wiggum Reviews

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

the greatest romantic comedy ever

[10/10 · 11 December 1998]

this movie from here on out will forever rank as one of my favorites of all time. jimmy stewart and margaret sullivan are excellent in the extremely well written and thoughtful romantic comedy. amidst a depressing day it still brought me to one of the best moods i have ever been in. i don't think it will matter who you are, this film is not to be missed.

Citizen Kane (1941)

i love this movie

[10/10 · 13 November 1998]

i find it hard to believe that i had not seen this movie until this past year. now i have seen it almost three times and i cannot think of a better movie. if there is one out there, i have yet to see it!

The Waterboy (1998)

i've done worse things with two hours...

[5/10 · 7 November 1998]

well, this is one of the most average movies i have seen in a long time. i watched it with a bunch of people who played high school football and they absolutely loved it, but i couldn't help but think that this movie was really dumb. i always hope that talented and funny people like adam sandler will come up with something better than this but they always seem to take a basic formula and do a voice instead of playing a character for a whole film. it's not a good thing when the funniest moment in the film is unintentional (the lawrence taylor joke). and even when i would have imagined that an actress like kathy bates would have added some legitimacy to the film i was let down. she might have been the worst part - if one could ignore the constant dumb cameos by sports personalities - in a film that she could have made a winner.

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

An average movie saved by some great direction

[7/10 · 28 October 1998]

Now I know that I am in the minority, but I left "Saving Private Ryan" extremely disappointed. I loved the first half hour and the last half hour, but the remaining two hours was a drawn out generic film with poor character development and a throw-away plot. The only character who evoked any emotion was Jeremy Davies' overly sympathetic translator. All the rest were a bunch of bad Hollywood stereotypes (the guy from Brooklyn, the hardass, the mysterious commander... etc.). and the acting made the movie even worse. I love Ed Burns as a director but think he is awful as an actor (especially after viewing this film), and Tom Hanks assumed his standard heroic role doing little to draw all of the Oscar attention that has come his way. The two portions that made this movie worthwhile were the two battle scenes in which Spielberg masterfully placed us in this horrifying world. but I would have been just as satisfied if the movie consisted of just these two parts leaving out all the excess garbage. And with that you can proceed to hunt me down and have me tarred and feathered.

Chasing Amy (1997)

the ending was all that was wrong

[8/10 · 5 October 1998]

alright, through the first ninety or one hundred minutes of this movie i was thoroughly impressed. and then came the ending. which made me hate holden and kind of turned me off to the whole thing. but now i own it on video, so i just watch until holden decides to tell alyssa and banky that he wants to have sex with them and then i turn it off. but i will say that this is a great movie to watch if you have really conservative friends, because it always freaks them out.