jon-gwynne Reviews

Love, Weddings & Other Disasters (2020)

Beyond Awful.

[1/10 · 12 December 2020]

A grotesque waste of acting talent. The cast deserved better than this mess.

Shame on the writers and the director.

It was as though someone's dog ate the original script so they got a caffeined-up intern, set him in front of a TV showing third-rate Hallmark Channel repeats and he stitched together random moments from three of four different of the worst.

Dennis Dugan needs to go back to working with Adam Sandler and none of these three writers should ever be allowed near a word-orocessor ever again.

Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)

Good summer popcorn film

[8/10 · 18 July 2016]

(No Spoilers)

I should start by saying that I saw the original when it came out in the theater and loved it so the remake had a lot to live up to going in.

I should also say that I liked other Paul Feig films ("Spy", "The Heat" and "Bridesmaids").

Finally, the notion of remaking "Ghostbusters" with an all-female main cast is bothering a disturbing number of people far more than it ought to.

This film is a typical, Hollywood Blockbuster summer "event film". Lots of money spent on effects and promotion.

Lots of annoying product-placement (note to John Schnatter, if you took the money you spend on advertising and put it into buying better ingredients and paying your employees a decent wage, you'd sell more pizza).

That being said, what we get is a good movie - better than most blockbusters and better than many other reboots we've been subjected to recently. Much better than the abominable Star Trek reboot.

Fortunately, director Feig keeps his stars (especially McCarthy) from going too crazy. He keeps the CGI from overwhelming the story and even makes sure that there actually is a story.

Wiig and McCarty are actually almost subdued compared to other films - though McKinnon manages to steal nearly every scene she's in.

Is it "great art"? Of course not. But, then again, neither was the original. The new one is a worthy successor to the original and does exactly what the original did in its day - entertains and amuses us.

Bottom line: don't listen to the sexist weasels who hate this film because of some preconceived notion that this is "political- correctness run amok". It's a good and funny film - well worth paying to see on the big screen.

Earth: The Climate Wars (2008)

An earnest effort but fatally biased

[4/10 · 7 January 2009]

While it isn't as ludicrous as Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and makes some token effort to represent different sides of the argument, the problem is that Stewart has still clearly made up his mind which side he's on and isn't really willing to take the other side of this issue seriously. He leaves out critical items like the fact that Mann's "Hockey Stick" graph, when corrected, actually proves that the Medieval Warm Perior was warmer than today and continues to claim otherwise.

There's plenty of other misinformation as well.

Also, Stewart has an annoying tendency to get very sentimental in his presentation. It is as though he's targeting the 10-14 age group.

Bottom line: take this with a pinch of salt. Take a look at "Doomsday Called Off" or "The Cloud Mystery", two Scandinavian-made films (in English) to show honest criticism of the theory that humans are causing dangerous climate change.

Doomsday Called Off (2004 TV Movie)

Good film

[7/10 · 11 August 2008]

Excellent antidote to Gore's nonsensical propaganda piece "An Inconvenient Truth".

This film presents the opposing view and shies away from the sort of over-the-top presentation that marred Martin Durkin's "The Great Global Warming Swindle". This picture sticks to the facts regarding the problems with the anthropogenic global warming theory.

Another reviewer complained about it being one-sided. That's true. If you're looking for balance, you won't find it here. This isn't quite the polemic that Durkin's film was, but they don't give equal time to the Gore position (any more than Gore gave equal time to the opposition in his film). However, unlike Gore's film, this one at least makes the effort to get the facts right.

As someone who works with computer models, I will say that I wish they'd been a bit more critical of them here. The idea that computer models can meaningfully give us a view of global climate is preposterous.

Hairless (2004)

Entertaining short

[7/10 · 29 March 2008]

I saw this on my "video on demand" menu and since I rarely get any shorts on the list, I thought I'd check it out.

It gives the impression of being an exceptionally well-done student film or the early efforts of an untrained filmmaker with innate ability.

It wasn't perfect of course, but most of its flaws only served to make it more charming.

The only problem that came close to actually distracting from the story was the makeup department didn't do enough (or perhaps anything at all) to deal with the "five o'clock" shadow on the lead's head.

Having said that, I hope to see more from this filmmaker.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

There is precious little "truth" in this film

[1/10 · 11 October 2007]

If you like your propaganda served up with more than a hint of smug self-righteousness then this film is for you.

The sad thing about Gore's film is that so many of the pompous pronouncements about those who don't agree with him are actually more accurately levelled at Gore himself.

From his silly attempts to link hurricane Katrina to global warming (it isn't) to his astonishingly inaccurate conclusion that the melting of the glacier on Kilimanjaro is linked to warming (it isn't).

