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Eric (1975)
I was named after the movie
My parents told me a stork's tale when I was young that they went to see a movie called Eric at the cinema, and that's where I got my name. It was only when I found the movie on IMDb that I finally believed them. Incredibly, the main actor is John Savage, and my full name is Eric John Savage, with the first-born being named John as a long-term custom in the Savage family since medieval times.
I found the movie on YouTube and was keen to watch it, but my parents didn't seem so keen, and having finally watched to the end this Christmas Day, I can see why they were hesitant. Still, it's a good reminder of the bond between family, and I too I am the eldest of 3 and love playing soccer, guitar and singing. Now I need to read the book.
Don't Look Up (2021)
Becomes what it mocks
This is an interesting movie for N-type personalities who enjoy compartmentalising and pulling out a bigger picture/agenda/narrative. It doesn't take long to figure out its core purpose of conservative-bashing, even if the Hillary-type lead was intended as an obfuscation.
As many critics have pointed out, it failed in its core objective, which was to soften the conservative position by pointing out their limited mindset. Instead, it perfectly illustrated the flaws of the liberal position, ironically by pursuing a Trump-like strategy: demonising, mocking, deriding, painting into carictures. The pigs walk tall, as Animal Farm reminds us timelessly.
Ultimately this movie fails on the science. It tries to get climate science to piggy-back on a well-established field with highly reliable formalae. The science of comets and weather patterns are poles apart - we can barely predict the temperature for next week or next year. Is there a credible voice in the script that honours the critical scientific quality of being able to revisit one's own assumptions and agenda - namely, to question the science?
If the film had been willing to extricate itself from its own political trailblazing and take a broader view of human psychology instead, then bravo, but it didn't. As such, it will be nothing more than a meterorite, when it had the chance to be a comet.
Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Shameless identity politics
It's no surprise that with Disney involved at some level, the script played all their political cards. Every evil leader was an old white male. Nearly every hero was a woman or person of colour. The white pilot gets schooled by multiple women. I get that there's a "redistribution" of roles happening, but firstly, don't be ridiculously obvious about it, and secondly, remember that if you're going to give the big roles to women and actors of colour, they also get to be the villains. Equally shared leadership? Don't be ridiculous, that doesn't ever work in the real world.
Beyond that, I'll reiterate what most pundits are saying: you have that moment in a mediocre movie where you lose "presence", you drop out of the story and suddenly remember that you're watching a screen. The battle scenes were cool for a while, although the "we got some help from a whole lot of friends" theme is a bit tired.
Man on Fire (2004)
Could have been legendary
By halfway in this movie I was truly enthralled. Washington and Fanning were terrific together - the cinematography, styling and writing were spellbinding. And then something weird happened - Washington's character went into battle mode and much of the great work of the first half was undone. It was like two different films.
It wasn't that battle-mode Washington was bad, it was just that it broke the continuity. A first half that had so much soul was suddenly soulless.
I wish they'd been able to step back, fix it, and then I'd have a movie I could share with my friends as a great Friday night thriller.
Traffik (2018)
B-grade exploitation flick
I read Roger/Egbert's review and it summed it up perfectly. Paula Patton's celebrity crush crowd will love the many minutes of her cleavage (exploitation genre, as the experts call it). By halfway you'll actually wonder if the movie has anything to with its supposed theme. And after that she'll spend the next half over-acting - it must have been exhausting for her to film a zillion crying scenes.
And by the time we're done, we're told that about 1 in every 150 women in America is being trafficked, which is absolutely absurd. The movie is based on a true story in the same way that Fast and Furious is based on the existence of cars. I've looked into the way they calculate these numbers, and it's deceitful - bad data ends up fighting for the opposite side.
I ended up fast-forwarding through big chunks of the second half, and I'd suggest any new watchers just fast-forward past the whole thing. Yes, we all agree the theme is important, but this is not how you tackle the issue.
