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james_jones
Reviews
The Lost City (2005)
This is your brain on drugs
What are you ex-patriots smoking? Andy Garcia is a b-movie actor, with minimal talent and all of this shows in his embarrassing opus from a narrow minded, spoiled rich kid from Miami. Hold this film up to Walter Salles' Motorcycle Diaries and lets see which film wilts in the light of day. Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman look awkwardly out of place. And everyone's speaking English?! WTF! Many things have been said about Ernesto Guevara, but Garcia carelessly passes him off as a bloodthirsty tyrant. This was not the depiction I felt after seeing the better film released a year before that portrays a thoughtful medical student who was determined to blur the lines drawing up North, South and Central America. Like I said, This is your Brain (Motorcycle Diaries)and This is your brain on Drugs (Lost City).
Give 'em Hell, Harry! (1975)
audio taped this back on 7/4/82
As a twenty two year old enjoying a blissful summer in 1982, I came home from a day at Zuma Beach and this is what channel 5 was showing. Back then, my hobby was to audio tape(VCRs will rare then)stuff on TV. I recorded about the last twenty minutes of it. His story about McCarthy and his reading of the Tennyson poem were parts I've committed to memory. since my mom had a stroke, I recently began driving her car and it has a cassette player in it. I looked in my dusty old tape box and there it was. I have been playing it over and over again, like I did 26 years ago. Whitemore is priceless as Truman.
A side note: After the Truman show ends on my tape, the next thing you hear is Dan Akroyd as Richard Nixon on a SNL sketch where he turns off the TV in disgust at how Rip Torn is portraying him in a TV movie: Akroyd blurts out on my tape: "Well that was a piece of crap"
Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000)
The Spirit of Seinfeld lives
Its been almost four years since the greatest sitcom of all time has passed on, but its spirit is more than alive and well with Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. After another successful run of ten episodes in 2001, Larry David has found a fresh outlet to tease us with his comedic genius.
With an almost unscripted, improvised format, Larry David is a pioneer who's delicate twists and turns never fail to catch us off guard and force us off the couch laughing even after repeated viewings.
I always thought if Shakespeare ever wrote a sitcom, it would be Seinfeld. Its safe to say as long as Larry David's around, we don't need to cling to our Seinfeld ruruns.
Face/Off (1997)
ridiculous
Whenever you see a typical movie made 20-25 years ago, you wonder how most films today have sunk into noisy, stupidly designed action death moans such as Face/Off. Near the beginning of the film, a jet is taking off a noisy runway with people yelling and shooting at each other with a boisterous music score to boot. If you add in a incoherent plot, far-fetched scenes that baffle medical description, what you have is a perfect example of the so-called action film of the 90's.
I'm not just criticizing this film, but the whole action/thriller genre which has forgotten how to use silence as a mood enhancer, forgotten how to develop believable characters who are well rounded(around the hips too), forgotten how to use loud sound effects effectively. Its like a bunch of bombs going off all at once-giving no impact to their devastation since we've grown so insensitive to the constant harrassment to our ears. I can save eight or nine bucs by just going to the nearest noisy arcade around the corner to get the same result.
This is the rule of thumb for most films in this genre and wouldn't want to discredit some films that have not forgotten how to do it right.