Reviews

A very slight, somewhat nonsensical movie about an orphan 16 year-old girl who runs away from her sugardaddy after becoming pregnant by him. She ends up in a village in the middle of nowhere and proceeds to charm the pot-growing locals with her youthful vigor.

Shot on video on an obviously low budget, the film pulls out some funny moments from the cultural clashes between the villagers and the headstrong young girl.

Other than that there's really no story to speak of and the editing is so slapdash that you really do have to be as high as the villagers (and obviously the filmmakers) in order to avoid a headache. Still it does have some scruffy charm and some real offbeat humour.

I'm not sure if I understood even half the cultural and political references this film makes. After all it is Brazilian and from the late 60's. In many ways a product of that era but because it seems to be based on fairy tales or legends there's an interesting timeless quality to it as well. That and the outrageous sight gags, combined with crazy costumes makes this seem like a live-action cartoon. Definitely a fun ride through jungles filled with carnivorous nymphs, machine-gun toting topless commandos, men changing race when they smoke marijuana, a piranha pool party and much much more! Well worth a look though you may need a friend versed in Brazilian history & culture to make sense of it all. The restored 2K print is absolutely gorgeous.

The thing about romantic comedies, especially ones dealing with yuppies, is that they stand of fall on the charms of the cast. Unfortunately here the casting director dropped the ball. The lead is an unappealing sub-Baldwin clone, his buddy a bland shlepp, his wife a cold fish (they're supposed to be hot for each other, so yeah it's a problem), his ubiquitious gay helper looks lost. Only the french girl used as a romantic foil has any appeal, but even this rests on her constant pouting and doe-eyedness. The plot is paper thin, and the amount of coincidences and conveniences the writer has taken just cause weariness. The direction is all telegraphed and you don't usually see this many lighting mistakes (shadows, unmatched lighting sources, etc.) in a film shown by HBO. There's also this annoying singer used, I suppose, as a po-mo commenting device. Unfortunately the singing and the singer as bland and boring as the rest of the cast. You don't have to cast ALL your friends in the movie no matter how low a budget you have.

Oh and the film is called "Apartment Hunting" but they drop this idea 10 minutes into the movie and move onto phone dating instead. Lame.

A slightly better film which feels and looks similar is "Breaking Up" with Selma Hayek & Russell Crowe. So you might want to check that out instead.

I really wanted to like this Korean-slackers-in-trouble movie but the director/writer really goes out of his way to bore, baffle and annoy the viewer. While the baffling part could be due to unfamiliarity with certain aspects of Korean economy and culture (what is the credit card "scam" about?) the boring part part certainly cannot. Long empty shots are sometimes just that. Minimalist acting doesn't mean NO acting. A female protagonist who inexplicably acts retarded does not make me sympathise, it makes me want to kill her (OK at least stop the DVD). The ending? I still don't understand whether this was a "tender" moment straight out of "The Gift of the Magi" or just another long empty shot.

The film isn't a total loss, there's some fine secondary players, and the B&W cinematography is really good but in the end it's not time well spent and it's hard to figure why this was a (small) success on the festival circuit.

Not being familiar with the production history of this film it's hard to figure what exactly went wrong. The concept is pretty interesting, kids in a small town are haunted/murdered by a witch like tooth-fairy who can't stand the light. This is well set up (despite the annoying voice-over at the beginning) and the first time the monster shows up it's genuinely scary. The creature is well conceived and scary (at least in the beginning) but as the movie goes on things fall apart and it becomes a boring sub-standard monster chasing people in the dark flick. The movie doesn't follow the rules it set up in the beginning, characters do illogical things just because the screenwriters (all three of them) had no other idea what to do. On top of that i haven't seen a budget film in a while with editing this shoddy/choppy. The film lasts only 74 minutes which means someone was cutting their losses on the editing room floor but the result is just more confusion. I'm not sure who to blame for the mess but my advice is avoid this film or turn it off after the first 15 minutes.

This is a short film about child abuse. The child actor is very engaging, extremely natural, very well led by the director. The cinematography gives everything a grimy, realistic, post-communist bleakness. Kudos to the director for keeping everything tight and lean. Whether the film could be more uplifting is a question of taste. Polish cinema isn't exactly known for it's light touch so don't expect a happy ending.

The only real problem with the story is that it's not very original. In fact, it looks like a compressed version of "Kes" with dogs subsituted for birds. I guess if you haven't seen that Ken Loach film it won't matter but this fact stuck out for me.

This movie just about defines what a Great Bad Movie is supposed to be.

It starts off with Sean Connery dressed only in red diapers and bandoleers sneaking into a giant levitating stone head, passes through a fruity utopian post-nuclear society, and then heads into post-modern literary references.

The film looks like it was cooked up at an LSD fuelled party in the 70's that I wish I had been at. I wonder if Boorman came up with Excalibur at the same party. Visually there is a similar thread in both films. One is just a whole lot more coherent than the other. At first viewing Zardoz makes no sense at all, but is so wonderfully weird, so out there that you stare at it in disbelief. How did they get James Bond to run around Northern England in his undies? Why is the bread green? What's with the magic marker mustache? These are the types of questions that come to mind and keep you wading through the mess on the screen. The questions keep your mind occupied while your eyes feast on state of the art 70's futuristic concepts. It's as brilliantly fascinating as a 10 car freeway pile-up and you can watch it with considerably less guilt.

Everything is so beautifully, perfectly confusing in this film that it was with a heavy heart that I had to admit after the 4th viewing that it DOES MAKE SENSE. I will not spoil the fun for anyone else but the whole thing really does come together. I can only say that you should enjoy the cacophony while it lasts because once you get the film's storyline it's not half as fun. Though there are still some great lines of dialogue left: "I'm voting for him, Monster" being my favourite.

