Reviews

We lived in Italy in 1967-68 and 1972-73, when I was an adolescent. Since everything else has been said, both positive and negative, I'd like to compliment the props team.

Although "Ripley" takes place a few years earlier, 1960 and 1961, that was Italy to the core. Not just the cars, but the gettoni that one dropped into pay phones (it was good luck if the phone worked), the mailboxes ("per la città" and "per tutte le altre destinazioni," although I gather that they haven't changed much in 55 years), the portiere's delight in telling Tom Ripley that the apartment has a phone, because it takes months to get one (I think it took even longer than that, and you may have had to know someone), the stamps, envelopes, and postmarks, the trains, the passports, the sporadically functioning creaky old elevator, everything.

The only trifling quibble I'd offer is that a few envelopes had "NY" (New York) without the periods that were universal back then and didn't have the zones that preceded the ZIP Code system implemented in 1963. (E.g., New York 7, N. Y.) But, back to more praise, when Tom gives someone a few coins to pay for something, you can hear the clink of what I assume was the silver 500-lire coin, very different from the clink of base-metal coinage. The dollar bills with which a barman is paid in New York looked like they may have been silver certificates, yet they were crisp. All remarkable.

Everything also reminded me of how poor Italy was back then. World War II had ended only 15 years earlier than when "Ripley" takes place. Hence the excitement in buying a refrigerator, even though Dickie had plenty of money-their lavish digs didn't come with one. I can relate to the faded beauty of the uneven, poorly draining cobblestone streets and buildings' peeling paint and pockmarked façades. I haven't been back since 1980 and wonder if much has changed. Italy is an old, old country, with lots of spectacular interiors that nevertheless are drafty, quirky, and, in the winter, freezing; walking on the cold marble floors was an ordeal. I couldn't live among such claustrophobia, with the enormous, dead-weight furniture and old paintings. That too is real, or was in the 1960s.

True, "Ripley" ran too long, it was implausible that Ispettore Ravini and other investigators could fail to see the obvious and that the New York detective, who initially did, was so easily bamboozled with another tall tale, and the soundtrack grew grating. But Lucio the cat made up for much of that and I liked the "Schindler's List" moment involving that cat.

Finally, I was pleased that, even though I hadn't lived in Italy since 1973, I could understand 95% of the Italian (less so the Sicilian dialect), and that so much of "Ripley" was in Italian. That was a bonus.

Epigone (noun): "a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone, especially an artist or philosopher." (Source: Oxford Dictionaries.)

That's "1899" vis-à-vis "Dark."

"1899" started out well enough, but then it became increasingly silly as it became increasingly melodramatic. Lots of running around and screaming. Unlike in "Dark," the ominous soundtrack sometimes didn't match what was going on.

Can someone please tell me what the character Ada died of, and to what purpose? I don't get it. It seemed like a significant plot hole.

My final complaint is that the actors (not so much the actresses) seem to have learned from Matthew McConaghey's character in "Interstellar": at all times, mumble.

I happen to speak some of the languages that the characters kept yelling out. I speak Portuguese quite well, but Ramiro's Portuguese was all but incomprehensible. I also speak French, but did little better with Lucien. Ángel's Spanish was somewhat easier to understand. The German-speakers and Clémence were understandable about 2/3 of the time, so I guess they decided to ignore the Rule of McConaghey.

In case checking the box didn't do the trick, please be aware this review CONTAINS SPOILERS and you should stop reading here if you haven't seen the movie.

Providing some vertical space to hide the spoilers.

More vertical space.

OK, here goes.

There are generally two types of science-fiction movies. The first category, by far the more common, consists basically of soap operas set in space, and the science is incidental, with no promise of accuracy.

Real-science movies comprise the second category, and they are rare. "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "The Andromeda Strain" come to mind. They also tend to be much better than movies in the first category.

"Interstellar" attempts to bridge the gap, but its soap-operatic histrionics (and over-the-top clanging, banging score) overwhelm what science there is. The science is basic concepts of relativity that the characters recite as if their colleagues had never studied physics.

But alas, the plot holes are a black hole unto themselves. Here are a few off the top of my head:

1. When you're sucked toward a black hole, tidal forces would obliterate you, your spacecraft, and anything else. Nothing can survive a descent toward a black hole.

2. Why don't the astronauts map the surface of these planets before descending to them? They'd see that Planet Mann is an icy death zone and the other planet is all water with huge waves.

3. Exactly how is time relativistically slowed to a ratio of one hour to seven years on a planet with only 130% of Earth's gravity?

4. The cute robots don't have the right physical design for effective maneuvering. A robot should not look like a Rubik's Cube. Nor should it have a video display that looks like a DOS batch file. I preferred the "Lost in Space" robot circa 1969: "Warning, Dr. Smith!"

5. In binary code, the few lines of sand on the floor would communicate only a tiny amount of information, not enough for the word STAY. (And Morse code transmits enough information to instruct the planet on how to unify gravity with the other three elemental forces? But I'm willing to suspend disbelief for that one.)

6. How does Cooper manage to communicate anything into his daughter's room?

I'm sure others have proposed other lapses.

