films that disappointed me

7/10 Exquisite composition fights moral clichés to a draw. If the imagery were more effective, the film would need far fewer intertitles.

6/10 The single best argument for the talkies I have ever seen: With a fresh intertitle on screen every thirteen seconds, it's an illustrated novel, not a movie. The endless close-ups alternating between Joan and her interrogators made me feel I was watching a tennis match played with an invisible ball. Falconetti has an expressive face--but I saw that single tear trace down it maybe 217 too many times.

7/10 Chaplin in full maudlin-mode. The story's ups and downs are plotted with mathematical inevitability; there is not an ounce of spontaneity in it. Oddly, I would find this more forgivable if the film were not so technically accomplished.

7/10 A utopian nightmare, both pretentious and preachy. I was especially disappointed with this flick because I adore Ronald Colman--and here he plays an awful prig. The sets & the cinematography are great, however.

7.5/10 A cold, dry movie with a banal theme: Money doesn't buy happiness (who knew?!). Welles managed to cram into a single flick almost every bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand invented in the previous 50 years, so it does deserve kudos for being a one-film education in technique.

But--truly innovative? Not so much.

Citizen Kane looks more creative if you've never seen a film directed by Paul Leni, FW Murnau, Fritz Lang, James Whale, Alfred Hitchcock, or any other distinguished director who worked in films pre-CK. Extensive deep focus? This goes back to at least 1913 (check out Yevgeni Bauer's films, as well as extraordinary trolley scenes in The Flapper 1920 and Murnau's masterpiece, Sunrise 1927.) Extreme high angles--low angles--Dutch angles? Surely you've seen The Lodger 1926 or Frankenstein 1931 or The Most Dangerous Game 1932 or M 1931 or Stagecoach 1939 or Foreign Correspondent 1940. (CK was in pre-production at RKO while FC was being filmed at the same studio.) Sinuous POV camera? Sunrise 1927, M 1931, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde 1932. The edge of sets revealed in a break-the-4th-wall manner? James Whale again (and also A Night at the Opera 1935). Incredible reflection in a snowglobe? Watch Champagne from 1928, or Easy Virtue 1927, or The Mask of Fu Manchu 1932. L cuts? Blackmail 1929, The Taming of the Shrew 1929, M 1931, The 39 Steps 1935. Multimedia for storytelling, emotional point/counterpoint, and/or thematic enhancement? The Lodger 1926, The Invisible Man 1933, Sabotage 1936, Rebecca 1940. Flashbacks? These were standard in movies going back at least to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari 1920, which also featured the evil daddy of all unreliable narrators. Jumping about in time? D.W. Griffiths' mammoth Intolerance 1916. Not to mention there were at least a dozen versions of A Christmas Carol filmed prior to CK (1901, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1914, 1916, 1922, 1923, 1926, 1928, 1935, 1938); the story always begins in the present, then moves to the past, back to the present, then into the future, and returns again to the present, with no known confusion for audiences or rapture from critics. (Note that Orson Welles himself served as narrator for Lionel Barrymore's annual radio dramatization of A Christmas Carol; Welles even played Scrooge when Barrymore was unavailable for the broadcast in 1938.) Multiple narrators? CK does not actually have those; what it has in every flashback, as well as the main narrative line, is the same 3rd person omniscient camera--whose visual tone throughout conveys a blandly contemptuous priggishness reminiscent of New Yorker short stories.

Most directors used these tricks to underscore or punctuate important themes or emotions. CK uses them with reckless abandon, sometimes for effect, but often apparently "just because we can." For my taste, the effects are diluted by overuse. If everything in a film is in deep focus, for instance, the deep focus has no particular meaning. Worse still, I was so distracted by the filmmaker's hocus-pocus, I was continually being jarred out of my suspension of disbelief.

Citizen Kane does numerous interesting things with the camera, soundtrack, and narrative line, and it does them exceedingly well. One plausibly can make the case that it does more of these things in a 119-minute span than any film previously. But CK introduced very little. And it moved me not one whit.

5/10 If a film has good acting and direction, I will happily go along with: 1) a bumbling, illogical plot; OR 2) Freudian theory, which is in reality an embarrassing pseudoscience. BUT I cannot suspend my disbelief about these two things simultaneously.

Maybe if Jimmy Stewart had played the Peck role? No, not even then. Not even if it had turned out that Salvador Dali was the killer.

6/10 Bebe D, Baxter, & Rogers were all swell in their stereotyped roles. But our nominal leading lady Ruby Keeler cannot act, let alone sing. Her dancing is mediocre. And yet she goes out there a youngster & comes back a star? I don't think so.

Why is this celebrated in the annals of movie musicals? Not because of the choreography--which is relentlessly average, especially compared to 1934's Flying Down To Rio--but for the manner in which that choreography was filmed. Too bad we have to sit through so much dreck to get to it, because the bulk of the dancing & good songs appear only in the last two reels.

4/10 So phoney it hurts.

3/10 There's really nothing wrong with this cult favorite, if you don't mind the spotty cinematography, amateur acting, or tedious musical score. Or the shameless plagiarism--did I mention the shameless plagiarism? The premise, as well as much of the plot and characters, were ripped off without attribution from The Hitch-Hiker, a radio drama by Louise Fletcher broadcast several times between 1941-1946, and subsequently in an authorized adaptation for a Twilight Zone episode aired in January 1960. The detail about the footprints ending mysteriously traces back to an Ambrose Bierce story published in 1893, which subsequently morphed into an urban legend; a version of it appears in the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights.

Thus, the only thing left to admire about CoS is the atmosphere created in the carnival sequences, which is indeed very good.

3/10 I should never have watched this because, in the first place, I find Stephen King's tales about as scary as a paper cut. But the movie wasn't even funny (at least Ed Wood's stuff is funny), and they killed off the only character I liked. Hisss!

3/10 After the exhilarating 1981 original, who wasn't expecting something worthwhile in the sequel? Yet what we got was this embarrassing mess.

Temple of Doom is shamefully bad: bad story, bad plot, bad characterization, bad acting, bad editing. Bad. Bad!

What makes the experience even more awful is that this wretched film follows a delightful opening credits musical tribute to Busby Berkeley.

4/10 Anglophile that I am, I tried to like this--I tried very hard. Sure, it's very pretty--full of pretty people, pretty sets, pretty costumes. But there is not an ounce of originality (or plausibility) in its melodramatic plotlines. Even the dialogue is completely unbelievable--and un-actable.

7/10 The first episode was so very good--vivid characters, rapid-fire dialogue, fun plot, great settings--that I was thrilled to have found new TV that I could love. Then the second episode aired, and I found the magic had dissipated in a morass of silly characters and sustained gloomy paranoid fantasies.

6/10 A $200 million budget--and they couldn't afford a script?! This version's all wet; go watch A Night To Remember instead.