man-man-dot-org Reviews

The Shooting (1966)

Great movie... and really not hard to figure out.

[8/10 · 22 November 2005]

I've just read some of the other reviews, and I'm baffled as to why people find this movie hard to decipher. Maybe it's because I've seen El Topo, the bar-none king of incomprehensible Westerns, but The Shooting is lucid, well-plotted, and perfectly understandable if you're willing to just think a leeeeetle bit as the movie unrolls.

Warren Oates is his classic surly self, grumping his way through a taciturn Western with an idiotic associate he feels slightly responsible for, a cranky woman who is dragging him through the desert as her guide on a quest for vengeance against the man who killed her husband and son (Coin, Oates' brother, as set up in the first three minutes of the movie), and a psychotic hired gun played by Nicholson, who was obviously enjoying the hell out of the whole thing.

The beauty of The Shooting is in its spartan simplicity -- it's a story stripped down to the minimum, a Western bleached to the bone by the relentless desert sun. If the words "archetype" and "impressionistic" scare you, you should avoid this movie. If you want a very '60s take on the Western, with a great visual sense and the odd descent into trippy cheese, this is definitely the movie for you. 8/10 -- could have been 9 but for Miss, who is written and played a little too shrill for me to believe.

Spartan (2004)

Excellent and intelligent. Not for Bruckheimer fans.

[8/10 · 24 April 2005]

If you go by the plot, or by the casting (Val Kilmer's done his share of stupid actioners), you might well go into this expecting guns, explosions, and improbably ninja-esquire super-agents who parachute around and kill things with their teeth.

But this is Mamet, so what you get instead is a sort of weird emotional flatland for almost two hours of film, with Kilmer doing an excellent (Val KILMER? Whoa!) job of portraying what top-level soldier/drones are like: emotionally neutral, physically economical, and not always all that bright.

If you're looking for somebody hoisting a bazooka and wisecracking before he blows up the compound and saves the girl in the bikini while smashing the drug smuggling ring, this ain't your film, friend. It's very well written and extremely well acted, but also quiet, murky, and deliberately understated.

Don't expect whiz-bang excitement or crackerjack dialogue. If you can shelve that and put yourself in the frame of mind of a Kurosawa samurai movie, where contemplation and futility take equal time with action and excitement, you'll find this movie a lot more rewarding.

Oldboy (2003)

Darn good. Not perfect, but darn good.

[8/10 · 5 March 2005]

It's funny looking through the reviews ... this movie seems to have a love/hate effect on people, and the people that hate it seem to have expected some sort of psychological masterwork that resonates truth and where every frame drips with brilliance. Maybe they were oversold and disappointed. Maybe some of the subjects covered in the film icked them out.

But (mild spoiler) unless you are a card-carrying professional hypnotist, I can't see what in this movie really set those frothers-at-the mouth off. I was told Oldboy was a good revenge flick. It's a good revenge flick. It's well shot, well acted, and has a plot that stands up to any other, well, revenge flick I've ever seen.

If you come to this movie expecting Orson Wellesian brilliance, you're gonna be disappointed. If you come, however, hoping for a stylish, well-crafted and engaging movie with a plot that makes about as much sense as Death Wish, I Spit on Your Grave, Ransom, and yadda yadda yadda, you're in for a treat.

Yeah, (mild spoiler again) the villain of the piece does seem to exhibit an annoying degree of omnipotence with surveillance technology, and hypnotism is used as a magic deux-ex-machina cure-all for the movie's plot woes. But jeez, people, lighten up. It's a revenge flick. Hell, the protagonist even LOOKS like a Korean Charles Bronson. I don't know how these fierce critics managed to miss that. Maybe they were busy sewing new leather patches onto the elbows of their tweed jackets.

8/10. It's a movie that has a job to do, does it excellently well, and goes home afterwards without cluttering up the joint. Toffee-nosed academics, stay away. This one's for us guys that like movies.

Camping sauvage (2004)

Solid comedy -- Quebec humour in abundance

[23 July 2004]

Saw this in VOF (Version Originale Français) last night, so caveat emptor -- I have no idea how it will translate, or if the jokes will make it through dubbing/subtitling. You've been warned!

