Ramnagel Reviews

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Riveting with a payoff in the final scenes.

[8/10 · 19 December 2023]

Musical track was fine. There was a payoff at the end on the bunker's computer screen: finally you get to find out what is actually going on. Reviews that have low ratings seem to be from... angry people who enjoy simpler movies. They just did not get it.

What did we get? Fine performances. Julia Roberts played a character who was perfectly understandable. Her character was not unpleasant in any way. She played a concerned and loving mother/wife with a completely understandable and constant low level of paranoia for strangers. Her character's apologies for her own behaviour were weird, unwarranted, politically correct expositions of "white guilt".

The behaviour of the deer was a weak point, though. It did not fit into the reality of the show which is revealed right at the end. It seemed to be in there just for creepy effect. And as far as that went, the deer were very effective, even if manufactured.

The anger of the black girl and her knee-jerk repetition of anti-white tropes and playing of the race card was very well done. This is exactly what some people do.

I rate this movie a thoughtful and strong 8 out of 10.

Hidden Strike (2023)

Chan back on form!

[7/10 · 31 July 2023]

What a fun movie! Ok, you've got to be a ChanFan to really appreciate the fight choreography, because it has echoes of the master who directed Chan *ab initio*... you know, back in the day of badly over dubbed classics like Snake in Eagle's Shadow (which got censored because of animal violence-animals were harmed in the making of that movie but was no great thing to Chinese culture at the time). Sure, this movie is a far cry from Yuen Woo Ping's Chan, and even from his Matrix "I know Kung Fu!" wire-fu, but Chan still abides in this movie. The stunts, the pure fun had by all, the sheer inventiveness in the action, the creative use by Chan of whatever objects surround him or come to hand in a fight, the in-jokes, the end titles blooper-reel, the actually good acting by Cena... It all added up to good times for me. A guy movie, and one for cool women who understand why guys love this kind of movie. A seven.

Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

The ultimate badass cop duo!

[8/10 · 18 November 2022]

The movie is a juggernaut of tension and character building. There is no single scene or snippet of dialogue that could be left out without subtracting from the plot and narrative requirements, or without being deleterious to the mood and the personalities and motivations of the principal characters. I was very impressed with this gritty classic which is a serious offering, not for the faint of heart or those who prefer more commercial and glitzy Hollywood pap.

The acting by Gibson and Vaughan was very impressive: these two badass cops must be among the most calm and collected ever depicted under fire. They never get rattled, they are relentless, they are the very epitome of Badass! It has to be seen to be believed. Well done to the cast and the writer/director.

Men (2022)

What REALLY Happened...

[7/10 · 13 November 2022]

This is my take on the movie's actual events, that is, what really happened. As we watch the movie through the eyes of a traumatised and psychologically battered and fractured "unreliable narrator," the way she experienced things is largely the way the audience has to see it and it seems many viewers were confused by this technique. The movie is simply a story of a traumatised woman being attacked in the country by a naked weirdo, not getting police protection, and having to survive a second attack by the same lunatic who is intent on killing her.

So. A woman misused by her husband witnesses his horrible death by suicide or probably accident. It seems likely, given the nature of the movie, that he was trying to gain entry into the flat again via the balcony to do her harm or even kill her, when he fell and died, leaving a horribly mutilated corpse that, in her traumatised state of shock, she goes to look at from up close. She retreats to the country to recuperate. But she feels mistreated and misunderstood by all the men she meets.

Some events relatively early in the movie indicate she is not well and partial to seeing and imagining things, like unconsciously viewing all men as the same, people suddenly flashing out of existence. The ending climaxes with her psychotic break or episode.

The trick is to separate her fantasies and fears from reality since we are watching through her eyes. And the following is what I am almost certain is real and what is her psychotic take on things.

What is real is that a naked crazy guy chases her and follows her from the woods and tries to break into the house to get to her. The male cop is unsympathetic. The perpetrator is released and follows her home again that evening. She is now primed by previous and recent events for losing her mind completely, and that she does when the naked weirdo appears again trying to break in and attack her.

But by this time she is completely loony tunes and she experiences his attack as an extended attack by the men in the village that freaked her out earlier, one after the other.

