Change Your Image
daniel-611
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againReviews
The Freedom of Silence (2011)
Would be better as a socio/psycho drama
This not-very-well-produced movie covers societal ills of which perhaps many are unaware. It addresses what's passed off as moral progress and "tolerance" by demonstrating the hypocrisy of its purveyors. The thing is you don't need a Sci-Fi premise to expound and dramatize that. I would have made it a socio/psycho-drama to deal with present day hypocrisy (the social psychosis of political GroupThink and cognitive dissonance). Modern day PC is so constraining and brutish that there are surely hundreds of contexts to dramatize the negative impact in a compelling motion picture. Of course that would cast off the entertainment field's PC too -- that thing that disallows anything so real and gritty from entering people's "PC entertainment consciousness" by dealing with a subject of religion unless it's either a biblical account or a dystopian fantasy. This story should be told again, but next time with a serious grain of realism and drama rather than as a fantasy. I gave it a rating of 6 (out of 10) for broaching a taboo subject.
MythBusters: President's Challenge (2010)
Review of "Hellboy" Segment
There's no spoiler here, and I won't say if the myth was busted or not. I'll just explain the setup and why I think the way it was done did not actually recreate the event they were attempting to prove or disprove.
The test was this: Determine whether, as it's depicted in the movie, Hellboy would be able to pound his fist down on the hood of a fast moving car making it pivot forward around the front axle with the back end of the car elevating and then flip up and over him with the entire vehicle becoming airborne. It would have to clear Hellboy and land on the ground on the other side of him.
To try and confirm whether this would be possible a free falling weight was dropped from a crane on the very front of a moving car so that it would impact the car in front of the front axle. And this is where I became convinced that whether they could make the car elevate and flip or not it was not a true test. The reason I say that is that in the movie Hellboy was standing on the road with his feet planted. He was not falling from the sky like a free falling object. To my mind their test removed the stationary force (more like running into a wall while receiving a quick downward thrust).
So... thumbs down in my opinion on this segment. I like MythBusters and get engrossed in it mainly because (most of the time) they do a very good job of recreating the conditions of the thing they're attempting to prove /disprove. And it has educational value. In this case though I feel they fell way short of recreating the test. That left me disappointed thinking it was deceptively over-simplified so they could recreate it (due to budget constraints maybe). Due to the fact that it was neither educational nor entertaining I rated it 3 out of 10. - Dan
A Holiday to Remember (1995)
Slightly predictable, but nice Christmas film
The film will appeal to those who understand the struggle of starting over as well as those who remember some drama in their Christmas. I think our heroine was aware that she wasn't running away but ultimately running home instead. Connie Sellecca in that role is believable (and strikingly beautiful) and Randy Travis is believable too, though he starts out timid he is soon redeemed as a strong compassionate male. The orphaned boy is as priceless as can be and, as one reviewer said, he holds the film together. There are a few moments where you will definitely know what's coming next, but it doesn't harm the film overall which evokes a nice sense of heart felt Christmas spirit that will lift you up while drawing you in to the meaning of Christmas. It's a nice film, and worth watching if you enjoy sentimental journeys.
Pinprick (2009)
Weird, practically inscrutable movie
At first I thought it must be written by a woman, because of a dark, mysterious man who ends up in the midst of a mother and daughter who live alone... You don't know what to make of him. At first he's just there and no one can speak of him. There is sexual tension. Then he begins to pry deeper into their lives, more sexual tension ignites, then jealousy and then just plain strangeness. At this point the plot can have gone anywhere, but it really doesn't do anything interesting. There is a twist at the end that revealed to me nothing more than that my instinct that it was written by a woman was wrong. The writer must obviously be a man, I thought. And one who must think he's very clever, and wants to think he's in control of his characters, but really he doesn't know what to do with them and he never created a decent plot for them anyway... in the end he unravels them into a morass and leaves them that way. Some people might like this movie for it's suspense, but it just barely kept my attention and I was disappointed with the anti-climactic ending. It was made around the same time as Chloe and has a similar theme. The difference is that Chloe was written by a woman, so it's a woman rather than a man who is tasked with manipulating the other characters.
Invisible (2006)
Invisible, while technically poor, has worthwhile artistic qualities
I rated the film higher than it deserved because there's more to a film than its technical qualities. The story I found the opposite of a typical movie of romantic love. It delved in to the seedy underbelly of it all. It was about two people's tragic missteps into the demise of love. At some point though, they're confronted with two real life psychotics who, through recollection of their own perverse tragic history, and while threatening the lives of our lost couple, propel them into an odd awakening. The last moment of the film is crucial to see in the right light. In addition to its technical shortcoming, where I think the movie fails is in it's failure to get inside the main character's heads to the degree necessary to convey that their torturers are in league with their own emotional strife. Some imagery, including flashbacks, could have helped.