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rulerattray-2
Reviews
True Grit (2010)
Ho-hum
It's been a long time since I read "True Grit," and I was disappointed in both filmed versions. In the first, Kim Darby was much too girlish and appealing to play the rigid, flinty Mattie Ross, and John Wayne was much too John Wayne for me to think of anyone but John Wayne while watching him pretend to be Rooster Cogburn. .
This one has been lauded for it's beautiful photography. What beautiful photography was that? The exteriors looked bleached out, and I never really got a feel for where we were in any of it, including the interiors, which for reasons I can't put my finger on right now, looked like they had never been occupied by man nor beast..
(And who the hell hanged that stranger forty feet in the air? A rope salesman? "Climb up and cut him down," says Rooster. Why? Why not just untie the rope at the bottom and let gravity take care of the rest, since it had to be just looped over the limb in order to get the guy up there in the first place.)
People were people back then, and had emotions, just as we do now. But I can't think of a single line in this film that was delivered along with a convincing portrayal of emotion. I've got a hunch that nobody who hasn't read the book or seen the first movie would have a clue as to what Mattie's dealings with the horse trader were about. All lines bunched together, spoken too fast, and delivered as if by rote. No time at all for the characters to react to what the other character was saying.
Charles Portis used no contractions in the book. That was okay, (if not a bit too cute) since he wrote it first person from Mattie's point of view and I could buy while reading it that perhaps the stiff-necked Mattie disapproved of contractions. But come on. In spoken dialog? Read a little Mark Twain – much of it written well before the time-frame of this story – and you'll find plenty of contractions. Eschewing them here was nothing but an affectation.
Sparkling dialog in the book wasted by flat delivery.
All in all, a flat, disappointing film.
Transformers (2007)
Spoilers? What's to spoil?
I could have saved the price of admission by stringing a couple dozen tin cans together, swinging them around in a circle, throwing them up in the air and letting them come down on my head fifty times or so, pausing only to sneak an occasional look at the mean-looking lady down the block. She is over thirty, just as the girl who's supposed to be still in high school in this movie looks to be, but is probably a much better actress.
But then, who wouldn't be?
If you choose to do it my way, be very sure to swing those cans around really fast, so you'll be good and dizzy when they hit you in the head. That way, you'll experience the director's technique of constantly revolving the camera around the actors and the tin cans, whether it needs to be or not.
Hmm... Did this guy also direct "Armeggedon"? I better go look. If that turns out to be true, I'll write his name down and post it in a prominent place, so I can avoid further eyestrain, ear-strain and nausea at the multiplex.
(Why'd I give it a "2"? Just feeling generous,I guess.)
Pas de deux (1968)
Talk about serendipity --
In 1969 I went to a middle-class matinée showing of "Easy Rider". At the break, we all got up to leave, happily surfeited with the phony, sad (and politically correct for the times) ending. Any southern redneck would shoot a hippy on sight. Okay. We bought that and started shifting around in preparation to leaving.
Then as I remember it, a single word appeared on a dead black screen. "Duo". A back-lit ballerina pirhoutted across that screen and danced away from her own still image. She did it again. We were mesmerized.
Ten seconds of stunned silence followed the last frame. The applause that followed had a quality I can only describe as "awed".
Breathtakingly beautiful, that's all.
Flyboys (2006)
Trite, dumb and pointless.
If you want to see a movie in which the CGI flying sequences are cluttered and unconvincing, where the hero takes no evasive action at all as the nasty guy in the black Fokker sits on his tail taking careful aim, where airplanes continuously fly through the camera, where bullets make holes as big as pie plates when they hit fabric instead of punching though it, where our hero cannot lift the fabric-covered wing off his friend's hand, where a girl learns English in two easy lessons, where the Squadron CO gives the hero a medal for disobeying a direct order, where the hero is out of uniform half the time, and where nobody at all says a damned thing worth listening to, then by all means go see "Flyboys".
But if you'd like to see a movie about the same subject in which the action sequences are actually exciting, something is said about war that is worth thinking about and the characters are well-played, go rent "The Dawn Patrol", made in 1938.
Twenty times better than this.
No, on second thought, fifty times better than this.
Click (2006)
Yikes!
Not one honest laugh from beginning to end, a real jerk with no redeeming qualities at all as a protagonist, and a mawkish ending I saw coming not ten minutes after the opening titles.
I stuck around though, wondering if they would have the gall to use the ancient gimmick I thought they might to resolve it, and sure enough, they did! I'd tell you what it was, since you can't spoil something that's already rotten, but no one over the age of five would ever believe me.
(But I did wish I had that fancy remote as I was leaving the theater. I could have used it to erase the time I wasted watching this irritating, witless piece of yuck.)
King Kong (2005)
Lotsa fun, in a sick-making sort of way.
I wish someone would clue some of these the modern CGI impresarios in on the fact that just because you can fill a screen with images does not necessarily mean you should. All it does is clutter things up. Take the New York scenes for instance. One still would have said "New York" for us, which is all we needed to know. A cut to Anne Darrow trying to steal an apple would have established her poverty, and a couple of guys mentioning that the ship was manned by "some of the toughest mugs you'll ever see" would tell us a sea voyage was to follow.
In other words, the original film-makers knew how to tell a story concisely. Here, these guys can't get three gallons of story stuffed into a 55 gallon drum without spilling most of it.
And a great story it was! An adolescent day-dream of a story, complete with brave rescuer risking great odds to save the fair maiden. Problem is, we already know the story, so there's no basic suspense here, save wondering how they're next going to bash us over the head with yet another hairbreadth CGI escape. One tyrannosaur for Kong to fight was great. That way, we got to see good old Kong use good old American one-two punches and some great wrestling holds to defeat him! That way, we could see just how he did it, in case we ever have to fight one ourselves! Fighting (how many? I lost count) a bunch of 'em while swinging around on vines gets a bit silly-looking.
But let's get down to cases here. In the original, Kong was Anne Darrow's worst nightmare, and she was very relieved to see him fall a hundred floors to the hard pavement. Now, for some reason, she has to have some sort of cuddly love-relationship with him. I'm surprised she didn't toss that writer guy off the cliff when he interrupted their little love-fest. ("Mind your own business,hatchet-face, I've found a REAL tough but gentle guy! He just needs someone who understands him, the silly old bear!")
The thing is, fellows, if you wanted to go have some more fun with Kong, then tell us about the second trip to Skull Island, the one where they've gotten word that Kong had an even bigger older brother, and they go there and find that the natives are really mad at them for screwing up their whole ecology! Not the weirdo, blank eyed monstrosities in this version, but the "real" natives they had in the original one, who knew that all they had to do was keep Kong happy with a once a year bride, and he'd keep the real monsters at bay for them.
If you're going to retell a story, do the original the favor of having some glimmering of what it's about. If you're going to retell a classic, DON'T! You'll never match it, or even approach it.