Change Your Image
Udolpho
Reviews
Falling Down (1993)
Pitiful
What is essentially a brilliant idea is mishandled by Schumacher's direction (This man's Filmography reads like a Shame File) and horrifically bad support actors. While Hershey, Duvall and Douglas try their best to make a hideously stupid script sound plausible, the surrounding incompetents reduce this to daytime soap quality. Frederic Forrest is kinda funny as the neo-Nazi surplus store owner but it's really not enough. The fast-food outlet segment is sicko-stuff - if he's really got a gripe, why not go and protest to the fat cat executives and not hassle people on minimum wage. We must be told about 15 times in the first 10 minutes that it is Duvall's last day on the job...The movie is so incredibly predictable. At times, the film verges on "so bad, it's good" but like most of Schumacher's oeuvre it is just plain bad. I watched it on DVD and the only thing that could sustain my interest was swapping between languages. Basically, the premise of the film is fundamentally flawed. D-FENS believes he can do whatever he wants 'cause he has to see his daughter on her birthday. So that means other peoples' lives don't count for zip...he loses all respect for other peoples' concerns and he is actually the aggressive invader interrupting people living their lives. Hard to believe that Duvall also starred in the far-superior 'Colors'.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Over-rated morality tale
The real descent into the quagmire is the last 30 minutes of this film, not the characters within the film. According to this film this is what you can expect from drug abuse: 1. Being force-fed in a public hospital (have these people heard of the IV drip?) and then ECT without any form of anaethesia (every bone in that woman's body would have shattered)- did they take her to a hospital in Eastern Europe?? 2. People with severe septicaemia will be denied hospital treatment and thrown into a cell on suspicion of being a drug addict until they require amputation. Watch and learn - it's fine to be a junkie as long as you don't get caught. 3. A man will be allowed to vomit into food being prepared in a government run correction facility. If you are bad, you eat vomit. OK? 4. A middle class chick will end up on the other end of a black dildo in order to feed her drug habit. Yawn... I mean, this film says more about what kind of overblown morality Americans are willing to accept in films than anything about drug abuse or its consequences. The anti-drug message descends into hyperbole and farce and I found myself laughing hysterically where I was supposed to be shocked and repulsed. Give me a break. These sanitised stories are just too ridiculous. As well as this, we are offered the same old, same old routine of white-powder-imagery and colourful-pill-popping. These guys injected something and were bopping around the place, next minute they snort something and they are all on the nod...go figure? And please, the heavy handedness of the junkie losing an arm...spare me, I am not that easily shocked or unaware of symbolism-overkill.