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Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
Oh my God! It is indeed the Dark Side!
*Minor Spoilers* (But I'll try to avoid revealing anything major).
I finally went and did it. Saw Attack of the Clones on the opening night in Strasbourg. I was a bit scared before going in - after all, Phantom Menace was a really flawed movie and I feared for the future of Star Wars.
Ten minutes into the movie, I was rejoicing. The opening Coruscant scenes and the "where's the assassin?" plotline was quite good and seemed more in tune with the original trilogy. Lucas was definitely back on track.
Not too long after this, the fate of Star Wars was sealed. It became really bad after the promising introduction. Boring love scenes, horrible dialogue and a mishmashed plotline that tried to cram nineteen movies into one and failed miserably.
Lucas has forgotten one simple rule: The audience have to sympathize with and care for what happens to the lead characters. He fails at this. There's just too many impersonal fight scenes, too much CGI and way too many locations, names and inane plot twists for the audience to do anything but look at their watches.
What was great about the original movies was the fact, that you were IN the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon, you understood the villains, there were few but well-planned locations that you'd remember and the plot was mythical in scope.
In attack of the clones you have two thousand locations all randomly thrown together. You have a love story (that is very predictable), a revenge story, a clone story, an evil villain (who pops out of nowhere) story and it is all too much and too impersonal for the audience to ever get sucked into the action. Add the too-perfect CGI feel to everything, and the movie comes away looking like a boring computergame. The fight scenes bothered me the most. There are just too many big CGI battles without a clear "thread" (yes, even combat needs a plot) and just too many aliens and thingies flailing about. The Amidala action scenes are just hillariously stupid (the desert scene, where she falls from the airspeeder anyone?)
I weep for the Galaxy. George: Do the story, let real writers do the script and for God's sake: let a real director take charge!
2/10 - and that only becaus Jar Jar only made a cameo appearance.
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
Oh my God! It is indeed the Dark Side!
*Minor Spoilers* (But I'll try to avoid revealing anything major).
I finally went and did it. Saw Attack of the Clones on the opening night in Strasbourg. I was a bit scared before going in - after all, Phantom Menace was a really flawed movie and I feared for the future of Star Wars.
Ten minutes into the movie, I was rejoicing. The opening Coruscant scenes and the "where's the assassin?" plotline was quite good and seemed more in tune with the original trilogy. Lucas was definitely back on track.
Not too long after this, the fate of Star Wars was sealed. It became really bad after the promising introduction. Boring love scenes, horrible dialogue and a mishmashed plotline that tried to cram nineteen movies into one and failed miserably.
Lucas has forgotten one simple rule: The audience have to sympathize with and care for what happens to the lead characters. He fails at this. There's just too many impersonal fight scenes, too much CGI and way too many locations, names and inane plot twists for the audience to do anything but look at their watches.
What was great about the original movies was the fact, that you were IN the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon, you understood the villains, there were few but well-planned locations that you'd remember and the plot was mythical in scope.
In attack of the clones you have two thousand locations all randomly thrown together. You have a love story (that is very predictable), a revenge story, a clone story, an evil villain (who pops out of nowhere) story and it is all too much and too impersonal for the audience to ever get sucked into the action. Add the too-perfect CGI feel to everything, and the movie comes away looking like a boring computergame. The fight scenes bothered me the most. There are just too many big CGI battles without a clear "thread" (yes, even combat needs a plot) and just too many aliens and thingies flailing about. The Amidala action scenes are just hillariously stupid (the desert scene, where she falls from the airspeeder anyone?)
I weep for the Galaxy. George: Do the story, let real writers do the script and for God's sake: let a real director take charge!
2/10 - and that only becaus Jar Jar only made a cameo appearance.
Titan A.E. (2000)
Who's Your Daddy? Gune's Your Daddy! *no spoilers*
I missed this flick in the theatres - BIG mistake. I finally rented it with a couple of friends and we were literally blown away by it. It has everything a Science Fantasy adventure needs: humour, bad guys, awesome action sequences and stunning pictures - as well as a killer sound track.
Why this movie didn't kill off Disney as the "lead" animators on the market, I will never know. The guys behind this movie did everything bigger, better, faster and far more innovative than any of the other animation companies have ever done before. I guess true genius really isn't appreciated in their lifetime. *sigh*
Anyway, critics seem to focus on "poor plot" as their sole point of criticism. And they're WRONG! The plot is there to create a driving force behind the movie and its characters - and this plot is both simple enough for kids to understand, yet powerful enough in theme for the audience to get sucked in. All you have to do is forget about French film and "high culture". This is a classic tale of "Hero triumphing against greater evil and saving universe in the process", great and simple - if it isn't done in a trite manner, which this movie isn't. George Lucas should have watched this film prior to making Star Wars Episode One, he might have learned something about directing, humour and how to make a very simple plot both entertaining and breathtaking on the screen.
The characters are wonderful, the dialogue okay and quite catching at times, Drew Barrymore's character has the sexiest voice you've ever heard and the original soundtrack is just devastating (and kept in the background!).
