Reviews

Peridot is about a young street hustler in Los Angeles who develops a platonic relationship with a successful, middle-aged female writer. It isn't the worst movie I've ever seen, but the lavish praise in gushing, maximum-star online reviews cannot have come from unbiased viewers. They're all about the same length and all sound like they were written by the same person.

Everything about this movie is mediocre, and since Shayne Pax wrote, directed, produced and starred in it, he gets the credit for its mediocrity.

The story is contrived and unbelievable, the direction and cinematography are awkward, and Pax's acting--pretty much limited to soulful looks--is boring. I got really tired of looking at his big soulful blue eyes, which seemed to get freakishly bigger as the movie progressed. The other actors are a little better than he is, but they get much less screen time, and they're not enough better to lift its rating above two stars.

A road trip movie about an obnoxious 13-year-old middle-class criminal brat. He steals a couple of hundred euro from his mother, runs away from home only because he's a spoiled brat, and meets up with an older girl who's also a middle-class criminal. They get a car (neither has a license) and drive from Catalonia (the autonomous region of Spain where Barcelona is) to Paris. Although the score is surprisingly pleasant (sounds classical), the movie is not funny or entertaining in any other way. Both kids are obnoxious, stealing and trashing anything they can as they drive to Paris. Dialog is mostly in Catalan, with lots of French and a little English. There are barely-adequate English subtitles for the Catalan dialog, but (bizarrely) only Catalan subtitles for the French and English dialog, so I have no idea what any of the French dialog was saying.

Van is such a spineless, selfish jerk. He brings his boyfriend-his fiance, really, because they're planning to get married-all the way from America to met his family. But from the moment they arrive in Vietnam, he lets his oppressive relatives publicly and persistently bully and humiliate both of them by acting like the boyfriend doesn't exist and insisting on Van's marrying a girl-ANY girl-so they can produce children as quickly as possible.

Van NEVER stands up against the relentless, obnoxious bullying, never even acknowledges that his boyfriend is more than a casual acquaintance, although there is not the slightest threat of violence if he did. He's just a weak, selfish, spineless jerk who lets his horrible family run roughshod over his boyfriend.

If I'd been the boyfriend, I'd have gotten on the first plane back to the US, left Van with the family he clearly prefers and deserves, and found a man worth committing to.

This is an extremely annoying, infuriating movie.

I had a hard time watching Fear and Trembling. If Japanese employers really behave as they do in in this movie, if they really treat their employees -- even if only their foreign employees -- with such contempt, screaming abuse at them in front of co-workers for insignificant errors that the employees have no way even to know are errors, or covertly but viciously sabotaging their work and degrading them as individuals at every opportunity, then Japan is much more hypocritical than another famously courteous society, the American South where I was born and raised. In the American South, contempt is reserved for private conversations with close friends and would never be expressed toward the victim in public.

I understand that this movie may be partially satire, but its tone is quite serious, and the fact that it is widely reputed to be faithful to a mostly autobiographical novel gives it credibility as substantially true. If this is indeed a true picture of Japan, then WWII was not an anomaly, and I can understand why they invented harakiri.

Vicious inhumanity hides under that efficient, obsessively courteous, antiseptic facade. Although Amélie is an annoying character, Sylvie Testud is a charming and formidable actor. She and the movie make a good case for the argument that in a contest for genuine human decency between East and West, West wins.

Nowadays a person with no talent in any facet of filmmaking can write, produce, direct and star in his own movie, and the apparently insatiable demand for streaming video content will make it available to the whole world. That's what this excruciatingly bad movie is. The 22 minutes felt like 22 hours.

The actors in this movie are uniformly good, even in small supporting roles, but the screenplay, direction and score are stupid and very, very offensive.

This is a romantic comedy, and each of the three main characters is assigned to either romance or comedy until the very end, when everything that came before is thrown out the window so that a completely unbelievable ending can be stuck on. Not that anything that came before was believable -- it wasn't -- but the ending is even more absurd.

Marc is the romance character; Cynthia and Robert are the comedy characters. Marc is NEVER ridiculed. Everything he does is perfect -- his face and body are perfect, his hair is perfect, his workout is perfect, his flirting is perfect, his pickup lines are perfect. And he is ALWAYS taken seriously, as if everything he does is done by a god who bestows favors as he chooses and is sought after, lusted after, followed and worshiped by everybody else in the movie. "What will Marc do?", or, maybe, "Whom will Marc choose?" is the question that drives the stupid plot from beginning to end.