Joker (2019)
Dishonours its predecessors
The Joker movie makes a distinct departure from the standard formula for super hero movies. It spends two hours developing a character and barely gets into a battle. In fact, if you showed it to somebody with no knowledge of the super hero genre, they wouldn't recognise it as a super hero movie at all. For those of us who loved the Batman relaunch by Christopher Nolan, this results in glaring inconsistencies.
Firstly, the death of Bruce's parents is reversioned yet again - why? Just stick with the original. Secondly, the timing is all wrong. The joker is an old man and Bruce is a kid - why? DC is risking what we've been experiencing with Spiderman, a whole bunch of incoherent timelines, when really there was no need at all. It's absolutely not beyond the capabilities of the scriptwriters to build seamlessly on top of Nolan's work. In fact, it's a discredit to their abilities if they're not able to do it.
Lastly, all the fears about this film being a potential trigger for violence are grounded and valid. In my group, we had a troubled teenager watching with us, and she walked out with emboldened sense of affinity with the Joker. With America's growth of sporadic shootings, it's very valid to look at movies like the Joker and blame them for feeding a mindset that a difficult life can give you an escape through grievous evil. Phoenix really needs to answer the valid questions posed to him.
Ad Astra (2019)
Interesting ideas, but emotionally plastic
During the opening scene of falling down from a space station, the visuals were so impressive that I thought we were in for an amazing ride, but sadly that didn't materialize.
I recently watched 2001 Space Odyssey for the first time, and it was so slow that I had to fast forward some sections. I feel like you'll enjoy Ad Astra if you liked the Space Odyssey - it's not as slow, but the stillness and pacing are kind of similar. In fact, many of the space themes have been explored before, although Ad Astra adds some ideas of its own, and that alone makes it worth a casual watch.
If anything, the best thing I took from the film was the awesome sense of loneliness out in space. I guess it's both a compliment and a criticism that a movie could make you feel so empty?
Captain Fantastic (2016)
For intellectuals with a soul
First up, remember this is an art film and it suspends a lot of reality to explore ideas in a way you can't normally. The moment you see a family of kids scaling a rock face together in the rain, you either laugh and get on with it, or you become quite irritated, and for the latter, the movie might not work.
What I loved was how I found myself both supporting and criticising the father's reasoning and intentions the whole way - managing that kind of love-hate with the audience is film mastery.
Ignoring the political commentary, this is a story of family and parenting, and in a world lost in individualism, there's something very appealing about rediscovering that social connection again, and this story is a taste of something we could have again.
Eye in the Sky (2015)
Evenly splits opinion, which is good
As with all rating systems, it seems a large number of users will either give a reasonable rating, or a straight-up 1, which obviously is dishonest, but what's very reflective of this particular title is that the 1's seem to fall on both sides of the opinion scale, which is a real credit to the film makers.
As a pro-war person, I was really put off by the teary-eyed drone operators and got annoyed while the cameras lurked around a single girl and forgot all about the primary mission, but that is about as much fault as I can find. Halfway in, at that moment you suddenly remember you're in a chair watching a movie, I thought: the pacing is really fantastic. It was so tense I had to take a break, which you can do when you're watching on your own television.
In handling such a fragile topic, it would be incredibly difficult to cover every angle and not leave a loop hole somewhere, but I found myself listening intellectually to the movie in a way that I really do. Given my loathing for the ignorance of the liberal left, it was with some credit that I had to acknowledge some of the arguments made. As such, this is a great movie to watch with intellectual friends.
Men in Black: International (2019)
Missed opportunity
There's so much you can do with sci-fi and humour, and both Guardians of the Galaxy movies are pathfinders in this genre. MIBI has its funny moments, but you walk away unfulfilled.
I thought Tessa Thompson might bring a nice quirky offering to the mix, but instead she took the mean feminist role - the know-it-all who was suddenly able to fix space-age bikes within a day of joining the team ... come on!. Again, a missed opportunity. There was a real chance to do what Spiderman did with Toby Maguire and give the audience a much more in-depth exploration into the first-timer's discovery of this wonderful universe and the skills required to be a man in black.
