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Reviews
Müllers Büro (1986)
Humor of Times Long Gone
Seeing this film for the first time twenty years after its release I don't quite get it. Why has this been such a huge hit in 1986? Its amateurishness drips from every scene. The jokes are lame and predictable. The sex scenes are exploitative and over the top (that is not to say that Miss Rudnik does not have nice boobs!). The singing is "schrecklich". The only genuinely funny scene is the big shoot out when the gangsters die break dancing, a trait that dates the movie firmly to the mid-eighties. It's really quite puzzling to me how incapable I am to grasp what evoked the enthusiasm of the cheering audiences in 1986 (and apparently still today, reading my fellow IMDBers comments).
Play It Again, Sam (1972)
The slapstick works great
I'm truly amazed at how funny this is. I was under the impression that slapstick comedy couldn't do anything for me anymore, seasoned moviegoer that I am (I recently saw 'The Party' with Peter Sellers and was only mildly amused). Woody, however, magically does the trick. Even tough the struggle with the hair dryer, for example, is totally over the top and clearly constructed, I could not help laughing out loud. At that point in the movie, Woody's persona has won you over completely (mostly by the witty verbalization of his desperation and neurosis) and the outrageousness of the physical comedy is gladly accepted.
Oh, and the rest is delicious as well. This movie is a gem.
Stargate (1994)
Totally Unoriginal
***Lots of Spoilers***
The story is unoriginal: Taking age old esoteric fantasy of aliens building the pyramids is boring. Re-enacting the archaeological dig from Indiana Jones - Raiders of the lost Ark is definitely not new. Getting a suppressed tribe to rebel against their evil oppressor is so old. Transferring some destructive device to the evil mother ship has been reused by Emmerich himself: here it's a bomb, in ID4 its a virus (Ok, maybe we should call ID4 unoriginal for this one).
The characters are unoriginal: everyone of them is a total cliché. Colonel O'Neil, suicidal at first because of a garden variety personal tragedy, then stony faced soldier trying to blow up everything (has been done much better in 'The Abyss'). The egyptologist 'dweeb' Jackson, goofy but brilliant, and his obligatory love interest are templates, not characters. The roles are only remotely more interesting than the cardboard cutouts the producers apparently used as extras in some of the mass scenes.
Alright, it's supposed to be an action movie. Why, then, is the final battle so detached? Shooting with rifles at laser equipped fighter planes (and surviving it) is so unbelievable that the viewer disconnects. Having a thousand tribesmen beating up two lonely soldiers of the opposite side is laughably unengaging as well.The umpteenth movie knuckle fight is a big yawn.
This movie is lost in genre, there are frustratingly few original ideas here to keep your attention. Emmerich's apparent nickname 'little Spielberg' is well deserved ('little Lucas' would also be adequate).
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather does not come close to Goodfellas (Spoilers)
I am not able to discern much greatness here. Very slow to start it takes too much time to set the mood with period sets and as a consequence does not have the time to make us get into the characters, raise our interest for them. For a long time it is not really clear on which of the main characters the movie really focuses and we thus cannot invest ourselves in one of them, but have to watch in a rather detached way the "epic story" of an entire family, their general mafia business dealings which to me at least are nothing new. The focus on Michael which comes only after some time is achieved with a scene where as a loving son he saves his father, then with a rather inexplicable revenge act which starts an all out gang war, and finally with a cartoonish love story which is also an exploitation device: the one full frontal nudity shot is totally out of place, and I am not against sex on film in general (the scene is however a direct adoption of Mario Puzo's pulp style, so it's at least true to the original material). All this is hardly above cliche.
Compare this to Goodfellas, where Martin Scorsese lets us into the head of one single gangster. By concentrating on three friends and their ascent in the mob, the viewer is guided in an effective and engaging way. The exhilaration, the rewards, the madness, the brutality, the arrogance, the anxiety of the mob life are all presented and, using voice over, explained. The viewer gets to understand the motivation of the characters in depth. That Scorsese is a much more effective director than Coppola can be seen from a direct comparison of two scenes. In The Godfather, Sonny beats up his brother-in-law Carlo when he discovers that Carlo beats his wife. This is done in a somewhat drawn out, brutal but standard style, filmed from a relatively static viewpoint at a distance. The average viewer having witnessed hundreds of movie-brawls is most unimpressed. In Goodfellas, Henry knocks down the guy who was harassing his girlfriend in a very similar scene. However, set in a peaceful neighborhood and done in a much faster editing style, the violence comes as a shock and it's over before it has begun. When Henry concludes the encounter with a death threat and Karen in voice-over talks about how she gets excited by the behavior of her boy friend, Scorsese has created a lasting impression. Or, as another example, compare how food is treated, an obvious fetish for the Italian-Americans as portrayed in movies. Coppola treats us to an recipe explained on-screen by Clemenza and a few shots of dining tables and dishes full of food. Scorsese however continuously gives us close-ups of frying pans and people cooking and amassing foodstuffs, and, in the narration of the last day before Henry is arrested, makes the stirring of the tomato sauce into the calm eye of the storm. This is just a masterful characterization, giving 'flesh' to the topic and guaranteeing to leave everybody hungry.
The Godfather does have it's moments, of course, and it has a formidable cast. The problem is that they only have a pulp novel to play with, whereas in Goodfellas it's the true autobiographic material of a real life gangster.
Finally, I want to add that The Godfather is certainly not the ultimate masterpiece for Coppola. From a directorial standpoint he has achieved much much more with Apocalypse Now. In the end, however, Martin Scorsese is still a better director by far.
Jurassic Park III (2001)
Best installment of the series
I was pleasantly surprised by this one. They finally threw out all pseudo-intellectual crap about chaos or the danger of genetics, which should make the story 'deeper' or more 'moral'. Such an approach may work for the book, but it plagued both former movies in the series. Finally, JP3 is nothing but an action movie. It has just enough formulaic plot elements to keep the excuse of a story going, the human characters only serve as a backdrop for the real stars: the dinosaurs. (I was clearly more fascinated by the the velociraptor 'society' than by any of the humans.) And that's how it should be: For the first time in this series, nothing hides what it is all about: the age old horror scenario of wild beasts killing humans. And thanks to the experienced hands of ILM and Stan Winston these beasts are very well portrayed in doing so (there, of course, JP3 has the unfair advantage of 8 years of CGI development over JP1).
Baise-moi (2000)
Not bad but unconvincing
I see a lot of similarities to Thelma and Louise, only that Baise-Moi is much more extreme on all accounts. That is not bad in itself, but if the characters behave in such a pronounced way, the motivation should be really sound. And for both main characters, I never quite understood their motivation. As far as I know, the book was written by a woman with a similar background as the protagonists and my simple guess is that the rage stems from the experiences made under these circumstances. Who am I to say that such an outburst is unjustified, being male and never having had to live this? But on screen, I was never convinced, the characters stayed strange and artificial on their violent joyride.
As an idea the movie is however quite good, like Thelma and Louise already was a good idea. The older one is just much more sophisticated, and balanced ;-)
Event Horizon (1997)
valid modern vision of hell
This movie is disappointing as a whole but the thing I will always remember, and what I consider a big achievement by the film-makers, are the scenes 'from hell' that we get see on the event horizons video system. The scenes of absolute chaos and the terror reigning when the crew destroys itself were incredibly well edited (sound and image) and got my by the guts. I think this is a vision of hell that is a valid modern equivalent to the medieval paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and others.