MW32 Reviews

Adventureland (2009)

Just mediocre

[5/10 · 6 January 2010]

Adventureland is neither as good as the fanboys claim nor as bad as some of the semi-illiterate posters here say. It's just a mediocre coming-of-age movie, which unfortunately seems to think it's smarter than it really is. Just because you mention Melville and Horace does not mean you are an intellectual with something deep to say. It just means you took a couple of lit courses and remembered a couple of things. (Although, in the 21st century, that qualifies you as smarter than 75% of moviegoers.) Clichés abound in Adventureland, from Em showing how wonderfully good-hearted she is by criticizing a girl who won't date a Jew, to every single adult in the movie being a fool, to the nerdy guy who hasn't had sex yet, to a romantic meeting in the rain.... Once again, the fact that this thing is hailed as a good movie shows just how lousy most movies are. Admittedly, it tries to be more than a dumb teen movie, but trying does not equal success.

Intimate Stories (2002)

Nice, but very low-key (Very mild spoiler here)

[7/10 · 20 August 2009]

An appealing movie with a likable cast, "Intimate Stories" could use a bit more plot. The scenery is fascinating (though the cinematographer is too in love with the long shot of endless horizontal landscape), and there are several touching scenes, but there are long periods where nothing of much interest happens. I love quirky foreign movies and I love Latin America (and I loved being able to understand much of the Argentinian Spanish accent, as opposed to Spanish in movies set in Spain), but even I got restless at times as the script simply seemed to be vamping. On the positive side, the movie nicely illustrates the theme that "you can't always get what you want"--- but sometimes what you get may be what you need. Three people travel independently across a bleak terrain to the same town with their own goals in mind. They return home without having achieved (exactly, anyway) what they intended, but with each having found something that might turn out to be better in the long run. Though I gave this movie a 7, I did so only to try to counter those who gave it a 10, which it does not deserve. I'd really give it an 8 for effort and the characters' faces.

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004)

Garbage

[31 March 2009]

I, too, read "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters" some time ago, as well as Hawking's books, and for the first few minutes of this movie I thought I was going to watch a serious discussion of the awe-inspiring discoveries and conjectures of quantum physics and related topics. Instead, it quickly deteriorated into New Age-y metaphysical meanderings by religionists. A chiropractor! A woman who claims to be "channeling" an ancient mystic! A guy who teaches at Maharishi University! I hesitate to use the word moronic, but .... Actually, I don't hesitate. This is moronic. There's the germ of a good movie here, but it got buried in fertilizer.

P.S.: Hey, chiropractor: The TV preacher called. He wants his hair back.

Rare Birds (2001)

An irritatingly bad movie

[3/10 · 21 August 2008]

This is a bad movie. I say this despite the fact that 1) I am a birdwatcher, 2) I think Wm. Hurt is a fine actor, 3) I love redheads, 4) the Newfoundland coast is quite striking, and 5) all the acting is generally pretty good. But actors can't do anything with a script this bad, and direction this witless.

The movie really, really wants to be endearingly quirky, and it tries really, really hard to be quirky. The problem is, you can't force quirkiness; you have to be genuinely quirky. Forcing it just reveals the desperation behind a lame script with barely a laugh through the whole thing. (The one exception: "Who's going to come after us? The International Bird Police? The IBP?" Not an exact quote but close enough.) All the many subplots seem meant to give a kind of madcap atmosphere to the events, but none is fleshed out and they seem, to put it kindly, implausible.

Telling is the fact that the writer didn't even bother to do basic research on birds and birdwatching. If you can't do the little things right, you aren't going to do the big things right.

Hurt seemed faintly embarrassed at times to have to do what he was asked to do. The one single convincing scene in the movie---when Hurt silently rubs Parker's tired foot---was probably made up on the spot, because it's too real to be part of the rest of this contrived mess.

Arena: The Real Buddy Holly Story (1985) Season 11, Episode 1

Social and musical insight

[8/10 · 27 May 2008]

Both musicians and those interested in the social history of 1950s rock 'n' roll will enjoy this documentary on the great Buddy Holly. Slickly produced it's not, but the slightly amateurish feel goes well with the raw, pure sound of Holly and the Crickets---before he moved to New York and added strings and harp to his music. It's fun to imagine the touring days when the Crickets, Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Dion and the Belmonts, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and other now-legends traveled from town to town on buses, sitting in with each other's acts when somebody was sick or otherwise unable to play. Scenes with Holly's family, schoolmates, and girlfriends not only reveal his small-town background but demonstrate that he knew early on what he wanted to do, and show his determination to do it. Despite the drive that took him to stardom, those around him unanimously say he kept his down-home nice-guy personality to the end. Nobody who's played rock music can deny what Paul McCartney and Keith Richards make clear: We all owe what we play in large part to Buddy Holly. As Richards says, "Not bad for a guy from Lubbock, right?"