After the movie I watched the trailer again and it doesn't lie - the movie really is that bland - perhaps they could have brought some comedians in to spice up the script?
Kandasamys: The Wedding (2019)
Fun insight into Durban Indian life
If you treat the movie as a cultural trip, there's a lot to enjoy: many panoramas of Durban's best sights, suburban familiarities, cultural insights, etc. The cinematography is very decent for a South African film and the acting is generally decent.
If you're viewing the film as a foreigner, you'll get some insight into a quirky subculture of South Africa that is less talked about overseas. Although the strong Hindu view of the movie doesn't nearly represent all Durban Indians, the humour and conversation is about right.
Aladdin (2019)
Some magic, but very preachy
Disney usually layers some morality into its pictures, and that's no wrong, but the extent to which they drove the women's lib message was painful, to the point of introducing a poorly written song sung at full screech.
It's a pity, because this was a pretty decent effort otherwise. Casting the genie was always going to be difficult after the pure genius that Robin Williams poured into it, and I personally never bought into the Will Smith character. Aladdin grew on me during the picture. Jasmine was the warrior the feminists needed, but I personally wouldn't have fallen for her.
The sets were pretty glamorous, but the scale of the movie felt vastly inferior to the original. Nowhere was this felt as fully as on the magic carpet ride, which is the original's exultant moment, touring the world's wonders. Here they went on a little spin around the neighbourhood and decided the local bazaar was the best place on earth ... please!
It's rare that repeats match their originals, and unfortunately this one fell considerably short. Crafting the epic moments is a skill and you recognise the skill most when you see its pale imitators.
What Men Want (2019)
Who was the man in the movie?
It's obvious purely from the title that the film was going to play heavily on stereotypes, so it was no surprise when the script went out very hard on men. The majority of men's thoughts turned out not just to be sexual, but vulgar. We had a 16 year old girl in our group of watchers, and it was too heavy for a 16 year old.
The real issue was that the female heroine of the movie turned out to be a man. Instead of "what men want", you might as well have called it "what Taraji Henson wants". She was pursuing business deals, doing one night stands, dominating sex, treating co-workers with contempt, everything we were supposed to hate about men, and then being told she needed a special experience in order to understand men? Meanwhile, the most stereotypical woman in the movie was the male PA. If we're going to hit hard on stereotypes, at least play fair.
The original What Women Want did a huge amount to defend women, glorify them and reveal their best qualities to men. What Men Want was mensploitation (if there's such a term, along with whitesploitation) and lacked the class of the original, and while that's not uncommon, I was hoping for a lot more than just a bunch of hoopla laughs. In fact, the movie would have been a lot more fun watching a naive girly woman discovering the secrets of men, learning to avoid their pitfalls and then taking on some of their best qualities to improve herself. That's what the original did.
Robin Hood (2018)
It was in trouble after 10 minutes already
There was an obvious intention to make the movie a lot more dark, blood-thirsty and full of action, and the story development was severely weakened to pay that price. All the key parts of the Robin Hood story - the romance, the camaraderie, the tom-foolery - were vastly diminished and scuffed over. After ten minutes the movie was already in real trouble.
I have another issue: the grossly obvious attempt to push a liberal political agenda on impressionable young movie goers. The bad leader was virtually dressed in a modern-day suit to represent a "businessman" wanting to make the "rich richer". The church leadership was severely targeted, arguing that they created hell in order to use fear to exert supreme control. Islamophobia was targeted with nice references to the "faith" of the Arabs while pasting Christianity. And while Robin Hood stole for the poor, he was murdering hundreds of security guards, representing a very distorted value system.
Obviously this is a reasonably big budget movie, so there were explosions and effects, but honestly, I can hardly remember an action scene of note. The pacing was messy and the creativity short.