If there is any doubt that Dreamworks’ computer-animation efforts are little more than pale copies of Pixar Animation Studio’s works, Shark Tale will resolve that problem once and for all. The concept is straight from the cesspool of creativity known as the Hollywood boardroom meeting – “It’s like Finding Nemo, but hipper!” – and the implementation is far worse. Having blown half the budget signing big-name celebrities, Dreamworks decided to get its money’s worth by having its animators graft psuedo-likenesses of those stars onto badly-rendered computerized fish bodies, resulting in a film that looks like a movie-length version of Sega’s creepy Seaman video game. And with the budget for this film blown on celebrity voices and advertising, it appears that Dreamworks only managed to pay its animators by pimping the movie itself; the film is a nonstop barrage of product placements and pop-culture references, giving it the same timeless appeal as a Flavor-of-the-Month Boy Band.
Proving that computer animation is no panacea for inept filmmaking, Shark Tale is one catch that should be thrown back – hard.
***Hollywood Movie Review *** - The Passion of the Christ. (Four Stars)
Savior Scores Big
[sup]By meek[/sup]
Starring, written and directed by Mel Gibson, (who also wrote the screenplay based on his own novel) this comedy captures the brutal realism of pre-adult, pre-sexual-revolution life and has been imitated often, rarely equaled, and surpassed only once.
Despite the literary origins, the movie isn’t much different from the conventional teen comedies from the eighties and nineties, but it’s far funnier than most.
I would say it’s in the same genre of movies such as There’s Something About Mary: crude, crass, and vulgar, which would be somewhere between annoying and offensive if it weren’t outright hilarious enough to compensate. Courtney Love provides a strong center to the film as Christ’s mom Mary, but Jamie Foxx and Don Cheadle are the scene stealers as two of the young saviour’s apostles. Sean Penn in a small cameo appearance as a surfer druggie dude, practically steals the whole movie.
The Passion of the Christ will really stand the test of time. This film will still have you reeling with laughter and tapping your feet along to those eclectic pop classics. Although the film remains largely prosaic, crude, stereotyped, and pointless, it’s among the coolest high school films I’ve ever seen and it’s one of the most representative movies of the ages.
What plot there is garnishes itself with an array of such like-minded sensibilities that you’d be hard pushed to find much in the way of fault. The panoply of teen types and turmoils is dead-on accurate. The movie is sublimely funny and interesting and it may turn out to be the greatest teen movie ever made.
Gibson has a huge presence in the film, and every whacked line he utters resonates with the sheer hilarity that he fully believes in what he says. The Passion of the Christ explores adolescent energy with elan and is truly a comedy gem.
Rosebud was his sled!, there, i just saved you two long, tedious hours
<apologies to Family Guy, that i blatantly sto…errrr…borrowed the review from>
I, Robut
This masterpiece stars Will Smith and his Decapodian partner John Zoidberg, M.D. in a quest to discover the dirty secret behind Mom’s Freindly Robot Company’s Bending Unit production plant, if they can’t figure out why the bending units keep breaking the “three laws”, we’re all boned… this movie has it all, love, passion, action, explosions and disembowling, and is rated M-14 (not appropriate for lifeforms from the M-14 galaxy)
Quentin Tarantino continues his exploration of violence in the cinema in this complex masterpiece concerning Uma Thurman’s quest for vengeance against David Carradine. While in the hospital in a coma, her husband-to-be is murdered, and once she awakens, Hong Kung-Fu hijinks ensue.
[At the moment it’s only me and Owl - but what the heck, I’m enjoying it]
As Stalin might have put it, Starship Troopers is a puzzle wrapped inside an enigma wedged into a Russian Doll. In attempting both to subvert essence and to explore distance, Verhoeven falls between two cinematic stools. Visually stunning, the picture draws upon an illusory metaphor that is itself a contradiction. By celebrating dialectic, he underpins his film at the same time as he undermines it. A work of art that doesn’t quite work as art.
If you are looking for a fundamental exploration of the female psycho-sexual dynamic this film is for you.
Directed by Alan Smithee, a journeyman director by his own admission, this is perhaps the work that comes closest to an overview of his entire ouevre.
Perhaps based losely on la ronde this film offers a series of romantic vignettes that are loosely based around a sporting metaphor and explore the meaninglessness of much modern romantic transaction.