On the whole, a solid effort with lots of laughs and some interesting directorial choices. Sometimes I was left wondering if the director was just throwing in everything but the kitchen sink to impress the audience with his oh-so-cute clever ideas, but the gimmicks are spaced out enough that it comes across as charming rather than contrived.

The plot is, of course, ludicrously thin. This works in the movie's favour, though, because it gives a lot of latitude to let the humour play out. Basically a paint-by-numbers fish-out-of-water script, Guy Lepage lifts it out of potential problems by delivering a rock-solid performance that finds the good precarious balance between baffled straight man and comic anal-retentive protagonist.

It's light, and a great way to fritter away an evening. My only real problems were the occasional dip into toilet humour, and the fact that I found the lead female character more horrifying than attractive, and the plot of the movie rotates around her being immensely desirable.

Small quibbles, though. With low expectations and decent French, you're in for a fun couple of hours.

Spider (2002)

Nigh-perfect unCronenberg film

[9/10 · 10 February 2004]

Fiennes and Cronenberg have made a film of quiet, dark and desperate majesty -- one I am only starting to truly appreciate a few months after seeing it for the first time.

It's hard to explain, but the one time I saw the movie, it whitewalled me a bit by the end: a bit too much bleakness, perhaps, with the relentless depression of the mentally ill in downtrodden England wearing me out by the end of the movie. But the more I thought about it after the fact, the more tiny moments began to impress themselves upon me: Spider's walk through the apocalypse of London, Cronenberg's deft impressions of a young disturbed man's worldview, the dead-on performances of the entire cast, the phenomenal restraint of everyone from Fiennes to the costume designer to create a world as that suffocates the viewer.

I'm very eager to revisit Spider again, having let the movie sit and mature in my mind for some time. I think the regular IMDB approach of watch-a-movie-write-a-review has done Spider a grave disservice, and I suspect that its more thoughtful detractors (not the "dude, where were the exploding heads?" ones) may find, given a few weeks, that they discover the film has merits that aren't immediately apparent.

The Last Samurai (2003)

64 slices of American Samurai Cheese

[7/10 · 11 December 2003]

Definitely not a waste of time or money, but... well, let me put it this way:

***

Say you build your own house, and fill it with great furniture, and you really really love this house you built. And then one day a whole bunch of guys with bulldozers show up, say they're going to bulldoze your house to make room for a bypass (you've got to build bypasses!) and tell you it's all gonna go.

You get, fairly understandably, quite upset and decide to lie down in front of the bulldozers and let them run you over if they must, but this is you Taking a Stand.

The day before the bulldozers are slated to knock your house down, some schmuck from the road crew -- let's call him Tom -- wanders into your house and starts touching all your stuff. "Say, this is a pretty cool house," Tom says. "You've got some awesome stuff here, dude."

Tom is, in fact, so taken with your house that he decides to run outside with you the next day and lie in front of the bulldozer beside you, and nearly gets run over but doesn't. You die horribly. The next day, Tom chastizes the foreman of the building crew, who shrugs and says "eh, I guess maybe we shouldn't'a knocked over the house, but whatchagonna do. Let's maybe spare that tree over there."

***

Now... years later, somebody decides to make a movie about all this. Would you prefer (a) a film about the beauty of your house, the craft it took to construct it, its elegant and harmonious contents, and your futile yet noble struggle to preserve it, or (b) the story of that schmuck Tom, who wandered into your house, touched all your stuff and became a house groupie?

I was hoping for more (a), and I got more (b). So will you. This film may suit your needs well as an introduction to the concept of Samurai or as "Dances with Wolves II: Spars With Samurai", but I would have far preferred more respect for the tradition and its history rather than the surface treatment it got.

Samurai were also nasty, obsessive, subservient and horribly single-minded at times; I respect the culture immensely but I don't think the Hollywood gloss will be a big help in the long run.

Begotten (1989)

This is not entertainment. This is disentertainment.

[8/10 · 8 November 2003]

I saw 'Begotten' last night, and I'm of two minds on the film.

