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marnixsalomons
Reviews
Soldier Boyz (1995)
Be afraid... be very afraid... to die of agitation or laughter.
I have trouble even knowing where to start. Okay here's a first go at it: WHAT THE F#CK!?
Let me give you a summary of the concept of this movie: Punks, Vietnam... Vietnam bad, punks worse... Who win? I am about sure that was what the scenario-writer wrote down when he made up this movie, but then again he must've either been 11 or mildly-retarded.
NOW, For the fantastic summary of stuff that makes this movie completely non-sense:
A. Everyone seems to fire assault-rifles from the hip, Here's a tip: DON'T, you won't hit a squirrel even if it was attached to the barrel of your gun.
B. Many fire assault-rifles using one arm, trust me... that will strain, break or ripture stuff in reality after a while.
C.They fire a pistol holding the thing tilted to the side, you won't hit an elephant from a meter's distance doing that.
D. The rebel Vietnamese fight for the purpose of 'No Trading With Tha Baddie U.S. of A.' but somehow they acquired U.S. made Hummers-trucks and Huey helicopters, Santa must've been sweet to them!!
E. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, in this movie pulls a face when shooting as if someone said: "Here's a piece of concrete, eat it and then poop it out within now and 10 minutes or I will kill you with a fork." Can you imagine that look? Good... thats how they look.
F. When one of the 'Operatives' is fleeing over a piece of grassland, he gets shot at by about 15 Vietnamese. He gets hit and during this firefight, the bullets seem to make him lose at LEAST 10 liters of blood. ...funny how we used to learn that a human has only so little amount of blood in its body.
G. Why the hell are these American-criminals carrying AK-47's!? H. Since when do criminals make good soldiers?
I. Since when do criminals turn good for no particular reason? J. Since when do criminals all look 'good'?
Okay, I bet I've demotivated you to watch this movie, thats good! When should you watch this movie? You want to laugh, you want to be agitated, you're stoned. This must've been a made for TV-movie, right? Because everything about this movie is cheap and made without any motivation of making it work. Everything, from beginning to the end, is predictable. This movie is one hell of an insult to any Vietnam-veteran as well as any soldier in the world. Cheers for comparing the average soldier's-skill to that of an untrained criminal, they will appreciate it.
The only thing I liked about this movie? This girl named Vasquez or something... why? She made me think of the girl that I love.
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
This is a great movie...
...It just is. I am not Christian, though this movie can still touch my heart, deeply. Unlike many other 'reviewers' I do not criticize the amount of gore - if it is fair to brand-mark it with this term - but see a sympathy in it for the story, or Christ himself if you wish to see it that way. What we see in Hollywood are usually movies which tend to use violence and brutal-imagery for entertainment purposes and those who think they can use violence as a tool to make their project seem realistic. "The Passion of the Christ" fits into neither one of these categories. Yes it contains scenes that are brutal, violent, painful and quite possibly insulting beyond recognition but it uses it to show us the enormous suffering of a man and wishes to show us the raw and pure pain and reality of it out of sympathy for this 'sacrifice', whether or not a justified sacrifice.
One thing that makes this movie, if you like it or not, stand completely out of the crowd is that it uses authentic languages! Both ancient Hebrew and Latin are represented and used non-stop throughout the movie... I truly support this great innitiative! The movie features the last hours/days of Christ and thus skipping large - virtually all - portions of the Bible, we could of course get our jackhammer out of the closet and completely crush the concept and the movie itself for this, but it is the artistic freedom of the director to do so. The movie tends to show us the most important parts via 'flashbacks' throughout the movie, usually represented is if it were the thoughts and memories of Christ himself. It may not contain every detail as represented in the Bible itself, nor may be it all be perfectly correct, none the less it contains all information necessary to make the movie understandable.
The camera-work of the movie is amazing, as well as locations and costumes... add to this the 'authentic' use of Hebrew and Latin and a truly absorbing atmosphere is created. "The Passion of the Christ" is a movie worth seeing for anyone who has an interest in Christianity, religion, history and cinematography. Go out there and watch this movie but do not expect to 'ease down' on using your brains or viewing a friendly and peacefull Christian-movie. Expect to be dragged along into a whirlpool of passion, anger and much more.
I rate this movie very high for adults, at least those who have an interest and a good IQ ;>) I wouldn't rate this high, NOR recommend it for younger audiences, since its to graphically violent and probably boring to them.
- Marnix Salomons
George of the Jungle (1997)
Nice on occasion
I remember this movie, I watched it in the first or second year of high-school together with all my classmates. We didn't pick the movie, our "mustache" female-teacher did since she was anti-violence and what not.
Anyway, this is the kind of movie thats nice for certain occasions. It has to be said that the movie is 'well predictable', no surprises cause you know what's going to happen... cause it happened before. The far majority of the jokes are 'physical', e.a. bump into tree, dizzy eyes, confused look and so forth. Now this can be funny on a short-term, but when it repeats itself over and over again it becomes rather irritating, at least to me and my little classmates back then.
