To worry about the future of mankind is absolutely valid. To make room for human emotions in scientific problems is even more valid. But to spend three hours of dazzling visual effects and loud background music to tell us what we should think about all that is cheap and worthless.

Leviathan (2014)

It can happen to you

[8/10 · 29 March 2017]

It would be easy to say that Leviathan is a cruel depiction of the current state of affairs in Russia, that long time enemy we love to hate. But what we see here -abuse of power, cruelty, greed- is sadly universal and would be equally in place in Rwanda, Bolivia or Iowa.

What strikes us as foreign is the steady descent into bleakness -poor Kolya seems doomed from the start and indeed the events throughout the movie keeps dragging him deeper and deeper- as opposed to the magic twist into a happy ending, or at least a glimmer of hope, Hollywood style.

Leviathan does not offer a solution to end with authoritarian tyrants, and that makes it a better movie. If a solution even exists, we the viewers need to think it over and come up with our own answers. Superheroes are pretty hard to find.

Fail Safe (1964)

Better than its comedy counterpart

[7/10 · 13 March 2015]

It's impossible not to judge this movie together with Dr. Strangelove. They were released the same year, and the basic premise is essentially identical. Of course, one is a wild comedy and the other a thick drama which considers the issue seriously. Today, Dr. Strangelove is considered a masterpiece and this movie is mostly forgotten, perhaps remembered as a "not too bad" flick but nothing else. I don't completely disagree with the latest statement, although I do believe it's much better than Kubrick's movie. Fail Safe may have left a bitter taste in the moviegoers because of its bleak ending, and to me that's important enough to disclose it here (big spoiler coming): in the end, an American president makes a decision that takes millions of American lives, and that was just as hard to swallow in 1964 as it is today, even in the realm of movies, which likely helped keeping people away from the theaters. While the kind of event that leads to that decision has never happened and hopefully never will, the decision is "fair" from a cold logic point of view. But the enormity of the ending forces the viewer to consider what's happening in the movie, and that is a big positive. Critics point out that the events in the movie are impossible, and often base their opinion in many technical glitches: I think that's completely irrelevant. The fact that the events never happened does not mean they could never have happened.

Johnny Tolengo, el majestuoso (1987)

Gimme a break

[1/10 · 9 December 2014]

How can this abomination have an average of 6.0? Sorry but it casts a shadow over all of IMDb's ratings. From now on, I'll have to assume anything below 9.9 is a total piece of crap.

Reviewing the movie is kind of pointless. It's a zero brains comedy showcasing a popular 80s TV comedian. Mr. Calabro was a pretty popular actor in Argentinian TV, in the early to mid 80s he headlined his own show, where he created this character, a spoof of dumb Latin dance singers, although often times the spoof effect was lost since he was not much smarter than the object of his jokes.

The movie does little more than repeating the most popular songs from the TV show, with a flimsy romantic - good vs bad guy background. This kind of cheap movie is common to almost every country, it's intended to make a quick buck banking on TV successes, and that's not bad per se. But awarding any value to it is plain ridiculous.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Damn I miss Tim Burton

[1/10 · 4 February 2013]

A movie in which an army of cops cheer happily while they charge into the "mob" (that's ordinary people like you and me, in case you didn't get it), protected (the cops, not the people) by Batman's veeeery expensive gadgets. To me that says it all.

But just because the review has to be 10 lines long, I might add that in the DVD version, when the camera shows the "mob", the subtitles read "mercenaries shouting".

I know this is just a silly fantasy. But even the wildest fantasy has a social context. And the makers of this thing want us to believe that the misery of ordinary people caused by the corruption and greed of our richest billionaires can be only fought by an even richer zillionaire, only honest. And common people are mobsters who deserve to be beaten up by Gotham's best (except in real life they carry guns, and use them). I'll believe it when pigs (not bats) fly.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

It's 2012 Hollywood

[5/10 · 4 February 2013]

There is a lot to love about this movie: it portraits real Americans, with real money concerns and no magical solutions for it, and real behavioral issues (both the one who spent time in a mental institution and those who are out, but may not be so sane after all). It also has terrific performances by De Niro (I had to place him first, since it's been a while since he played such an interesting and complex character), Cooper and Lawrence.

But then again, this is a Hollywood product. Once upon a time, people with mental issues were depicted as uniformly bad, dangerous for the sane population and either confined in an institution or in the process of being taken to one, usually after committing some horrible crime. That was dumb and justly forgotten. Then some other movies would portrait mental patients as possessing some sort of hidden wisdom, seeing deeper truths that most mere mortals cannot reach. While not impossible given the fact that many perfectly sane persons were sent to mental hospitals for political or other spurious reasons, this is not representative of the majority of cases. And then a few movies dared showing mental illnesses for what they often are -grim, hard to bear both for the patient and those around him/her, and often requiring life long treatment, sometimes to "cure", sometimes just to keep under some sort of control.

In this movie (I checked the spoilers alert box) two people with issues meet, and begin working together on themselves (the "stategy" as they call it). That's perfectly believable. But then they get the usual Hollywood epiphany, including not just one improbable personal victory but two, and as the TV show says, it's always sunny in Philadelphia. That was just too much. It's not that happy endings are a bad thing per se. But when there are so many clouds in someone's life, a victory could be, for example, just accepting your issues. There was no need for a "and they lived happily ever after" ending. It is still worth watching, but not as great as it could have been.

The Front Page (1974)

Wasted opportunity

[2/10 · 15 December 2011]

Why would a director put Lemmon and Matthau together in a movie? Chemistry, right? These two could bring life to the worst plot. But there's this little catch: as long as they share the screen.

It's hard to understand how could a top comedy director like Wilder have missed that very basic premise. Because Lemmon and Matthau do not share too much screen time. Each one of them has its moments, and yes they do lift the first few minutes by exchanging clever stabs, but that's it. From then on, it almost seems as if Wilder had purposely decided to shoot them in different days.

And then we are left with a barely OK dialog, a rather tired set of witticisms and some good secondary roles. Maybe it would have been OK for a lesser combo of director and stars. But it feels like a terrible waste in this case.