Reviews

Let's start from the good things: the setting of the movie, the backgrounds, the colours, the natural phenomena are awesome, well conceived and breathtakingly well executed.

And that's pretty much it.

The character design, for example, is bland: visually, they look like a rip-off of an average TV animation series from the mid '00s (Avatar The Last Airbender, anyone?). They are neither ugly nor beautiful, they are unmemorable; you won't like or even remember any of the supporting characters, and even the protagonists are sort of indistinct.

But then, there's the plot. This is where the movie goes horribly wrong. You see, if even the director thinks that he has to add a panel at the very end with a sign telling you what the story means, it's the sign that the screenwriting had big problems. It took me a day and several cycles of fridge logic to realize that this movie is supposed to be about the cycle of seasons, with Chun representing the spring and Qiu representing the autumn, and so this explains the climax (spoiler ahead) in which Qiu dies to allow Chun to be born again (no winter apparently in China). I don't think I am stupid, and perhaps for Chinese viewers this would be more obvious, but this had totally escaped me and even the panel at the end came out of the blue and immediately went away.

While you watch it, the movie rather seems to be about a rotten love triangle in which Qiu, the strong, beautiful, courageous boy, gets horribly friendzoned again and again by this dumb, hateable girl that makes a stupid thing after another after having fallen for a well built fisherman that she saw only once, but you know, he goes around naked and flexing his muscles, so how not to fall for him? He's the kind of guy that must have a Harley in the backyard. You will end up hating Chun for how she mistreats Qiu, exploiting him again and again to fix all her mistakes until getting him to die for her.

And then, there are the plot devices. Terrible plot devices, badly thought out, unbelievable in the bad sense. Such as the Rat Lady stealing the dolphin flute because it is required to travel to the human world, except that the dolphin flute has already appeared a dozen times without anyone mentioning this, and that the protagonist has already travelled to the human world without it or any other human object. Or the god-girl-turned-dolphin sent by the gods to watch the humans for seven days, except that the vortex to bring her back home is positioned exactly near to a superstrong fishing net that is several kilometers long and that she cannot avoid. Or the fact that when Chun is first shown magically growing begonias, Qiu is shown magically growing an orange; in hindsight, this was trying to hint us at the fact that he represents the autumn, but its only effect when viewing the movie was to make me think that all the kids in the village can magically grow stuff. Or the fact that when Chun's mother inadvertingly throws away the human turned fish, Chun reveals her the truth, but then nothing happens, nobody mentions it again and the mother disappears as a character and reappears only at the end of the movie. Of course, with all these blunders it is almost impossible to understand the story or to build any empathy for what is happening.

In the end, you may think that this is a bad movie. It is not, and for all its faults, it is ok to watch and it will give you some good moments. But please, let's stop mentioning Miyazaki at every promotional occasion; perhaps these people wanted to be Studio Ghibli, but they completely missed one of Miyazaki's great marks - the ability to express complexity in simple ways without losing its depth, and to express deep concepts through immediate emotions. So, if you want to see a really good Chinese animation franchise, go watch Luoxiaohei instead.

This movie is sorely disappointing for at least two reasons.

First of all, it is plainly boring; most of the time is spent in pointless, overly dramatic dialogues that possibly would like to explore the emotional side of the characters, but which are so filled up with stereotypes - being a nerd, being a nerd that all of a sudden becomes cool, and being a rebel to your (adoptive) parents that don't understand you - that they quickly become unbearable. It takes you thirty minutes only to get to the point where Peter gets bitten and becomes Spider-man - hey, that could have been easily summarized in the first thirty seconds. Also, when at last you get some action, it is the kind of brawl in the dark side alley that looks like a bland replica of a Michael Jackson video from the 80's - not very exciting.