From beginning to end, the film is a littany of misrepresentations, exaggerations and outright deceptions.

Even one of his more objective claims - that 2005 was the hottest year on record - turns out to be untrue and that the only reason that 2005 was believe to be was due to faulty computations by people who were predisposed to believe in anthropogenic global warming.

You want a real documentary about global warming? Try the CBC's sober and non-political "Global Warming - Doomsday Called Off" http://youtube.com/watch?v=fr5O1HsTVgA

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Excellent but could have been great...

[9/10 · 8 January 2004]

I can't really say much about the content of the film that hasn't already been said. Yes, there are no points for originality of plot in this film. But that actually a negative. It is a homage made by a lover of horror/suspense movies FOR lovers of horror/suspense movies. As such, it succeeds brilliantly.

The acting is top notch - even characters who are killed early on get a chance to develop themselves and, consequently the audience begins to care about them.

It is a scary, funny, touching and overall worthwhile film. The only thing that bugs me is that it could have been one of The Greats.

If there are any negatives here, they belong to the American producers. After listening to the producer's commentary on the US DVD-release, I now understand what I guessed about this film when I saw it in the the theater.

It COULD have been great but the producers (especially the one who talks all the time during the commentary track - I think it was David E. Allen) seemed to be doing their level best to ruin it.

Mr. Allen (or whoever was responsible for what I'm about to point out), this film could have been another "Alien", "Terminator" or "Sixth Sense". It could have been a legend... the sleeper horror film of the DECADE. But you didn't have faith in the script, the director or your audience. The over-the-top gore and you insistence on cutting key character-development scenes because you didn't understand them and because you wanted to hit this absurd 90 minute time target left this film a shadow of what it could have been.

Do you know why "Silence of the Lambs" got recognized at Oscar time? It wasn't because Anthony Hopkins is a great actor (he is, of course) but because the film had a director who knew how to tell the story without resorting to cheap tricks and producers who stayed the hell out of his way and let him do it.

Your juvenile obsession with "arterial spray" and repeated insistence of "more gore! more gore!" not only cheapened this film but I bet you'll find that it closed doors for you in terms of getting a theatrical release.

(warning! spoilers ahead)

Look at Alien. The infamous "chest-burster" sequence was so horrendous because the rest of the film was almost devoid of bloodshed. It is called "contrast" - have a filmmaker explain it to you if you don't understand what I mean.

If you had come up with one or two real shockers near the end and left the other attacks more along the lines of the attack on Ryan, more emphasis could have remained on the tension. Just as you claim to believe CGI detracts from the atmosphere and story, so does childishly-overdone gore.

When you showed Sgt. Wells' guts out, you were telling your audience that you thought they were too stupid to imagine the details of a mortal gut-wound and that audience is left thinking "That looks like a handful of leftovers from a butcher's counter lying on his belly - how fake!" and the horror they should be feeling is not only diluted but they are reminded how low the budget for this film was.

Think how horrific that scene would have been if we had been allowed to imagine his guts out rather than being shown some old meat scraps lying on his uniform.

You know what the best scene in the film was? The transformation of Captain Ryan. Why? Because we never actually see it happen. It is merely alluded to and that is enough. Another is when Sgt. Wells mutely loads his pistol during Megan's final speech. We KNOW he knows what's coming and it never has to be pointed out to us.

Anyway, if it hadn't been for the stellar cast and crew to rescue it, it would have been garbage. This film wasn't great because of you, it was great in spite of you.

You owe us a director's cut at the very least.

Whoever you are, I sincerely hope you learn from the mistakes you made on this film. If you can, you can go on to produce a great film someday. If not, well... Hollywood is filled with producers who don't trust writers and directors as well as the writers and directors who hate them...

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Dreadful

[1/10 · 29 December 2003]

I had such high hopes when I first heard that a Tolkien fan was going to write and direct a live-action+CGI version of Lord of the Rings... ... only to have them cruelly dashed.

FOTR was a bit rough but I said to myself "It'll only get better". Boy was I wrong.

I suppose the main problem is twofold.

First, Jackson is way too young/inexperienced to have taken on this project. He certain has ability but he has a lot to learn about filmmaking before even thinking about tackling such an ambitious project.

Second, for alleged lovers of the source material, Jackson and company took WAY too many liberties with the story. Changing them in pointless and even foolish ways. Perhaps this was inexperience, maybe it was just laziness or a lack of understanding of the source material.

Goodness knows that LOTR is far from perfect as an example of storytelling but there is a great tale buried in Tolkien's massive tome.

Too bad that Jackson and his crew were absolutely unable to bring it to the screen. By the TROTK, Jackson's exhaustion is practically oozing from the screen and he's lost sight of many key elements of the story.