This movie is not suitable for adults nor teenagers, especially cause most of us have seen "Crocodile Dundee" which is fairly comparable to this movie but far superior. Though if you like a cartoonish style of acting, don't demand an in-depth story with intelligence/emotion and not too fancy special-FX then this may still please you. The Gorillas are not too well made but none-the-less funny characters, the Elephant was well made (digital) and its of course always funny to see an animal with an extreme identity crisis which doesn't suit its body. On the other hand, the fake-trees in which George keeps smacking himself into are way to obviously fake. So for ages 13+ I would not recommend it, I'd rate it barely average for such an audience.
Fraser (George of the J.) is a good well-descend and talented actor but this movie does make me a little less fond of his performances.
Now if you're going to watch this with 'kids' (preferably under the age of 11) this movie may very well please them. It's basically your average Disney-cartoon brought to life with adults that act like kids and animals that act like adults. What more can a child wish for?
Looking for a good solid comedy with your (semi-)mature friends? skip it.
Do you want to have a nice evening with your cute toddler on your lap laughing itself silly, then it's a well considerable alternative.
Good Burger (1997)
Dear god, please be merciful on the director's and script-writers souls...
I've watched many movies, many bad movies too. Fairly often I've watched movies that other people find stupendous or bad.
But this movie, honestly... I did not know such cr#p existed. Dear god, people actually watch this!? The acting, the jokes, everything was SO bad it gave me a feeling of shame, as if I was an actor or part of the cast working on this movie.
How can ANYONE even smirk at this movie? I mean seriously, I know it's a "kids-movie" more or less, but I'm just 20 yrs old and I still enjoy many cartoons and what not... but this is not for kids, not for adults, I wouldn't even want to torture Saddam Hussain with this movie!
I watched the entire thing, but its of such bad quality that I can't even completely recall what it was about. ...And I watched it yesterday. In a nutshell: guy works at Burger Restaurant, burger-restaurant has (financial)trouble, employees save restaurant.
The kind of jokes? Well here's one: The main-character holds a burger of his own restaurant and that of a competing restaurant across the street in his hands, as he wonders what the difference is that causes the competition to sell better, he holds them to his ears and says: "Well, they sound the same"
and makes a weird roll from left to right with his eyes followed by a really bad-quality cartoonish sound-effect. So are you rolling over the floor and laughing yet? It features these kind of jokes etc ALL the time, its never surprising, never a thrill, never original and especially NEVER well acted.
The restaurant also owns a car in the shape of a burger with lots of lights, the main-character(s) race around in it like lunatics. Now this MIGHT sound cool, right? Its not, you NEVER even expect it to seriously crash into something or doing something surprising.
My true and honest advice? Do not let your children watch this, it's seriously bad-quality TV/Movie-production. I hope it was just a made for TV-production cause if anyone payed money to see it, I would like to personally re-fund them.
Maybe this is typical American-humour? I don't know, I can usually appreciate American-jokes, but this is no joke... well it is a joke, one "Joke" of a bad movie. I refuse to see this as American-humour, but especially to all the other foreigners out there. This is not our cup of tea whether you are Canadian, British, Australian or Dutch... whatever.
Avoid it, honestly I don't like to badly criticize this or any movie or risk someone missing a movie they might like, but this movie is just SO bad. We have Nickelodeon on TV here as well, and its an "okay" TV-channel in my opinion... but this is a really bad STAIN on all the good stuff they made as well. (like Sponge Bob) I don't even understand how this was allowed to be broad casted or released, isn't there some board that judges whether or not something is worth funding/creating/showing to the public?
Please, please, please do NOT watch it.
Rose Red (2002)
Well descend thriller
Rose Red is the 'mini-series' based on Stephen King's book, of course carrying the same name.
The concept is simple but effective, stuff 6 people with a rather unpleasant gift of 'extreme' psychic abilities into a ghost-house and see what happens...
The 'psychologist' Joyce wishes to visit a Victorian-style mansion "Rose Red", once build for a rich oil-company owner as a wedding-gift to his wife Ellen. >From the start on 'strange' things occur in and around the mansion even when it's under mere construction. Everything goes wrong, the man of the house dies, guests disappear and eventually Ellen too, dies.
After this all, guest-tours are held inside the house, until too many visitors seem to vanish into thin-air. The tours stop and the mansion is now truly abandoned. Though 'Joyce' (many years later) decides to hold her own tour to the mansion, as mentioned above, with her own team of psychic/paranormal-investigators. As can be expected this 'resuscitates' the whole place, and the house tries to make the 'six men'-team a victim of its lust to expand and kill.
The character are all pretty interesting, in my humble opinion. We have Joyce whom is a psychologist that investigates the paranormal and has a huge struggle with the university-council at which she works, An Englishman that can read minds (telepathic) with a cynical form of humour, an autistic teenage-girl with extreme psychic-powers, a paranormal man with a strange bond with his mother, and more.
Overall seen I enjoyed watching it, even though its 4 hours long. It's an entertaining, well build movie with nice special effects and a 'fairly' catching story. One of the pros about this movie is that its NOT an insult to the 'real' paranormal unlike many other thrillers/horror-movies are. Even though the 'forces' in the house are way to obvious to be possible in real-life, its well made and not 'completely' ridiculous overall seen. Though in the end it gets a little more 'unrealistic' but lets not exaggerate.
Conclusion: Well crafted, entertaining movie/series, might or might not scare you at all (not in my case), lasts 4 hours which is long but very bearable in this case. 4 **** out of 5 *****