Reviews

Walking With Dinosaurs was the beginning of an era. There were dinosaur documentaries beforehand, but mostly just 1-hour TV specials with rough animation, stop motion or puppetry. Even if they had the science down for the time, the recreations were rough and the Dinosaurs never felt alive.

WWD was a daring production, more expensive per minute than any other documentary. Accuracy for the time blended with artistic competence so perfectly, nothing has matched it since. So many copycats have tried to emulate its success. Some came pretty close, like When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Prehistoric Planet, and even Dinosaur Planet, some okay like March of The Dinosaurs, and some embarrassingly failed like Tarbosaurus: The Mightiest Ever and (IMO) Dinosaur Revolution and Monsters Resurrected.

Let's break down those two components, shall we?

1. WWD came out in a time where dinosaurs were best known for being movie monsters like in King Kong (1933), or kids stuff like Land Before Time (1988). Jurassic Park (1993) treated its dinos respectfully for the time, but at the end of the day their role as movie monsters took center stage. WWD was a game changer in that it seriously tried portraying dinosaurs as living animals with animal behaviors. Not every interaction between dinos results in chaos. Sure they eat, but they must also sleep, migrate, form social bonds, build nests, etc. Take for example the shot of the Allosaurus laying in the shade, watching the diplodocus herd walk by. In any Hollywood movie. And even many documentaries, the vicious, bloodthirsty carnivore wouldn't be able to restrain itself from killing anything in sight. Instead it watches them walk by, like a lion watching zebras or wildebeest walk by, interested to see what they do, but still digesting their last meal and too busy sleeping 20 hours a day to do anything us humans would perceive as "cool" or "epic". Another example is these animals' hesitancy to fight. Look at the two Eustreptospondylus fighting over a dead turtle, and the "polar Allosaur" infiltrating the Muttaburrasaurus herd. They don't fight to the death like in the laughable "Jurassic Fight Club". Real animals only fight as a last resort. Fighting means risking injury. If you get injured, you can't hunt, therefore you can't eat, and therefore you'll die. One Eustreptospondylus simply intimates the other into backing down, and they carry on with their lives. The Allosaur and Muttaburrasaurus keep an uneasy distance. When it can't find any young, old, weak, or sick among the healthy Muttaburrasaurus, it gives up and backs off. The only "awesomebro" scene in the whole series is the Liopleurodon grabbing the dinosaur from the sea cliff, in water too shallow for it to fit. Subsequent dino docs made their subjects more anthropomorphic and monsterfied with each passing year, focusing on what will draw viewers and stimulate their short attention spans. WWD treats these creatures with not just the respect, but I dare say, reverence they deserve. I say reverence because dinosaurs hold a special place in pop culture. Literally every 6 year old on the planet loves dinosaurs. Most adults find dinosaurs cool too, even if they may not be willing to admit it. We owe them our respect because they were once alive. They breathed the same air and drank the same water we do. To portray them as bloodthirsty monsters, especially in a "documentary" setting, is insulting to me. I'm looking at you, Jurassic Fight Club and Monsters Resurrected. Thankfully shows like Prehistoric Planet and March of The Dinosaurs treat their subjects with respect, though I still think WWD is superior because of my second point:

