Change Your Image
JackGallagher
Reviews
How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Good but not great family adventure movie; many boring parts, and almost has a good female role model but doesn't
This is a good but not great movie that I liked but did not love. My principal objection is to the fact that one spends a great deal of time watching dragons swish their tails around and eat fish and be confused and do other things that are not awesome. It could be protested that this is consistent with the film's likable themes of peaceful coexistence and friendship. I am not interested in excuses; I am interested in seeing cool things happen in movies. A good movie finds ways to let the viewer see awesome things. For example, the terrific family adventure movie Kung-Fu Panda has many great kung-fu fights throughout its entirety. Imagine if the kung-fu fighters always found reasonable excuses to not fight most of the time in that movie. What a bad movie that would be. The viewer of How to Train Your Dragon is given just such an experience.
I enjoy when movies, particularly movies like this one that appeal to a younger audience, feature strong female characters. The character of Astrid in this film is a strong character. Within the context of the goofy fantasy society she lives in, she is more like an aggressive over-achiever - she is expected to fight dragons, and does so well. She is not rewarded for her hard work because the hero destroys the entire system of values to which she dedicated her life. Nonetheless, she is a strong young lady, and that's cool. She gets sold out later, at the end of the film, when all the kids get to ride around on dragons, and she has to ride behind the hero on one of the crappy dragons until he can jump off to ride the coolest dragon of all. Why can't she ride on the second best dragon? The character of Snotlout, who is a jerk, gets to ride on the second best dragon, and she has to ride behind the hero. She is also very pretty aside from being good at things, so when boys like her, it's like, do they like her because she's good at things? Probably not. Anyways, this movie has a pretty good but far from perfect strong female character.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Very chatty movie
This movie is good, but it suffers from extended periods of people talking to each other and not doing anything, as though it were some kind of stupid book. Additionally, there is are long periods, sometimes over half an hour, having nothing to do with the overarching plot. Is that okay? Can one do that? I thought movies about the joys of watching bad guys get shot were supposed to stick to the point. This movie does not. I do not feel betrayed or hurt over these issues, and was able to enjoy the movie despite its listed shortcomings, but I would prefer that in the future all movies not have shortcomings and conform more neatly to my preferences. Further, I hereby give notice to all filmmakers that if I wish to read a book, I will do so. The book will presumably be written by a literate and thus have certain advantages in life over the screenplay to this extremely chatty film. From what I have been able to observe, there are books available at both the library and the book store. The books at the library are mostly in foreign languages and frequently cover topics relating to career advancement, but this is a topic best covered elsewhere.
Moving Violations (1985)
Elements of this Film's Plot Seem Inconsequential
At the time this film was made (the 1980s), it was sometimes the case that a person might enjoy watching horror films. This cultural moment is crystallized in artistic permanence here by the character of Wink Barnes, played by Ned Eisenberg. In his many scenes, Mr. Barnes brings up the topic of horror films despite their inapplicability to the diaphanous and delicate plot of Moving Violations. On meeting a woman, he asks her about her own tastes in horror cinema. Being told that a classmate is anxious about his father's reaction to a dismaying contretemps, Wink advises watching a horror film. When Dana Cannon tells a largely pointless anecdote about violence in the Arab world, Wink arrives and announces that he, given his tastes for violence, would like to see such a thing. Asked to meet his friends socially, he arrives dressed as Jason Voorhees. Some sophisticated viewers might feel that they had come to sufficiently understand Wink's character at this point and would not need to see his schtick reiterated without elaboration any more. Such viewers are in for a surprise as Barnes appears again and again, sounding his one note each time.
Other fashions and political movements of the 1980s are similarly examined by the film (punk music, space exploration, perms), but none with the relentless jackhammer regularity of the mystifyingly dull jokes about Wink Barnes's taste in film.
Le Cinquième Élément (1997)
Movies are pretty cool sometimes.
Chris Tucker's performance as the radio host Ruby Rhod is a lot for the mind to deal with. His manner of speech, appearance, mannerisms, and personality add up to a great deal of mental stimulation. The signal coming off of Ruby Rhod is so high it may be subject to the conceptual equivalent of audio clipping. One might think about a normal person, "Oh, there they are. I know who that is. I know what they are saying to me. I know why they are moving their body in that fashion." With Ruby Rhod, one thinks, "Ahhh! Oh my God, what is that? Turn it off! Is that a person? What's going on? Someone stop that!"
It is also strange that a radio personality plays such a big part in the plot. If you or I were to make a movie about people in the future meeting aliens and saving the world and so forth we might not think to include a hilarious shrieking gay stereotype.
With Gary Oldman's performance as Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg, similar problems occur, though constrained to his accent and the manner in which Jean-Paul Gaultier has dressed him. Some English people, like Mr. Oldman, have an unsophisticated understanding of the English language as it is spoken by Americans.