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mjj237
Reviews
Days of Thunder (1990)
Bad even for a racing movie
Let's get this straight: I have been, almost from birth, a great fan of auto racing of all kinds (although, admittedly, I've grown to like NASCAR in particular less and less in recent years as it's become just a little bit too big for its own good). I have also been disappointed by every racing movie I've ever seen. Sure, Grand Prix and Le Mans both have some awesome action shots and some really cool cars, but the stories are dead in the water.
And yet Days of Thunder makes both of those earlier films look like great art. This is just Top Gun on the ground, full of a lot of noise and action paired with a fantastically awful, Scotch-taped-into-place love story.
Some of the action sequences are worth seeing, and there are some nice touches of comic relief (the ice cream incident in the pits, for instance), but they're sorely needed because the rest of the movie is so mind-numbingly heavyhanded. All right, I get it. The brash youngster has a lot to learn before he can run with the big boys and win the heart of the...23-year-old brain surgeon? What? Yeah. Nicole Kidman in this role might be the worst casting decision in the history of the cinema.
A muddled mess and a fine example of what's wrong with the action genre: there's plenty of eye candy and super-cool stunts, but you don't have a movie without a story. So they sorta just fished around in the trash until they pulled out a story, and it shows.
Gumby 1 (1995)
Not bad, when taken for what it is.
Folks, I'll be straight with you. This is not the greatest film ever made. In fact, it's not the best Gumby film ever made (although it's the best--read: only--full-length Gumby film ever made). I attribute this largely to the fact that Gumby and his secondary characters are intended to be digested in five-minute doses. An hour and a half with them is a little bit like a phone call from an old friend you haven't talked to in years, who stays on the phone long after you remember how much better you liked them when they hadn't been chewing your ear off for hours. In other words, as you watch the movie (if you're over the age of 8 at least), you're glad to see Gumby is doing well--he's got a new band, some new friends, even some groupies. And in fact, if you liked Gumby in normal-size episodes as a kid, you almost feel validated somehow because the slightly weird character you liked finally got his own movie. But as the clock ticks forward, you begin to wonder why there needed to be a Gumby cartoon of this length. In fact, you realize, even if you'd really wanted an hour-and-a-half-long Gumby fix, you'd rather have watched 15 or so regular Gumby shorts.
But I must admit, once a Gumby fan, always a shameless Gumby fan. It has its moments, and if you like the little green guy with the pointy head, you'll get a kick out of it. But let me put it this way: I've owned the VHS of it since about 1997 and have watched it twice in the past eight years. It's not a movie you'll be watching again and again if you buy it, no matter how much you like Gumby.
That said, a word about the two new characters: I can accept a guy named Gumby. I can accept, even, that his dad's name is Gumbo. I can accept a horse named Pokey, a girl named Goo, a kid sister named Minga, and even a dinosaur named Prickle. Not to mention a red teardrop with a face that has limbs coming directly out of said face, and the fact that said teardrop is a professor of some kind. I can even accept the fact that everyone in the world looks normal, except for Gumby and his pals, who are highly stylized blocks of primary colors. But I draw the line at two guys named Claybert and Fatbuckle. What kind of names are those?
Kinsey (2004)
Terrific biopic with perfect timing.
It's been said that hard times in a country can bring out the best in its filmmakers, and Kinsey, while maybe not the best of the best, is a fairly compelling example. The story of Alfred Kinsey, ideally, would only be relevant today as the biography of a man who made great contributions to science by having the courage to study a topic as controversial at the time as sex. Unfortunately, nearly sixty years after his first study on sexual behavior was published, many of his countrymen are still out to smear him as some sort of monster.
The film portrays a man with a one-track mind, a scientist so dedicated to his work that he allows it to consume him and start to wreck his life. Liam Neeson turns in a gripping performance as the slightly obsessed Kinsey, but the real star is Laura Linney, whose relatively small amount of screen time as Kinsey's wife doesn't stop her from dazzling.
If nothing else, Kinsey will draw a strong reaction from you. If you already hate the man, you will undoubtedly find more reason to do so. If you respect his work, though, it'll really make you think about how little our culture has changed since 1948. If anything, we've moved backwards into the age of disinformation about sex that predates Kinsey's work.
9/10
What stops me from giving this a 10, incidentally, is a truly awful bit of special effects graphics towards the middle, when a just-plain-bad animated map is used to show Kinsey's crisscrossing the country to conduct his surveys, featuring the disembodied heads of respondents popping up from the map. Weeeeeirrrrrd.
The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew (1983)
Better than it has any right to be, eh. Beauty.
This is one of those movies I've loved since the first time I saw it, and that I could watch over and over again, and that I couldn't begin to tell you why I like it so much. On its face, it should be pretty bad, as it's got two strikes against it: a fairly formulaic buddy comedy for one, and based on recurring characters from a TV sketch show for another. But the McKenzie Brothers are so unbelievably endearing with their constant bickering and their oh-so-earnest ineptitude.
Their unusual status as stereotypes of a culture (Canadian, in this case, of course) generated by the same culture adds another layer of depth, putting this ahead of other buddy comedies, and it scores points for its eminent quotability, too (a favorite Doug line leaps to mind: "I am your father, Luke! Give in to the dark side of the Force, you knob!").
Maybe it's the unbelievably dated-looking special effects that I love, or perhaps the fact that I cannot begin to understand why there are so many references to Hamlet in the plot line, the character names (Claude Elsinore? Claudius? Get it?), and of course the castle-like Elsinore Brewery. There are few pairings more incongruous than Shakespeare with these two hosers, but it makes for good fun regardless.
If I could bring myself to give a 9 or a 10 to a movie as lowbrow (and somewhat predictable) as this, I'd do it, but I'll limit myself to an 8, as this is just about the best you could hope for if you're looking for mindless fun that will have you ready to take off to the Great White North.
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
An amazing job of humanizing a controversial, if not hated, figure
Going into the film, I expected it would only confirm my long-standing dislike of Secretary McNamara. I just have never liked the guy, seen him as disgustingly calculated if not cold-blooded, the sort that sees things on paper but never acknowledges the consequences of his actions.
I was blown away.
Speaking for himself, Robert Strange McNamara is suddenly a living, breathing man, at age 85, with real feelings, real concerns, and some real regrets. If you can get past the disconcerting jump-cuts in the middle of some talking-head bits, which admittedly took me a few minutes, you will likely be stunned by what McNamara has to say about war and the future of mankind.
An absolutely amazing film, with the added bonus of the Sixth Avenue Subway rattling the walls every now and then at the Angelika Film Center here in New York, since the auditorium is in the basement, right up against Houston Street, where the subway cuts across en route to Brooklyn. This might be irritating during some films, but it had a way of punctuating the war footage woven in and out of the interview segments.