Change Your Image
danielkr-1
Reviews
Iron Sky (2012)
Trying a Little Too Hard
When you have a premise as schlocky as this, jokes are unnecessary. Still, visually rich, nicely paced, and impeccably scored. It's a rare low-budget film that looks this expensive.
It's always nice to see Udo Kier. He manages to be funny while playing his part completely straight. Dude is a national socialist treasure. If the rest of the movie was written for characters like that instead of the caricatures it used, the whole experience would have been sublime.
The Americans are all broad stereotypes here, and this may be the thing that is bugging me since I'm American. If this is how the world sees us, I fear for our future. Though really, I couldn't say I'm surprised either. We've provided plenty of buffoonery in the last 20 years. Even so, where are the British in all this? It's not like we were the only country in WWII. What's why it wasn't just called WII.
Well in any event, there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half.
Erotikon (1929)
Sophisticated and Beautifully Photographed
I just stumbled across Seduction on an obscure Roku channel (Pub-D-Hub) under its title EROTIKON, and was really wowed by the gorgeous cinematography, subtle and complex acting and effective visual storytelling. And that last one is especially important because the inter-titles on this print were in the original Czech, and therefore completely alien to me.
The leads were both richly complex people, evolving over the course of the brisk hour and a half from seemingly shallow types (virgin and callow seducer) into rich, fully rounded characters.
A great exercise in visual storytelling!
Spaceflight IC-1: An Adventure in Space (1965)
SF By People Who Hate SF
I've seen this kind of thing before - science fiction movies made by people who seem to really be kicking and screaming against the genre. It's like they are saying, "those fans like heads in jars? Fine, let's give them heads in jars." If anything the premise seems to be a weird excuse to hang a soap opera on. The space ship is implausibly large inside, the black and white cinematography is bland. The actors, surprisingly, seem fine in roles which are pretty aimlessly written. BUT, there are two things I can get behind in this movie. It does have the virtue of brevity, clocking in at just over an hour. And it's always nice to see an American villain for a change.
After Image (2001)
It's the Screenplay That's the Problem
Hollywood is full of people who have taken basic screen writing courses, people who have been forced to see everything in terms of 3-act structure and what the protagonist wants and how he acts to achieve his goals. You can't swing a dead cat in the movie biz without hitting someone who has this stuff burned into their cerebral cortex.
But somehow the producers did.
If you don't know about classic screenplay structure it's just a boring movie that seems longer than its 91 minutes, but if you do it's a fascinating series of bad decisions. I was considering adding spoilers here but I'm not even sure you can spoil this story. It's an anti-story.
The plus is that the photography is really quite lovely. If you are a trained CINEMATOGRAPHER, you might think this is pretty good.
Eagle Eye (2008)
Eagle Eye Observations
Just got back from an IMAX screening of EAGLE EYE, the #1 box office champ this weekend. A few thoughts:
This movie is a lot like Michael Bay's THE ISLAND, in that it rips of ideas from a half dozen movies that I love, adds explosions, and mushes it all together into a movie that I hate.
There is a certain kind of plot that kind of obligates you to be tongue-in-cheek. The audience is going to be laughing no matter what you do, so if you don't bring the funny yourself, they'll bring it instead. EAGLE EYE doesn't bring the funny.
From now on, I'm going over the stories of all Shia LeBeouf movies with a fine-tooth comb to tease out the Hitchcock ripoffs. I could name the one here but it would be a spoiler. Then again, the movie kind of spoils itself. If I said any more, you'd Know Too Much.
Structurally, the movie passes plausible pretty early on. Which is merciful because when it arrives at insane about midway through, the shock isn't as great.
It sucks.
The Voice on the Phone is great. Someone around here said it's Julianne Moore, which sounds probable to me. I was guessing Joan Allen. In any event, a bright spot. Probably necessary that it be a woman too, because you wouldn't be able to hear a man over the all the low rumbling.