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Reviews
Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business (2010)
Informercial
This seems to basically be, at best, a two hour infomercial for a fringe cancer clinic, and at worst, another conspiracy film about big bad pharma and propaganda for something someone is selling: in this case, another cancer cure.
If you want to know about Burzynski and his treatments, it's a lot faster just to look up Burzynski Clinic wikipedia. It's a bit tricky to do an Internet search on Burzynski, since some of the results are for his clinic, and a lot of the others are sites claiming his clinic and treatment is an expensive scam. But at least wikipedia tries to cover it from a neutral point of view.
Unlike this movie.
The Abandoned (2006)
Pointless
Nicely filmed I suppose. The accents can make it hard to understand some lines. But as for the story, it just seems to go from one poorly explained scene to the next. In fact, in order to submit a review, the minimum number of lines is 10 lines of text. But with an overall pointless movie, how does one fill out 10 relevant lines? The story was pointless, the characters were pointless, the setting was pointless, the things that tried to be scary were pointless. Even the "reveals" made as the story goes on, which tries to tie the thing together, while not completely pointless if you measure them as links in a chain, but the chain is pointless, as it doesn't, itself, seem to support a larger structure or messages.
In a word, pointless.
The Illusionist (2006)
Illusionist vs Prestige
Illusionist, to me, was an OK movie. But I was really seeing, and judging, it in the shadow of The Prestige. Both movies seemed to be fairly similar in many ways, but I thought Illusionist was more predictable, and also more confusing in some ways. Without getting into any spoilers, I felt all my questions were answered in the Prestige, while Illusionist left a couple things hanging. I suppose walking away with a little mystery sometimes isn't a bad thing. But in this case, it felt like I didn't get the answers promised or expected. Adding to that having guessed the ending early on, while Prestige was more of a surprise to me, made Illusionist less of an overall enjoyable experience than Prestige.
The Descent (2005)
Middle of the road
Maybe I'm getting old and pining for the good 'ol days of horror movies, but I couldn't really see why this one got high marks. Well, it did have good production value (acting, directing, effects). But I thought it was mostly just another monster-and-gore flick. While these elements can be part of a good horror movie, in my opinion they shouldn't be the backbone of one. Personally I want an atmospheric, clever movie where hope and dread slowly circle each other; one which has interesting turns and shifts ; which slowly reveals knowledge that is both awesome and terrible. Movies that just go for a lot of running and screaming don't often fall into that category. Maybe the problem for me is that I wish Horror had sub categories: Weird, Gore, Poe-Ish, etc. But since it doesn't seem to, I have to rate all these in one category. And Gore to me rarely stacks compared to the rest.