smithco

Appaloosa is a really great western.  The plot was a bit predictable, the direction was not particularly creative, and the music was a bit pedantic, but the actors filled the scenes with a gripping presence.  Much like other westerns such as Unforgiven (1992) and The Magnificent Seven (1960), the greatness comes from the actors.  The whole film is filled with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen being as big as the set would hold, with the quiet, cool manner of all the great western heroic actors.  And Jeremy Irons, despite his inability to do an American accent, was a well-played foil to the heroes.

Be Cool is not a great movie by any stretch, but it is far more entertaining than the reviews suggested.  To be clear, my expectations were low; I only watched it because it came up as a 99¢ rental on iTunes.  In the end, I was pleasantly surprised.

My first surprise is that John Travolta turned in a decent performance.  Normally, I find his acting horrid.  I usually have the impression that his screen time is about advertising that he's John Travolta and not about his character.  Yet, this time around, I was able to believe that he was Chili Palmer and not the usual giant Travoltan ego.

I did find the doconstructuve humour quite funny.  Though it's not particularly original, it is well executed.  However, it does require a good attention span.  I think one has to realize that the entire film is the punchline for the premise set in the first scene to find the humour.

In the end, not a great film; but I thought it was 99¢ and two-hours well spent.

I finally saw Seven Samurai.  It is undoubtably a great film.  Though by the intermission came around, I was thinking that it is not as good as The Magnificent Seven (1960)  A lot of people may want to fit my neck for a rope for stating that, but that's what I was thinking.

For me, comparing the two is an excercise in comparing great works.  I hope that my opinion here is not constued as a dislike for Kuosawa's masterpiece.  It seemed to me that The Magnificent Seven surpassed Seven Samurai in four areas.

First is the pacing.  I doubt anyone would notice if forty minutes were cut from Seven Samurai.  There's a lot of scenes of people staring at each other, scenes that repeated exposition of the story, and a lot of extraneous battle preperation scenes.  Generally, the pacing of The Magnificent Seven is a lot tighter: the same story is told just as effectively in much less time.

Second is the dialogue.  The snappy banter of the characters in The Magnificent Seven is very entertaining.  I just didn't get that from Seven Samurai.  Naturally, there is a loss in the translation.  The grammatical and typographical errors in the subtitiles didn't help much either.  I won't fault the original script for this, but the movie deserves a better translation before it can be properly enjoyed.

Third is the villain, the leader of the bandits.  In Seven Samurai we hardly see the bandit leader, he just shows up at the start and at the end and is supposed to be scary.  He was just too thin a character to engage me.  In contrast, throughout The Magnificent Seven, Eli Wallach turned out some great scenes as the villanous Calvera.  The script of The Magnificent Seven takes the time to get to know Calvera in a meaningful way.

That leads us to the fourth point.  The actors in The Magnificent Seven are second to none.  The acting in Seven Samurai is very good, but The Magnificent Seven had some of the best actors to ever be on film.

Well there it is.  I say The Magnificent Seven is a better film than Seven Samurai.  And yes, I do expect to have my opinion confronted by someone.  But, at least I have my reasons relatively well laid out for everyone to consider.

D.O.A. is an interesting film.  On one side, Maté prioneered some brillant shots and the premise is absolutly genious.  But, at the same time, it is a B-movie, and there are plot holes (since when did he carry a gun?) and the acting is overly melodaramatic.

I found A Scanner Darkly to be a bit of a disappointment.  It should have been a really great movie, but at the end, it wasn't anywhere near what it should have been.  Before I continue, I should note that I saw this one on an airplane -- not the best viewing conditions.  So take this critique with a grain of salt for that reason.

I found that the story and the acting was very good.  This is one of those rare instances where the presence of Keanu Reeves does not ruin the film.  Heck, I was surprised to see that he actually turned in a decent performance, almost as good as the one from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.  And the other actors were quite good too, all far better than usual.  Though, it does speak to the quality of the casts' talents that they play stoners better than other roles.

However, it wasn't long into the movie that I started to get distracted by two things.  Firstly, it seemed that the sound engineering was botched.  The actors were often speaking in low, conversational and meditative tones.  The voices came out all mumbled and muddy.  This could just be the result of the poor audio system on the plane, but the other movies I watched did not suffer the same problem.

Secondly, I found the faked rotoscoping to be extremely poorly done.  That distracted me a lot from enjoying the film.  One obvious problem was that not nearly enough polygons were used.  This introduced a lot of edge and texturing artifacts into the film and consequently made it look ugly.  Then, there was the artistic choice of just using flattened colours sampled from the filmed scene as the textures.  Due to that choice, there was no artistic creativity introduced into the movie through the rotoscoping.  It was simply the filmed scene flattened out.  Compared to other rotoscoped animations, it was boring.  Considering how much hype was made about the style, I was severely disappointed on that front.  If you want to see some really cool work done with rotoscoping, check out the animated series Delta State.  Rotoscoping can be used well, but A Scanner Darkly shows that it can be used badly too.

In the end, had a decent job been done of the audio and graphics, this would have been a great movie.  As is, it is barely worth watching once.

About 10 minutes in to watching Touch of Evil, a thought occurred to me: Charlton Heston doesn't look particularly Mexican.  Most of the "Mexicans" are white actors with a little darkening make up and a silly sliver of a dark moustache.  Quite frankly, the moustaches look ridiculous.

Touch of Evil is a great movie, but the fake Mexican moustaches are distracting.

The Sand Pebbles is one of those unconventional war movies that deserves far more recognition than it gets.  Both for the performances and the matter that it treats.  The eight Academy award nominations are well deserved, that it did not win any of them is very much undeserved.

Once again, Steve McQueen turned out a brilliant acting job.  A cool, quiet unassuming navy engineer with more backbone than any other sailor on the ship.  If there's three things Steve played well in his career, its characters that are cool and quiet, characters with a lot of backbone, and making all those cool, quiet, steely characters unique.  And it's not just Steve that pulled off a great performance in this one.  In this film we get the shining performances from the supporting cast.  In particular, we get to see a young Candice Bergen shine as the love interest.  It's a good reminder that she was a talented actress prior to her career of poking fun at Dan Quayle.

And the historical matter is quite interesting too.  The Sand Pebbles is set around an American gunship caught in the middle of the Chinese Revolution.  An odd sort of perspective as it was a conflict where the Americans were caught in the middle of something they had no interest in.  It's nice to see a war film that isn't on one of the World Wars, Vietnam, or the Gulf.  McKenna and Anderson deserve a bit of recognition for doing a bit of research and writing something other than one of the old Hollywood formulae.

12 Angry Men is one of the great exemplars of cinema.  There are no car chases, no kung fu, no special effects and no love interest.  The film is set nearly entirely in one jury room and all the excitement comes from the great performances and brillant deliveries of the actors.  The film relies entirely on the talent of the actors, and not one of the twelve misplayed their parts.  In this film, we also get to enjoy two of the great classic film actors play off each other; Henry Fonda and Ed Bagley create a lot of friction on screen and that generates a great drama.

The great thing about Repo Man is the details in the film.  The plot is dumb, the characters are flat and predictable and there is are morally redeeming qualities whatsoever.  But, the little things in this film make it great.  There are a whole bunch of little absurdities woven into the props and background that are often hidden under the absurdity of the characters and plot, and it is these little absurdities that make the film worth watching.