In sharp and extraordinarily offensive contrast, Cynthia and Robert are ALWAYS held up for the audience's ridicule -- whether it's Cynthia's gross overeating and obsessive quest to go straight from college to Tina Brown's right hand, or Robert's goofy clothes and impossible, humiliating crushes on men WAY too hot ever to notice him. There are countless extreme closeups of Cynthia's fat, manic, over-made-up face and anxious, needy Robert in his thick glasses and dorky hat -- accompanied by clownish music that's like the laugh track on an old sit-com.

Compounding the problem is that the actor who plays Robert is a hundred times more attractive and sexier than the actor who plays Marc is. I'd choose Robert any day over Marc -- but the writer and director are determined to ridicule Robert and glorify Marc, so they force it to be that way with heavy-handed wardrobe, direction and music. I didn't buy it for a second. I always wanted Robert; I never wanted Marc.

I was going to give this a few stars just for the earnest and competent actors, but I can't do that. The movie is so offensive that I must give it the lowest rating I can.

Well, I made it through to the end at last, and man, am I glad! It DID get better!

At exactly 1:57:00 on the Blu-ray, when Elio and his father meet in the library, an entirely new movie starts, and it is fabulously, fantastically, spectacularly, amazingly good. Perfect, in fact. Moviemaking cannot get any better than that. If the first part had been even half that good I'd have loved the whole movie and enthusiastically given it at least 8 stars.

Now I understand why Chalamet was nominated for an Oscar (the first two hours give no clue) and marvel that he didn't win. Now I understand why the movie and the director were nominated and why Ivory won. It's pretty amazing that the last 15 minutes could be so much better than the 117 minutes that came before.

I stand by every word of my original review (so I'm leaving it unedited below, and I think I'm going to leave the one-star rating), because it perfectly says what's wrong with the bulk of this movie. That's too bad, because some people won't press through all of that to get to the good part.

So I would advise anybody who has ANY problem with this movie -- whether it's a personal, aesthetic and artistic problem like mine or a moral problem with the subject matter -- to skip the entire first part, all the way to 1:57:00, and watch the remaining 15 minutes to the very end. Do NOT stop when the end credits start to roll, or you will miss some of the finest acting you will ever see.

The last 15 minutes are completely self sufficient; there's no need to know what came before -- in fact, you'd be better off NOT knowing. This is still really crappy as a gay movie, there is still no credible chemistry between Chalamet and Hammer, but that's irrelevant in the last 15 minutes. The dialog in just those final scenes gives you all the information you need and makes the relationship completely credible after the first two hours failed to.

The fact that the first 90% of the movie is bad is no problem after all, because you don't have to watch it. At the first urge to hit STOP or FAST-FORWARD, just FF all the way to 1:57:00 and enjoy 15 minutes of the best movie you've seen in a long, long time.

------------------------------------------ ORIGINAL REVIEW:

Dead at its erotic core, and Elio is obnoxious

Call Me by Your Name reminds me of Brokeback Mountain, because they both seem to me like movies made about gay men but by straight people and for straight audiences. In both cases, though, the characters aren't actually gay men but straight men who experience spastic episodes of gay-like behavior, which is one of my chief problems with both movies.

I love James Ivory, but he should have won Oscars for writing and directing Maurice -- the first unhomophobic mainstream gay movie ever made and 30+ years later still the best gay movie ever made -- instead of for writing Call Me, but it's typical of the Oscars to award the right person in the wrong year for the wrong movie.

Hollywood is full of morons, but occasionally they accidentally get something halfway right, like a roomful of monkeys eventually pecking out Hamlet on a typewriter if you give them a trillion years to do it. Ivory included Ismael Merchant and Ruth Jhabvala in his acceptance speech even though both were dead and had nothing to do with Call Me, so he realized he was getting the award, at least in part, for the wrong movie.

Two things bother me about Call Me, one trivial and one not. The trivial one is entirely James Ivory's fault, because it's something that's in the movie's screenplay but not in the book. It's the way Elio and his friends and relations switch effortlessly and fluently -- often several times within a single conversation -- between English, French, Italian and German (in the book, it's all English with a little Italian, since it's in Italy).

