stevespeedy Reviews

Beginners (2010)

vapid narcissism

[1/10 · 8 July 2011]

In an effort to avoid an ugly commute I risked this poor attempt at yellow journalism. It's abominable! Stay away! This pile of smarmy propaganda ought to tie a sign around it's neck, ring and bell, and shout,"unclean, unclean!"

Seeing the Sound of Music martinet as an old queen was the best surprise, and from there the characters went quickly downhill. The protagonist is a boring no-talent cartoonist who can't even over-design a CD cover. The best he can draw from me is sympathy for taking the worst role of his film career. He's plays the responsible one, listening to his dying father, and doling out pills. The other characters, starting with the low-IQ himbo, are dreadful without any doubt. The mother spends half her dialog propagandizing about how horrible the bygone conformist, anglo California used to be. And then everything turns into another freshman sensitivity training course -- for no credit. Guilty White Liberals are so ready to live - and to die in the police/nanny state they foisted upon the rest of us. Maybe they can reap the whirlwind of wicked judges and STDs.

Inside Job (2010)

Very important

[10/10 · 19 November 2010]

Ferguson has used the ambush interview popularized by CBS' 60 Minutes to grill both the guilty and the extremely guilty in a way that commercial television will never do for fear of offending its sponsors. The Keiser Report on Russia Today is the only exception.

The film starts with the collapse of the Icelandic banks, although the banking crisis began with Public Service Announcements on talk radio pushing loans for minorities. The banks -- many of them local -- feared congressional investigation coupled with potential charges of dreaded racism, so they arranged loan packages that enabled the marginally qualified to purchase houses. The local banks unloaded the mortgages as has become the norm in the industry. You can forget about such quaint notions as the Bailey Building and Loan anymore. This bubble began in 2006, but the Iceland saga was later in 2008.

YouTube has been showing a satire on the subprime crisis by John Bird and John Fortune that has aired since January 2008 which summarizes this film in 8 minutes. But, this film gets to the root of the problem by mercilessly grilling the shysters. Elliot Spitzer got air time, but even he caught the stinging end of the lash from the producer. Apparently, the vanity of of the players left most of them unprepared. The only drawback to Inside Job is the extensive face-time given to the smarmy George Soros -- the mastermind behind global financial speculation.

Splice (2009)

Deep Blue Sea Didn't Meet 12 Monkeys

[1/10 · 14 June 2010]

Well why not? Put a female biochemist suffering with hereditary nuttiness in charge of an experiment involving her own unauthorized DNA, and what do you get? A horny winged clone with a scorpion stinger and the sexual habits of the preying mantis. And she can breathe underwater. OK forget 12 Monkeys; Splice never got that far because the female human did silly girl things like dominate her epicene lover/husband/spjnk donor to the point where he can't tell her no -- about anything. Same thing with his half-daughter/niece/science project who can change from a female to an aggressive talking male, who will do his potential mother-in-law. Oooof ha! The silly beaker shouldn't have pushed the start button. Then they do it with the clone peeping thru the sheer curtain in the store-room. But with this money invested, you could tell things were going bad in the dance scene. He should have found out from his brother.

Enough! It's simply squirm-inducing, mental pornography fading to black with a pro-abortion preach.

NB The stockholders' meeting made me laugh out loud all alone. Nobody else came to watch.

The Filth and the Fury (2000)

Best documentary

[10/10 · 3 February 2010]

I titled this "documentary," although it's so much more. In retrospect England was an empire in precipitous decline. Mortgages were extended to 40 years leaving nothing to posterity. Immigrants - legal and illegal - were taking work cheap and crowding out the council estates, thus leaving youth disaffected with no hope. The Sex Pistols voice that deep discontent, so the Callahan Labour government ginned up a campaign of 2 Minutes Hate as a temporary distraction from his evil party's stupid policies. I was caught up in it too.

However, in 1985 I bought a copy of Never Mind TheBollocks. After listening to it enough times to decipher the lyrics, I was blown away! No wonder the government had to shut them up, the Pistols pulled no punches - calling the government a fascist regime was simply going too far. Well, God bless these lads.

