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Reviews
Moving (1988)
Tired and Trite
A sad look at the waning talent and life of Richard Pryor.
Rife with clumsy setups, lead-balloon jokes and worn-to-death clichés, this movie is a snooze-fest from beginning to end.
There is a reason this movie is not even on DVD: there is not demand for this dreck.
I only stopped by to write this review as a warning to others not to get suckered into watching this film like I did, simply because it has Richard Pryor's name on it.
Ice Cube's role in "Are We There Yet" is to his rapping career as this movie is to Richard Pryor's comedy legacy.
King Kong (2005)
1 Hour of Story, 2 Hours of Dinosaur Fights ...
I'm not sure what's gotten into Peter Jackson -- maybe his ego is going the way of the misguided George Lucas in the "let's see how many special effects shots we can squeeze into a movie" vein ... the potentially heartfelt storyline in this movie is lost in the maze of dinosaur fights. For the love of pete, didn't this movie have an editor or story consultant?
The movie opens admirably, spending quite a lot of time developing the characters. For a while I was thinking this might turn out to be a cut above your typical "action" movie. There was an instinct going on there that guided the film to a decent start, so I was hopeful...
Until the crew lands on the island -- isn't it enough that the jungles are inhabited by a giant ape? NO! There needs to be brontosauruses, T-Rexes, Velociraptors, pre-historic crocodiles, triceratops, weird bat-things, and ... oh yeah, there's a monkey in there somewhere ... You'd think that Kong would've found Manhattan a welcome respite from the constant deathtrap of an island he lived on.
So commences the humans vs. cannibals fight, the Kong vs. dinosaurs fight, the Brontosaurus vs. human, velociraptor vs. humans, humans vs. Kong, humans vs. spiders, humans vs. man-eating grubs, humans vs. giant vampire bats, vampire bats vs. Kong, ... eh, ... WHATEVER...
The giant plot hole in this crap-tastic island adventure (or one of them) seems to be that for some reason everyone is fixated on a giant ape, rather than running around saying "Holy Moly, did you see those DINOSAURS!!" There are DINOSAURS here! But for some reason the only thing the people can come up with to make a buck is to take Kong to a vaudeville stage...
If I were Joe-Bob Briggs I would be scoring this movie according to its B-Movie collection of Tyrannosaurus-foo, machine-gun-foo, giant slug-foo, giant gorilla-fu, etc. etc. etc. And at the end of this movie that's what I was thinking. What started as a promising story descends into a B-Movie slop-fest.
What was most disappointing is that there was no resolution with nearly any of the main characters -- not that I need to be spoon-fed like a child on every little plot point, but the characters who were so painstakingly fleshed out at the story's beginning were left floating in space at the end, with no rhyme or reason to it -- they had almost no dialogue, instead staring teary-eyed into the camera for too long, stupidly running around the city in ad- nauseum action sequences, or popping in and out of unnecessary montages.
In the end, this movie, like Kong, fell from a great height. Too bad I won't be seeing it again, or recommending it to my friends. I'll also be leery of Jackson's future works. Hopefully he'll go back to making The Hobbit.
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
One of the worst movies ever
Yes I am old enough to remember the first Star Wars movie, in theaters. It was an exciting ride, and a great story. The special effect actually augmented the story, rather than detracting from it. Sad to say that trend has flipped -- the series started downhill at "Revenge of the Jedi" and has swirled into the toilet of bad storytelling ever since.
This last installment takes the cake. George Lucas is a mature, adult man with grown daughters -- why on earth can't he write a female character with more personality than a paper bag? Natalie Portman's entire existence in this movie is to walk around, whine and complain, and be pregnant. Oh yeah, and cry. Nice job, George.
The Star Wars glamour and specialness is gone to a land far, far, away. Watch this movie again, and compare it to the first episode. Then ask yourself where is the humor, where is the high sense of adventure. You won't find it.
What you will find is a lot of whizz-bang, gee-I-wonder-how-many-computers-it-took-to-do-that-scene scenes. That's all they are, scenes with cardboard characters doing nothing you care about. And the Darth Vader "rise" scene was a ridiculous, unintentionally comic parody of some bad Frankenstein movie. I had to stifle a laugh.
This movie also tries to substitute a little extra blood and gore (Annakin the Amputee) to make itself seem more dark and "menacing" -- George apparently forgot how to do that with good storytelling. Far from a classic, this is a movie to forget as soon as you've seen it.