deschreiber Reviews

Quo Vadis (1951)

pretty awful, really

[4/10 · 28 August 2023]

Yes, the scenes of spectacle are impressive. They almost make the movie bearable. Robert Taylor can't act, of course, but his looks and physical presence make a good soldier who doesn't understand what all those Christians are going on about. Deborah Kerr is pretty in her usual Ice Queen way, and she does her best in the romantic scenes with some really awful dialogue. The costumes are terrific.

But the religiosity of the story keeps spoiling one's enjoyment. Devout Christians may be able to submit to the swelling music, shining light from Heaven, dopey-looking faces awe-struck to be in the presence of the apostle Peter, and so on over and over, but for the rest of us, it gets very annoying. Too many scenes seem childish, on the level of Sunday School stories. The two romances are drivel, too, without any effort to give them a sense of reality. The religious scenes and the romantic scenes are just schlock.

Body Heat (1981)

Nice crime drama (apart from first 30-40 minutes)

[7/10 · 6 August 2023]

After the premise was established -- the lovers plan to do away with the husband (not exactly a spoiler) -- the plot and relationships among the characters begin to get interesting. The opening section, though, where the lovers meet and become passionate lovers, is way overdone with nudity and sex, way beyond what is necessary to illustrate how powerfully they are being linked through sex, until it begins to feel uncomfortable, verging palpably toward porn. In fact, I thought it definitely reached the yuck stage when a little girl happened upon the couple, and it was made very clear that she was seeing the woman giving oral sex to the man.

I spend time making this point because other reviewers seem to skim over it with vague notices of the film being "hot," "sexy," and so on.

Otherwise, I quite enjoyed it with its relationships among various charters and surprises in the plot.

Her Infidelity (2015 TV Movie)

Watchable, maybe

[4/10 · 31 July 2023]

This is a watchable movie, if you have nothing else to do for an hour or two and don't want to do a lot of thinking. Most of the screen time is given to Rachel Hunter, who is not at all hard on the eyes and who is fully capable of registering the various degrees of stress (disappointment, confusion, anxiety) that are called for a wife who has a one-night stand and finds herself stalked by her new paramour. As for the story, it is no more than an endless series of clichés. The direction, too, is as clichéed as the script, with the so-called scary parts done the same way we've seen them done in thousands of movies before. I actually fast-forwarded through the scary parts because they were so tiresome. But if your choice is this movie or Wheel of Fortune or some sit-com re-run, choose the movie.

The Castle of Sand (1974)

Too long

[7/10 · 11 July 2023]

There's a lot to like about this film, mostly because of the beautiful cinematography and the picturesque Japanese countryside. The unraveling of the police investigation of the central murder has interesting moments, but by the end it becomes too strung-out and torturous. The last 45 minutes or so had me tapping my toes waiting for it to end, as every plot point and every shot was prolonged far past the limits of my patience.

Lovers of classical music will be amused by what passes for the output of the "genius" composer. While composing in the early stages in his home at the piano, he plays quite awful nightclub music. It would never get him an invitation to perform with the New York Philharmonic, as the plot requires. In the last section, with him performing on stage, intercut with scenes of the police concluding their investigation, he plays a pretty forgettable late-Romantic piano concerto, apparently written by a real Japanese composer, Yasushi Akutagawa.

Wexford Plaza (2016)

Slow, needed tightening up

[4/10 · 11 December 2022]

I have a lot of sympathy for what was trying to be achieved in this film, a sympathetic portrait of young adults in Toronto struggling to find their ways economically and in their love lives. In a kind of general way, that is, measured by just the overall feeling that accumulated over the film and which I was left with by the end, it worked. But it did require a lot of patience for the audience who were given so many shots that seemed to add nothing to the plot or which merely added yet another repetitious drip to the sense of ennui, frustration and failure. Next time, more plot, less atmosphere, please.

I See a Dark Stranger (1946)

At least it has 2 good things about it

[4/10 · 29 July 2022]

First, the positive: the lead character, naive, young Bridey Quilty is delightful. Even when she's spouting her second-hand hatred of the English, she seems totally innocent and charming. The second good thing about this movie is Deborah Kerr, not only for the wonderful way she brings Bridey to life but also for the way her beauty lights up the screen.

