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Reviews
Ashes to Ashes (2008)
The Audi coupé is the best thing in it
On seeing series 1:
Crude, puerile, facile, over-acted... was it done this way on purpose, and if so what are they making fun of - the poor wights that stay glued? John Sim reportedly thought "Life on Mars" was a stupid idea, this one is an even more stupid retread with lousy acting (or is it direction?) thrown in.
The Audi coupé is about the best thing in it. Lovely cars, they were. For the rest of it, the criminals are obvious, the cops bumble about, the floozy who talks phunny (Alex Whatever) is ludicrous. The guy who popped her one at the beginning should have used a dumdum.
Yet funnily enough, it's quite enjoyable in its lobotomized way...
Several months later:
Changed my rating from 2 to 7. Why? Someone else in the family bought series 2 and 3. The way they tied it off explains why everything is crude, puerile and over-acted. Cunning devils...
We Own the Night (2007)
Predictable, formulaic, only slightly leavened by quality of cast
Oh well. All the old ingredients shaken up and tossed out to form YACM - Yet Another Cop Movie.
I suppose crooks keep on doing the old same things and cops keep on doing the old same things, and scriptwriters and directors keep doing the same old things with the same old things and turning out the same old same old. Family conflict ploy #14b is a bit threadbare, too, as is Driving Wrong Way On Freeway ploy #6c. Some nice thin Russian ruthlessness there, though, but even that had a touch of the retreads to it. Not forgetting Big Cop Funeral Scene #1.5 (thankfully short), Girlfriend Getting Strident #34x (also truncated, relatively), and Stupid Villain Hanging About To Be Shot #47c. Fortunately, that wasn't too protracted either. Maybe the director realized he was steering a little close to the Land of Nod.
When are they going to recognize Robert Duval's august years and let him out of uniform? Come to that, it'd be nice too if J. Phoenix Esq. took the steel wool out of his mouth when he speaks. Sounds like he's aiming at playing the Godfather.
Well, I didn't fall asleep, but then I had too much coffee beforehand. I give this one the Order of the Half-Closed Eye.
Dune (2000)
What a shame...
First time we watched it it wasn't bad; second time it was excruciating.
I've worked out why. I've read Dune maybe four times since 1970. I saw the first film (oh dear), so first time I watched this one I was mostly curious to see how they had rendered it. Not bad, I thought, although there were a few things I found tacky and a few plain wrong (Reverend Mothers don't dress like that, for starters: "plain hooded robe" is the get-up of preference). But as I said, not bad. Second time around the abysmal standard of acting - or maybe direction? - came through like a sledgehammer and flattened the whole thing. I felt sorry for William Hurt, Ian McNiece and Saskia Reeves, who are really good actors, at being caught up in something that came across like the school play.
Was this thing really made for people whose first language isn't English, or directed by someone in the same predicament? Almost every delivery was slow and stilted, gestures were wooden: everyone seemed to be slightly embarrassed: "oh gee, here I am standing up here wearing clothes Punchinello wouldn't be seen dead in, and oh whoops there go my eyes glowing blue and if I'm not careful the air-resistance on my hat will break my neck, I hope my agent gets my name erased from the credits and the thing bombs before it opens because if any good directors see it my career will go south and oh, he wants me to say something portentous again and walk like I was squeezing a chick-pea between my buttocks..." Etc.
It does have its points, though. They spelt the name right.
I Am Legend (2007)
What a cop-out
I find it hard to describe my feelings abut this film without using wee short words.
Basically, it's a good buildup followed by a bit of specious God claptrap and a cop-out.
Will Smith's character's taking apart of that woman's "God's-Plan" codswallop is excellent, but after that they can't let him live: they paint him into a corner, give him a divine vision of a butterfly and with one hand grenade he takes out a whole Boy's Brigade Troop of "vampires" and himself to boot (thus making a hero of a suicide bomber), then she drives casually up to Vermont; and the first thing you notice when the Gates of Salvation swing open is a down-home white church with a bell calling the faithful to prayer. Give me a break! It made me wonder how much money the Religious Right had poured in.
