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illannoy
Reviews
Dogma (1999)
Not Interesting Enough to Offend
What an awful mess this film is. Jam packed with more "look at me, I'm pushing the envelope!" schtick than you can shoot a hockey puck at, Kevin Smith forgot one thing: a story. Oh yeah, he forgot one more thing: a character that doesn't talk like he does. Dogma is more a compilation of Kevin Smith's self-chosen greatest quips than anything that even remotely resembles a coherent movie. I suppose he thinks he's taregting the Catholic church with this meandering, miserable grab bag of gross-out and piss-off anti-religious sentiment, but in the end, it just amounts to a desperate, simple-minded lucture from a man with absolutely nothing to say about the topic he's chosen to discuss. God is a woman. Jesus is African-America. The Second Coming works in an abortion clinic. And this is what passes for bold in today's multiplex. Somewhere lost in all this safer-than-safe political correctness is any rhyme or reason. There's a couple of fallen angels slaughtering churchgoers, God getting beaten half to death by Satanic pygmy skate-rats on a Jersey Shore boardwalk, a nun getting talked out of her faith, a fecies monster being neutralized with a can of air-freshener, a violent gang banger being soothed by the Fat Albert theme song, and people falling from the sky on cue, over and over again. It's a comedy, I think. What's it not is funny. Or interesting. Or entertaining. It's like watching some lonely kid in the back of the classroom trying to get the other kids to look at him. It's a hideous, pretentious, career-killing mess. How this nonsense ever got out of development will go down as one of the great mysteries of the entertainment industry.
Return to Paradise (1998)
Return to Film School
Watching "Return To Paradise" was like watching a pitch meeting gone terribly wrong. I could almost hear the writers unveiling the story before a disinterested studio exec...
Writers: "Three guys are on vacation in Malaysia. Two of them go home, the third - some sort of Greenpeace kid sticking around to save the endangered whatever - gets stuck with everyone's hash. One thing leads to another, Greenpeace Guy goes to jail and he's going to be executed for trafficking if the other two don't come back and take responsibility for possession."
Studio Exec (Yawn; Beat): "Does it have to be Malaysia?"
From there, things get ridiculous. Greenpeace Guy's lawyer (Anne Heche) comes to New York and falls in love with her client's most unlikeable, loathsome, arrogant friend (Vince Vaughn). BUT WAIT....
He's not really anyone's friend. He's just some self-serving creep. But that's okay because she's not really anyone's lawyer, she's Greenpeace Guy's SISTER (collective gasp). And she's just using Self-Serving Guy to save her brother, Greenpeace Guy. BUT WAIT...
She's not really using anyone. They're really in love. And Self-Serving Guy isn't going back to Malaysia (Did it have to be Malaysia?) to save Greenpeace Guy. He's going back to show Greenpeace Guy's sister how self-serving he really isn't. BUT WAIT...
There's another guy. Equal parts success and conscience. Everything Self-Serving Guy isn't. By the end, he becomes everything Self-Serving Guy was, but isn't anymore. We're not really sure how this happens, it just does. But it's not really important, because when it's all said and done, he's only there to make Vince Vaughn's character look good after the movie exhausted all of whatever energy it may have had making him look bad. Still with me? I didn't think so.
"Return to Paradise" lacks depth, feeling, direction, conviction, characters, story, cinematography, performances and a decent score. If you want to watch unlikeable characters wandering aimlessly through the greatest crisis of their miserable little lives and then stop on a dime and contradict everything we've come to know about them for the sake of a plot twist, you should enjoy this movie.
If you'd rather see believable characters that you can actually care about in a similar predicament without a lame love story and a couple of bogus sex scenes, go rent "Midnight Express", directed by Alan Parker, written by Oliver Stone. Unlike "Return to Paradise", "Midnight Express" is based on a true story and made by expert filmmakers. They understood their story, their characters, and the reasons for making that film. "Return to Paradise" serves as the 90's counterpart to its infinitely better predecessor, like "Independence Day" to "The Day The Earth Stood Still", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and every other film it ripped off and misunderstood. It's just another sad example of the truly God-awful state of moviemaking in this day and age.
(Zero Stars)
Babe: Pig in the City (1998)
Please Fight For This Film
The overall reaction to this movie is enough to shatter anyone's faith in humanity. How could something so absolutely perfect and so perfectly beauiful be so misunderstood and maligned? One critic called it "a pathetic, miserable mess". This is a critic who called Larry Clark's "Kids" a masterpiece. Has it come to this? A film about drug smoking, gang-raping, murdering children is genius? A movie about a little pig who jumps in the water to save a drowning pit-bull is pathetic? Disney's "Bug's Life", a bland, witless "Toy Story" retread cleaned up at the box-office. "Babe: Pig In The City" languished. I'm guessing Walt Disney would've have stood behind the pig, not the video game insects and their celebrity voices. He would've have loved this film. Jim Henson would have loved this film. The great ones would have loved this film. George Miller is one of the great ones. An Autralian perfected the American art of filmmaking.
"Babe: Pig In The City" is the most stunningly beautiful motion picture ever made. That's one man's opinion. And I'll stand by that opinion until the day I die. Yes, it's intense. Maybe too intense for children at times. I'm a 28 year old man with a great love for classic gangster pictures like "The Godfathers" and "Goodfellas". And I was sobbing uncontrollably for much of this film. The fact is, this movie is too good.
For Hollywood to embrace "Babe: Pig In The City" would be to admit that Hollywood has proven itself incapable of making movies this imaginative, this wonderfully creative, and this moving. Hollywood had nothing to do with this end-all be-all of movie masterpieces. This is a movie made in Australia by Australian filmmakers. God bless the late Gene Siskel for standing up for this film. It warms my heart that he was able to see how great movies can really be before he passed on. Bless Roger Ebert as well, and everybody else who recognized the sheer beauty of this movie. 1998 may have been one of the worst years in cinema history. But true to form, the little pig with unprejudice heart saved the day. Thank you George Miller, for restoring my faith in this world. Thank you, Pig.
Bulworth (1998)
The Worst Movie Of The Year
This is the kind of self-important mess that you should come to expect from Hollywood. The limousine liberals don't have a problem with children selling crack and carrying guns. Of course, all they need is a little ice cream. Warren Beatty has it all figured out and he's going to tell it like it is. Apparently, he has a pretty decent view from his gated fortress in Beverly Hills. If we'd all just start snorting drugs and talking in rhymes, we'd all get along much better. So sayeth the gospel according to Warren Beatty.
This film is the most agonizing mid-life crisis I've ever had to the misfortune to witness. After a fairly interesting opening ten minutes, the picture nose dives into an endless, deafening gangsta-club scene where Warren Beatty's transformation from Senator to Drugged Out Rapping Whitey is complete. Suprisingly, there's no scene with the good Senator loading the backseat of his limo with bass heavy speakers so he drives around and annoys the hell out of everyone within earshot, but I'm sure he considered it. There just wasn't enough time. He had to run around on drugs rapping the truth to the uninitiated, and that's not just the fat, cigar chomping insurance monsters who were probably slum lords in a previous life. It's the audience, too. We don't know anything. They don't know anything. Nobody knows anything except for Mr. Beatty and the kids with the guns. They know. And they're going to tells us how it is.
Every frame of this miserable, wretched, god-awful mess was the worst kind of torture I've ever endured. The fact that this screenplay was nominated for an Oscar speaks volumes about the state of movies today (it ain't good).