Change Your Image
jconder45
Reviews
Short Cuts (1993)
Great movie, thematically simplistic
And the dominant theme is: women good, men bad. Which makes this film both reflective and constitutive of the one of the dominant social themes of the early to mid nineties: the moral superiority of women, and women as victims vs. men as victimizers. To me, the image that sums up this movie: Huey Lewis's character urinating directly onto a nude female murder victim in the stream below; i.e. a man pissing on a woman. A related theme is the fragility of the more developed, more human as compared to the less human, lower form of life, usually embodied by a male character. This explains the seemingly gratuitous use of female nudity: women, the higher, the more beautiful, are mercilessly exposed to the gaping, befuddled, animalistic male, whether it's the murder victim, mistreated in death by the cretinous fishermen, Lily Tomlin's frazzled waitress being exploited visually by the same fishermen even while she's catering to her needy, ne'er do well boyfriend (Tom Waits), the sensitive, suicidal violinist being ogled by Chris Penn while she swims nude in her backyard, or Julianne Moore trying to defend herself over an affair to her insecure doctor husband (Matthew Modine), while completely naked from the waist down. The women-as-victims theme extends, of course, beyond the use of female nudity. Robert Downey, Jr. seemingly gratuitously punches a female image on a pillow and makes up his girlfriend (Lili Tyler) to look like a beaten woman in order to have sex with her, Tim Robbins cheats obviously and serially on his faithful, long-suffering wife, Peter Gallagher trashes his ex-wife's house, and, ultimately, Downey and Penn ditch their wives/girlfriends on a picnic to chase down two teenaged girls, and Penn in a fit of rage kills one of them. Only Moore seems to get the better of Modine. The two non-female victims in the movie are the little boy, Casey, and possibly his milder, somewhat feminized father (Bruce Davison), who is forced to relive his abandonment as a child by his father (Jack Lemmon). But, while he is relegated to a tragically terminal coma, Caseys' mother (Andie MacDowell) is harassed by phone calls from Lyle Lovett's deranged cake decorator. Further, it is in empathy for Casey's demise that the violinist kills herself. The casting and acting are great, the script is authentic and entertaining, and the editing and direction are impeccable.
Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976)
An attempt to remake "M*A*S*H"
In a domestic, peacetime context, and it's partially successful. The same existential, near-nihilistic ethos (competency is pretty much the only acknowledged value) as that in "M*A*S*H" pervades here. Bill Cosby is basically a black Hawkeye Pierce. Despite several nods to 70's feminism, the "Jugs" character is basically another Lt. Dish. And Larry Hagman's character is a straight knock-off of Frank Burns, with male chauvinism substituted for religious fundamentalism. Nevertheless, many of the gags and much of the dialogue are (usually darkly) hilarious. The film does convey the tragi-comic atmosphere of the inner city, much like Scorcese's "Bringing Out the Dead." The acting is generally superb.
The Pink Panther (2006)
Lacks the intelligence of the original
I didn't expect Steve Martin to recreate Sellers' character. But I didn't expect the screenplay to be so dumb in places. Example: one of the murder victims is heard to say "oh, it's you" right before being murdered, so Martin's Clouseau has everyone in Paris with the last name "Yu" interrogated. Ha ha. Sorry, Seller's Clouseau was clumsy, naive, pretentious and obtuse, but he was never an abject **moron** like this screenplay makes Clouseau out to be (until the end, when he's revealed to be actually a genius, another difference from the Sellers Clouseau). There are some funny sight gags, but most of them are labored; things fly out of Clouseau's grasp quite unrealistically and clonk people in the head. It's predominantly kid stuff. OK, it works as absolutely mindless entertainment, but the originals were more than that.
Wolf Creek (2005)
What is the big deal about this movie?
It's not bad, as slasher films go, but what is the big deal? After reading some critic and user reviews, I expected incredibly gory and sadistic scenes. Didn't really see them. Not that I'm disappointed; I'm not a sicko, I'm just wondering whether these people saw the same movie I did. (Spoilers) There were no scenes of protracted torture, no depiction of sexual assault, no entrails- all things I had been led to expect. I mean Roger Ebert said this movie "crossed a line"- where? I don't watch that many modern horror movies, but the remake of TTCM strikes me as having been more gory and sadistic. The movie does a great job of building foreboding and tension, especially in the scene at the camp before the carnage begins. All the acting is good and believable, especially the Mick Taylor character. But, the carnage itself was just not that horrifying to me. Furthermore, many of the typical horror movie clichés begin to come into play: (spoilers) Liz fails to finish off Taylor when she has the chance, and in her second trip back to the camp to find a rescue vehicle, knowing that Taylor is close on her heels, she takes the time to look through the home videos of the previous victims. The movie really lost credibility at that point. Joe
The Haunting (1963)
A classic
(Spoilers). I'm going to try not to repeat in detail what the other reviews have said. This movie scared the crap out of me when I first saw it age 12. All the horror movies I had seen up to that point were of the Saturday afternoon schlock variety, and were easily dismissable; this was my first somewhat "adult" horror movie, and it left a lasting impression.
Because of that impression, it's hard for me to put myself in the place of a first-time adult viewer. It's certainly somewhat dated in it's dialogue and it's themes (except that it may have been the very first major studio movie to have lesbianism as an explicit element in its plot); certainly the the idea of a serious exploration of the supernatural was much fresher in 1963 than it is now. This takes a lot of the punch out of the subtheme of the young skeptic Luke coming to accept the possibility of the supernatural. That simply does not resonate now as it must have in 1963. I'm willing to bet that for many moviegoers in 1963, this movie introduced them to the terms ESP, poltergiest, and psychokinesis.
I want to comment on the influence of the movie on popular horror. It is well-known that it was a major early influence on Stephen King. He paid homage to it in the book *Carrie* by recapitulating the stones-falling-on-house episode in Eleanor's past, transferring it to Carrie and her mother. More importantly, *The Haunting* was quite obviously the inspiration, even, I would say, a "template", for *The Shining*, just as King mined *The Monkey's Paw* for *Pet Sematary* (let's face it, King is nothing more than a very gifted reprocessor of classic horror tales). *The Shining* is pretty much *The Haunting* with blood and with the main character's madness turned outward, rather than inward. Other influences, besides the later rip-offs and the hideous remake, obviously include *The Exorcist* and *Poltergeist*.
The real strength of the film, and it's real contribution to modern horror, IMO, is it's uncanny ability to depict the *numinous*, that is the peculiarly unfleshly, otherworldly, aspect of the supernatural. Although quite rightly left unstated in the movie, by the end we have the sense that what probably haunts Hill House is not so much a collection of individual ghosts, as it is some sort of unimaginable dark spiritual *force* or entity, built up out of the accumulated tragedy and "bad karma", if you will, of the house. I think the central horror is summed up in Luke's line toward the end when the whole group is bottled up in the parlor, and he tries to prevent the doctor from opening the door, saying, "I don't know what that is out there, and I don't want to find out." We, in the audience, both want to know, and we don't want to know. We have the sense that whatever it is, it's more horrible and unsettling than whatever we can imagine it to be. It's that idea, along with the horror of Eleanor's self-destruction and absorption into the house, that give the film it's power.
Aiding this, of course, is the impeccable location chosen for "Hill House" (Ettington Manor, in the Cotswolds, England, in answer to a previous poster), the pioneering sound effects, the fantastic cinematography, and the evocative music score. A drawback is the sometimes quaint and heavy-handed dialogue (I *hate* it that Dr. Markway at the end is made to say, "Hill House *is* haunted!"; we'd like to come to that conclusion ourselves, thank you). 9 out of 10.