Secondly, the plot has more holes than a golf course. Every minute or so you stumble upon an unbelievable set of coincidences (your hottest schoolmate and love interest, who is also the most intelligent girl in the class, is also the assistant of your father's best friend and colleague, and also the daughter of the head of the local police - how likely is that, one in a billion?) or into a very apparent lack of coherence (e.g. Peter's hands stick to pieces of paper, but in the following scene they don't stick to the pencil and book he is holding, but in the following scene they stick to the computer's keys so much that they break, but they start to stick only after a minute of ordinary typing). In a scene Peter's uncle tells him that he is absolutely identical to his lost father, but just a few minutes later Peter meets his father's best friend and he won't recognize him. This is the kind of stuff that will break the suspension of disbelief and make the movie unbearable to anyone over 10 years of age.

In the end, for a while we enjoyed laughing at the plot's repeated inconsistencies, but after some time the experience became totally boring; when we realized that just one hour had passed and there was still over one hour to go, we just gave up and saved us the pain.

I went to see this movie with friends, completely unprepared. I had never heard of the comic before - I understand that for its fans things may be different, however for me this was, hands down, the worst movie of my life. It's not just bad, it's disgusting and evil.

Cinematographically speaking, the movie is terrible; adding elements such as actors, writers and a decent director could have helped. The viewer is forced to sit through 2 hours 45 minutes of bad acting, unbelievable dialogues, puzzling plot and violent beatings all choreographed the same way (hit right, hit left, hit up, hit down, repeat ad libitum). The final plot twists are ridiculous and they are mixed with silly, stupid, pretentious musings on the destiny of humanity. In the meantime, the director resorts to all the tricks of whoever has to fill a meaningless movie, including special effects, random flashbacks (some repeated three or four times) and videoclips.

So you get in the middle of three extremely boring hours that you wish you had spent doing something else, but that's not even the worst part of it.

The worst part of it is that this movie is filled with completely gratuitous violence: not just lakes of blood everywhere, but a 6-year-old girl torn to pieces and given as food to dogs, with an insisting picture of her torn leg in the jaw of the dogs; with a guy whose hands are cut with a jigsaw and left there; with countless men splattered, spread on the ceiling, exploded from inside, killed or tortured by the "superheros", often just for fun; of a pregnant woman killed with a gun by her man as a solution to get rid of her; and with the beating of a woman, up to filling her face with blood, followed by a meticulously shown rape; and tens and tens of similar scenes.

All of this, really without any plausible reason - it's not necessary to show all this blood for the story, and for what regards character development and messages from this movie, well there's none of them anyway. So the only plausible reason for all this violence is to allow the director to cover up his mediocrity by filling up the void with gory visual effects.

It was terrifying to me to see that no one else in the theatre (well there were just 10 people on 750 seats, and this it's the premiering week - what an outstanding success) seemed to be troubled by this kind of show, and there were even a couple of people laughing at the image of a guy killed by dropping his head into boiling oil, then letting him suffer in atrocious ways on the spot, of course shown up to the very detail. I thought, how nerd do you have to be to laugh at this, rather than be disgusted? In the end, Watchmen is the best supporting argument in favour of censorship that I've seen in twenty years, and a clear proof of the degradation of Western civilization; even I (and I am a pretty open minded person) went out praying for more control on what is shown on our screens, and being disappointed since I could not puke on the floor of the theatre (something I really felt like doing several times) then leaving my puke just there and possibly even spreading a bit of it on the silver screen as a sign of disapproval.

I think that the director Zack Snyder should be forced not just to watch this junk in an endless loop forever, but to give his own daughter as food for dogs after cutting away her hands with a jigsaw - then we'd see what he actually thinks of ultraviolence. I have been lucky enough to never see 300, and I swear I'll never be, nor I'll be watching any other movie by this immoral director or by any other person involved in the making of Watchmen. Be warned.

