Change Your Image
ferraro
Reviews
25th Hour (2002)
A Modern American Allegory
While a somewhat boring and unaffecting story on the surface, 25th hour feels like an obvious allegory. Basically, Spike Lee has taken a story about a man who has finally been "touched" after a life of dealing drugs and grafted it onto the aftermath of the "touching" of the US on Sept 11.
Edward Norton stares down his last day before being locked away in prison, and the film picks up right at the beginning of the day, the start of the aftermath. We get a tone poem of anger and grief, the nature of blame and guilt, resilience and spirit... some might take the symbols as American flag-waving, but I personally thought the film was actually a cry for levity, a cry against building business on the backs of others' suffering, a cry out for recognition of who's truly accountable, a cry out against the apparent "responsible" reaction to the eventual repercussions of those selfish practices, and a plea for a more sensible choice. A choice that may be riskier, but is the only chance for a positive outcome.
The film is an almost-epic, but it's maybe too much personal baggage heaped onto a story that wasn't meant to support it.
Black Hawk Down (2001)
Shallow execution makes for mere sensationalism
If you're going to make a movie that's basically two straight hours of combat, there's lots of different ways to make it stay interesting. You can show the political forces at work or the simple tactics that make the events unfold, or otherwise give the audience an overview of what's happening on a larger scale to give the smaller events meaning. Think Three Kings. Or you can divide the action into several set pieces of different types of battle to keep the action fresh. Private Ryan. Or you can make the characters people that you care about and let them arc or at least play off eachother in interesting ways. Or you can make the action so visceral that the audience feels like they're going through the events themselves, hoping that the experience is fascinating or harrowing enough to be the point of the film. Or hopefully, like any good war movie, you put a bunch of these things together.
Black Hawk Down does none of these things. It gives you "characters" who are all boring interchangeable "hero" archetypes with no backstory and are even harder to tell apart for all looking the same. That would be fine, but then it puts them in a maze of streets and rubble, without a sense of where they're trying to go and what they're facing against, shooting in every direction at "bad guys" who pop up in random places at random times, for the whole movie. There's no sense of how far they are from their targets, how far the teams are from eachother, or even how far the army base is from the action when it's time to refuel and rearm. (Some long shots is all I ask.) The action is pretty visceral, but the perspective jumps between the different teams so much that you never get any sense of how long someone has been traveling or waiting, no elation when someone finds their objective, and it's even confusing what most people's objectives are or what direction they're heading.
I guess it can be argued that that's exactly the nature of being thrust into urban combat and having everything go wrong, and that the movie in fact does a good job of keeping the events straight, but if you ask me it's just a lengthy two-plus hours of Bruckheimer-driven sensationalism. It would be a complete disaster if not for Ridley Scott's technical skill keeping it watchable. But I spent nearly the whole film thinking about how many ways it could have been much better.
Ekkusu (1996)
Totally unimpressive all around
There's a lot of terrible anime, but I thought only good anime made it to North American theatres. Wrong.
I know nothing of the manga series, so I know nothing of what this was SUPPOSED to be about and am speaking on the movie as it stands on its own.
The film is a poorly-paced muddled mess. The english dubbing obviously took some liberties and chose to do a LOT of exposition. But only on the obvious stuff, not on the complicated themes. "The power-shield is crumbling!" as we watch a power shield crumble. The art was typical "big-eye" design, and the animation was typical pan-and-zoom limited stuff. Thoroughly unimpressive.
The characters were non-existent, and they spend the brunt of the film either talking terrible exposition at eachother or doing abstract battle with their non-descript mystic powers. They fly around in one shot, then worry about falling in the next. They hit eachother with waves of energy and bounce back, then hit each other with waves of energy and die. All done without any dynamic to the scenes or interesting FX.
The themes were almost interesting here and there, if they weren't so muddled and unconnected. The only interesting bit was the empathetic bad guys; they were fighting for the well-being of the earth at the expense of human-kind. But it was done without any grace, subtlety, or style. Do yourself a favour and watch Mononoke, which breaches the same subject with infinitely more texture and intelligence.
Fantasia 2000 (1999)
The IMAX version looks terrible
This is a warning to film geeks who aren't waiting for the wide-release 35mm print of Fantasia 2000. The film was made for 1.85 widescreen 35mm, digitally at 2K resolution. The IMAX frame, however, has about the aspect ratio of a television set: square. When they made the IMAX print, they cropped the sides off the 2K movie, making the six-storey IMAX image poorly composed and only double the resolution of television! The 70mm print was sharp and clear of course, so I for one could see pixels quite often. 35mm will soften it and give you the WHOLE frame. The fact that I spent 12 bucks to see a pan-and-scanned film in the theatre is ridiculous.