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Reviews
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Great potential, but wasted
The fourth Thor movie was such a waste. Every bad bad decision in editing and plotting that could be made in this movie was made. Taika Waititi can't let any moment of drama go by without undercutting it with a bad joke or screaming goat. This is a pitty, because Natalie Portman, Chris Hemsworth and Christian Bale are all giving great performances and deserve better. This movie is filed with purposeless diversion just to shoehorn in pointless cameos. Thor: Love and Thunder seems like it was made by a committee of blind, deaf mutes.
The highlight of the movie was Natalie Portman as Thor. She was fun and compelling to watch. But she couldn't save this mess.
The Book of Queer (2022)
Great look a queer history
This show does and excellent job of citing primary documents where available and shows that many people assumed to be straight were anything but. The information is presented in a fact dense but lighthearted manner.
There were some reviews that complained about singing. But that was a single music video at the end which summed up the episode. Skip that segment t if it bothers you, but don't skip the show.
Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)
More but not more insightful
My problem with the Zack Snyder cut is the same as the Matrix reboots. The CGI is ungrounded so the battles that are supposed to be epic, end up being boring. Nothing has any sense of reality. I get that it is supposed to be a super-hero movie and not Lawrence of Arabia, but the characters' motivations see to change depending on the need of the individual scenes. There are big moments, but none of them have any sense of pay off.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
This movie deserves to be on DVD
I love this movie. I used to describe it as one of the greatest movies you've never seen. This is Capra at his best. It is much better than "Wonderful Life" and "Mr. Smith." At the start of the 20th Century a Chinese warlord captures the fiancée of an American missionary and proceeds to attempt to seduce her. He denies that he loves her, but does he?
One of the things I really like about this movie is the complex portrayal of all the characters. This was made at the same time that Asian characters were routinely portrayed as mustache twirling villains or servants. Yen is cruel and determined, but you get to see other sides to him as well. The same happens all the other Asian characters.
This movie shows how love, lust, greed and betrayal combine in all relationships. Watch it and you'll never see "It's a Wonderful Life" the same way again.
La guerre du feu (1981)
I forgot what a great film this is
I saw this film on the big screen when I was a pre-teen. I recently saw it again and was reminded what a great movie this is.
You don't need to know the languages to understand what is going on. (The characters from different tribes don't know the other languages and they often act out what they need.) This is a movie about the primal fight to survive and how even though they are forced to travel to find a new fire, their experiences expand their horizons in ways they could never have anticipated. If their own fire hadn't gone out they would never have met the cannibals or the clay people, who ultimately hold the key to their survival.
At its core, this is a movie about how although we may look different and have different customs we are all human and what we can learn from each other is irreplaceable.
The Ring (2002)
Somebody wake me when this gets scary
It shouldn't take this long for a horror movie to get scary. I saw The Ring at a preview and I'm sorry it doesn't live up to the hype. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has more scary moments.
First off this movie steals elements from so many other horror films and uses them incompetently. The whole into comes from Scream, the creepy kids who can see ghosts from Sixth Sense and on and on.
An evil demon child "who should never have been born" makes an evil video tape that looks like a rejected Nine Inch Nails video and seven days after watching it, the viewer dies. So what does the heroine do, she shows it to everyone she cares and about, but won't let strangers see it.
The one, genuinely, creepy moment comes at the end, but by the time you get to it, you want the evil demon child to get rid of all the morons you've seen in the movie so far. And the end was the dumbest thing I've ever encountered.
Seeing this makes me want to see if the Japanese original is nearly half as dumb and incompetently done.
Como agua para chocolate (1992)
Failed experiment
I expected to like this from what I was told by friends, but it failed as a piece of magical realism and ends up being both goofy and boring. Filled with disgusting offhand comments, bizarre circumstances and completely unlikable characters, I was wondering what people saw in this.
It is pathetic when a women who runs down the road naked, becomes a prostitute and then later turns into a general in the Mexican army is the most realistic character. The rest are just one note characters who never develop into anything.
In other movies which use food as a device, the food serves to bring people together and express something about the characters who made it. In eat, Drink, Man, Woman it is food that holds the family together but is just eye-candy without real flavor until the family is allowed to grow naturally then it turns into a feast. In The Big Night, the fantastic dishes that emerge from the kitchen are not only a great feast but also express the joys that hope can bring.
In this movie, the food is only a symbolic device. It fails to nourish anything.
Viy (1967)
Stinks on dry ice
A group of drunken Russian seminarians wander through the dark until they stumble upon an old crone's farm. The hag tries to sleep with one of them and he beats her up. She then turns into a beautiful princess on the verge of death. Her father, a prince, calls on the seminarian to say prayers over her corpse. Each night she comes to life and tries to get her revenge. But luckily, the seminarian carries a piece of chalk and draws a circle on the ground which keeps all the demons out, or does it.
Dumb and filled with bad special effect even for the 60's. I've seen better work at kindergarten productions. It's isn't funny enough to be worth watching and is too boring to spend time making fun of it.