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Reviews
Irezumi (1966)
Otsuya, a young and unhappy Japonese woman fell in love with Shinsuke who happened to work for a father, a wealthy businessman.
As a character Otsuya is willful and self-centered and her beauty sparks desire in every men who simply are puppets to her. As her geisha her training is not even hinted, being one is just resumed in the movie as a woman whose will and beauty empower her to command her wishes to any man. Her might and her vampire-like behaviour is represented by her tattooed black spider which both fascinates and repulses her lovers who nevertheless got voluntarily caught into her web. The only man she seemed to love is Shinsuke but even him got corrupted by her evil as she finally gnawed and sucked every traces of strenght in him. However some ambivalence resides in her character by the inner desire to find a man who could match her and fully accept her that is both her soft and "spider"parts.
Babymother (1998)
Come on!! It's not that bad
This is so easy to launch a poor 1.5 on that movie. Yes it is very naïve,the plot is thin and not original but it does add an interesting and compelling view on some black communities,and the fate of their teenage mothers and to say the least it is full of energy, the cast is more than correct, and the music is quite good. Less dull and politically correct than a lot of Lifetime and HBO T.V movies, less ridiculous that a lot of Hollywood blockbusters.At least it aims at entertaining and edifying it's fresh, rough, definitely not so bad if you give it a shot. Well I enjoyed it more than Fast and Furious, Pearl Harbor or XXX, you'll say this is not difficult.
The Pledge (2001)
This movie is great!!
I won't bother writing down a review Jlynch-5 did it for me without even knowing it, you read my mind!!! Date: 15 July 2001 Summary: This film seems misunderstood
(May contain thematic spoilers, but no plot points)
Having read the reviews of this exceptional film, I have become a bit disturbed by the shallow and unimaginative expectations of the other IMDB reviewers.
So often we are asked by the American film industry to pony up to $10 to watch the same old crime/police drama plots spun in a slightly different but eventually unoriginal way. Don't we want originality in the films we see, or are we happy to see the same old package in slightly different wrapping? I think the answer is yes: we want new and original films to view.
The problem is that the American viewing public is addicted to action and the kind of simple-minded ideas of "justice" that spew from garbage television like "America's Most Wanted." When we walk into a theater and witness a crime in the first ten minutes, our good ol' American blood-lust view of revenge demands to be quenched by familiar plot points of car chases, gun fights and bad guys behind bars. And when an original picture fails to deliver that formula, we balk at it as being "too slow" or having a "bad ending." All our lip-service to "originality" goes out the window.
This failure of evaluating art is the theme of the reviews I read here. This movie is not a action picture. It is not even a crime drama, although it uses a similar type of story to achieve its goal. This is a character study: a view of a good and decent police detective and his subtle and sorrowful descension into madness over the death of child, the final case of his career. The reviewers who pan this film do it not based on what they saw, but what they did not see but wanted to.
Like any great character study, ala "The Remains of the Day," "Hurlyburly" and "American Beauty," this movie seems to move slowly to the impatient, action-oriented viewer. Also, like any great character study, it depends on the skill of its actors to convey the film's artistic message. Character study films are like great novels: they are art. Unfortunately the great American movie-going public doesn't want real art. They go to movies like they go to a roller-coaster: for a thrill. Only in America is a roller-coaster confused with art!
The reasons this movie is great, interalia, is because it comes close to being a thriller, but it isn't one, and to confuse it with a thriller makes it seem flat. Review it not as the thriller it mirrors, but as the character study it is. In that light it is truly mesmerizing.