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Reviews
Batman & Robin (1997)
How to fix this rotten movie
Listen close, children: so long as "Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas," the "Atlas Shrugged" movies, "Joe," "The Graduate," the Robocop remake, 25 randomly-selected Godzilla movies, and Army training films exist, there's absolutely no way this could possibly be the worst movie ever made.
Having said that, it's still pretty bad...although, strangely enough, I liked it better than "The Dark Knight Rises" - in which the character of Batman was played by Howard Hughes.
Anything can be fixed if you're willing to sacrifice enough. To square away this picture and make it truly fun to watch, they just need to remove all these things from it:
Robin Batgirl Poison Ivy Either Bane or Mr. Freeze - and really, Mr. Freeze WAS kinda fun The Dying Alfred subplot The Telescope Donation subplot The Charity Ball Mr. Freeze's wife The nipples on the Batsuit The ugly Batmobile
One hero, one villain, action from beginning to end. It would have been great.
This thing they inflicted on us? NOT great.
The Concorde... Airport '79 (1979)
They gave the people what they wanted
In the beginning, there was darkness. Then someone flipped a switch, the projectors came on, and the first "Airport" movie filled the screen...many, many times, all over the world. They made it for $10 million and it earned $100 million.
And the people wanted MORE! Fortunately, the producers still had more to give so they released Airport 1975. It wasn't as good as the first one, but it was still a decent-enough movie.
And the people wanted MORE! The producers still had an adventure left in them so they release Airport 77...which wasn't quite as good as the first two, but it was still decent enough...
And the people wanted MORE! The producers had nothing left to give - no more grand gestures or heroic feats lived within them, at least when it came to movies about ill-fated airliners - but you have to give the people what they want..so they gave us this. This...ridiculous...thing. It had the desired effect: we didn't want any more Airport movies after that.
This movie is terrible. There's no getting around it. This thing is full of intentionally bad acting - it has to be intentional because the cast is full of very good actors. The premise is ridiculous. The "special effects" are something you'd see in a high-school play. It is obvious they intended to make the worst movie in history, and nearly succeeded. "Manos, the Hands of Fate" is still worse but not by much.
Fortunately for us all, the sequels "Airplane!" and "Snakes on a Plane" are of much higher quality.
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
First rule of marketing: Give the customer what he wants
And that's what The Force Awakens does...over, and over, and over again.
What does the customer for a New Star Wars Adventure want?
Well...first, he or she doesn't want to wait half an hour to see some real action. Soitanly! We'll throw the Patented Star Wars Plot Crawl up on the screen, let two guys lay out a major plot point, then dump a couple hundred Stormtroopers on screen and let them start blowing stuff up. Fantastic.
Fans want to see new things brought into the saga, but they also want to revisit their old friends. Yup...everyone we liked from A New Hope that hadn't died somewhere along the line is in there, and the new introductions are well worth watching. Great.
And then they want a few more battles. Check.
They want a great story. Got one.
They REALLY don't want any stupid characters like Jar Jar Binks or the Ewoks. Gotcha. This movie is completely Jar Jar and Ewok free.
They want Darth Vader. Well, he's dead - how about we give you a replacement Vader who's just as evil?
Hey, why don't we throw even more battles in there? People like battles. We ain't makin' Mockingjay Part 2 here, kids, if we don't kill off a couple hundred extras a minute we simply aren't doing our jobs. You want to see people sit there and talk? Rent My Dinner With Andre. You want to see Stormtroopers get blown away wholesale? The Force Awakens is for you.
They want a new Death Star. Uhh...sure, we can do that, but how about we make the new one a whole lot bigger? You like? Fantastic! And hey, while we're at it we can make the new Empire environmentalists and have them destroy planets with alternative energy!
They also want the new Death Star to get smeared all over the screen at the climax of the movie. Fine. We can do that. Love it!
I loved this movie. Lots of fun and nothing to complain about. Go. Repeatedly.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)
How to make this better? Deviate from the book!
This movie has one major problem: it's based on a book millions can recite verbatim, and those folks would get extremely upset - and dive straight to the Internet to express their disgust - if the movie weren't as close to the book as it's possible to get. So...that's what they made.
