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Reviews
Poor Things (2023)
Big names make porn...should have left it to real porn stars.
The best thing about real porn is there are no false pretenses. No one thinks they are acting for intellectual or artistic purpose. Viewers know why they are watching it. Poor Things will have you asking why?
It must be given that Poor Things takes porn to another level in production values. Excellent actors, beautifully filmed, accoutrements aplenty.
None if this can disguise the fact that as with real porn, watching sex, nude bodies of many types, sizes, in all manner of positions gets, well...boring after forty-fifty minutes or so. Even when surrounded by pseudo-intellectual baby talk messaging...yeah, messaging what? Little more than Linda Lovelace or Debbie does Dallas with hours, yes it seems like hours...and hours... of inane, oh so pretentious dialog.
The sad thing is there may have been a decent film here with less emphasis on shock, campiness replacing messaging and an hour less film.
It will have its defenders, this kind of thing seems to attract pseudo intellectuals and professional reviewer seem for whatever reason, enthralled by it. After all, there are still those who think Jerry Lewis was funny, Ed Wood was a great movie maker and Myra Breckinridge was a terrific movie.
Marlowe (2022)
A well intentioned mess
Raymond Chandler wrote Marlowe as tough, taciturn and hard boiled. Bogart nailed him. So did Mitchum a couple decades later.
Unfortunately Liam Neeson for all his talent, is simply miscast here. He plays a softer version, a more post modern caring version. It just doesn't work.
It's certainly not all on him. The characters are perfunctory, there are too many to keep up with and decent actors simply don't get the screen time to make you care.
The sets are the best thing going, creating a fine period effect. It's not a waste of viewers time though only the most devoted Neeson fans are not going to wish he'd passed on it.
The 12th Victim (2023)
Hmmm
Some interesting footage from the events inter-spliced with questionable use of hypnosis, lip reading, current feminism and the usual amount of spinning events toward the outcome desired by the title.
Fair enough. As expected. It's not advertised as even handed.
The Starkweather rampage is a seminal story in Lincoln and Lancaster County Nebraska. No one who has lived there as have I for long stretches, has not known or heard eyewitness accounts of the terror that prevailed. Lincoln at the time was more like a small town with a city population. To say everyone knew everyone is only slight exaggeration.
Many citizens had personal ties to officers closely involved with Fugate during and after her return from Wyoming. Near all, if not all, believed her demeanor was belligerent and showed little remorse.
So, as intimated we'll never know. But let us recognize that key questions remain unanswered.
Vengeance (2022)
Some decent moments but...
Novak makes a brave attempt to engage current social/political divergences in this attempt to present both sides of the blue/red divisions in the country. Brave because the subject itself defies simple explanation and is all too easily characterized as dumb vs bright.
Novak falls into this trap. The actors are competent and well cast but each plays a one note caricature of either the snobbish east coast lefty or right wing no nothing.
The plot is not a bad idea though it spends too much time preaching and too little developing the mystery angle. Novak is on screen too much, others too little.
Worth a watch for the good moments but be ready to wish they'd move along. 90-95 minutes rather than 107 would have been enough.
3 Days to Kill (2014)
Which way do we go...
A compelling cast does the best they can with a script that wavers unsettlingly between typical spy drama and Father Knows Best by way of teen/Daddy angst. If played for humor it might have been a genuine romp. But it isn't.
Despite veering off and on track, it presents enough compelling moments to keep your attention while wishing they had chosen high camp comedy direction.
Too often ridiculous situations are played seriously; the hero outgunned and outnumbered by 10 to one prevailing with only a handgun and his dexterity prevailing over the evil ones. Amber Heard plays her role close to camp. At times she pulls it off without appearing to know it. To her credit. She appears to get it. The others are stuck in drama mode.
Ok, but might have been a classic satire.
In the Dark (2019)
Destined to be "So Bad it's Good" cult material.
OMG. Where to start. A decent premise in season one quickly becomes so over the top with contrivances, banal dialogue, increasingly unlikeable characters continually manipulating events and each other in a series of illogical circumstances, that after you get over hating yourself for continuing to watch, you learn to love it for being so bad.
