abernant_85 Reviews

Persepolis (2007)

One of the best films of 2007

[10/10 · 27 December 2007]

This is a marvelous film. The voice actors in French are superb; I'm not sure whether it will translate in an English dub. The animation is charming; you forget that it's mostly black and white, and remember only how beautiful it is. It is both bleak and hilarious, chilling and human. The "Eye Of The Tiger" scene is awesome for being so amateurishly sung in heavily accented English and only just in key. I learned a great deal about modern Iranian history, and relived a great deal of childhood and adolescence (albeit not in a sophomoric way).

I saw it at a free screening with about 6 other people before it was released, but I will be paying to see it again and dragging as many people as I can to see it with me. If you're reading this, I'd drag you to see it, too. It's a GREAT film, one that deserves all the awards it can garner, and not just as an animated film, but as a brilliant movie that just happens to be animated.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

Lazy, flat, a waste of film

[3/10 · 27 December 2007]

Judd Apatow apparently believes he is God's gift to comedy. His producers and editors apparently believe he has a Midas touch and can do no wrong. Up until this movie, all of them may have been pretty dead on. With this movie, all bets are off.

Perhaps if the movie had been cut down to about 15 minutes and put up on YouTube it might have garnered some hits and some pass-it-around-the-office laughs. At full length and in the theater, it is a train wreck. Joke after joke after joke falls flat. Actor after actor mugs and hams and tries to blow some air into this deflating blimp of a film, but it was never properly stitched together to begin with and their efforts come off as sad at best and indulgent at worst.

I kept waiting for the movie to get funny. On paper, it probably read funny. But as I sat in the theater, beginning to dread each new scene, I realized it was a failure on the part of the director, writers, editors and execs to see that it wasn't working. Let's put it this way: even the lame Scary Movie spoofs are better than this. This movie just flat out sucked.

Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) (2010)

Why hasn't someone picked this up for distribution?

[10/10 · 16 September 2006]

Sony Pictures Classics, I'm looking at you! Sony's got the rights to Harry records -- you need to distribute the film and you'll get radically increased sales of his back catalog! Anyhow, this is a great study of a fascinating musician, woefully underknown, full of great stories, greater music, and it could have been 3 hours longer and I'd have loved it even more. Saw it at the American Cinemateque Mods & Rockers Festival at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, where it played to a packed house. They were turning people away at the door! I went to many of the Mods & Rockers festival films, and let me assure you that no other film came even close to selling out, let alone turning people away. See it in the theatre, buy the DVD, and make sure some slow-on-the-uptake company [*cough SONY cough*] picks it up ASAP!