Reviews

So many plot twists--some improbable, others never resolved--the viewer easily loses the way. And wear a face mask to protect yourself from all the smoking if cigarettes.

If you can figure this one out, you're a genius. Even with triple replays of scenes, we still don't know who did what to whom. An episode shows us how someone died, another shows a completely different version. The moral behind the film, I guess, is that reality is ever what it appears to be. Which doesn't much help us the unsuspecting viewers. The ending suggests a second season may be down the road, but, Dios! I hope not.

I'll leave it to Germans, Jews and historians to vouch for the accuracy of this film. As a work of dramatic entertainment, however, I can attest to its brilliance of construction and visual realization. Following the lives of five principal characters in the confusion of war is no easy task, yet the makers have succeeded in keeping their stories clear while producing exciting variety for us viewers. I saw this film at a festival after sitting through two duds. Generation War came as a riveting, exciting and thoroughly professional achievement. The writing, acting, cinematography are all first-rate, and kudos, too, to the musical score, including the terrific song, "Mein kleines Herz". In detailing the lives of five people during World War II on the eastern front, Generation War ultimately exposes the brutality and futility of war. Because its protagonists plunge into it with the greatest of hopes, the process of how those hopes are dashed is what makes Generation War such a fascinating film.

I doubt that "Juan" will win many new converts to opera, but it's great fun for the already converted, an ingenious attempt (mostly successful) to update Mozart's opera to the smart-set of Budapest — people who fall hopelessly in love and thrive on delusion using cell phones, TV monitors, video cams and Mac laptops.

Frankly, I wouldn't wish Italian opera sung in English on my worst enemy; I would have preferred a "Juan" sung in Italian, but I guess English is the world language of update. One aspect of the film I did not enjoy was the English subtitles: why use them when everyone sang loud and clear? For me the best singer was Mikhail Petrenko (Leporello) followed by Christopher Maltman as Juan who looks sexy enough to conquer 1003 women in Spain.

Leporello's aria "One thousand and three" blew me away: his use of a Mac laptop and Mac software to display Juan's conquests is utterly brilliant.

Money may never sleep . . . but the audience will. The first hour drags, a screenplay wandering around looking for its theme. Lousy cinematography, in which heads are cut off in the frame, subjects get lost in street scenes, is pieced together with pan shots of Manhattan—enough already! I got the feeling that director Stone was providing an old-folks home for actors who can't give up their glory days, e.g. Sylvia Miles and Eli Wallach. There are way too many characters wandering around in this film. Only Michael Douglas lights up the screen, as does Susan Sarandon, briefly, when she comes on as a Jewish mother and realtor.

Once again Hollywood grinds out another shoot-em-up, this time in the guise of a mind-exploration film. Come on: who's fooling whom? the film is directed at an audience whose attention span has been honed on video games: they can't go on unless he/she sees a dead body or car crash every second.

As for the story, why not have all parties sit down and chill out on good weed or opium? Much cheaper than getting all those guns and first-class plane tickets. Some roles are dreadfully miscast. Watanabe's English is just not up to snuff and Ellen Young looks totally inappropriate.

And that ending! "Citizen Kane" accomplished the same thing with a lot less bloodshed and just one memorable word, "Rosebud".

Bad way to frame a film -- at the bedside of an elderly woman who's dying and on morphine drip. There's a scene where Benjamin is working on a tug boat, and the boat lets go a blast of its horn which sounds like a fart. Cut to the bedside, and the daughter asks her mother: "Did you say something, Mom?" Not the best editing I've seen this year.

The tinkly music that cushioned every scene was unbearable. After an hour of this stuff I walked. Just the prospect of, what?, an hour and a half more of Brad Pitt left to come was just too bleak. This is one of the "best films of 2008". Oh well, I know it's been a terrible year for films, so that's no surprise.

As fine a film as this is, I have one problem with it: the actor Mathieu Almaric as a paralyzed stroke victim reminds me of Mike Myers. The character created by Myers, Austin Powers, has rubbery lips that he contorts out of shape. He also wears glasses with black frames.

I would also like to call attention to a scene that many viewers may overlook: the scene in which Jean-Do Bauby shaves his father, played by the magnificent Max von Sydow. The movement and dialog are so smoothly directed, the scene seemed like one long take, but I doubt it. In a stroke of genius costuming, actor Almaric wears a red-and-white shirt, the colors of the barber. (Will he nick his father's skin? will he draw blood?) These colors, red and white, also appear on the lighthouse beside the hospital.