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phil-1119
Reviews
Rock the Casbah (2013)
Shake & bake scenario with director's unresolved issues
Bring together members of a well-off family who've gone their separate ways with daddy's money (the altruist/good girl, the independent/artist, the lazy/narcissistic) around daddy's funeral, add a cheap sleeping w/ the maid / unknown half-brother/sister incestuous relation & a suicide plot and you've got enough material to last 1h45. The problem is nothing ever happens to make you CARE about the characters so 1 hour into the movie, after you've figured it all out and you give up on the story ever going past 2nd gear, you start guessing when will the brother/mother/sister/etc. find out and how... The end is just as predictable as the rest and if you hadn't guessed it, you couldn't care less.
Give a similar underlying drama to a genius like Denis Villeneuve (incendies) and you have a story that will trouble you for days. Give it to the part time 'script consultants' who wrote Rock the Casbah's scenario and you've got a beautifully shot concentrated episode of "Young & the Restless". It's a shame when you think all these resources could have been put to such good use.
Once again (re. Marock) we're held hostage by the Director's love/hate relationship with her native country but the hate part comes out as miss-directed bashing coming from a spoiled brat instead of something really constructive.
The Road (2009)
20 minute guilt trip for the Judeo-Christian public stretched into 1:40
Some book are just not meant to be made into movies. Or perhaps some directors should not be making movies.
If you can't afford movie sets (The Road's sets were obviously bought for cheap from an old 80s B-movie maker), at least get the attention of the viewer with interesting characters or developments. This movie has neither and tries to redeem itself with an "artsy" and "indy" flavor it can't even achieve because it falls victim of the same old and tired clichés every Hollywood movie with a strong Judeo-Christian theme must have: a guilt trip and a happy ending (all things being relative).
At least if the pool of untalented people who worked on this waste of film managed to entertain or captivate the audience, we would not mind being told what to think about life, its meaning and how to redeem ourselves. Some of the more obvious references:
-Suicide is bad. Wife commits suicide: reject her, forget her and throw your marriage down the bridge. -Good people don't eat people. Bad people do. -There's a flame inside good people -Wake up in a church with a poorly written and narrated paragraph -Continue your journey despite the hardship, never give up.
And it goes on and on with the moral brainwashing, UNFORTUNATELY, whenever you think the story is going to take off, the scene gets cut short and you get a repeat of the previous scene. I stopped counting the "going to bed", "take the gun" and "exploring an abandoned house" scenes at 3 (for each of the above).
There's so little interaction with the few characters we meet that you simply don't care.
We get it, the only preoccupation people have is food and despair. From that premise, there's not much else going on. But at least build an interesting story around the characters and don't try to make the audience think after 1:40 (felt like 3:00) that in 20 years, canned Pineapples and a can of Coke will be more precious than Jewelry and $100 bills. WE GET IT. It took 20 seconds and a can of dog food in MadMax to pass on the same message.
Finally, if the director and all the sellouts who made this movie had any guts, they would not have added insult to injury with one of the most pathetic "everything will be all right" feel good endings I have never seen. Had it been for a cruel and cold ending, we might remember this movie for having dared to be a little different than the rest, but that would have been what a real director might have done. Not the monkey on a corporate and religious leach who did this piece of crap. Never mind the book and its ending, I did not read it. We came here to watch a movie and if you're adapting a book, at least try to make a good script. I could care less about a movie if the only interested people are the ones who read the book and will spend the movie pointing out: "look, this is the part in the book where the guy tries to grab the kid to eat him".
Do not get me wrong, I love independent movies with an original story and great characters. Vigo Mortensen is the reason I stepped into the theater expecting a little bit of relief from the garbage holiday blockbusters like 2012 made for the zombie nation out there. I used to love Vigo and must have seen Eastern Promises 4 times. I guess times are hard for everyone. Even good actors.
Tropic Thunder (2008)
Tropic Sewer
As great as Something about Mary and Zoolander were, The Heartbreak Kid and Tropic Thunder are perhaps 2 of the worst pieces of crap to ever land in movie theaters and on DVD.
