Change Your Image
linescraig
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Favourite (2018)
Not for americans
Excellent film in the Peter Greenaway style (though not quite as subtle). The seemingly simple story is intriguing, very well written and acted with feeling, pathos and bathos. The film as a whole benefits from superb costume design, natural lighting, and great use of super wide lenses, an excellent musical score and cool sound design. It's modern yet authentically period, funny and quirky but tragic and serious. This quiet masterpiece is not everyone's cup of tea of course, americans will have bother comprehending history that happened before the 'founding' and it is unashamedly British - none more so than the thankfully correct spelling of the title.
Papillon (2017)
More like a Moth
As many other reviewers have commented, the original version (1973 - when some classic films were made) is almost flawless because it has the atmosphere, peril and drama of Charriere's real-life experiences. This unnecessary remake suffers from the same issues that spoil many 'present day' films; too many Producers who know zero about script writing. Script Writers who know zero about drama. Directors who put the 'photography' above the content, when in reality 99 percent of viewers don't give a flying fox about lighting and grading, and Actors whose egos far outweigh their talent.
Papillon, the book, is a true masterpiece for so many reasons and it's almost a natural screenplay - what the Producers, Writers and Director have done here is managed to sum up the book like a Twitter Post rather than a script, missing out on the absolutely wonderful, scary, heartfelt and funny scenarios that Charriere went through for real. The film was also shot in Malta, presumably for the South American scenes, and probably in Winter because there are many scenes where it's clearly cold enough to see the breath of the actors. I mean, if you are going to spend a lot of money on a film, at least go somewhere more authentic and save your money elsewhere.
So, forget about this attempt, it's insulting to the memory of Charriere. First, read the book, then check out the '73 version with McQueen and Hoffman.
This poor attempt is not so much a butterfly, more like a moth.
The Equalizer 2 (2018)
Lost the Plot
Everyone likes Denzel and I'm sure he's just as nice in real life as all of the characters he plays. No exception here. It's a good film - there's a lot of characters, maybe too many to focus on, and that's the real issue - the central plot is lost; it's set up vaguely at the start and then disappears altogether becoming simply a tale of revenge in the 3rd act. Overall, this film needed a more ruthless script editor and it needed to concentrate on the essence of the concept of 'The Equalizer' - helping those who no-one else could or would help. Just too many storylines without real resolution. The other problem is that it's too damn dark - not the story - the lighting and grading. I wonder if it's because editors edit on computer monitors and don't check their edits projected onto a screen. I was squinting trying to see details in the film. The 'lighting' is nice, and the mainly CGI'd and special effected 3rd act is very well done, but the overall grade is dim. Additionally, and this is not confined to this film, the 7.1 soundtrack is excellent BUT for goodness sake mixing engineers, please turn up the volume of the central dialogue track - the SFX overwhelm it.
Hangman (2017)
Hang on a moment ...
I wasn't going to leave a review of this waste of time, money and fake blood because all of the other 33 reviews gave it one star as well, so, hang on a moment, how come it has a rating of 5.0?! Something fishy is hanging in the air here. This film is a complete and utter barrel of bollox from start to finish. It's preposterous in every way shape and form, most importantly because the script is clearly written by a seven year old who has no idea what a story is, much less motivation of characters. It's insulting, superficial, mindless twaddle, and I agree with other reviewers, Mr Pacino clearly did this for the money. He's considered to be a great actor (though not in my opinion) and he should know what a good script looks like before he accepts a role, so, obviously he just took this on to pay into his pension fund. What happened to the integrity of film-making? So called 'producers' with lots of money to invest to try to make a profit and get a credit on imdb probably.
Alone in Berlin (2016)
Not Alone in Berlin
There's no doubt that Rudolf Ditzen - or rather, Hans Fallada's book Every Man Dies Alone, or Alone in Berlin, is a masterpiece. This film 'adaptation' is far from it and is actually insulting the book and the true story and memory of Otto and Elise Hampel. A period drama set in Berlin during the heyday of Hitler's Nazi Party is an exceptionally ambitious, difficult and costly film to recreate, and the film maker and his team seem to me to have gone about this project in totally the wrong way - it's a confused jumble of priorities which negated the essence of the story and therefore the script completely lost sight of the intricacies and emotions of the real characters and the time in which they lived. The only real way to do justice to the novel is to serialise it as a television series; to explore the paranoia and the fear and the difficulties of living under the fascist regime, to show the poverty and hardship, the insidious mistrust of person for person, the degradation of society and the desperation of the inhabitants of Germany at that time. The film maker completely misses all of this, instead creating an atmosphere largely based on washed out colour and nothing being said. The costumes are far too neat and clean, everything is shiny and lovely and carefully placed, the casting is appalling - Emma Thompson, bless her, does pull in a good performance, but Brendan Gleeson plays himself as usual, and the detectives are just young boys completely out of their depth. And Depth is the biggest argument I have against this mockery of a great story ... there isn't any. It's superficial to say the least - only 10 percent of the characters from the original novel appear and the film maker pays little attention to those ten. It looks like it was filmed 'on the hoof' with very little thought for drama and direction, largely leaving it up to the mediocre actors to supply the viewer with the pathos needed. I wonder if when filming it more time was given over to style (which is largely inaccurate) than actual substance. This is not Alone in Berlin, it's simply a vacuous film that borrows a small idea from a truly dramatic, sad, and powerful real life story. Extremely disappointing and immature in every way.
Train Station (2015)
An Amazing Achievement
Bringing together so many film makers from around the world and creating a feature film which is highly entertaining, thought - provoking, clever, imaginative and unique. It deserves to be watched and watched again. Truly a milestone in cinema history. The basic premise of one character changing bodies, languages, countries, age and sex yet being in the same story and selection of stories is a very clever device. Spanish director Luis Buñuel of course did this in Obscure Object of Desire, but only with 2 actors - Train Station takes this a whole lot further and it takes a few minutes to grasp what is happening, but once involved in the film the viewer is transported into this world and actually looks forward to the next change. This film is a rich tapestry of genre and story, like I said, an amazing achievement.
Subterranea (2015)
Deep in so many ways
Deeply flawed. A deeply stupid and shallow story. Deeply insulting to the viewer. Deeply sorry for the kick-starters that invested. This film is slower than a snail stricken with rheumatoid arthritis trying to pull a cannonball up a steep hill covered in broken crystal. The preposterously unbelievable and naive story is enhanced by the appallingly naive make up, clichéd costume and awful acting - especially by John Turturro who has completely misread his character, but then the acting is the domain of the Director isn't it? I doubt that the director was actually paying attention to the performances and was instead spending most of his time looking at the pretty pictures - the videography was OK. I say videography because it was shot on Red video cameras (whatever happened to them?) The lead role, played by someone called Bug, was okay, but oh my goodness, everyone else was either miscast or just plain bad. If you really want to see this video at the cinema, take a sleeping bag and a good book.