2. Presentation. The filmmaking behind WWD sets it apart from other dino docs. Let's start with music. The score is phenomenal, remining me of motific and melodic pieces from John Williams and Howard Shore at points. Take for example the "Giant of The Skies" theme in the Ornithocheirus episode. It starts epic, almost intimidating. As the subject grows old and starts dying, the theme returns sounding dismal and melancholic. After a crossfade, the camera pans to reveal the animal's dead body, the theme returning but with a connotation of sadness rather than strength. The music alone makes this scene so powerful, I fight back tears every time I watch it. The opening theme is killer too, and who doesn't love the triumphant "Time of The Titans" theme? The filmmakers use a mix of CGI and puppetry to bring these animals to life. I'll admit the effects can be a bit wonky at times watching in high def, but they looked fine back when it aired on my tube TV, or on a low-res VHS. Prehistoric Planet may have had the most photorealistic CGI, and a decent score, but their music doesn't hold a candle to WWD, and the live action backgrounds in WWD really help ground the CGI models, even if they're not amazing by today's standards. So many other documentaries, such as March of The Dinosaurs, are let down by their ugly CGI backgrounds that break the immersion. Another thing I think WWD does better is storytelling. Prehistoric Planet is framed like Planet Earth, only showing a few minutes here and there to show as many animals as possible. I prefer WWD's episodic structure where we spend a whole episode with the same subjects, making the payoffs more satisfying. The camerawork is fairly conservative. No doubt a limitation of the time, but I think it works in the documentary's favor. It gives us time to let the atmosphere of each episode sink in, unlike the unholy handheld cinematography of Planet Dinosaur (not to be confused with Dinosaur Planet). I also especially like the extinction scene, as it shows a rare dino POV perspective of the asteroid strike.

No dino doc is perfect though. Of course info will become outdated as we discover new things, but there's certain things where they should've known better, even at the time. The Ornithocheirus and Liopleurodon are double the size they should be. Many dinos that should have prorated wrists are unpronated. None of the raptors are feathered. The T-Rex model looks wonky to me, like the dimensions are off, especially the tail. It looks lopsided with such a short tail balancing such a top heavy animal. But you know what? I consider these issues negligible in the grand scheme of things. So much is done so well, treating its subjects with the respect they deserve, and sporting great stories, awesome music, and great effects for the time and budget. The fact Walking With Dinosaurs went above and beyond with both its subjects and presentation means no other dino doc has surpassed it since, and probably won't for a long time.

10/10.

I give Passion of The Christ a lot of credit for its ambition. Its troubled production is fascinating. The production value, and the decision to have the dialogue in Amaraic are very impressive (even though the Romans are shown speaking Latin, which though they did speak in Italy, everywhere else they spoke Greek). It's very impressive. Unfortunately the experience lacks depth.

The Passion without context is just torture porn. Every biblical film focuses the majority of the time on Jesus's life, with the crucifixion taking no more than 10 minutes. This film tries to give context with brief 30-second flashbacks of Jesus giving the Seemon on the Mount, but in a vacuum this isn't enough time for us to care about why this guy is being tortured and executed.

The film tries to make up for this and make you sympathize with Jesus with extremely brutal abuse, but they go so far no man could ever survive it. Jesus may have been the Son of God, but he was given a physical human body with Earthly limitations. As he's being arrested, he's knocked off a bridge and caught in the chain restraints. That would've killed him already. The whipping scene drags on over 10 minutes, and I lost count of how many times he was hit after 130. The scene is so bloody, he would've died of blood loss before they could do anything else.

His suffering is prolonged as much as possible. Every time he falls its in 30 seconds of slow motion, grinding the already slow pacing to a hault. After dogpaddling it's way to the 126-minute mark, we can't even be rewarded with an epilogue of the impact he had on his apostles and other followers.

This is the fundamental problem, not just with the movie, but the extreme sects of Christianity who use the Passion as a scare/guilt tactic and make that the focus of the Gospel rather than Jesus's teachings and the events of his life leading up to it. Greater biblical films inspire you to be a selfless, better person, not force you to follow teachings because you're afraid of punishment.

Full Metal Jacket is a strange film in that it doesn't really follow a traditional narrative. It's sort of just a day in the life of a soldier during the Vietnam War. We spend the first 45 minutes getting to know Private Pyle (after Gomer Pyle) and his relationship with drill sergeant Hartman. Suddenly, they're taken completely out of the picture, and the film spends the remaining hour on Joker, one of the supporting characters up to this point. Themes and ideas are carried over to the second half, but the second half could easily be re-edited to be it's own film.