Ben Stiller is stuck in a mode where he's still trying to milk the Mary & Zoolander franchise, holding everyone hostage of his lack of writing skills and actual humor beyond what could be crammed in the initial success.
This movie is an absolute waste of time. Unfortunately, as other posters have noted, it also confirms that IMDb has become hijacked by Hollywood agencies. Whereas this movie deserves a 3 or 4 star rating, it manages to get away with 7.4 stars??? It reminds me the time Rambo 4 made it into to the top 10 next to the Godfather and Alien.
Next time I look at a Hollywook movie review on IMDb, I'll be sure to start on pages 3 or 4 of the reviews, to bypass all the Hollywood spam.
Babel (2006)
Lured by the title and its cast, here's a loose ended movie about nothing.
Want to be mislead into thinking you're about to see a great movie on the clash of cultures? Enter Babel.
Taken under the wings of Hollywood's altermondialists, who hope to score points in their quest to denounce the rising barriers between countries/cultures, Inarritu wastes 2h30 of your time to show you a series of loosely connected and predictable events triggered by idiotic characters who get what they deserve.
Why is this such a disappointment? After all, showing idiots get in trouble on the screen usually works! It doesn't work here because you'd think the clash of cultures and the language barriers is the cause of all the problems that occur in the movie when in fact, it's nothing like that. The characters get in trouble because of their complete lack of logic and the authorities actually act accordingly to minimize the damage.
I think Inarritu wants us to be more sympathetic to the cause of complete imbeciles vs. officials abusing their powers against "poor and innocent people" none of which are not portrayed in this movie.
Case in point: a/ The clash between the drunk Mexican and the US customs agent would have been just the same had the drunk been a Texan red neck. I'm even surprised Inarritu shows us how "understanding" the US agents are by accepting to look for the kids the next day. You'd think, as a good left-wing, anti-establishment activist that they'd have arrested the maid, not trusted a single word she said and left the kids to die in the desert! b/ The clash between the American tourists and the locals in Morocco would have been just as bad between Moroccans. Proof of that is the local tour guide is no better -he's actually worse- at getting help than Brad Pitt who delivers a pathetic and predictable performance. Next, the police find the culprits in less time than it takes to say "shoot", by moderately roughing up the locals - which is not shocking given the severity of the event and if you've seen what it's like in Morocco.
So what is he trying to say? That the police were effective? That the US government did a good job? Finally, the link between the Japanese family and the rest of the film.... well you just have to see it to believe it: I've never seen such loosely connected stories in the same film. Not only are they loosely connected, but they don't even come together at the end of the movie - something Inarritu had managed quite well in Amores Peros.
Maybe if he'd gone through the trouble of telling us the parallel story of the Russian or Israeli factory worker who built the bullet used to shoot the tourist, we'd have had another 30mn or 45mn of lame and useless storytelling.
I was caught once with Y tu Mama Tambien, thinking Gael García Bernal who'd done such a good job in Amores Peros would bring us another good story - which ended up being about jerking off at the pool and swearing for absolutely no reason for 1h30 something my Mexican and Colombian friends were ashamed off (and they were not raised with a silver spoon in their mouth). I was caught yet again with Babel, mislead by the title, by the producer, by its cast and by the fact that it had been a favorite in Cannes, Toronto and other film festivals.
Such movies are usually favorites because they want to denounce the establishment and we all know the social penchant of artists and movie critics that's fine. Except this movie fails on all aspects it tackles!!! Independent movie-goers: Don't drew because a movie is simply off the beaten path; don't fall in love or get all sympathetic because you see a bunch of peasants get beaten up by police, just because you don't like Bush it happens everyday and it's been like this since the dawn of men.
There are limits to abusing one's good faith and this director does just that for 2h30. He takes you on an empty ride, with an empty story, empty characters and worst of all a fully predictable plot from the moment you realize you've been conned into seeing a movie not worth the film it's printed on.