The end result is a movie with far too little of Katniss shooting Peacekeepers and way too much strategizing, deep existential conversation, and attempts to convince Peeta not to eat Katniss' face, that took all of its predecessor and half this one to actually start moving. Unfortunately for the book, those of us who haven't read the trilogy would much rather have had shot-up Peacekeepers.
The movie isn't a total loss. The fight scenes are fun. It's just that there are so few of them! If they could have made a movie "inspired" by the book with about half the talking and twice the battle scenes Suzanne Collins put in her book, it would have been a more entertaining show.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014)
Not bad; better than the four-hour alternative
This is a movie based on a very popular book, so we all should know by now what's supposed to be in it. (If you don't, either google "Hunger Games Wikia" or read the trilogy.)
It's also no secret they're pulling four movies out of three books. The problem with "Mockingjay" is there's just so much in it, there are three not-altogether-satisfying ways to deal with the problem: make a really superficial two-hour movie no one would really like, go into the level of detail needed in one film and wind up with a four-hour show that would have taken two years to finish, or split it in half.
If they would have done the whole book as one two-hour movie, what would you get? Oh...maybe a few propos, Katniss killing Snow, not really much at all.
I don't think the theaters would buy a four-hour Mockingjay: it would cut the number of screenings per auditorium in half. Let me see...charge the normal admission price and lose your shirt because a four-hour flick at the two-hour price means your box office is cut in half...or charge the proper price and lose your shirt because no one's gonna pay $30 to see one movie? Decisions, decisions... Also, just how many people want to spend half the day watching one film? Or wait two years for the end of a YA franchise to come out? By then the second installment in the Divergent series would have dropped and the third would be drawing near - also, The Outliers series is already in the planning stages - and we'd have forgotten all about Katniss.
So they split it in half at a fairly logical point in the movie: just before all the serious violence takes place. You wind up with a nice cerebral movie that's got a little taste of action. And more importantly from the studio's point of view, you've got a respectable movie (which all of us will be binge-watching along with Part 2 as soon as that 2015 movie is out on Blu-Ray) that doesn't tax the patience of the exhibitors or the audience.
I liked this film. I thought it was better than "Catching Fire." There's a lot of talk about how Mockingjay Part 1 is a "setup" movie - which it is, no denial - but Catching Fire seemed more of a setup movie than this did. I caught myself thinking during CF, "if Snow wanted rid of Katniss so badly, why not just slip some nightlock into her flour bin and make a few fake propos?"
The Graduate (1967)
Standard-issue 1960s coming-of-age movie, and one of the worst of its breed
99.44 percent of the reviews for this movie read like they were written for "Appreciation of Cinema 101" class at university. Here's one that's not.
The nice way to put this is, "The Graduate overpromises and underdelivers."
The more direct way? "This movie is God-awful. No one should watch it."
We can go on and on about existential angst, dialectic materialism and unique camera angles all day long, but none of those things can change the fact the movie focuses on one of the most annoying people ever to grace the silver screen, Benjamin Braddock. Halfway through the movie you'll scream "get a job, you lazy bum" so loud your neighbors will hear. This guy's worse than Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, and I didn't know that was possible until I saw The Graduate.
Where do we begin? Ben gets bullied at every turn. He gets bullied into sex with his dad's business partner's wife. The whole "scuba diver" scene was one long period of bullying. Mrs. Robinson bullies him when he hooks up with her daughter, then lies about the nature of their relationship to drive them apart. He probably also gets bullied into acquiring a cigarette habit.
The sex is totally unsatisfying - it's clear the movie makers were celebrating the end of the Hays Code by throwing all the nasty things you couldn't do before into their picture...but being able to put drinking, smoking and nookie into a movie doesn't necessarily mean you know HOW to do it. A trip to the foreign theater downtown for an afternoon of French flicks would have been useful.
Oh, and the music! It's like.."gee guys, here's a boring part, let's jam another irrelevant Simon and Garfunkel song in here!"
Take my advice, young ones: Stick to Breakfast at Tiffany's.