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Reviews
Chow lok yuen (2003)
It's CAMP! Don't take it so seriously
I have no idea why this movie is getting so many bad comments. The reviewers must have been expecting an actual "horror" movie - where you get scared and throw your popcorn around. I think the first clue that you shouldn't take this movie seriously is the fact that IT IS A 3-D HORROR MOVIE! I knew going in to the theater at Sundance Film Festival that it would be campy and satirical and silly. And it turns out it was exactly that.
I enjoyed it as a kind of homage to 80's B horror flicks in America. It had all the right ingredients:
teenagers
a deserted place (amusement park) that used to be fun but has been abandoned because BAD THINGS HAPPENED THERE
unrequited love (boy likes girl who likes other boy, 1st boy gets to "save" girl, making him wonderful and attractive)
group starts out on dangerous search to solve a mystery, couple splits from group to search alone (what will happen?!)
running/chasing scenes that involve tripping, falling down
etc, etc, etc
This is so Scooby Doo meets every horror film made from 1975 to 1989. Plus it's 3D!
I got exactly what I expected from this movie. It's dumb, it's silly, it's not really scary at all -- I had a great time.
Easy (2003)
great acting, great story, great movie
EASY is not a "chick flick" (though women will definitely identify with the main character) and is not your standard Hollywood romantic comedy. EASY is the film all those Hugh Grant movies aspire to be - smart, funny, sexy, appealing to both sexes, not smug and patronizing.
Jaime (Marguerite Moreau) dates a lot of jerks and it never works out. She's beautiful, interesting, neurotic, and dates in all the wrong ways. Any 20-40-something woman who didn't grow up in a convent will smile and cringe as she identifies with Jaime's struggle to figure out who she is, what she wants and how to get it. She seems to take one step forward and two steps back with her family and friends getting all tangled up in the story (in brilliantly funny ways).
This movie isn't spoon-fed to it's audience with all the glossiness of Hollywood. The sex scenes feel real, with no soundtrack crescendo at the climax (or anti-climax); the characters are sympathetic and interesting; I especially liked Brian F. O'Byrne's performance. Weinstock showed playfulness in writing the overlapping relationships with a tongue-in-cheek humor, ala Shakespeare or modern British comedy.
EASY is a funny, emotional, sexy movie for thinking adults, not the lobotomized masses that can't get enough close-ups of Julia Roberts' smile or Meg Ryan's smirk. It's smarter than other films about contemporary relationships. It's also better acted.
Finally: If you don't fall in love with Marguerite Moreau after seeing this film, you're made of stone.
Tarnation (2003)
Bad Film School Assignment
After seeing this film I came to the conclusion that Jonathan Caouette had several years of film diary footage he didn't know what to do with so he made a crappy film project out of it. And even then, he didn't have ENOUGH footage so we see a lot of the same clips over and over.
Using unimaginative "edgy" editing techniques does not make a bad documentary good. (And by edgy I mean not at all edgy - like split frame and color saturation.) This movie goes from quick cuts interspersed with text (he literally "tells" the background story rather than showing it) in the first half to long scenes of his mentally/emotionally-disturbed mother singing and dancing followed by confrontational interviews with his 90 year-old grandfather. I honestly don't know what kind of story Caouette was trying to tell, unless it was that his troubled childhood led him to become a bad filmmaker.
Every year, there are more and more great documentaries being made. This wasn't one of them. If this movie ever gets past the festival circuit, save your money and don't bother seeing it in theaters. If you are going to Sundance this year, save your passes for better films.