On one hand, I appreciate it for being the total invert of a Michael Bay film. No dialogue, extremely stylized grainy B&W photography, some of the most genuinely horrific imagery ever set to film, and a very compelling use of sound (which nobody else seems to have really picked up on yet). It's a reflection on a theme, and it dares go where most filmmakers do not not only in terms of images, but of production and concept. It's a movie that most people don't understand, and if you read through these comments you'll find a lot of people whose lack of ability to figure this film out results in them shrieking about 'pretentiousness' with the fervor of a gibbon rattling the bars of its cage at feeding time. It genuinely shocked and disturbed me, and the last time a film managed to do that was a while ago.

On the other, this is a thirty-minute short that sprawls out to over an hour and a half. I understand that there might be artistic merit in using repetition and monolithic pacing as a bludgeon, but in this case it just doesn't help everything hang together. Imagine being approached by a ragged man on the street who grabys you by the shoulders and says something that completely confounds the core of your being... but then, instead of leaving your shattered and gibbering in his wake, he just keeps talking and talking and talking. By the end of the movie, I found myself glancing at my watch now and again.

This is not entertainment, people. This is disentertainment. This is how you deprogram people who just watched "Glitter." If you watch movies to be entertained, this will frustrate, confound, and possibly anger you. You don't approach 'Begotten' like a chocolate cake you want to eat because it tastes good. You approach it like something on the menu you have never heard of before, something you see furtive glances of through the kitchen door, something that's dark and glistens and twitches on its platter; something you order not because it will taste good, but because you just have to know what it's like.

Spider (2002)

Danged near perfect...for what it is

[9/10 · 7 September 2003]

First: I loved "Spider."

Second: If you haven't seen "Spider," try not to read too many comments here -- they're riddled with spoilers -- but be warned that this is a slow-paced movie featuring a main character who mumbles incomprehensibly. The movie revolves around Spider's inability to deal with normal things in normal ways. He doesn't connect to the world the way most do. And that can make this movie an immensely frustrating experience if you're not ready to spend two hours watching a man fail to connect to himself, his past, and other human beings. Cronenberg and Fiennes are brilliant at portraying this -- but there's nothing wrong with really disliking it. Most people like main characters they can relate to on some level, doing things they can comprehend. "Spider" doesn't indulge.

Third: This movie is a rare gem in how perfectly it has been acted, directed, and shaped. From set design though music and costumes, I can't find any serious flaws. Some story elements left me a little flat, but I'm waiting for a second and third viewing before I let that jury in.

This isn't a movie for 90% of movie watchers. But for those 10% of us who like movies that disassociate from us instead of reaching out, it's a thing of beauty.

Ravenous (1999)

Doesn't hit 100%, but aims REALLY high.

[9/10 · 6 March 2003]

This is one of those movies that seems to attract either delirious praise or grumpy grousing. I'll be one of those rare middlin' people...while Ravenous isn't 100% successful, it aims so high that even its partial success leaves it much better off than most of its peers. It's an attempt to base a criticism of American expansionist policy on cannibalism and the native American legend of the Wendigo, and while it doesn't always hit, it's got great ensemble acting, some danged creepy moments, and a few genuine surprises.

Guy Pierce is danged adequate and Robert Carlysle is bloody (!) brilliant, Jeffery Jones is exceedingly impressive, and the cinematography ranges from workmanlike to staggeringly beautiful.

The real star of the film for me, though, was the soundtrack. It's schizophrenic, scattered and brilliant, but not suitable for those who think all films should feature either John Williams or Kenny Loggins at one point or another. That 7/4 - 6/4 banjo backdrop to the movie's main theme is jarring genius.

If you're a gorehound, hunt down some Miike...if you're a fan of period drama, avoid this like the plague. But if you want to see the thinkin' person's cannibalism movie, check this and Cannibal! The Musical out. Neither are perfect, but both are bolder than your average flick.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Perfect for what it is...and what it is is mindbending

[10/10 · 6 March 2003]

Look, everybody's said pretty much everything there is to say about Buckaroo, so there's not much point in adding to the froth. I just want to say it's the perfect movie for what it is -- a dizzying tribute to pulp adventure series. It's crazed, over-the-top, disorienting, metatextual, addled sci-fi-high-adventure-pop-weirdness, and as I'm sure you can tell from the other reviews, you're gonna love it...or you're gonna hate it. Give it ten minutes and if you're not sold, save yourself the next hour and change. If you ARE sold, though, you may well find this the best -- movie -- EVER.