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Reviews
Kurtlar Vadisi: Irak (2006)
I love the smell of propaganda in the morning
"Kurtlar vadisi - Irak" is an important film. It boldly and bravely documents a number of "true facts" about the war in Iraq, including that American troops routinely crash Iraqi weddings and turn them into bloodbaths, and that the sole reason for invading Iraq was a fresh supply of sweet, sweet Muslim internal organs for transplant into wealthy Jews in New York and Tel Aviv.
Just kidding.
It's pretty entertaining propaganda, but it's propaganda nonetheless. Perhaps stirred up because of Turkish resentment about Americans training Kurdish fighters in Kurdistan, and an unfortunate incident during the invasion when Turkish out-of-uniform soldiers were mistakenly taken as insurgents and held captive, it's a bizarre ride through a world where everything America does is governed by... you guessed it, the Jews.
Quite why Billy Zane and Gary Busey decided to appear in this obvious sensational political drivel is beyond me. To be fair, it is entertaining, in much the same way that the Star Wars Holiday Special is entertaining, but it shouldn't really be taken as serious cinema, or historical fact, for that matter.
The Loss of Sexual Innocence (1998)
Art for art's sake, and not very good art at that
Films like this are the reason that independent film often gets such a bad rap. It's a messy, sloppy series of images which have very little relationship with each other, slapped together with some "biblical imagery" which is about as subtle as getting shot from point blank range with a shotgun, and with some of the most obnoxious, pretentious classical piano music lathered all over the top of everything.
The allegory is heavier than a copy of "A short guide to the Australian Taxation system", but despite the woeful film-making, this might have been tolerable if it weren't for acting. Not that I blame most of the actors, who don't seem to really want to be there, for the depths this movie plummets to, but when there's only about ten minutes of dialogue, you need to do better than a vaguely disinterested performance to make something of a film. As it is, the performances mean that it's very difficult to draw any links between the characters, or anything at all that's going on. This reduces the film to a series of disconnected scenes and shots, which will leave most viewers wondering what exactly is supposed to be going on.
I'm not even going to go into the pervasive nudity and the like, which has seemingly been added simply for the sake of having some pervasive nudity in the film. I'm no fundamentalist wowser, but if you're going to do things like that, please at least have a point to it.
Essentially though, this film is pretentious art for the sake of making a pretentious art film. This does not translate into a film that is worth watching at all. Avoid.
Elektra (2005)
An atrocity
Wow.
Having nothing to do on a Friday night, myself and my girlfriend decided to go along to the cinema and see a movie. There was nothing much on, of course, I sure didn't want to see "Alexander", and the choice eventually came down to "Elektra" or "Meet The Fockers". Perhaps foolishly, I agreed with my girlfriend that "Elektra" might provide us with some better entertainment. That was my first big mistake.
Sitting in the cinema, just as the movie began, a baby in the front row began crying. I thought to myself "What sort of person takes a baby to a movie?", but I realise now that what the baby did was very smart, because he or she got themselves out of having to see this turkey. Not following the baby out was my second big mistake.
It's hard to pinpoint an exact reason why this movie fails dismally. It could be the fact that Jennifer Garner, who is hardly a spectacular actor to begin with, is completely out of her depth here. It might have something to do with the fact that Kristen Prout's character is so unlikeable that I was hoping that somebody would stab her in the face. It might be something to do with the fact that the baddies are completely undeveloped as characters, and are little more than mobile weapon-carrying props. It could be to do with the fact that a lot of the action in the film is completely nonsensical, such as Elektra's OCD. How is this relevant to the film, or the story? It isn't! I shouldn't have to read several years with of comics to be able to make sense of what is going on on the screen. However, I think that the reason that this movie really stinks is just that almost everything about it is mediocre at best, like the cast and crew were on autopilot when it was being made.
The sole saving grace in this film is Colin Cunningham, who plays McCabe, who gets off to a slow start, but nonetheless manages to deliver the most convincing acting here. Other than that though, it's very slim pickings. Bad acting, bad plot, bad special effects... bad everything. The director and writer of this film should be taken out the back and beaten within an inch of their lives, for releasing this shocker onto the world.
PS. My girlfriend hated it too.
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004)
A truly tepid experience
What is it with "quirky comedies"? Movies that are quirky should be funny, but as is seen with "The Edge of Reason", they usually are not. While the first movie was clever enough to provoke a few belly laughs, this poorly-conceived sequel relies on just being plain weird for its humour, and it fails dismally. In most places, it's too over the top, and British subtlety and comedic restraint are two things that this sort of film needs, but which are not present.
Really, this is a bit of a stinker. Much like "The Simpsons", it's made the mistaken assumption that bizarre scenes can substitute for funny ones in a comedy.
The Village (2004)
Pleasantly Surprising
I wasn't too hopeful when I went in to see this film, having seen all of the critics pan it, and lots of people say that it was dull, boring, etc. Which is why it was an especially pleasant surprise for me that not only was this movie not dull, it was actually rather good.
Set in 19th century Pennsylvania, it's not a "thrill-a-minute" horror ride, but if you were expecting that... then you deserve what you get, since this film never claimed to be that. Instead you get a much more subtle horror film, which is scary because it builds and builds and builds. Like most other films by Shyamalan, there's more twists in here than a mountain road, and while some of them are rather predictable, the ones that aren't still manage to throw the story in unexpected directions.
For those that are critical of this film for being "dull", might I suggest that a movie like "Catwoman" might be more to your taste? For the rest of us though, who crave intelligently crafted films like this that don't treat the audience like imbeciles, "The Village" is a winner.
Catwoman (2004)
Marginally better than being put in front of a firing squad.
How to describe this movie? It's a tough question. I could go with something pictorial, like a giant pile of manure covered in a swarm of buzzing flies, or try to invoke some sort of description based upon the booing and jeering audience in the cinema when I saw this. But those would not be good enough. No, this movie left me feeling at the end of it as if it had just murdered my entire family, and then subjected me to a couple of millennia of Abu Ghraib-styled torture.
Just what is it that provokes such vitriolic hatred? The movie is just flawed, from start to finish. I know from experience not to expect too much from American superhero flicks, but this makes "Batman and Robin" look like a masterpiece of modern film-making. The script is embarrassingly clichéd and bad, the cinematography is average at best, and Halle Berry's acting is about as wooden as the contents of a lumber yard. Apart from Ms Berry, all of the other actors here, mostly a collection of Hollywood wannabes and has-beens, overact to a degree that would make William Shatner blush with embarrassment.
Some people might think it slightly silly that I'd take offence at going to see tripe like this, but when you think about it, the millions of dollars that were spent on the bevy of special effects in this film (an ironic term, since not a single one of them is very special at all), could have been spent on cancer research, feeding starving African children, or, perhaps my favourite, actually putting together a decent film that people will watch out of something other than a sick sense of fascination with bad cinema.