Change Your Image
jnarimbaud
Reviews
When You're Strange (2009)
90 minute advertisement for Light My Fire
I expected something that embodied the the approach, the spirit, the intelligence & interests of the band. This did not, it played out for what it was a feature length advertisement for the re-issues of their back catalogue.
It desperately needed to highlight what made them different from any of their peers & it failed. An in-depth exploration of their motivations & influences (musical, cinematic & literary) & how they fit together is what this should have been. It fails to capture anything that The Doors meant to me; & Is only good for a few short clips of rare footage.
I'm quite surprised that UCLA film school graduate Ray Manzarek is not as ashamed of this as he is Oliver Stone's awful mess of a biopic. Is this the kind of film Jim would have wanted to be represented by? I can't answer that question other than by judging it against his own work; It would be a resounding no.
Edge of Darkness (2010)
Edge of vomitus
If you were to strip the original Edge Of Darkness BBC series of all of its depth. Its political motivation, its ambiguous characterisation, its genuine grittiness & general atmosphere. You would have this movie. It is hard to believe it is the same director (unless you watch terminal velocity first). It is just not dramatic or touching in any way. They turned a thought provoking drama into a modern day revenge Western which is almost unforgivable.
Martin Campbell can make great movies, love or loathe him Mel Gibson can bring depth. This should have worked if these revenge fantasy cookie cutter clichés hadn't been applied to the script. Anything remotely containing any depth was stripped away, according to the screenwriters, as it was dated & unacceptable to modern audiences. So what we have here is a screenwriter suggesting that actually having characterisation is a thing of the past. Basically insulting you & I, the audience, telling us that we are not clever enough to handle shades of grey in characters. That only the man in the white hat Vs. the man in the black hat will bring us to the cinema. The same writer said that the political element of the original series was a child of its time. I think he needs to take a look around him because not much has changed on either side of the pond & the essential political themes hold just as strong, because they are human themes.
Time & again with these failing re-makes we see everything that made the original worthwhile stripped away in the name of modernism. Only for the film to bomb & the studio to wonder why. Alfie, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Get Carter etc etc etc
Do you not understand that if the elements that people enjoyed are completely gone the core idea of a project goes with it?
If you have half a brain, first be sad that this was not all it could have been. Then go & buy the t.v series.
The Descent (2005)
The Descent into mediocrity
This was utterly dire & childish. Just horror by the numbers, & other peoples numbers to boot. I've seen people suggest that the "references" were a good thing, but it just seemed assembled from other scripts. I fail to see how this obvious committee style cut & paste can have any merit? I've even seen people suggest that this movie has strong characterisation, may I suggest they need to watch more varied kinds of movies!! It just all seemed so lazy & contrived, just like Dog Soldiers.
This kind of over-stylised, under thought-out rubbish needs to stop, so we can get back unselfconscious film-making, good film making.
I will give praise to the cinematography & the lighting though. Very very good.
Get Carter (2000)
Stephen T. Kay is a big man, but he's out of shape. With Mike Hodges it was a full-time job
Do not see the remake of Get Carter. I did in a moment of weakness & ended up shouting at the television for an hour & a half. Imagine Get Carter with everything that made it different (the violence, the culture clash of London to Newcastle, the cool soundtrack, the emotional detachment of all characters, & the ending) missing, & you have the remake. They even try to make Carter & his niece bond in the most sickeningly turgid scenes of mush evah!! & Guess what? Carter drives off at the end into sequelsville...only he doesn't because only two people saw this movie. & Now three with me, but I would spare you this pain.
But don't blame Sly!!
Silver Dream Racer (1980)
I got a lot of love inside...
Tell me for god-sake why people slate this movie?
I'm no Essexmania reject I'm not old enough, & I like Kurosawa & Truffaut movies mixed with a little German expressionism. However I am a racing fan, & herein lays the reason I like this movie, the ending. There's a well worn saying "You couldn't write stuff like that" but I've seen it happen for real on track. Hell, you can all see unimaginable feats on the race track every few weeks from Valentino Rossi in the Moto GP series (incidentally for those in the know, checkout David Essex' shaggy hair & earring, pretty similar to The Doctor!!)
Yeah you can tell it was made in 1980 but who cares, what's the preoccupation with always having a present day setting? The racing scenes minus the awful blue screen are sheer class, as are the crashes. Give it a chance, like McQueen's Le Mans it'll at least give you a few race thrills with the first viewing. It's not Citizen Kane, but it's not as unwatchable as people would like to make out.
It gets 9 just for the ending race sequence.