Change Your Image
sadief1880
Reviews
National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
Made Its Mark
Animal House is an excuse--and a good one--for staging lots of funny scenes, quotes and goofs with an early 1960's campus motif as the "setup". Culturally, it gave us a new vernacular ("double secret probation", to name one) and made "Shout" a hit for another generation or two. But its true enjoyment lies in remembering what that time period was about, and appreciating the funny pokes at then-society's crumbling institutions: the "outcasts room" at rush early in the film, the oh-so-sweet, yet latexed-gloved sorority girls, brown-nosing "good-guys",etc. I can't help but think that today's younger generations just "won't get it".....they didn't live the '60s, and by virtue of political correctness have never been allowed to laugh at many of the jokes here!
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)
Enjoyable creep-out
Recurrent dreams of your murder that may signify your reincarnation! Others who've noted the superior cinematography and soundtrack are correct in identifying the elements that glue one to Peter Proud's predicament. I was an usher when this first showed up in'75--we always got 'gasps' from the audience at the preposterous climax! An opening screenshot saying "L.A. 1975" would make the film appear undated and retrospective. Otherwise exciting and a must-see especially for film students and aficionados.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Good Fellas Redux
In 2024 we'll ask: What was the name of that movie ten years ago that was "Good Fellas" with DiCaprio & stockbrokers instead of gangsters? In fact, 'Wolf' would be high plagiarism had it not been Scorcese self-aggrandizing: The sound track parallels GF identically to set mood and time frame. The martini lunch with McConaughey attempts an analogy with the GF "whadda mean funny" scene in its "over the top" script, but comes up short, far from 'the top' without Pesci's superior ad lib performance. Bad guys with poor educations laugh a lot, do drugs, cheat on their wives, eventually do themselves in with the feds' help. Whoddathunk? Why did that '90 ticket to GF cost me so much less?
Man of Steel (2013)
Nothing new
If you're under ten years old this one's a must see: You haven't seen all that many big, menacing alien spaceships. And your fill of overly-amplified sub-woofer blasts every time an action 'event' occurs has not yet been reached to banality. So many special effects (that everyone else has seen before). You're not much into plot or character development--there isn't any here....whoopee! Lessons learned?--oops, the good vs evil axiom of prior Superman stories is either absent or undecipherable in this installment, so no need to fret over "missing the big picture".
Advise: MISS this big picture.