hrv806 Reviews

Klimt (2006)

Don't go

[1/10 · 19 September 2007]

Alas there is no minus rating. This has to be the most boring, pretentious load of old cobblers I have ever subjected myself to. I haven't walked out of a film since 1987 so you will understand my expectations are not extreme - I even sat through the remake of The Wicker Man. Forty seven minutes was all I could do with this one. My friend fell asleep in the first twenty minutes - a far more discerning critic than I.

Most of the reviews on this site have more than adequately nailed this monster - I can't add anything - except my weight to the advice DON'T GO.

The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005)

This is a wonderful film

[10/10 · 2 September 2006]

I loved this film. The story was slight and simply told but not, as so many people seem to suggest, cutesy, sentimental or manipulative. A little Mongolian girl makes friends with a puppy she finds in a cave; Her father wants her to leave dog where she found it - little girl struggles to keep dog. Dog turns out to be mans best friend after all. Everybody's happy. And Why not?

This film is so beautiful - the rolling steppe, the vast and broody skies, storms, lost children, marauding wolves - lots of excitement - car chases and people screwing and exploding bombs with bits of bodies flying about are not the only excitement available to us thank God.

It is exciting to see a mode of life so totally different to our own and portrayed so honestly and without any moral squint at all. I was enthralled from start to finish. The scene where they take down the yurt and pack up their belongings to move to new grazing - wonderful music by the way - was perfect. And although the film suggested (never preached) that this way of life might not endure for too long I, for one, felt that in spite of the hardships and unrelenting battle with nature involved in their lives, going to work in McDonalds could never be seen as a tempting alternative.

Go and see it.

The Wicker Man (2006)

One of the worst films I've ever seen

[1/10 · 1 September 2006]

This has got to be one of the worst fillums I've ever seen and I've seen a few. It is slow, boring, amateurish - not even consistent within its own simplistic reading of the plot. The actors do not act. I can't blame them - they have been given a script of such utter banality all they can do is trudge through it with a pain behind their eyes which has nothing to do with the evil goings on in SummersIsle.

There is not one moment in this film that rings true - not an honest line nor a single instant where one is moved. The Nicholas Cage character is so badly drawn that one feels not a smidgeon of compassion for him through all his tribulations. I have no doubt that I was seeing a suffering man up there but it was Nicholas Cage fully aware of the fact that he was in the worst movie of his entire career.