That IMMEDIATELY elevates the characters beyond reach and alienates the audience, because normal 16-year-olds (or 70-year-olds) CANNOT speak four languages so fluently that they can start a sentence in one language and flit at will in and out of the other three languages before they get to the end of the sentence, without even taking a breath. It made me hate Elio before he'd even done anything. What a privileged, obnoxious brat!

The second thing that bothers me about Call Me is exactly what bothers me most about Brokeback Mountain. It's that the sexual attraction between the two men is completely unbelievable.

In both cases (Call Me better than Brokeback) the actors go through the motions PERFECTLY, doing everything they ought to be doing exactly as they ought to be doing it, but it leaves me feeling as cold and dead as a dead fish. Nothing they do resonates with the part of me that resonates with sexual attraction. What they do LOOKS authentic, but it FEELS completely false. Empty, Cold, Mechanical. Expertly choreographed and performed, but lacking even a tiny spark of the relentless, consuming fire that drives real sex.

I would say that it's because the actors, in both movies, are completely straight (which they are), and that it's just impossible for ANY straight actor to get gay sexual attraction exactly right, making it feel real and alive and inescapable. But that obviously is not true, and, again, it's Maurice that proves it.

James Wilby and Rupert Graves both are completely straight, but the fire between them onscreen in Maurice is REAL, so real it's almost scary, but very wonderful. FINALLY I'm seeing on a movie screen what I feel inside and have NEVER seen onscreen before (or since). James Ivory got that from those two straight actors in Maurice, but it's completely lacking in the two more recent movies.

It makes it worse that the two actors in Call Me are extraordinarily beautiful men, while neither Keith Ledger nor Jake Gyllenhaal is. Ugly men making out can't be expected to be very sexy, but men as beautiful as Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet making out OUGHT to be sexy just BECAUSE they're so beautiful; so when it's not, the disappointment is much greater.

I should admit now that I haven't finished watching Call Me yet, although I bought the disc and started watching it almost three months ago, on March 13. I still have more than a half-hour left to watch out of the 2+ hour movie -- so I've averaged watching one minute of it every day for 90 days, although actually in spasmodic chunks of 3-5 minutes each.

The infuriating multilingual conversations and the erotic deadness at its heart make me so angry that I can take only a few minutes of it at a time. So it's possible that it gets a lot better before the end, but I doubt it. Struggling through that movie is for me like climbing Mount Everest in a blizzard; it will be a miracle if I ever actually make it all the way to the end.

I don't understand why there are so many strongly negative reviews of this movie on various sites. This isn't a great movie, and the story is muddy, with no clear explanation of what the guys in masks and capes were up to, or exactly what happened at the end -- but the acting and dialog are pretty good, especially Tom Beedim as Ray. He's sweet, charming and completely believable.

I guess, since this is a British movie, there aren't dozens of friends and family to pump up the rating with lying 10-star reviews. That's too bad. This movie is a lot better than many comparable movies with inflated, completely unreliable ratings.

Stupid, boring and completely unbelievable. Badly written, badly directed and badly cast. No actor should write and direct a movie that shows him (and no one else) showering, repeatedly, full-on naked, every part in closeup. It makes him seem like an exhibitionist who made a movie only so he could do that. It's not sexy or even interesting.

Way way WAY too many minutes-long closeups of faces looking directly into a mirror or the camera, grimacing or trying to look shocked or trying to portray some other unknown emotion. A very badly conceived and executed movie that should never have been made.

I learned something interesting from this movie. I've always wondered why movies in foreign languages would be dubbed instead of subtitled, and now I know (for Italy, anyway). It's because after World War II, when foreign movies flooded into Italy, many Italians couldn't read. It makes perfect sense that those movies would have to be dubbed, and that set the norm for everything since. I'm very grateful to live where dubbing never got established and nearly all foreign-language movies are and always have been subtitled. For me, the sound of the original language is essential, and I hate watching dubbed movies.

It's also interesting to learn how complex, sophisticated and challenging the dubbing process is in Italy. The Italian script not only translates the dialog but tweaks it so that the dubbing matches the on-screen actors' lip movements -- so it's nearly impossible to SEE that the voices are dubbed. And the actors have no chance to rehearse; they get the script and start recording, without even having seen the movie. It's amazing.