This film paints the despair of four down and out, yet very real people. I'd buy the fellows a round any time. They are genuine, no phoniness whatsoever. The best scenes are when the band hurled green on the hook-nosed heroin addict from the New Musical Express who was responsible for starting the media's hate campaign. And also the scene during the TV interview with the totally forgettable Bernard Whathisname. The lecherous host came on to one of their fans, so Glen called him a dirty old man. You could see this lilylivered coward blanch with fear, and cringe as he called for a commercial break.

The Sex Pistols proved to the world that if you have something to say, then set it to 3 chord rock and proclaim it loudly!

Repo Man (1984)

Let's do some crimes, we'll get sushi and not pay

[9/10 · 3 February 2010]

Repo Man's not the best film of all time, but Christine was on cable TV last night and Repo Man was the best segue I had in my collection.

The very strong opening with a soundtrack worthy of Decline Of The West grabs your attention right away. It captures the LA punk scene of the 80s perfectly. The new LA has virtually no Anglos. I liked the product placement of Little Tree deodorizers while all other products shown are generic. I also liked the pot smoking parents who watched televangelist Reverend Larry. They donated $1000 to the kook for the purpose of sending Bibles to El Salvador, while neglecting the needs of his son. Somewhat like a lowbrow version of Mrs Jellyby in Dickens' Bleak House.

It's all the little things coming at you all the time that make this a great movie. You need to be listening to all the background distractions because not one frame of film is wasted.

Think Buckaroo Banzai meets The Filth And The Fury.

The Killers (1946)

so-so

[6/10 · 30 January 2010]

I have never read Ernest Hemingway, nor do I ever intend to. That much said, let me review this film noir. In true black and white with good lighting and patterns the visual is a good watch, but it's by no means the best of its genre.

Two goons buffalo into a small town to hit a gas station attendant. An insurance adjuster pursues the case and solves the murder mystery. It is all flashbacks as he interviews everybody associated with the Swede's death. Burt Reynolds is a washed up prizefighter who broke his knuckles and became a two-bit hoodlum. He takes the rap for a selfish, double-crossing girl, and upon his release from prison takes part in a robbery. If he'd been successful, he'd have been set for life, but remember about the double crosser? She played the poor smitten pug to the point that his life was no longer worth living, which was why he didn't put up a fight during his execution. If this sounds depressing, it really isn't. It's simply a crime drama.

Tip: the Ronald Reagan remake is much better, but in color.

The Killers (1964)

better than the original

[8/10 · 30 January 2010]

For some peculiar reason I wanted to see Ronald Reagan's last performance before he became governor of California, and truthfully, it was very good. In fact I'll say it was better than the 1946 version because the script cut out the insurance adjuster and left the film dealing with only the criminals.

Lee Marvin and his menacing sidekick Clu Gugler kill a shop teacher, but become puzzled as to why John Cassavetes offered no resistance whatsoever to his fate. As with the original, the movie is made up of flashback interviews and done with great effect. A racecar driver has a crash and has to return to being a mechanic due to damaged eyesight. A double-crossing dame leads him on all the while being Reagan's main squeeze. As it happens the driver Cassavettes, is needed to drive the getaway car in a robbery. He's tipped off by the dame that he's going to be crossed, so they hatch a plan to run off together, but the woman, Angie Dickenson, after so much evil sweet-talk ditches him in a motel room as he's left for dead.

Not really as grim as it sounds, but a splendid crime drama.

Down on Us (1984)

ugh!

[1/10 · 30 January 2010]

Bad plot, bad dialogue, bad acting, idiotic directing, the annoying porn groove soundtrack that ran continually over the overacted script, and a crappy copy of the VHS cannot be redeemed by consuming liquor. Trust me, because I stuck this turkey out to the end. It was so pathetically bad all over that I had to figure it was a fourth-rate spoof of Springtime for Hitler.

The girl who played Janis Joplin was the only faint spark of interest, and that was only because she could sing better than the original.

If you want to watch something similar but a thousand times better, then watch Beyond The Valley of The Dolls.

