Change Your Image
brennanm
Reviews
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
a disaster
Stay far, far away from this movie. An overblown, overhyped turd. Outdated effects, a baby, some pretty good music, and lots of empty screen time. That's about it. If you plan on watching this, make sure your fast-forward button works.
La vita è bella (1997)
How the reviews for this came in as they did, I can't imagine. I think maybe people like to hear themselves say aloud that they loved a movie with subtitles.
This movie is possibly the most wretched abomination I've ever been forced to endure. Never was I amused, stimulated, impassioned, engrossed, or even interested. Divided into two independent halves (which in and of itself isn't necessarily bad), it proceeds to bore and insult the unfortunate viewer with two seperate stories. The first of these unlikely tales involved a horribly contrived and utterly loathsome tale of a man and a woman falling in love. Basically, he drags her around the city to various locations where he knows something specific will happen, such as a man tossing a set of keys down from a second story window to a locked-out friend, and she falls in love with him. Whoopee. Nothing is done here that hasn't been done a thousand times over in better movies. The second half amazingly and deftly trumps even the first's diabolical drabness by continuing its utter bore-fest, but then contributing what may be the most insulting, degrading, and unholy storyline ever to grace (or in this case, curse) the screen. The filmmakers evidently thought it appropriate and amusing to have a good chuckle at the expense of all of those sustained and killed in Nazi concentration camps, as the one in this film is depicted as more of an expensive resort than a death camp. Of course, there were token scenes that showed a death or two, but never was the horror ever at the focus of the story. (This may have worked if the picture had anything else going for it, such as a storyline, but sadly such amenities are absent from this stinker.) I am shocked at the poorness of this movie, and I walked out asking myself something that years of exposure to the supposed decay of society, American pop culture, had never caused me to wonder: "Is nothing sacred anymore?"