In any case viewing the film from a 21st century perspective reminds me that back in the 70's some very original, idea based SF movies could be made with a fittingly large budget. Some of these films have become classics which is more than I can say for the big-budget, no-brainer crap that mostly comes out of Hollywood nowadays.

I wholeheartedly recommend Zardoz for those who can admit to cinephilic guilty pleasures!

This film is full of good intentions and has a good initial concept but the execution is so awful that 20 minutes in you'll be heading for the door.

A bunch of bourgeois kids (where does their money come from anyways?) take their revenge on the filthy rich in the name of all oppressed people in the world (or Germany, at least) by breaking into their houses having bland parties and then leaving grafittied warnings similar to "Repent for the time of judgment is nigh". An interesting premise and definitely very timely in the wake of many anti-globalist actions around the world. However the dialogue, direction, music and just about everything else are howlingly awful.

Out of the four principals only Daniel Bruhl and Burghart Klaußner don't embarrass themselves. The best you can say about the girl who plays Jule is that she's cute. The guy who plays Peter on the other hand has some great cheekbones, but not much else.

I realise that not speaking German and having to rely on the English translation I may miss some of the subtleties of the characters "witty repartee" but I doubt that excuses the pages and pages of expository dialogue flowing from everyone's lips. As for the attempted agitprop political statements I only wish they were meant as ironic. Unfortunately you get the impression they were cribbed from a high school kid's presentation on Che Guevara. It's all presented with such a sledgehammer approach that you can't help but miss the point.

The film is shot on hand-held DV, documentary (or Dogme, if you prefer) style. Other comments cite this as a big problem. Believe me the rest of the film so unengaging (except for occasional unintentional humour) that you won't even notice the technical limitations of this cinematography.

Oh, and if you want to hear the worst version of Leonard Cohen's "Halleluia" ever recorded (and used in the most inarticulate way possible) then stick around until third act. There's not much else to look forward to in this very long (2 very very tedious hours), naive and banal treatment of some serious contemporary problems.

I saw Zipang on midnite madness TV the other day. Fun little film, the Japanese equivalent of a 70's Shaw brothers production. The same cast of hundreds, same lame wigs, same cheap/charming production values and tight shooting schedule.

The plot is simple a sword master and his group of friends; a midget, a bomb expert (who blew his nose off), a geek (with glasses so you know the filmmakers aren't striving for historical accuracy), and...a small rubber elephant (no joke you have to see it and then maybe you can explain it to me) must get a golden sword before a gang of ninjas, a rival gang of thieves does the same. The sword has magical powers and belongs to a Golden King who lives in a Golden Kingdom. The plot isn't all that important, the set piece battles are. These are done with great flair even if the swords do wobble rubbery from time to time. Thrown in some cheap SFX (the matte painting looks like a Betamax pause still), a lot of references to other movies and video games (actually the whole movie is a lot like a video game come to life) and you have a lovable, scruffy little mess that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Well worth seeing if you like old kung-fu movies, definitely great in its category.

Lives up to the genre standard. An ex-con tries to go straight but also wants to get back money he's owed for the job that put him in prison. He meets a waitress who's also seen her share of trouble and they start up a tenuous relationship. Then there's a murder and things get complicated. It's noir so the plot isn't the main focus but the mood of the film is consistent and properly downbeat. The characters can't seem to shake the fate that hangs over them. The only thing that which was stood out as a mistake in judgment is the ending which comes too abruptly and seems tacked on from another film.

James Russo is excellent in this film, his face has aged rapidly acquiring a toughness/grittiness to match that cold stare he's always displayed. To my surprise he also wrote the screenplay, and maybe if he acted in more films he scripted he'd be a better known actor.

Theresa Russell, also getting more and more interesting with age gives a good performance as the waitress. There's also some excellent character work from Brad Dourif, Steve Railsback and Michael Rooker as the friend and the heavies, respectively.

I really love this genre and I wholeheartedly recommend it for other fans.

This classic film is one of the few to still live up to the name of "perfect film". Everything in the film is perfectly controlled and at the same time so natural.

The story involves an amateur entomologist captured in a giant sand pit somewhere on the coast of a small Japanese island. He tries to escape but a mysterious woman and some nasty villagers keep pulling him back in.

Despite being made in the early sixties this film still packs a dose of eroticism that most contemporary filmmakers pray to achieve. The black and white cinematography is absolutely haunting (watch out for poor video copies which are way too dark, there is a new DVD out which shows what the original print intended)

This is about as close as you can get to a perfect film. There is nothing that could ever be improved upon.

Based on fact. A fun and funny account of the PMRC hearings in the 1980's. Priestley plays a lawyer who has to defend the American record industry from a group of overzealous congressmen's wives calling for censorship against music they deem "obscene". He has to bring together a motley crue of rock stars (Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, John Denver) in order to overcome the group of "concerned parents" (headed by almost-first lady Tipper Gore).

It plays out like one of those 50's "sock-hop" movies (ie."Rock around the clock"), where the band of fun-loving duck-tailed rock types must fight the prejudices of small town America in order to let the kids have their fun. Then again that's part of the fun of watching this telefilm: the generation voting to ban metal (among others) in the 80's grew up on the rock of the 50's. Just don't expect any big surprises. The only real problem is that the last act, the congressional hearing itself, seems a bit rushed.

Priestley is fine, Mariel Hemingway is as blandly concerned as the real Tipper, Griffin Dunne is very funny as Zappa, Dee Snider is even funnier as himself, Tim Guinee (is this a pseudonym of Spike Jonze?)plays John Denver OTT.

The film doesn't aspire to be more than it is. A pleasant couple dozen minutes in front of the TV.