Nashville (1975)

pointless

[3/10 · 29 January 2010]

Nashville came out many years ago and bamboozled the critics. I remember it being severely panned. "Too long" seemed to be the main complaint, and I disagree. This is a Robert Altman movie, so it has no script and for the first 2 hours seems to be a series of random ad lib conversations and party scenes. It did make some sort of sense toward the end, but not enough to earn any praise from this viewer. Nashville is mostly incoherent politically correct psychobabble churned out by foreigners who hate the Southern States for emotional reasons. For me the only highlight was showing NASCAR as it used to be prior to Fox perverting this great Southern pastime.

It smells vaguely as though this was an adventure of elitist Hollywood skunks venturing into rebel flag country in order to film dangerous rednecks and the things they hold dear; country music, populist politics, drunken driving, church on Sundays, etc. And the fact that Tennessee voted for Nixon over JFK. Had to get Nixon dig in there. There was a vague documentary feel about the whole thing highlighted by an extremely annoying BBC reporterette. It's a hard movie to stay with, so I took care of chores during the painfully slow build-up and didn't miss a thing. I did stay to the end, but only to read the song credits and had to give a nod for originality even though the songs were not very good.

If you like Southern literature, culture and geography watch any of the wonderful films made in Texas, or even Gone With The Wind. Reject this turkey with extreme prejudice!

A Serious Man (2009)

sow the wind and reap the whirlwind

[7/10 · 9 January 2010]

This film is hard to categorize. It's obviously not riotously funny, the drama is low tension, so it must be a documentary. It's not about a latter-day Job, either. That biblical hero lost everything and emerged triumphant because of his faith in God above.

A professor is living the great American nightmare. It's the tail-end of the 1960s with all of its goofy protesting and free love and tolerance. His shrew bitch of a wife wants to leave him for a bald-headed quack pop psychologist with a nicer car. Prof Gopnick is the sum total of his fears. Fear of the future, fear of relationships, and especially fear of his red-meat neighbor plotting against him. His children are awful, his brother is an idiot savant child molester who cheats the mob.

It's rather a docudrama about jews in deepest darkest Minneapolis who must deal with each other on both a professional and spiritual levels. He meets specialist lawyers who are no help, rabbis who wax philosophical about parking lots and goy teeth. The tenure committee would rubber-stamp him in if it were not for some malicious letters, and then there's that pesky bribe hanging over him like the sword of Damocles. Fortunately, Gopnick gets the inside skinny which enables him to take the money with a clear conscience to pay the lawyer for his brother's sins.

It ends with a tornado blowing across the suburban prairie, which by no means answers why the opening skit had anything to do with what followed.

Extract (2009)

Double Income No Kids

[8/10 · 9 September 2009]

DINKs is the term used by realtors to describe Joel and Suzie. Their sex life has been reduced to once a quarter, and Joel seeks solace at a sports bar where Dean, a former co-worker talks Joel into doing something stupid. Suzie has an affair with a dimwit that her husband hired to "clean the pool." And from there things go horribly wrong.

A drifting con-artist who uses her good looks to swindle anybody and everybody attempts to swindle an injured employee, Step, out of his settlement. And they all live happily ever after.

But this is a Mike Judge film, and he can usually muster up blistering social commentary. There is not much of that here, unless you look at the small end of corporate buyouts, and the fact that Joel and Susan never bothered to raise a family and decided to pursue money instead. The factory workers seem happy with their lot in life, including the tattooed and excessively pierced heavy metal guy. Step becomes floor manager.

12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)

Me cac robotu tu

[7/10 · 3 August 2009]

The summary translated the sub-title phrase as "I don't like your answering machine." Such was the problem with the translation and a fluent speaker in the room was a terrific help for me. What the actor had actually said was "I crap on your robot." Was It, Or Was It Not is the English title of this film, a mockumentary about the fall of communism in Romania. The story centers around a drunk who wastes his entire paycheck on booze, and every payday gets shaken down by his sponsors and returns home to his nagging wife. The film builds up slowly to a talk show which portrays the masses as being ineffective to stop anything the nomeklatura want. As a result of such unheroic conformity, nobody did anything to get rid of communism, even the execution of the brutal Ceaucescu was mere amusement shown on the boob tube.

Such is the hard lesson of government overthrow, and Americans need to take notice.