10/10. It has just become my favourite animation film - and scores better with me than Star Wars One! (maybe Lucas will get up to speed in the sequel -after all, his original trilogy is unsurpassed!)
Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)
I laughed till I nearly broke my humour...
Can I get a transplant from anywhere? Damn, this movie is the funniest I've ever seen. It is sweet, picturesque and captivating. The story is simple, yet wonderfully detailed and complex in a sort of "life-like fantasy" sort of way. Ok, I'll dispose of the wordgames and just say: Fabulous Film! Best comedy/romance ever! (And who cares if it is French? this is the movie that redeems all those "Two guys sitting in a bar, smoking Gauloises and uttering cryptic zeitgeist sentences in monochrome colours!")
I saw the film in "the notoriously intellectuel" movie theatre in Copenhagen. Normally, this is the place where movies by Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark), Trois Colours by Kiezlowski (?) and anything in Polish, black and white is shown. I didn't really know what to expect, but was kinda nervous from entering the Halls of Intellectual Opinion. Ten seconds into the movie, the theatre burst with laughter. Two hours later, the theatre was still laughing, eventhough the film was over. Everyone was just smitten, happy and had that little smile constantly playing about their lips. There was literally a warm feeling in the theatre. Everyone had just shared a beautiful, heart-filled experience - and laughed their asses off in the process. I'm pretty sure that less than ten percent understood French (I didn't), but even subtitled this movie was hilarious.
11/10 for humour, 9/10 for story and 10/10 for directing, cast and overall script, photography and that elusive "something more" feeling.
Vercingétorix (2001)
What the f*** just happened?
Ahem, maybe I shouldn't be commenting on this film at all -especially since I turned it off after just watching half of it. But I have to warn people! This movie is SO BAD, that you'llprobably become sterile from wathcing it. It could replace capital punishment. This movie could end crime, if criminals knew they had to see it one or more times!
Lambert made one good movie (Highlander - the original, not the appalling sequels) and maybe one or two passable ones. But with this movie, his career definitely ended! I will never watch another Lambert movie ever again. He is relegated to the same box, where Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren reside.
I saw the teasers and thought "hey, kinda Braveheart-ish in a Gladiator kind of way" and hoped that Lambert was returning to original and good movies (hey, it had Von Sydow in the cast for christ's sake). But I was sadly disappointed. ALready in the opening scene I got an eerie feeling. Maybe it was the dialogue, maybe it was everything! This movie is just a) stupid, b)bad and c)should be illegal.
I would like to give it a negative mark (minus infinity or failing that: -10). I cannot even give it a 0. So 1/10 is the final result.
I want my life back. That's forty minutes WASTED! And nightmares to boot.
Driven (2001)
Any Given Sunday - with cars! *Spoilers (but only some)*
After avoiding this film for ages, I finally got around to see it yesterday -and instantly wondered why the hell I didn't get my ass to the theatre to see it on the big screen. This movie has a completely engrossing way of presenting itself, that even I (no fan of motor"sport") was sucked in and cheered for my favourite drivers. It does what Any Given Sunday did to football films - it shows the people in and around the sports arena. How their lives off the track/pitch affect their performance on it. How there really is no "good" or "evil", but only people wanting the same thing: to win and excel at their sport.
I know WHY I avoided it. I blame Days of Thunder and other crap car movies. They create small fanasy worlds, where one driver is totally evil, the hero is so much better than everybody else and where the girl will only love him if he wins.
This is a very unfair attitude towards this movie. It is refreshingly unlike Days of Thunder. It shows ordinary people, driven to win, but not necessarily at all costs. We have the rookie, who is completely dominated by his brother/manager and falling apart from the pressure of being famous. We have the German Champion, who dumps his girlfriend the better to focus on his driving - only to discover, that driving ISN'T everything. We have the Support Driver, who naturally isn't ateam player but craves personal fame and the former Star turned Support Driver, who has been changed by a past accident and now tries to see the bigger picture. Combined with the extremely well shot action sequences, that leave you on the edge of your seat (and even got me caring for motor sport for 2 hours), this is quite a solid movie. And it is well worth spending two hours with. Its fun and the races are fantastic.
7/10 (maybe 8, I really was entertained).
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
Disappointment through and through -SOME SPOILERS!
*Spoiler*(But not much) As much as I have always admired the imagination of George Lucas, I am seriously beginning to doubt his talent as a writer and director. Being a huge fan of the original trilogy, I was seriously disappointed by Episode One. The characters are one-dimensional, the plot is just stupid and there are a lot of worrying stupidities and idiosyncrazies in this movie.
The Force is played down to some basic bio-chemistry level. I mean, what the f*** are midi-chlorians? Anakin is supposedly another "immaculate conception" - I'm Jesus, anyone? And he BUILT C-3PO? How stupid is that? If 3PO originated on Tatooine, Lucas better explain why he appears to be thoroughly perplexed by this planet in Star Wars IV. Darth Maul is ultra-cool, but since he's wiped out in the end, we won't have more than a small hint at how evil he is. He is alas merely an extra in most of the movie, only shining through in the last fight-sequence (by far the coolest lightsabre duel of the entire series). The space scenes with the batte-droid fighters are just to fast and furious for one to really get sucked in. You don't really get to see their ships, as they move to fast for the naked eye. The "Good Guys" seem like merely add-ons to the scene, never really shown to be fighting - and Anakin saves the day by being lucky, out-of-his-depth and of course far greater than any of the experienced pilots. It seems like a last-minute idea, as Lucas remembered the original Obi-Wan describing Anakin as "already a great pilot when I met him" in the original Star Wars movie. Stupid, too easy and far too CGI based to be even moderately enchanting.