Aside from technical insights like those, this movie is only occasionally interesting. Of the three voice actors (doppiatori in Italian) featured about equally in this movie, one (an emotionally raw kid who's been doing it since childhood) is painful to watch, another (a mild-mannered and very appealing thirty-ish actor desperate for work) is fascinating, and the third (a fat bald middle-aged blowhard who thinks he's both an expert and a star) is an obnoxious bore.

I have never before seen or even heard of either of the two lead actors. The male lead is sort of charming, and it would be nice to find out if his range extended into any other emotions as the story developed, or if he stayed locked in the same surly shyness all the way through. But the female lead is so unbelievably obnoxious that I couldn't get past about 25 minutes.

EVERY TIME she came on screen and opened her mouth or gave that stupid dimply smirk I cringed, and I wanted some berserk extra to run up and punch her very hard in the face. Nobody ever did, and I couldn't stand any more of her, so I stopped watching. It's not like I HAD to watch this movie.

It's amazing that such an obnoxious person ever got hired to be in anything, even a direct-to-video flop like this. I need to look up her name so I can be very sure never to see her again. Rachel Nichols. Yuck.

I was really enjoying this movie, loving the people and gently grieving with them over the accelerating decline of their remarkable community ... until about a third of the way in. That's when a short scene incidentally (it was not the main focus of the scene) showed the most appalling animal abuse I have seen in a very, very long time, as if it was a perfectly normal activity integral to the way of life in that village. The fact that the abuse was superficially so unremarkable, so commonplace, with no violence or drama at all -- not even noticeable if the viewer didn't happen to be looking at the relevant corner of the screen and realize exactly what it was he was seeing -- made it all the more chilling and appalling.

That scene INSTANTLY killed ALL of my interest in the people of Monticchiello and ALL of my sympathy for their disappearing world. What hypocrites! I hope they don't survive until next year or even next month. Good riddance.

This series is not only absolutely gorgeous and fascinating to look at (not just the costumes, but ALL of the sets and even the make-up -- or the authentic-looking lack thereof) but extraordinarily entertaining, intelligently produced, and beautifully acted. Neither American nor British television (including the BBC) has EVER produced anything half this good.

I don't care about historical accuracy (and I disagree with reviewers who say you need to research the history in order to enjoy this series), but I care very much about historical believability, and there is not a single frame or word or movement that feels like anything but 15th century Russia.

There is much thoroughly believable drama, but not ANY melodrama, which is what sets it miles apart from American and even British productions. It's like a time machine, letting me watch these people living their lives as they really lived them more than 500 years ago. It seems so real and so true that I'm amazed when I remember occasionally that these are 21st-century actors only pretending to be historical persons.

Before the Fall is bad in every way. Terrible screenplay, terrible direction, terrible acting. Even the potentially beautiful Appalachian Mountains setting (which state it's supposed to be is debatable, but the mountains are not) is ruined by the overwhelming STUPIDITY of everything else. I mean, what lawyer conducts a confidential interview, discussing a third person in a way that would qualify as slander anywhere on earth, in the public hallway of his office, directly in front of the waiting room door, for anybody who may be waiting there to hear?

The whole movie is like that: stupid people saying and doing unvaryingly stupid things in the most unrealistic, unbelievable way possible. And there's an extremely annoying, cloying synthesizer-piano muzak soundtrack, the same dull, soporific notes played over and over, oozing its sappy way through every scene, constantly underlining the unrelenting stupidity of everything we see and hear.

I HATE this movie! The guy who plays Lee is gorgeous -- and I mean breathtaking -- but, just like the mountains, his beauty is buried in the mudslide of stupidity that swallows everything in its path.

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's best work by far, one of the finest and most deeply satisfying novels ever written. It's so good that it has survived many bad adaptations, including this one. But writer-director Byrum Geisler (whoever he is) really shouldn't have told anybody what he was trying to do, because his failure is so monumental that he SHOULD be too embarrassed now to show his face anywhere. There is no HINT of Pride and Prejudice, or any of its marvelous characters, STILL alive 200 years after she created them -- not the tiniest spark of Austen's genius -- anywhere in this stupid movie.

