Change Your Image
wintermancer
Reviews
South of the Border (2009)
Stone vs Fox News
Here we have a completely lopsided documentary starring Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and of course Oliver Stone as the on-camera host. It was nice to see Oliver sitting and talking to the all the major players of South America and Cuba. But so what? Stone implies that because Fox News is a completely transparent propaganda machine that Hugo is not a dictator but a misunderstood hero of the continuing Bolivarian and communist revolutions. At least he is right about Fox news. He seems to get almost every other fact about Chavez and Morales wrong. To make Chavez shine like a new penny, Stone includes interviews with Christina and Lula. Pure farce.
I was hoping to learn something about Chavez and Venezuela, something that might change my opinion. I wanted to learn about the irrevocable changes to the political system there. But what I got was a pathetic excuse for Stone to schmooze with various heads of states as he toured South America as the other kind of American.
This is a terrible, self-serving documentary that has no place in an intelligent discussion of Chavez. There is no journalism here, no fairness, and nothing to learn. Just a puzzle and perhaps the end of a career for Stone.
I Want Your Money (2010)
United we stand...
I remember a time when we as a people trusted in each other and upheld the notion of a person's character until proved otherwise. We trusted our government perhaps naively because we assumed others were like ourselves. We saw ourselves and others as decent and moral beings.
We don't do that much anymore. Look to this little piece of propaganda to understand why. Watch it to understand the politics of division and manipulation.
To get to the truth, do as the film suggests and follow the money. The characters in this cast have done pretty well for themselves by attacking and dividing, by slander and derision, and by inciting others to attack the foundations of our democracy. We were not always like that. We once had a good country, a wholesome spirit, and we believed in each other.
So watch this film. Ask what the makers of this film want from you. Do they want to build or destroy? Build trust or destroy it? Build a better nation or destroy it? Benefit you or benefit them? An examination of the message and intent of this film does indeed reveal that you cannot trust anybody anymore. Thus they succeed no matter what you believe.
The Thin Red Line (1998)
The Sublime and the Stupid
The so called poetry of this film is out of place, the cut-a-ways to the girlfriend at home during a firefight, the long shots of birds and nature at odd moments, and the often lovely but daft musical score are just a few of the many technical difficulties that plague this beautifully filmed motion picture.
Despite a stellar cast with some good performances, many scenes are marred by the director's desire to make a tragically poetic statement by lingering to the point of viewer exhaustion on solitary characters in crisis. If you don't agree, then ask this question: if you remove Nolte and his character from this movie, does the movie work? Does it succeed at all? My answer is no for without Nolte, the movie fails bitterly despite the excellent cinematography.
There are moments of great film making here and there and the battle scenes generally work well, some brilliantly, some less so (the hilltop melee for example). In the end, war is war and not art or morality, thus the forced marriage fails. What a pity.
The Road (2009)
Something went wrong in adapting the book for the big screen
The book stands at the pinnacle of recent American literature and certainly earned the Pulitzer for 2007 Fiction. The movie attempts to render that soul penetrating book into film and succeeds in several areas while failing overall. The visuals, cinematography, lighting, costume, and Mortensen's acting make for a potentially fine film. Yet, in the end, the adaptation of the story destroys the potential and we are left wondering why they bothered.
The omnipresent shopping cart is an important part of the book, yet in the first half we often see the father and son wandering around without one. The father has pneumonia and is fighting against time to save his son, but he coughs hardly at all until the second half of the movie? The many flashbacks to the mother don't help and neither does Charlize Theron, an otherwise fine actress.
The shear joy of finding the bunker/shelter after nearly dying in the woods is abbreviated to just finding the bunker. Visuals for the the road (literally the road they travel on) are not brought in until the second half of the movie - a shame. Earthquakes in the movie - huh? The list of annoyances is long for me so I'll stop there.
There are some inherent difficulties in adapting the book (such as the son's contrary need to help others), but in my opinion, this film could have been much better if they had attempted a straight forward linear adaptation. Not all was lost in the adaptation but the overall arch of the storyline was compromised.
Is it a good film for those who have not read the book? I do not know but I suspect not. Read the book, then ask yourself if the film even approached the shear joy and despair of the book. Not for me, not for me.
Brüno (2009)
Pathetic over promotion and under delivery
This movie was just awful. You could see the disgust on those who stayed for the whole movie. Don't be fooled by the hyped marketing and over promotion, this movie is worse than Borat by several orders of magnitude.
More, when you see a movie that's over hyped in the news and TV media, you can guess that the makers of this movie have no faith in it.
Jokes and gags where as lame as a one legged dog. Throughout the whole movie, there was audible laughter about three or four times and I even saw some get up and walk out after the half-way mark.
Personally, I think this IMDb rating is deliberately overinflated by those promoting the movie. Bottom line, save you money.