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stephanieleejackson
Reviews
The Longest Week (2014)
You can't ape wit
This movie is a beautifully styled illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's got all the trappings of a Wes Anderson film, except wit, character, color, humor, and plot.
A cringe-inducing waste of a studio budget.
The Story of Luke (2012)
Seriously?
Ladies, I'm going to give you a couple of scenarios, and you tell me if they sound realistic.
Say you're in your late teens, early twenties. You're at your boyfriend's house, making out on the couch. His autistic cousin walks in on you. Boyfriend leaves the room. What do you do?
You invite the autistic dude to sit down, move inappropriately close to him, and proceed to confuse and confound him with your teasingly seductive remarks, am I right?
Or how about this. You're the stay-at-home mother of two young adults, with nothing better to do all day than get manicures and ruin dinner. Your neglectful husband adopts his autistic nephew and senile parent, expecting you to provide round-the-clock care and supervision for both of them. You quite unjustifiably behave like a raging bitch, dumping senile grandpa in a home, and emotionally abusing the nephew. But then you find that autistic nephew can cook! So you admit you are a raging bitch, he teaches you to cook, your husband pays attention to you again, and you all live happily ever after.
Note to all ambitious writer/directors: if you are incapable of imagining a female character with a personality, nuanced motivation, complex emotions or an inner life, what in the world makes you think you can depict the experience of a non-neuro-typical person with anything approaching verisimilitude? What makes you think you have the right to try?
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
A pretentious failure.
No. No, no, no. You people are WRONG.
This film is a fake. It purports to be a quirky, deep film about real relationships; it is badly written, blandly directed and hollowly acted. The relationships are totally unconvincing and the events are random without being interesting.
Does anyone who saw this film actually *believe* that the shoe salesman had been married to his 'wife' long enough to produce two children, one of them a teenager? They had about as much chemistry as two people sitting next to one another on a bus. Ditto with the 'father' and his 'kids.' He might have been a live-in boyfriend, for all the intimacy or history in their interactions.
Every piece of dialog in this film is recited without context, internal motive or cohesive characterization. It has been written by someone who trying to invent 'weird' characters out of her own shallow imagination, not observing human beings. Every supposedly 'poignant' interaction between characters made me cringe, not out of empathy for the characters, but embarrassment for the writer/director, trying to force the unbelievable.
Even the most basic, physical exchanges are hopelessly screwed up. In the scene where one teenage girl is making up the other, one girl says, "Your skin is darker than mine; it doesn't match my skin tone!" Which is fine, except 1) the actresses have the same skin tone and 2)the actress doing the make-up isn't *wearing* it. Plus, teenage girls don't make each other up while standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Then the guy comes along and says, "that makeup doesn't match her skin tone." Which is something that no heterosexual man would ever notice, much less say out loud. If you are going to show 'real' characters, *get it right.* Films can be quirky and imaginative without being random, uncommitted and hollow. This one fails the standards it sets for itself.
The Upside of Anger (2005)
Who WROTE this script?
Oh, the director did. That explains it.
This film gets points for concept and cast, but the writing was AWFUL. Banal, unrealistic, awkwardly paced, plot holes the size of a Mack truck and character portrayals that made No Sense. I saw it on DVD and I kept having the urge to backtrack and say, what? What did that person say? Why? What was THAT about? How inappropriate! I must have missed something.
This does NOT mean that the dialog was at all INTERESTING. No, it was a hodgepodge of clichés; the clichés themselves, however, were bizarrely out of place. For example, at the very beginning of the film, Mom comes in to dinner and announces that Dad has left the family. "Your father is a small man," she declares. "I hope that doesn't mean his dick size," says one of the newly bereft daughters. I mean, huh? That's just NOT RIGHT. Not merely crude, or flip, or insouciant--it's just NOT what a teenage girl from a hitherto stable home SAYS in that situation. It's what a fatuous writer/director/actor who hasn't done his research THINKS she might say.
This film felt like it was a hundred years long, so untidily did it lurch toward its conclusion, but I still had to watch the first part of "Creating the Upside of Anger" in order to discover how on earth this piece of garbage got made. And the mystery was solved! The director wrote it, produced it, and acted in it, too! He plays, appropriately enough, a vulgar, foolish jerkwad. He even manages to miscast himself in the same way that Woody Allen has in years of late, pairing his character off with a gorgeous young woman who would not sleep with his real-life self in a million years, no matter how famous and wealthy he is.
I felt terribly sorry for the actors, given this mush to work with. Within their given parameters, they did a fine job. I just wish they'd hired a script editor with a clue.
xXx (2002)
Please get a scriptwriter
I laughed harder at this movie than at anything else so far this year; I would only like to know how much of it was INTENDED to be funny. Vin Diesel is, as always, charismatic and adorable, growly voice and puppydog faces all. The action scenes were splendid, except insofar as they pushed the boundary of what would have been believable in a Warner Brothers cartoon--I found myself chortling uncontrollably, at moments which by rights ought to have been heart-stoppingly tense, my disbelief utterly un-suspended. But GET A WRITER! Any sophomore English major could have done better than this schlock. The banalities that came out of the "villain's" mouth (I've mercifully forgotten his name) defied the inventive powers of Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steele. In fact, I would bet the entire contents of my piggybank that any random wino on Hollywood Boulevard after 11 P.M. could come up with deeper, funnier, more creative dialogue than what we heard onscreen. There are brilliant writers out the wazoo in this country, working for FREE, pawning furniture to pay the rent! Are idiot producers with billion-dollar budgets afraid they'll take over the world if they're given paid work, or what? Hell, I hear that Vin Diesel himself used to be an English major--maybe you could hire HIM to write the scripts. I'm sure he'd do a better job than whoever wrote this one.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Well, *I* thought it was EXCELLENT,
in spite of the strangely checkered comments on this site. Fascinating that people came down so hard on opposite sides. I suspect that those yahoos who fell asleep and cried "plotless!" do not appreciate or even notice subtlety. The jokes are not setup-and-punchline, Comedy Night garbage, but mostly jabbing little bits of dialogue that make you scream "I can't BELIEVE that creep" or "Jeez, this guy needs to see a shrink." The plot is simple and beautiful; it is the story of the redemption of a complete jerk. The inscription on his tombstone tells it all. The strangely ambiguous time setting gave it the air of a fable; it's like the kind of book you read over and over at the age of fourteen. I came out giggling with tears running down my face.
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Arrrgh!
This movie is awful! awful! awful! I was bored during the opening credits and it never got any better. Like most other Tim Burton movies it is long on Nifty Costumes and short on trivialities like plot, dialog, pacing, character development, and general depth. The alleged spoofiness is too uncommitted to raise even a wan, jaded smile, and the socio-political commentary was copied off the back of a cereal box. I must congratulate the other Users on this site for concentrating on this movie hard enough to articulately explain some of the myriad reasons why it is so awful; my own mind simply rejected it wholesale. Blech. Urgh.