It's a film that requires multiple watches to get the nuances of the ideas it's trying to explore. It's critical of the war machine and how governments prepare their soldiers for war. In addition to it driving an innocent, mentally unfit recruit like Pyle to something unstable, Hartman uses Lee Harvey Oswald and a school shooter as examples of great shots in the firing range scene. You'd think he'd give examples of great military snipers who killed enemies from far away, or make a point how this power can be mishandled in the wrong hands and therefore you must be mentally fit and have a good moral compass to use it properly, but no, all he cares about is making killers. Joker just wants to be a military journalist, and the whole "born to kill" shtick is just an act. His only kill isn't really necessary, he just euthanized someone another soldier shot. He had the opportunity for the first shot, but since he still has a moral compass, hesitated at the moment of truth as Hartman warned. It brings a new meaning to the "I'm still alive" speech. He did it as validation, nothing more.

This is one is Kubrick's weaker films in my opinion. Obviously it's still great, coming from one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but I have my own gripes with it. The unorthodox structure fails to keep investment and suspense for me. There was some fake looking blood, which suprised me considering all the effort Kubrick put into getting all that Kensington Gore for The Shining elevator scene. The only way I can make sense of the murder/suicide scene is if it was a dream. Unless the policies were different back in the day, why is Pyle allowed to take ammunition off the firing range? Why is no one else running when they hear the gunshot? Why is Joker still his normal self at the beginning of the Vietnam sequence, with no PTSD?

Despite my gripes it's still a very well made and enjoyable film, and is definitely worth a watch.

Halloween is a film I watch every October. Its not perfect but there's still plenty to appreciate. My biggest annoyances are that the acting overall is not very good, the pacing often drags, and nitpicky stuff like Myers looking at his stabbing hand in the opening shot and how its deceptively filmed at an adult's eye level, even though its actually a child. Despite the obvious budget limitations, you can tell a lot of care went into the crafting of this film. I love the cinematography, you can tell they had a lot of fun playing with the 2.35:1 aspect ratio in some scenes. Plus I appreciate the stoic, mature tone the movie mostly successfully employs, and makes the most of its minimal soundtrack which pretty much consists of 2 piano motifs.

Robert Eggers is quickly becoming one of my favorite filmmakers. His unorthodox style is as entrancing as it is unsettling. Some may write this movie off as pretentious garbage, others call it a masterpiece of psychological horror. If you haven't guessed yet, I fall in line with the latter, and have my own off-the-wall literary hot take on The Lighthouse:

Winslow is Tom Howard, a man who murdered his coworker and later died while he was still a logger by the Hudson Bay. He really did die by drowning or hypothermia like Tom Wake hypothesizes. Since Wake and Howard have the same first name, a lot of people like to interpret the film as all happening in the subconscious of the main character. I like to think Tom Howard is dead from the very start, and this film is the afterlife.

My interpretation makes a lot more sense if you've read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. I don't think the filmmakers had this intention in mind, but for me so much adds up. The novel is basically an analogy for the afterlife, where "purgatory" is this expansive grey plain next to mountains, which you must climb to attain a higher state of being or "heaven". Everyone starts off on the grey plain. If you are able to continue climbing the mountain to the point where your state of being would make it uncondicive to turn back, you'll find you had started off in purgatory but ascended to heaven, or at least the first level of it. If you stay on the grey plain, you'll find you were in hell all along.

The island and lighthouse are purgatory, and if he can attend to his duties and not kill a seabird for four weeks, he earns the right to heaven. How appropriate this "grey plain" is filmed in black and white. Coincidence? I think not! Anyways, not killing a seabird is one of the rules because if he has the capacity to achieve the objective good despite the temptation, he proves he at the very least has the capacity for further reform. When he kills the gull, Tom has sealed his fate. He is now in hell, and his Promethean fate is inevitable. I'm undecided as to whether Wake is an angel or demon. I like to believe angel since Dafoe portrays a hint of fear and regret when reciting the sea curse to resign Tom to his fate. Either way, he is an agent sent to test Tom by being his annoying farting coworker, while at the same time playing a fair game and laying down the ground rules to give him a chance. The rules are you can't kill a seabird, you can't go into the top of the lighthouse, the weather and food are terrible, and every time you pleasure yourself it will always be to a shrieking freaky mermaid. After he kills the bird, the weather keeps getting worse, and the boat (a substitute for the bus in The Great Divorce) will never return.