She manages to escape after stabbing the naked lunatic in the imagined form of the priest and attempts to flee in her car but by accident knocks over the lunatic who has made it to the road somehow. He now takes the form in her mind of her landlord. The lunatic survives and manages to drag her from the car, get in, and race off. She is bewildered but suddenly galvanised into action again when he drives back and attempts to run her over. But he crashes just as she manages to slip through a sturdy stone gate. He manages to get himself out of the car and come after her yet again.

Now he is at death's door and as he drags himself towards her, in her mind, he successively dies and gives birth to various incarnations of all the men in the village who traumatised her. They are all getting their just deserts. In reality the crazy naked attacker is dying and can only drag his stabbed and broken body in fits and spurts of supreme effort. Her psychosis is heavily dependent on her experience of all these men essentially being the same dangerous, violent individual, engendered by the real nutcase who originally kicked things off and ending with her accusing dead husband appearing as the final form of her attacker as he bleeds out and dies next to her on the couch.

The naked lunatic is the only man in the movie who can be a real character that would actually attempt to kill her. Nobody else has motive. The "horror" is the attack as seen in the mind of our mentally traumatised and unreliable narrator.

The final scene shows her pregnant friend arriving. Everything in this scene is reliable because we see it through the eyes of her friend. The car is there, crashed by the naked attacker while trying to run her over. The blood trail into the house shows where he dragged himself after the crash and finally succumbed to his wounds without her even having to resort to using the axe.

Her smile to her friend at the end hopefully signifies her catharsis through justifiably defending herself and working through her issues during her hallucinatory psychotic episode. In any case, the movie is clear that men are to blame for her losing her mind earlier and shows that she only ever acted in self-defence and was a blameless victim constantly victimised by Men. It is significant that the title MEN appears at the end of the movie when all the horrors and violence depicted are fresh and immediate in the viewer's mind's-eye.

This movie was trying to say something about the real world but one could perhaps enjoy it as a supernatural gore-fest if prepared to not think too deeply about it. The movie makes no sense and is pointless taken as supernatural horror, though.

So, it is up to the viewer to realise that it was all real and not supernatural, had a point about men vs women in real life, and used an unreliable narrator's viewpoint to depict for the viewer what horrors she felt and hallucinated, so that the viewer could sympathise with her and realise fully how terrible men are/can be.

And that, as far as I can make out, is what "really" happened.

P. S. It must be said, Rory Kinnear stole the show with an outstanding performance.

My Faraway Bride (2006)

Light-Hearted Fun

[6/10 · 19 November 2016]

A paint-by-numbers romantic comedy. But the clichés still work. There are some stand-out elements, like the "rickshaw" driver. Very predictable in a totally satisfying way.

One of the gems of this movie are the bloopers and outtakes during the end-titles. The "rickshaw" driver performs an awesome parody of De Niro's famous "You lookin' at me?" scene from Martin "Marty" Scorsese's "Taxi Driver". Only during the end-titles do you fully realize what fun was had by all, and how talented some of this cast is.

The only way to hate this movie is to indulge the mean-heartedness of some blackened corner of your soul.

Ronal the Barbarian (2011)

Fun Parody Of Lord Of The Rings Type Fantasy

[7/10 · 7 September 2016]

This is a fun little outing and they did a great job on the English dub. This has some elements of Conan Barbarian type fantasy but it is much more in the vein of Lord Of The Rings.

The main bad guy looks like Sauron, there are elves like in Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) and they even speak like the elves in the LOTR movies. There is an awesome parody character of Legolas who is hilarious. There is even Runic script and Elvish script (Tengwar) depicted in one scene. There are bad guys called Black Riders who also fly on creatures like the Nazgul.

So, if you are into a High Fantasy parody that does not take itself too seriously, would like a few laughs, and can appreciate more than a few nods to Lord Of The Rings long the way, then I recommend this animated comedy. The violence is depicted in a non-gory or fun way, so if you don't like graphic depictions of violence then you should be fine to watch this movie without being freaked out.

God on Trial (2008 TV Movie)

Watch It

[3/10 · 24 November 2014]

I would recommend you not read this post if you have yet to see "God On Trial". This movie is essentially a philosophical inquiry so any review of it is almost bound to be a "spoiler" of some sort.