I liked "Gravity" better. I also liked "Contact" better. In the latter, science and human drama blended; here the two are jarring in their juxtaposition.

Warning: these comments contain a couple of spoilers, albeit mild ones that don't give away very much.

In their documentary of a hostage standoff aboard a city bus that occurred in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 12, 2000, the creators of "Bus 174" ("Ônibus 174" in Portuguese) have created a memorable documentary that follows the best traditions of Errol Morris. The hours-long hostage seizure was shown live on Brazilian television and gripped the country as it unfolded, probably unleashing the same feelings of horror, frustration, and anger that were generated by the live coverage of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Mood-setting music accompanies footage of the drama and dénouement, which in turn is interrupted by interviews of eyewitnesses and of people familiar with the perpetrator's background and upbringing. The result is not the doctrinaire presentation and predictable condemnation that infect too many documentaries of this type. Though earnest, the filmmakers are fair: the police interviewees come across as intelligent and well-trained, and the film conveys the predicament that the police faced in how to deal with the psychotic hostage-taker and his captives.

The videotape of hundreds of infuriated people converging on the hostage-taker after the standoff ends, wanting to tear him limb from limb, is destined to become one of the classic crowd scenes in film. It's far more powerful than the celebrated "Odessa steps" crowd scene in Sergei M. Eisenstein's 1925 classic film "Battleship Potemkin" ("Bronenosets Potyomkin" in Russian). It would be worth seeing "Bus 174" for this footage alone.

One note on context: a number of downbeat films about Brazilian society have emerged in recent years, and if you've seen "Bus 174," "Central Station" ("Central do Brasil"), and "City of God" ("Cidade de Deus"), along with the older "Pixote," you could be forgiven for thinking that urban Brazil is hellish. That would be too simple. Though beset by high income inequality and far too much urban violent crime, Brazil is a complex country inhabited by millions of sophisticated citizens capable of operating at the frontiers of applied and pure technology and of producing great literature, music, and film. Moreover, the mentally unbalanced hostage-taker of bus 174 is hardly less addled, and hardly less cared for by society, than tens of people I pass by on a typical work day in San Francisco. In that sense, "Bus 174" is a cautionary tale about what could happen in first world cities like San Francisco that are overrun with mentally ill and/or drug-addicted street people.

In sum, highly recommended.

(WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FILM.)

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche turn in fine performances in this killer-with-a-heart-of-gold melodrama. But the plot is unrealistic.

Auguste Neel was in fact guillotined in Saint-Pierre in the nineteenth century after waiting months for the means of execution to arrive from Martinique. You can see the guillotine in Saint-Pierre's modern and beautifully designed museum. (Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, a French territory hard by the coast of southern Newfoundland, is an absorbing place to visit; I was there in 1999.)

In the movie, Neel wanders around the island after receiving his death sentence for murder, performing one good deed after another -- some heroic, others mundane, but all saintly. Was the French penal system really so inflexible that no one would commute his sentence despite all his good works, including saving another's life? That's the way it's portrayed.

Neel would have been even more saintly to take the islanders up on one of the many chances they gave him to escape to "les Anglais" (i.e., Newfoundland, 10 miles away across a channel). In the end, his self-imposed martyrdom proves foolish, for it leads not only to his own execution, but to that of Daniel Auteuil's character as well.

Nevertheless, the film is beautifully photographed and the acting is fine. I give it 7 out of 10.

[WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS]

You shouldn't be reading this unless you've already seen the movie, so I won't rehearse the plot (both puns intended). Here are my comments:

The plane-explosion scene is very scary. It's frightening to think that people might actually experience something similar in a real mid-air disaster. That's by far the film's highlight--it's very well done.

So here's why I gave "Final Destination" a 4.

The plot is shallow. Death wants revenge against the survivors and goes around killing them. Where's the suspense in that?

The plot contains senseless material. Does Alex notice the effect of "Rocky Mountain High" or not? It seems not, so playing that tune, along with such other clichés as causing candles to be extinguished, wind to blow, lightning to strike, etc., only serves to tell the audience that another killing is nigh. Talk about lack of subtlety!

I agree with a previous comment that it was insensitive to draw so many parallels to the TWA flight 800 crash (high school group, New York-to-Paris flight). I also think it's kind of racially insensitive to make Death a black guy.

But what I really resented is that, as far as I could tell, the movie bowdlerized its own plot and ruined its integrity by failing to resolve the story. The two main characters are left alive, but with no guarantee that Death has completed his mission. And this outcome, I believe, must have been a deliberate marketing gimmick (no screenwriter could be that inept). If "Final Destination" had done really well, a sequel could have been made to disclose the main characters' fates.

It's sad that Hollywood is willing to screw up its movies for commercial considerations, and how oblivious many people seem to be to devices like these. I have no hope that Hollywood will improve, but what's wrong with the reviewers? I am amazed at the positive reviews "Final Destination" has garnered in presumably discerning places like the New Yorker magazine. Maybe the reviewers have seen too many mediocre films and are critically comatose. Or perhaps I'm too cynical and/or misunderstood the ending. But if I didn't, it's a far cry from "the kicker of an ending [that] leaves the audience with a perfect final scream," as the New Yorker capsule review said.