The lighthouse represents, in the broadest sense, the truth. They say no mortal can experience God without completely losing their sanity. A lighthouse is usually a beacon of hope and offers a course of guidance. Now that Winslow is damned, he will never be worthy, and the light simply serves as an inevitable temptation. When he does look at it, he is so overwhelmed he cannot function anymore. Its also worth noting that in The Great Divorce, none of characters can die since they're already dead. You can get gravely injured though, and you just have to lie there in agony for weeks while your "body" heals. In that respect, the Promethean fate is a brilliantly twisted form of torture for him.

There's not much I can add about this movie critically that hasn't already been said by thousands of other reviews. Instead, I'm just using this review as an excuse to tell an amusing story. This movie came out when I was very little and my mom took me to see it in the theater. There's one thing I remember from that screening back in '99: When Qui-Gon was fighting Darth Maul as Obi-Wan was behind the blast shield, my mom leaned in and said something like "he's a good fighter" referring to Liam Neeson and how he wasn't known for action roles at the time. Literally seconds later Qui-Gon got stabbed and I thought it was funny. LOL.

This is my second review I'm posting for this film. My original review from 4 years ago was a long winded comparison between this and Rosemary's Baby. The films do share many similarities I'll get into later, but don't think about that going into the movie.

This paragraph is my spoiler-free review, and everything after that will be more in-depth. All I'm going to say is The Witch is the last horror film I ever saw that legitimately scared me. I've seen a lot of horror movies, and its not like I was a kid when I watched this either. This movie came out when I was 20, it still unsettled me to the point where I had trouble falling asleep for the next 2 nights. No movie has done that to me since. I even saw it in the theater twice. It takes a lot for me to see a movie in the theater twice. I think the reason it affected me so much is because its a very unconventional horror film. After seeing so many scary movies, you get an idea of the formula. Chris Stuckmann said it best when he described The Witch as "almost perversely designed to make you feel uneasy". When I first watched the film, there were several points where I expected something to happen, and instead of that thing happening, it would do something else, and that thing was always way more disturbing than what I imagined. The isolation and tension the supernatural happenings drive into the family's life adds another layer of conflict, and it works very well. The 1.66:1 aspect ratio makes the protagonists feel small and the trees imposing and ominous. The score of slow strings and choirs creates a haunting, monolithic soundscape. The atmosphere is so effective, even in a scene where you can tell the sun's going down, you're put on edge in anticipation of what might happen at night. If the mere time of day in a film can instill suspense, that's good tension building if I've ever seen it. Overall the acting is strong, but the actors who played William and Thomasin were the real standouts. The young twins were annoying, but I think they were supposed to be.

Most of my problems with the film are minor, but the elephant in the room for me was how similar it is to Rosemary's Baby. The dominant male figure in our female protagonist's life seeking professional or spiritual fulfillment is the reason they're in a new environment in the first place. They are isolated (socially in Rosemary's Baby, physically in The Witch). In both endings, the female protagonist joins a coven due to their waning faith and because they are left with nowhere left to go. Their respective decisions to join a coven takes them from the submissive female roles of their respective cultures to positions of relative power, albeit in a perverse way.

I love both these movies, but Rosemary's Baby is undeniably the stronger film. The Witch is a great movie, but if you didn't like it, I would recommend Rosemary's Baby since its a similar premise but more timeless and overall better crafted. It's an amazing first film nevertheless. Since the release of The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers is quickly becoming on of my favorite directors, and I eagerly anticipate his future projects.

