Change Your Image
jeffreyd-1
Reviews
Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007)
Jumped the shark, hard
For the first three seasons this show was charming fun. Obviously low-budget, the production values of the first season looked like it was made by three friends with a camcorder. And the drama was always extremely low-stakes, and everybody (including the antagonists) all seemed to get along really well. It remained very fun, something like a Muslim "Andy Griffith Show," and I'll give credit to the ensemble cast - while the show centered on the new imam, really he was the straight man. The show gave just as much focus to about ten other characters, all of whom were likable and funny. The writing could be corny, but got better over time, and in particular the melodrama of season three was well done...
More than any other show I've ever seen, though, the show jumped the shark, and I wish it hasn't gone on past three seasons. The obvious problem was that the show shifted focus onto the conflict between Amaar and Rev. Thorne. Neither character was well-written, neither actor was good enough to carry the show themself, and anyway the strength of the show was the ensemble cast, which got pushed to the side in favor of a new character. Additionally, Carl Rota was the strongest actor and probably the best character on the show, and he left in the middle of season 4.
I live in the US and ordered the season 2 DVD set off Canadian Amazon. I was disappointed that there were no extras on the DVD aside from really inane commenting on a couple episodes by the show's producers.
Da wan (2001)
Could have been better.
The basic setup is there - You Ge plays a likable cameraman given the funny task of creating a cross-cultural comedy funeral. It's not anything world-breaking but it should be enough to carry a comedy.
However, the follow-through just isn't funny. It drags and never goes in any direction but the most obvious, until the vaguely amusing end. I found myself extremely bored with this movie. All the main actors are likable, or I probably would have stopped it halfway through.
For all the people talking about how you need to speak Mandarin to understand this movie, or you need to understand that China has commercialism to understand this movie, or you need to understand that people like comedies to like this movie, these comments are more-or-less groundless. Probably most useful would be to understand the Mainland Chinese art cinema world, where the artistic movies about Chinese history receive all the foreign attention and acclaim, and domestically popular pictures such as Feng Xiaogang's don't. It won't actually improve your movie experience, it will just give some of the boring speeches at the beginning some context.
American History X (1998)
Don't believe the hype
I was curious to see what other people thought of this movie, and am genuinely surprised to see this ranked so highly in IMDb polls.
What are the sins of American History X? First of all, the narrative structure is confused, to no good purpose. By showing Edward Norton's jail-stay in flashback, when we already know he's grew disillusioned with the movement, all dramatic interest is removed from the scenes. And the method of his conversion was so trite as to be laughable. While his prison scenes should have been the most powerful part of the movie, they just felt like a waste of time (and using B&W for the past is such an embarrassingly Hollywood device).
Secondly, the script is just terrible. You feel embarrassed for the actors as they're forced to talk entirely in polemic. Characters just didn't talk or relate to each other in a way similar to how people talk or relate to each other. And I felt American History X's take on violence was too cartoonish, where it should have felt genuine. The scenes felt adapted from action movies, whether the scene was sufficiently brutal or not doesn't make it better or worse.
You have to review artwork based on what the artist was trying to do, and how well he did it. The movie was trying to provide insight in the neo-Nazi mentality, while providing insight into the real cause of the racial violence. However, the unrealistic characters and the Hollywood-ish take on violence left the movie flat in both regards.