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mwright-13
Reviews
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Not very realistic
I am wondering about all the other reviews that say this is exactly like real life in the 70's. I found this movie to be very unlike real life in 1976, to a severe extent. I graduated high school in 1973 so it should be almost exactly my time but there are many things wrong here. The movie has stoners wearing polyester print shirts which were actually the costumes of the disco set. In real life they would all be wearing blue denim jackets with DISCO SU**S buttons on them, and never disco clothes themselves. The movie has them smoking bongs in a convertible in plain view of cops, something never done in the 70's when people still went to jail for 2 joints and always smoked dope where the cops couldn't see us. It shows stoners always getting into fights. Not like real life, only greasers and jocks got into fights, stoners were too stoned to fight at all. They never talk about music in this movie, the most you hear about music in this movie is the one guy who talks about getting Aerosmith tickets, but in real life, all us stoners talked about was music. That was like 80% of our conversation. Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, Captain Beyond. I think most of the people in this movie were the lower intelligence set, the smart stoners didn't knock over garbage cans or go around paddling people in the posterior with wood paddles. It never happened. In real life, the football players were dumb jocks with short hair, big muscles, dated the dumb straight cheerleaders who made money at the bake sale to buy uniforms. Jocks were straight and never smoked dope or even cigarettes. They were scared of the stoners because they didn't have any idea what we were doing. Once in a while a stoner got on the football team but never fit in with the jocks, and when the stoners found out he was on the team we thought he was maybe a jock-hippie which was a rare thing. But this movie has skinny little hippies playing football!! Never happened, ever. And it shows hippies with late-60's Camaros with 454 engines in them and Dodge Chargers with a 440 and a 6-pack. Bzzzzzt!! Those were the greasers! Hippies drove beat up Volkswagens and Chevy Novas with 6 cylinders. This movie is not realistic at all. I think this movie is ABOUT the 70's but it lampoons them, and it seems the people who made the movie were not really there.
Nell (1994)
not believable, on any level
Not believable. So many of these "wild person" movies have been done, from Tarzan to Crocodile Dundee, that we know what to expect of them...nothing believable, and nothing to learn from. Characters in other movies have been suckled by wolves, raised to swing from vines like apes, to fight crocodiles by the Australian Aborigines, raised by Indians and taught to dance with wolves, who knows what else? The only thing is, it could never happen. Raised by people in other societies, yes, but children raised without contact with any other people, it's impossible. Nell, if she had been living like the story has us believe, would have matted hair, filthy skin that was callused from head to toe, and she would be eating caterpillars and bark, not the groceries that were delivered to her door every week. And if the grocer knew where she was living, so would everybody else. Who pays the grocer? Why is she wearing shoes that fit? Why is her skin so soft and smooth? Why does her sister have to be an identical twin to make their own language...she could just as easily be a cousin. The thing that bothers me the most is that the average hillbilly in the mountains of North Carolina are much worse off than she is, and yet she is the one with new clean clothes and perfect teeth, while they are the ones with none. You want to make a movie about hillbillies in NC, then just go into the woods and film an average family in those hills, you don't need to drag Jodie Foster in with 25 makeup artists to hide blemishes. We have her in a cabin near a road that some local bikers have found. Are they the first people who ever stumbled on that cabin? The US government has surveyed every square inch of land in this country, and census takers know where every cabin or shack is. I have 28 acres in a part of the Adirondacks that are every bit as remote as the hills of NC, and when I tried sneaking a cabin in there, within a week I had the Town Officials up there wanting to see my permit. The movie is impossible.
Blazing Saddles (1974)
One of the funniest movies of all time. Corny by today's standards but icon shattering in it's day. A stroke of two geniuses, Brooks and Pryor.
I can only imagine the laughter in the room when Brooks and Pryor combined their heads to create this one. A Jew making fun of Jews, a Black making fun of Blacks, two Western Americans making fun of the West, movie makers making fun of the movies. The childish fart-level humor and utter cornball gags keep you rolling of the floor unable to breathe. This movie doesn't pretend to be anything more than cornball humor, but it's the all-time best at that. Let's not pretend to be intelligent adults, let's just watch this gem and laugh our heads off like the kids we are inside. Downsides are the overuse of swear words, which were funny in the early 70's because of their shock value during those censored times, but today are just annoying and unnecessary. Another annoying scene is the sexual perversion when Hedley makes love to the statue, though it's funny that the creep gets horny over the thought of money, it creeps me out. But the strength of the movie is its originality for its day, long before the Zuckors. The jokes come so fast and so unexpectedly that you can watch this movie many times before you catch them all.