Lawn Dogs (1997)

Oh so precious

[3/10 · 11 August 2007]

Let me admit up front that I turned this movie off after a half-hour. I'm a big fan of quirky, low-budget movies with odd characters, but movies that attempt to satirize contemporary mores need to have characters whose actions have some relationship to the way human beings would act in the real world. I didn't believe one second of the part of this movie I saw. The parents and community cop were straw people and the worst kind of clichés. Nobody, no matter how quirky and counter-culture, would stop in the middle of a bridge, strip naked, and dive into a creek while holding up a line of traffic. If he did, the people being held up wouldn't just sit there and watch. No ten-year-old girl would know the make and model of an old pickup truck. No---these are many other scenes were just the screenwriter's lame ways of pounding into our heads that the sympathetic characters were offbeat and charming and the unsympathetic characters were stupid and lacking in imagination. I can't believe anybody would rate this movie higher than a 3 or 4. The fact that this film could even get made and released is symptomatic of how low modern movie standards have fallen. It's really bad.

The Miracle of Bern (2003)

Good period detail, bad movie

[5/10 · 3 May 2007]

I have no doubt that the 1954 World Cup win for Germany was important to a nation trying to move out of the shadow of Nazism and the deserved defeat they suffered in World War II. This movie does a fairly good job of conveying that emotion, and of depicting life in a poor town less than a decade after Hitler. I also liked the music, which was supportive without being overly dramatic or emotional. Much of the acting was also good.

I can't say the same for the script or plot, which were predictable (I don't mean the historic truth of the World Cup, of course, but the fictional family developments), highly sentimental, and annoyingly manipulative. The father was a cardboard character whose actions I didn't believe for a second, and what he did to provide a dinner for his wife was totally implausible. If the movie was aimed at eight-year-olds who need something completely lacking in subtlety, so that every plot point is as obvious as a road sign, then it succeeded. Adults, though, will find it as thin as onionskin.

The trip by father and son to Bern for the final match cheated by having them drive through gorgeous Alpine scenery, when a real trip would not have been anything like so beautiful. If filmmakers will cheat on something like that to get an easy reaction from the audience, they'll cheat on everything.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

Let's be honest here...

[7/10 · 16 April 2007]

Carnival of Souls is an interesting low-budget movie, but it's hardly the masterpiece some people make it out to be. The technical quality, direction, and editing are so bad that they nearly overwhelm whatever good elements are present--those good elements primarily being the occasional evocative image (the dancers!) and the eerie quality of the acting of Ms. Hilgloss.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed the movie, but after reading about it for years and looking forward to seeing it for so long, I found it overrated for what it actually turned out to be. Even for a budget (I read) of $17,000, the crew could have done a much better job of editing the shots they got. I really wanted and expected to like this better than I did, because I'm prejudiced in favor of strange, cheap little movies.

(MINOR SPOILERS)

I find it hard to believe that anyone would actually be surprised by the ending, but just in case.... It was at best a homage and at worst a ripoff of Bierce's famous short story "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge," though I'll admit not exactly parallel.

One of the discussions the movie provoked between my girlfriend and me was how much the main character's attitudes and emotions were shaped by the fact that she was dead. Put bluntly: Was her attitude that being a church organist was "just a job" a reflection of being dead, and was that an attempt by the writer and director to make a moral point? On the other hand, she also didn't enjoy music, dancing, or beer, or even human company, so maybe it had more to do with the death of human emotion in general. In any case, it was hardly subtle.

I would recommend that any film fan see this movie, but understand that it represents something like cheesy rock 'n' roll music of the time: a precursor of something better and more sophisticated to come.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Falls apart at the end

[7/10 · 12 January 2007]

I really wanted to like this movie better than I did. I'm drawn to odd, quirky, iconoclastic, low-budget movies, especially ones with an edge of meanness (e.g., Alexander Payne's Election). LMS started off great, with a collection of characters that, while more than a little contrived, were interesting and deliberately challenging. But as the movie went on, the writer's and directors' desire for forced quirkiness and audience reaction overcame any sort of logic of consistency. SPOILER HERE And you know the film-makers aren't on top of things when they kill off the funniest character halfway through. One of the most telling moments comes at the very end, when the family---reconciled to each other in most unbelievable ways---drives eastward back home into the setting sun. If the film-makers will cheat on the makeup of the solar system, they'll certainly cheat on true human emotions and reactions.