This movie sucks big time. Why? Because its writer was deeply dishonest. The question posed by the movie is the question of evil. If there is human suffering (and who could deny that) then is God responsible? The unthinking assumption in this movie is that "God" refers to the tribal god of the Jews. But this is not the greatest sin of the script writer. The movie (the script) moves back and forth between two ideas: God exists and has our best interests at heart, and God exists but does not seem to care about our welfare. The script pretends to examine this question fairly, considering both sides with equal interest. But here is where the script fails dismally: it assumes one common denominator to both "sides". God. When God's possible culpability in allowing millions of Jews to be eradicated is discussed - the obvious answer (that God does not exist) is not entertained. No, the debate, rather, is about whether God is good or not in light of all this suffering. About whether God's so-called Plan can encompass all this misery in a way that still allows a thinking being to hold simultaneously in their mind the idea that "God is good, blameless, and kind" and the idea that "God is all-powerful but somehow impotent in the face of human free will". The entire movie is basically an argument that it is OK to blame the victims (victims of divine non- intervention) because there might conceivably be a Plan our feeble minds cannot appreciate.

But that is not the problem I have with the movie. Blaming the victims of an all-powerful supernatural being is one argument an intelligent person can make. An opinion to have. I support the notion that people need to be free to air their opinions, no matter how unconsidered or how much I personally disagree with them. After all, I can only disagree with opinions that are allowed to be expressed and to reach my ear.

My real problem with the movie is that the script writer was deliberately dishonest with the audience. The writer had to have been relatively well educated, above averagely educated I would argue, in matters of Judaism and Christianity. Therefore he would have to have known what the Bible clearly says about the ten plagues that ended supposed Jewish enslavement in Egypt. Ignoring the latest scholarship that shows such enslavement never actually happened, the most salient of points about the Moses myth is that GOD "hardened" the heart of Pharaoh and ensured the continued enslavement of the Jewish people throughout the ten plagues, culminating in the slaughter of the first born Egyptians. Most comfortable Christians believe the Pharaoh "hardened" his own heart, that he and his people's young were somehow deserving of punishment, even in the form of the murder of children. Today it is a quite common moral lesson that one should not "harden" one's heart and be therefore uncharitable. Whoever does the "hardening" of heart is to blame, the perpetrator of moral evil. But God "hardened" Pharaoh's heart. God is the perpetrator of moral evil as judged by today's juries. And why did He do this? Merely to show the Jews (not any other human beings) how awesome He was.

And after wandering aimlessly about the desert for decades, they still didn't get it. Even divinely inscribed stone tablets were destroyed because the Jews were not convinced of God's awesomeness. These stories have an obvious point: to show people (Jews and their local enemies in those necessarily parochial times) that God is awesome. Frightening. Powerful. These ideas require, at some point in their relating, someone to suffer and die. In fact, the more, the better. Hence the plagues which culminated in the arbitrary death (supernatural murder, in fact) of children, even those of Jews who for some reason had failed to mark their houses with the blood of sheep. (Did God not know whom to kill?) Hence the requirement that Jews, even after their supposed slavery in Egypt, after witnessing life-giving water being struck from a stone in the killing desert, after the parting of an entire ocean's water for their own sake, apparently still could not believe in God's power, or in God.

These stories are myths and moral tales, and their purpose, by the very "facts" they relate, is obvious to any scholar of religion. But not, it seems, obvious to the script writer of this movie. Or rather, obvious, but then concealed. This script writer relates the entire story of the ten plagues while paying lip service to the popular idea that the Pharaoh "hardened" his heart, and that God did not in fact manufacture the end result. There is no way a script writer so well versed in Western religion would not know that God, in fact, did the "hardening". Power apparently equates somehow (for some people) to a valid argument for divine supremacy and the requirement for unconditional worship. Stupid, I know, today, but quite valid several thousands of years ago.

So, in summary, I think the script writer of this movie was biased toward a "religion positive" position. He deliberately, in the course of his propaganda, avoided relating crucial theological facts that could be seen to harm people's belief in the god of the Western bible. He sold out, in other words, to a specific religion and tried to cover his guilt.

The only good thing to come out of this movie as far as I am concerned is that I was motivated to write this unfavourable review. I do enjoy the irony of that. So, watch it but watch it.