I watched this movie (dubbed in Italian) this morning, as I was forced in bed due to a flu. I don't normally write negative reviews on IMDb, since tastes may vary and movies I didn't like might be good for others, but this one was so terrible that I felt the urgency to come online and post a warning to anyone who might conceive the idea of watching it. Please don't do it - this movie possibly classifies as one of the worst films ever, and not even of the "bad but involuntarily funny" type; rather of the "I'd rather be dead than watch this again" type.

Basically, the movie revolves around Dana Carvey, who plays an idiot (or is an idiot - at least that's what I think now after watching the movie) who learns to disguise himself perfectly as other people. The entire movie is just an endless series of gags with Carvey disguised as characters who are supposed to be funny and are designed only to let you say "oh how good is Dana Carvey in disguising himself"; unfortunately, they instead are so obvious, dumb and hopeless that even a 4-year-old would find the movie boring.

To make things worse, the writers decided that this was enough for the movie to work, so there is no real plot whatsoever, and you are even confronted with plain inconsistencies in the script - such as when Jennifer Esposito gets invited to the villain's party and introduces herself as "Barbara", but once she's there she's repeatedly called "Jennifer" by everyone. The villain is played by Brent Spiner and now I understand why his career started and ended with Star Trek; moreover, several supposed celebrities (Bo Derek in 2002? Jessica Simpson?) play cameos that should make you think how good is Carvey to disguise himself as these people, but they don't, since he doesn't disguise at all and just hired the real people instead.

And when you eventually think that the movie has reached the minimum length to be allowed into theatres so to reap your money and let you go home, Carvey pops up again with just about the worst imitation of George W. Bush ever made, and then tortures you with minutes and minutes and minutes of unfunny bloopers, and no, that's not enough, after the bloopers and final titles end, he feels the need to add an even less funny scene in which he reveals the dwarf that operates the wooden puppet in the movie, and starts to chat with him, and you just want to shoot him, the dwarf and the entire TV set.

Bottom line: Dana Carvey should not be allowed in front of a camera again, unless he can expiate by watching Naked Gun and Hot Shots at least a hundred times to learn how to do stupid movies properly!

It's hard to understand this B-movie if you didn't grow up in the '70s and '80s in Italy. Most of the script is made by vulgar puns, bad musical numbers, homophobic sketches, references to then-contemporary Italian popular culture, and abundantly naked women.

OK, you can look at the naked women, but what is most enjoyable is the pure nonsense. And the lack of a recognizable plot. And the very, very, very low budget. Director Ciro Ippolito proudly declared "I made the worst Italian movie ever, in the worst moment ever of Italian movie-making."

You won't believe anyone could make a movie like this, and actually release it in theatres (two. In one the release was 3 hours late, as the film was being brought by car by the director itself, who got stuck in a traffic jam.)

Some random quotes to illustrate the concept:

Indian Chief: "Son, who do you like more, daddy or mommy?" Son: "Pippo Baudo!"

Narrator: "In the meanwhile, among the chestnut trees, an ass was wandering."

Arrapaho (kissing his girl): "I feel you are very nervous, what's up?" Girl: "It's four days since I last shitted!"

It is so hopelessly bad that it became a cult movie straight away. And it was intended to be.

In a dry, documenting style, the director brings the audience inside the heart of organized football supporters in Italy. Two teams are going to clash against each other the following Sunday: Turin's team, Toro, and their black and white guests usually known as Thieventus.

As the movie unfolds, we notice the devotion with which the supporters prepare for the great match, but also the differences among the two curves: Toro's "Ultras Granata", who, led by the mythical Margaro, know about grammar and include plenty of nice girls, and the "hunch-back" Juventus supporters, one of whom, in a dramatic moment of reality-TV, confesses to cameras that he hasn't got a woman for centuries.

Modernity lovers can't miss the spleen effect caused by music, clothes and hobbies typical of the late '70s in Italy.

More than everything, it is an interesting movie that defies common thinking about football supporters, showing the passion that they put in supporting their team, but also in creating friendships and activities in our impersonal modern cities.