As someone else observed, it's a missed opportunity, but really it's a lot worse than that. The cop-out and swift voice-over ending are a great let-down. The woman (appropriately kitted out with little boy from the stock properties department, to which he may now be returned only lightly used and very glad we are of that) appeared too late for us to form any attachment, so really we didn't give a hoot whether she got saved (with a small S, with a big S she was already a goner) or chewed up. I formed the impression that she was dropped in there as a last-minute decision after a plot meeting that went "OK, we're stuck. Here he is in this house, he's lost his dog (easily the most impressive actor on the set, incidentally), he's got a bolt in his neck, sorry, leg, the ghoulies are breaking in by the hundred and gee, how are we going to have the audience Feel Good when they finally stick the gum under the seat and go home?" News for you: it would have been a lot more convincing if the ghoulies had won. They could have spared us the ghastly woman - or maybe got her crunched, what joy! - and simply left a picture of inevitable desolation. I would have bought it. But they way they ended it I didn't Feel Good at all, I felt I'd been conned.
Something else, too: anyone else notice how the villain of the piece, yet again, wasn't American? They can be French, English, German, Serbo-Croat, Italian or whatever, as long as they aren't from the good old U.S. of A. And calling her Krippen! Oh my godfathers...
Thinking of buying the DVD? Save your money! I wish I'd saved mine.
The Astronaut's Wife (1999)
Learn some basic physics, for Pete's sake
Any kid that ever bought a battery knows that if you don't have a circuit the current doesn't flow. Depp was standing in water that was flowing past a radio sitting in a steel sink. Juice goes into radio and out through sink, Depp remains unscathed - there's nowhere for juice entering him to flow to, so it leaves him alone. Charlize with her probably wet hands was in a much more dangerous position. Yet he gets fried, she doesn't.
Lack of attention to primary-school physics is a plain insult. Compare with "Frequency" where at least a circuit is established, even though all it would probably have done was given the evil cop a bit of a tingle, since his shoe soles didn't get time to soak through (and might have been rubber).
Apart from that, this film is half Rosemary's Baby and half a BBC thing from the 60s called "The Big Pull" (q.v. http://imdb.com/title/tt0057735/), quote "A deadly alien force is brought to Earth by a US astronaut after a space orbit through the Van Allen belt**". Like the guy said, half of it's good and half original, unfortunately that which is good is not original and that which is original is not good. It needs Depp & Theron to rise above abysmal - I enjoyed watching them. Imagine it with Kurt Russel and Helen Hunt... Yawn.
** Hey, *real* science! Wow! How many TV viewers nowadays have heard of the Van Allen belts?
Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets (2004)
They did all right, considering...
My main criticism is quite simply that it isn't long enough or detailed enough. I would have loved to see more of everything: the building of the vessel, the engineering, the training, the first lift to orbit, preparations for departure, Venus Orbital Injection, everything. I would have liked to see more of the first leg, Venus to Earth, instead of zipping there like a n°10 corporation bus. In fact, I would have liked to see a series on the scale of Earth Story made of this, with a full hour dedicated to every planet and maybe another to the loop around the Sun. As it was, I was left hungry. On the other hand, I do understand budgets and viewers' attention-spans.
Re the science: Let's be fair about the speed-of-light time-lag: they did mention at the beginning that there was a lag in conversations, but they let this evaporate once they reached the outer planets. Some kind of conversation had to be presented to the viewers, and we have to assume that the lag was edited out for the sake of palatability; so no complaints there. But zero for noisy spaceships. The only film in which spaceships make no noise was Kubrick's 2001, and even then he copped out by using the noise of the crew breathing in their helmets - which *was* pretty effective. I wish the makers of Space Odyssey had realized just how eerie the sight of vast rocket-motors blasting in absolute silence might be but alas, Pegasus lets out much the same roar as every other cardboard spaceship in every other cardboard SciFi film.
But the rest of the science was excellent. No complaints there, in fact praise for bringing out the radiation problems as well as they did. I just hope that having done this film won't discourage the BBC from making a really detailed version, but I suppose that's not for next week or next year either...