Don't even get me started on Jar-Jar Binks and the Gungans. If ever there was a species apt for termination, it must be this one. In the interest of justice, why don't the nascent Empire do us all a favour and make sure that these blithering idiots are wiped out before the completion of the current thrilogy? It would sort of make up for the destruction of Alderaan in my book. Hearing that Jar-Jar will return in the sequel (along with N'Sync) is making me literally fear for the future of Star Wars (but I'll probably end up seeing it anyway - if only out of love for the original series and the hope that this one will better itself real soon!).
3 out of Ten. Not a total waste of time, but definitely NOT a Star Wars classic! I don't want my money back, but I won't be singing its praise anytime soon (I'll just stick with Episode 5 as my current favourite - it's is nicely horrifying and shows the full might of the terrible Empire, effectively justifying the Rebellion of Episode 4 and the amazing Victory of Episode 6. The glue of the series.)
Phew, I'm done ranting.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Peter Jackson: Lord of the Screen.
*SPOILER ALERT*(but not too much).
Well, I finally got to see the most eagerly awaited movie of the year "The Fellowship of the Ring". Admittedly, I felt more than a little apprenhensive about the whole thing. Having read LotR about 4 times since I was a kid, I couldn't help being a little nervous about "how disappointed I was about to become". In my mind, noone could fully live up to the standards of my mind with regards to THE BOOK (no, not the Bible).
As the film began and Galadriels voice filled the theatre, my anxiety came to a full stop. Suddenly, I was there. In middle-earth, bleeding and fighting alongside the very best that world had to offer. I felt full of innocent cozyness in the Shire. I dreaded the Ringwraiths and hated their Lord with all my heart. I fought my way through Moria, whishing that I was as cool as Legolas the Wonder-Elf. Finally, I felt proud to be of the race of Men, with Boromir and Aragorn as my chieftains.
In short: Peter Jackson blew my brains out (not literally, but in a metaphorical sense). How he did it is beyond me. I really didn't see this Director coming. He was quietly tucked away in the category "B-type movies, Geeky films" with Bad Taste and Braindead as cross-references. Now, I have to rearrange my entire "Favourite Movie Persons" gallery. My favourite movie has to go, favourite director as well, Elijah Wood and Liv Tyler have to be removed from my "Hate Them" list and advance quite a bit in my small world of film.
This is easily the best 3 hours I ever spent in a movie theatre. My only regret is, that I couldn't stay for another 6 hours and finish the Thrilogy.
11 out of ten. Peter Jackson (and the rest of folks behind LotR): Thank you very much. TOlkien would have wept for joy.
Pearl Harbor (2001)
Most Awful Waste of Time Ever! *SPOILER ALERT*
*SPOILER ALERT* Well, Michael Bay stepped in it again. After producing the stunningly boring HEAT, he moved on to slaughtering every single tragic/heroic feeling ever associated with Pearl Harbor. How anyone in their right mind can watch this film and feel it to be a romantic action movie is beyond me. It is about three hours too long, the romance is poorly written and quite trite to watch and the action sequences want to make you yawn and go home doing income tax returns instead.
From seeing the trailers I expected a movie about the events of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. A movie about the tragic loss, that was alas necessary to get the US off their collective ass and do their part in World War II (where Europe had already bled for two years). A movie about the event that awakened the slumbering Titan and in actualíty was a major turning point for WW2.
What did I get? A run-of-the-mill love triangle that didn't feel the least bit innovative or gave me any feeling of sympathy for the three "soap opera" leading characters. I just couldn't care less about their small problems, when young men and women were about to get their lives cut short in a tragic event or when the rest of Europe experienced far worse. This movie should not have been a Titanic rip-off. Love has its place, as always, but not soap opera one liners and boring repetitions of "I can never look at a sunset without thinking of you". Ewwww!
There was about 30 minutes of Pearl Harbour. Hallo! What was the rest of the movie supposed to be about? Apparently not about Pearl Harbor. This movie was merely set in some Americanized version of Hawaii, where apparently someone got killed in the short scene you missed because you took a sip from your soda.
I expected far more from Randall Wallace (of Braveheart fame) and something of Michael Bay (Armageddon was at least just that, a film about an Armageddon). What I got was nothing to do with WW2 or Pearl Harbor. It didn't honor the memory of the fallen, the heroes of WW2 or at least attmpt some modicum of historic relevance.
I sincerely hope noone watches this movie. Your money is better spent just throwing them out the window - at least they may be found by someone in need and nt just vanish into some producer's fat pockets.
1 out of ten (and ONLY because you cannot give a negative score).