This is like a home movie about the awkward coming-out of a college senior in a Detroit suburb. It has jerky camera work, terrible sound, long periods in which nothing is happening (in a movie that's just barely an hour long), and a total creative crew that consists of the five people who appear in the movie (two only as voices) -- but I liked it. It doesn't pretend to be anything great, but it has a sort of naive sincerity that is really charming.

The acting is better than it should be, as is the writing (the two main actors also wrote it), and Ian Spangler is very VERY cute, even with his weird haircut. It all seemed real, like Ian and Holly were real people, talking the way real people talk, which means practically nothing they say is worth saying, but that's how real people are. Only fake movie people always say things that are interesting.

Although I got restless pretty often, I like this movie's simplicity and lack of pretension, and I want to look at Ian Spangler some more (he has a beautiful face and a quiet, shy, very sexy manner), so I'm going to watch it again.

This series looks fantastic, and a lot of care has been given to its production (including amazingly good English subtitles), but the performances are uniformly over-the-top: constant exaggerated drama; posing and other "attitude"; and stupid, clownish comedy -- everything, in fact, except believable stuff real people might say or do.

It's not a cultural thing, either, some sort of disconnect between Italy and the US. Some of the most compelling, moving, believable, genuinely funny and universally entertaining movies ever made have been made in Italy (everything Nanni Moretti has ever done, for only one example). It's just that the makers of this series evidently were going for a very broad, exaggerated, mawkish and slapstick kind of entertainment that completely turns me off. It's like a bad American sit com and a bad American soap opera all in one very irritating series.

G&T is so beautiful to LOOK at that I keep trying, but it's so agonizing to WATCH that I keep backing out. Too bad. A waste of money, effort, time and (I'm willing to assume) talent.

I bought this movie because of its nearly universal glowing reviews. I tried, but I couldn't get past the protagonist's routine and gratuitous cruelty to perfectly innocent creatures around him, like kicking a cat -- hard -- just because it was there.

Art, age, social isolation, brutal environment -- none of those is justification for such unprovoked cruelty. All I wanted from then on was to see somebody twenty times his size kick HIM as hard as he kicked that cat, for no reason, so he'd find out what it feels like.

I enjoyed this movie more than I expected to but less than other reviewers. My biggest problem is the relationship between the two lead characters -- I never believed in it. It was ACTED, not EXPERIENCED, by the two actors.

Their love scenes were so tightly choreographed to the cloyingly sweet soundtrack that they came off as cold and mechanical. It was like watching ballet dancers, not lovers. That may be either because the straight actors needed a rigid scenario to follow since there was no genuine sexual dynamic between them or because the director didn't know how else to stage those scenes. Either way, it's the director's fault.

They were more believable outside the bedroom. There the actors were somewhat freer to be themselves and allow the characters to interact as persons, not having to try to force themselves to act like lovers. The story is fairly interesting but not quite believable.

All of the actors in this little movie are surprisingly good, but the screenplay, direction and musical score are irritating, to say the least.

The story is stupid from the very first scene (in which Charles the high school guidance counselor nags at a fat kid for masturbating in the restroom) all the way through to the very end. I can't believe that any real human being would do or say anything that appears in this movie, and if they did it should never be filmed. And if the movie really does advocate staying in the closet (ie, lying to the school administrators AND to the kids who trust you) in order to keep your job -- as it seems to -- it REALLY should not have been made.

The direction seems to accentuate everything that's wrong in the screenplay. The scenes that stick most persistently and annoyingly in my memory are the pointless, endless, irritating, Charles-supervised confrontation between the girl and her erstwhile date-slash-jacket-thief (in the boy's home, which they invaded); and the coach's slow, loud, percussive clapping near the end, after Charles tells him something the audience (annoyingly) isn't allowed to hear.

The score is almost worse. A loud, intrusive clicking noise in the diner scene turned out to be music; and a relentless jollity toward the end demands that we take this movie as a comedy, despite the fact that absolutely nothing funny happens in it.

The writing, directing and music are so uniformly and consistently bad that it's easier to imagine that the movie is intended to be annoying than that the writer, director and composer are just incompetent -- but then why did they hire such good actors?

Whatever was going on in the creators' minds when they made this movie, it didn't work.