It isn't the actors; all do everything possible with the stupidity of the scripts. Their talent is reinforced by their ability to stay in character and not succumb to hysterical laughter at half the lines they are given.
Given that we don't annihilate ourselves in nuclear war, some future day will find IN THE DARK a front runner in the So Bad I Couldn't Stop Watching It top ten of all time.
So bad it's definitely worth six stars to the good. Just watch and don't allow self hate darken your psyche. The characters have that covered. Someday when it's reached cult status you can say "told you so".
The Silencers (1966)
Dean and Stella Stevens shine in light spy spoof
The first and best of Martin's four Matt Helm entries sees Dino utilized at his comedic best. Credit goes to the slightly crazy, almost Stanwyck like performance of Stella Stevens. Attractively loopy with sex appeal, she and Dean play it both sexy and comically laugh inducing.
Like the succeeding Helm films the plot is irrelevant, merely the device to produce some laughs. And this one produces plenty, mostly because Stevens brings out the best of Dean's inherent natural comedic instincts. Unlike some of Dean's later phoned in performances, here he really seems to be enjoying himself. And so does the audience. Light fluff, yes. But in the best use of the genre.
Texas Across the River (1966)
Dean Martin makes it work...
In one of the later arrivals in western comedies birthed in the sixties by award winning Cat Ballou, Texas Across the River stacks up as the best. Dean Martin here gives a performance which clearly demonstrates why his talent was often under appreciated.
The plot is uncomplicated, Martin is running some guns for delivery at the same time a wedding between a handsome Louisiana Spaniard would be aristocrat (Alain Delon) to a beautiful bride (Rosemary Forsyth) is interrupted by a former jealous lover forcing Delon to run for his life and promise to meet Forsyth "across the river". He meets up with Martin and his small crew who reluctantly takes him on to help get them through Indian country. What follows are a series of comic escapades featuring most of the stock actors in the industry.
The hijinks would amount to little more than a series of blackouts, amusing though little else, were it not for Dean Martin. His character Sam Hollis, holds together every scene he's in. He is at once tough, bemused, confused, irritated and frustrated. Whatever the scene calls for. The laughs are less situational as Martin's REACTIONS to situations.
Martin had an intuitive ability to make everyone around him look better. This film is a testament to the fact.
The Forgiven (2021)
Vapidity thy name is Unforgiven
Right in time for the Wokester Bus tour of the desert, comes another depiction of the soulless prevarications indulgent in western societies propelled upon other cultures. In this case the Moroccan desert is home to a palatial estate where rich, snobbish westerners meet to party non stop with the usual accoutrements; booze, infidelity and lines of cocaine.
Trouble portends immediately when on the way, a rich, bored couple full of booze, themselves and boredom along with obvious dislike for each other, run over and kill a desert lad who, with help from his accomplice hiding with a gun, intends to rob the couple and steal their car.
There might be an early lesson here: don't get in front of speeding vehicles as a tactic in robbery.
There might be though many reviewers ignore these facts for the more tepid account; that they "run over an impoverished youngsters attempting to sell them some trinkets". Get the Mcguffin?
The problem is less the script though it's strained, tedious and thoroughly predictable, than professional reviewers who purposely ignore whatever doesn't play into the evils of western society.
Two stars for location photography and scenery. The Quiet American, 1958, and The Ugly American, 1963, do this stuff much better with entertaining story lines.
CHIPS (2017)
Ring the Bell on Shepard
This script ruins a decent "bro-Buddy" concept. And in the process makes some competent actors look stupid. Not only in character but worse, for signing on in the first place. Dax Shepard and wife Kristen Bell, reportedly a popular couple, likely here attracted several friends for appearances in work written and directed by Shepard. Poor choice, bad result. Worse, Shepard has a quirky likable presence in other work which he wastes here in low brow humor where gross out jokes go too far, too long and too many. Like a stand up comic whose smut jokes aren't producing laughs so they make more of them.
It's hard to know if Bell was simply trying to support her husband's career or actually thought the script was funny. The best support would have been to tell him "Not funny Dax, not funny".