Archive

0 stars

The Piano Teacher – 0 stars

February 7, 2012
0 stars, Drama
Leave a comment

The Piano Teacher.  An icky foreign film about a gruesome piano teacher (Isabelle Huppert) who self-mutilates and otherwise sexually degrades herself. Why?  She’s over 40, lives with her overbearing mother, has a father in an insane asylum, and a deep loathing for love, joy or compassion.  When she finds a love (in the form of a young piano student), she does not know how to receive it and thus, she must pervert it.

Why would you want to watch a 2 hour foreign film about such a person, even if it were well acted and adequately directed?  Perhaps you too have a deep loathing for love, joy or compassion.  You should get that looked at.

Hollywood Ending – 0 stars

February 7, 2012
0 stars, Comedy
Leave a comment

Hollywood Ending (2002) |

My how the semi-mighty have fallen.  The Woody Allen stable of Diane Keaton, Diane Wiest, and Mia Farrow are replaced by Tea Leone, Debra Messing and . . . wait for it . . . Tiffany-Amber-Thiessen.  Worse, the 67 year old Allen still insists on casting himself as a love interest (this time, with 36 year old Leoni).  The courtship is ridiculous and the images revolting.

Worse, the film lacks one funny premise, line or sketch.  Allen plays Allen, arms waving and neuroses on all cylinders. But oh does he have some subversive things to say about filmmaking.

Allen is directing a $60 million picture.  He he he.  And he’s stricken by psychosomatic blindness. Te he he.  But he makes the film anyway, and in the process, reunites with his ex-wife.  And again, they kiss (just vile – you’re praying his teeth do not fall out).  And guess what?  In the end, the French love the film.

Har har har.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

It is the worst film of 2002, certainly one of Allen’s most terrible and perhaps the shittiest film of the millennium.  In the face of Hollywood Ending, saying “Well, Allen directed Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters,” is like saying “Well, Hitler built the Autobahn.”

Murder by Numbers – 0 stars

February 7, 2012
0 stars, Crime/Mystery
Leave a comment

Amazon.com: Murder By Numbers [VHS]: Sandra Bullock, Ben Chaplin, Ryan Gosling, Michael Pitt (II), Agnes Bruckner, Chris Penn, R.D. Call, Tom Verica, Janni Brenn, John Vickery, Michael Canavan, Krista Carpenter, Neal Matarazzo,

Awful. The protagonist is a hardened, take-no-crap bitter homicide detective with ghosts in the past and a skeleton in the closet. This detective fucks hard and then kicks you out of bed so you don’t get too close. Voices haunt this detective. This detective is a pro, hardened by the massive homicide rate of a California coastal town in San Benito County, California. This detective has seen it all.

This detective is played unconvincingly by professional pixie Sandra Bullock.

The next Jack Ryan may as well be David Hyde Pierce.

Grizzled ole’ Sandra has to deal with two Leopold and Loeb wannabes (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) who fail the Leopold and Loeb movie prerequisites of being either 1) smart or 2) cool under fire. The plot is a senseless mush of hackneyed stew, and Bullock is humiliated by being given a discordant tough gal role, only to be pushed around time after time after time by one of these high school punks.

Worse, she gets attacked severely by . . . a monkey.

You really have to see it, but I recommend that you do not.

Igby Goes Down – 0 stars

February 7, 2012
0 stars, Drama
Leave a comment

Igby Goes Down (VHS, 2003) for sale online | eBay

A punk of a little rich kid, Igby (Kieran Culkin), is sold to us as righteous because all who vex him are, comparatively, worse. There is his pill-popping, domineering mother (Susan Sarandon), his coldly efficient and soulless brother (Ryan Phillipe), and his go-go godfather (Jeff Goldblum). So, yea smarmy little shit Igby is indeed the best of the bunch.

Igby also has a schizophrenic father (Bill Pullman), an unhappy childhood, and he is in therapy. While “rebelling” (i.e., escaping various boarding schools and bumming off of people in New York), Igby harshly judges those around him, has some sex (Amanda Peet and Claire Danes) and comes to terms with . . . well, he doesn’t really come to terms with anything.  Rather, Igby endures angst, punctuated by slow motion scenes of our lonely rich boy running through New York – lost.

Yes lost in a world of hypocrisy.  Poor lost Igby, reduced to running through Manhattan to Coldplay or The Dandy Warhols.

This film might appeal to folks who fantasize about always having the perfect comeback and who fancied themselves terribly oppressed and misunderstood (because of their unflinching truth-telling and high standards) when they were teens. Folks who lived high school with a really cool soundtrack in their heads, and who think schizophrenia is bad, but it may just be more “honest” than normal life.

None of which may be surprising, as it was written and directed by Burr Steers,  who has familial ties to Jackie Kennedy and Gore Vidal and even Aaron Burr. Like Igby, Steers was educated at the best, kicked out by the best, and eventually, forced to attend military school.

The film is crap. If you want to see a funny, soulful and intelligent coming of age NY flick, see Tadpole and if you want to see Kieran Culkin play in a coming of age flick with heart, see The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.

The Last Samurai – 0 stars

February 7, 2012
0 stars, Drama, Historical
Leave a comment

The Last Samurai - Wikipedia

Tom Cruise is a dissipated, drunken Civil War vet who slaughtered women and children Indians (at the evil Tony Goldwyn’s behest) and must atone and “find himself” in the mystical East.

I’m not a Tom Cruise hater.  His effort is incomparable and he’s a star, in that, most everything he does on screen, if not interesting, is watchable. But he has two huge drawbacks.  First, he’s eternally youthful and thus, cannot effectively be world-weary.  Second, he is just weird in period pieces.  I didn’t like Cold Mountain, but Jude Law struck me as a man of his time and thus lent the film authenticity.  Cruise, on the other hand, is hopelessly 21st century and appears on the cusp of saying “Dude” a few times.

He is not helped by this hackneyed, American-hating, simplistic piece of garbage that is the script.

Avatar – 0 stars

February 6, 2012
0 stars, Sci-Fi
Leave a comment

Watch Avatar: The Way of Water Family Audio Track (Includes Bonus) | Prime VideoIf you are a 14 year old boy who thinks The Lion King script was opaque, Transformers was too sedate and you have plans to major in “Live Action Role Playing” at college, James Cameron’s technological Sominex is the film for you.  While there were tussles over the politics of the film (it is, as a fact, virulently anti-corporate, anti-military, anti–Coca-Cola, anti-modern and anti-Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan etc . . .), the script is truly at the level of Disney’s Pocahontas, so it’s difficult to engage in an analysis of the meaning with much gusto. That said, minor examples that for whatever reason made me laugh: the corporate shill’s name is Parker Selfridge and the psychotic “Burn the village and fu** saving it” stand-in for Lt. Calley is Col. Miles Quartich.

I’m guessing the first draft included Bernie Skilling and Col. Ariel Cheney, but legal problems ensued.

Cameron’s script for Titanic was simplistic and laugh-inducing (“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class? I hope they aren’t too crowded”), and that too is a terrible blight of a picture, but at least you knew the damn boat would sink and sink with a bang, so you had that to look forward to.   Here, it’s all blue people, interminably hopping from tree to tree, and there is no assured calamity to keep the lids from drooping.