Beautifully lit, by an anonymous lightingman and cinematographer, with authentically “naive” dialogue, and a cast drawn mainly from amateur work this film is a stand out modern American Work
Jean Luc Goddard reviewing this film in Cahiers de Film simply wrote “Formidable”, ands it’s hard to disagree with the master. Yes this week’s must see Film is Debbie Does Dallas.
Dude, Where’s My Car? Can be seen as the missing link between the European Auteur school of film making and it’s Hollywood Studio-system counterpart. Part art house project, part blockbuster, it has a foot in both camps whilst still holding onto it’s fundamental counter culture values, so beloved of the Sundance festival set.
Offering a distopian view of teenage angst in a post industrial world, it takes as it’s main theme the “Grail Quest” of European legend.
Our proud knights embark on a heroic quest to find the mythical, and totemic “car” despite their obvious drawbacks as traditional heroes. In an almost perfect reversal of traditional classical tragedic structure, catharsis, nemesis, hubris and hermatia are all visited on our protagonists in direct relationship to the proximity of their grail - the car. This is not the only dramatic theme that is subverted.
The concept of deus ex machina is thoroughly explored through the medium of the “car park” which doubles for the Elysian Fields of classical myth.
In short this is a film that repays many viewings at a variety of intellectual levels. The word “masterpiece” is an overused trope, but in Dude, Where’s My Car? it finds a righful home.
Quentin Tarantino continues his exploration of violence in the cinema in this complex masterpiece concerning Uma Thurman’s quest for vengeance against David Carradine. While in the hospital in a coma, her husband-to-be is murdered, and once she awakens, Hong Kung-Fu hijinks ensue.
As Stalin might have put it, Starship Troopers is a puzzle wrapped inside an enigma wedged into a Russian Doll. In attempting both to subvert essence and to explore distance, Verhoeven falls between two cinematic stools. Visually stunning, the picture draws upon an illusory metaphor that is itself a contradiction. By celebrating dialectic, he underpins his film at the same time as he undermines it. A work of art that doesn’t quite work as art.
If you are looking for a fundamental exploration of the female psycho-sexual dynamic this film is for you.
Directed by Alan Smithee, a journeyman director by his own admission, this is perhaps the work that comes closest to an overview of his entire ouevre.
Perhaps based losely on la ronde this film offers a series of romantic vignettes that are loosely based around a sporting metaphor and explore the meaninglessness of much modern romantic transaction.
Beautifully lit, by an anonymous lightingman and cinematographer, with authentically “naive” dialogue, and a cast drawn mainly from amateur work this film is a stand out modern American Work
Jean Luc Goddard reviewing this film in Cahiers de Film simply wrote “Formidable”, ands it’s hard to disagree with the master. Yes this week’s must see Film is Debbie Does Dallas.
[With thanks to Shibb! I’ll ask for the other thread to be closed.]
Chain Reaction (1996) is a movie with a star-studded cast about some sort of miraculous alternative energy source. Probably the good guys want to make this energy available to the world free of charge while the bad guys want to suppress it forever so that they can continue to make money, the bastards. There’s a bunch of chase scenes, I guess, with an “ice hovercraft” chase that might be exciting. It’s PG-13, so it’s violent but not too violent. I hate Keanu Reeves, so 1 star.
Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction continues the iconoclastic style of this stereotyped director. His continued exploration of the wood pulp industry is single-handedly developing a genre. Unfortunately his modus operandi adheres to the inclusion of a thematic style as wooden as its principle motif. While this generates a visceral symmetry to proceedings, it creates a tension that its celulose subject matter is ill equipped to sustain. One can only hope that the reputation of its stellar cast suffers no damage, particularly Mr. Travolta whose performance in Look Who’s Talking Too puts into shade the entirety of this dead wood travesty.
A Clockwork Orange is another in the series of fruit and vegetable-themed children’s movies such as James and the Giant Peach and Veggie Tales that have become so popular lately. This charming film features the soothing music of Beethoven, as adapted by Walter Carlos’s sister, Wendy. Roddy McDowall stars as Alec, whose many whimsical adventures are chronicled by director Stanley Kramer. Highly recommended for the family.
Cinema has a reputation for offering up a bubble-gum take on the human existance. Frothy romances, show tunes and Busby Berkely, as opposed to a serious insight into the great themes of life. Who are we? What is the nature of life? Where do we go to when we die?
Thankfullly, once in a generation, a film comes along that really attempts to answer the eternal questions with a version of it’s own eternal verities.
This generation’s film which truely examines the nature and meaning of life, and the relationship between the living and the dead (Church militant and church triumphant if you prefer) is Weekend at Bernies .