I like how the movie's called Kickboxer, but it's about Muay Thai, and Van Damne resorts to karate and taekwondo techniques in the ring. That leads me to a big problem with this movie: Van Damme's character doesn't really have arc. He starts off as an accomplished karate practitioner (like Van Damme himself) and doesn't seem like he needs any more training to beat Tong Po. The movie tries to make it seem like he's not flexible and has to work his way up to a complete split, but earlier in the movie he practiced his form in various types of kicks, and at one point not only throws a side kick above his head, but chambers it up and down in a slow and controlled manner. As someone who's trained in various martial arts for years, I know from experience that throwing a side kick that high requires a lot of flexibility and control, and Van Damme's technique is impeccable from the start.

But this is Muay Thai, not karate. For the sake of the story, Van Damme should have to learn clinching, elbows, and roundhouse kicks to the thighs to beat Tong Po. Instead, we have two scenes of Van Damme in the ring, a warm up round where he annihilates the dude, and the final match between him and Tong Po. Both times he wins with hook kicks, side kicks, traditional punches, and other karate/tkd techniques.

Beyond that, an even bigger problem with the film is how shallow the writing is. Tong Po is written to be literally the most unlikable bad guy ever; he's unfair in the ring, collects protection from the townspeople, and rapes our generic love interest. I keep calling Van Damme Van Damme because, while he's an impressive martial artist, the dude can't act his way out of a wet paper bag and lacks the screen presence of someone like Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, or Michael Jai White. At least he's better than Steven Segal. The only memorable character is our Mr. Miyagi stand in Xian Chow, who's genuinely charming and likable. I'd say Kickboxer has more competent story structure and technical aspects than his previous vehicle Bloodsport. Bloodsport at least knew it's story wasn't it's strong point, and made a good third of the runtime tournament matches. It still has issues like a thin plot and lots of bad dubbing, but it's more enjoyable to sit though than Kickboxer. Whichever you think is better will ultimately come down to personal preference.

Last night was Halloween, so I knew I needed to watch a horror movie. I went with Hostel, one of the films infamous for helping start the torture porn craze of the 2000s. I guess I'm satisfied, but I have no desire to watch it again, either.

Two Americans are backpacking across Europe with an Icelandic guy they pick up along the way. On a train from The Netherlands to Slovakia, they meet a man who tells them about a hostel with lots of hot girls. Slovakia in this movie is painted as some battered post-communist wasteland. Even in 2005 I doubt literally everyone was driving 80s Eastern block beaters. The first half hour of this film is somewhat meandering and plodding, with a subplot of the shy guy not wanting to get laid that goes nowhere. At least the Icelandic guy is funny.

Unfortunately, the Icelandic guy goes missing, so the other two try to find him. Every fishy character they meet is the most obviously evil looking guy and the ominous music plays, but besides a little cheesiness they build up the mystery pretty well. The cinematography/direction is particularly on point here. When one of the Americans is captured, the first torture scene is surprisingly held back and effective, and that quick shot of the Achilles heels always makes me cringe. The acting is good across the board, with the exception of the final guy/main character Jay Hernandez, who wasn't very convincing IMO. He convinces one of the sketchy girls from the hostel to take him where his friends have gone. He gets captured and tortured, and this is where the film goes off the rails.

In the final act of this movie, the torture scenes are so grotesque and over the top, it crosses the line of being scary or disturbing and starts becoming comical. I'm sure there was some intentional really dark comedy in there, but stuff like the German guy slipping on the ball gag and chainsawing his own leg, and the Japanese girl with her eye hanging out of its socket made me laugh. The implausible stuff our hero does from killing a dozen people to fitting a leather glove over his hand with 2 missing fingers without screaming in pain was also funny to me. On top of that, during his escape, he coincidentally boards the same train the Slovak man from earlier just happens to be on. The revenge deaths are satisfying, I'll give the movie that, but it's all just so, so silly.

Though an enjoyable watch, I don't feel the need to ever see this movie ever again. It has a plodding beginning, decent rising actions, and crazy ending that I found both genuinely and ironically entertaining. Feel free to give it a watch if it seems like your kind of thing, but there are much better slashers and torture porn movies out there.