The rest of the movie is hogwash. I can't for the life of me understand why it has been preserved by the Criterion Collection, unless it's just to preserve an early performance of Deborah Kerr. What's wrong? Well, for a start, the plot is full of nonsense -- too many points to list here. Watch it and squirm. At several points the time and place change between one scene and the next, as happens in every movie, but here it's done in a most clumsy manner. Then we are given to believe that the two main characters fall in love over the course of the story, although nothing is really given to let us see any progression in their feelings. And finally, the fight scenes are ridiculous, with not a single punch registering to the audience as even vaguely convincing. When Bridey is brutally slapped slapped across the face several times, the level of fakery goes through the roof. The attempt to inject moments of humour into the fight scenes make no sense at all given the seriousness of the story.

Incidentally, is I don't suppose Nabokov had in mind Bridey's last name when he created the character of Mr. Quilty in "Lolita" (1955)?

The Vanished (2020)

So-so until you reach the ridiculous ending

[2/10 · 28 April 2021]

The ending left a bitter taste in my mouth. What a cheat, how ridiculous, what a waste of time it had all been! So the idea that the couple had a child was all a fiction they were maintaining because they didn't want to admit their real child was dead. Sheesh! And they could finally reach a moment when they were tired of "playing that game," put the child's clothes and toys in a trash bin, and move on. Right. So what was the point of their raising a hue and cry about their kid being missing at the lake? And most ridiculous of all, how could they play their game to the point of finding a camper sleeping in the woods, take his gun, and shoot him to death, all to maintain a fantasy they knew to be a game? Or stab a man to death trying to help them after accusing him of kidnapping their kid? The whole premiss of the movie falls apart at the end. The writer should never get another job.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015)

spoiled by 2 choices of director

[4/10 · 21 March 2021]

I was very interested in this film and had high expectations. At first I was pleased. The scenes of the busy docks and on the decks of the ship looked authentic. It might have been enough to carry the movie despite its main character looking like a male model rather than an old whaling hand.

But it was pretty much all spoiled by two bad choices. 1.- Most scenes were shot with the camera about 18 inches away from the subject. We lost all perspective of what it was like to be on the ship, of what things would have looked like to the characters. It left me longing for the great views of sailing in Mutiny on the Bounty, both versions of which gave time to magnificent scenes of just the ship. 2. - Most of the film was edited like a TV commercial or some action movie aimed at 13-year-olds, that is, with quick cuts throughout. A single shot seldom held for more than 5 seconds.

What a shame!

Love & Savagery (2009)

A lovely, touching love story. But ...

[7/10 · 27 January 2021]

I agree with all the positive reviews here about this film and especially enjoyed the beautiful Sara Greene. Who wouldn't fall in love with that shining face? But surely only a Catholic could enjoy the ending. To deliberately give up the riches of a lifetime of love, children, grandchildren, all of that, to become a nun, to a non-Catholic this has to seem nothing less than perverse and horribly sad. I hated the ending and was looking forward to the opposite, even if, as someone here has said, it might be a little cheesy. For Catholics only.

Smash Cuts: Who's Havin' a Bad Day? (2010) Season 1, Episode 27

Decent, if not exactly original, thriller

[6/10 · 15 December 2020]

The main thing this film has going for it is the Irish setting, which is to say the accents and a bit of slang. Otherwise, it's a fairly standard thriller of a little man going up against the dark forces of organized crime. It's well done, with the plot moving along briskly. It's very violent and bloody, of course, as the genre demands.

I didn't think it did a very good job of integrating the revenge plot with the human trafficking plot.

At the end I was left with 2 questions: 1. What does the title mean? Apparently it's Irish farmer talk for bad day for the harvest, but what does that have to do with the plot? 2. Why was Donal's mother using her vacuum late at night in the yard? It appeared early in the movie, then again near the end, showing the machine throwing material into the air, as if to make something clear that we did not understand in the earlier scene. A big puzzle to me and my family.

Christine (2016)

Terrific acting but seemed pointless most of the way through

[3/10 · 14 October 2020]

I came to this movie on Netflix not knowing anything about the real-life story it was based on. I think you had to know that beforehand; otherwise, as it was for me, it just seems to go nowhere. You see this woman in various little situations at work, socially, with her mother, and you wonder what the point is, where is it leading. After she speaks to a man selling guns, I thought she was going to shoot a bunch of people. I might have been carried along with her story if she was a sympathetic character, but she was arrogant, mean to everybody around her, self-centred, and near-crazy with professional ambition.

The actor did an excellent job of portraying Christine's angst and depression, her frustration and lack of self-control, and her steady downward progression. Could she have made her more sympathetic? I don't know whether it was the actor or the script that left me aloof from Christine's plight, blaming her as much as feeling on her side, and ultimately not caring about her.

I didn't like this film at all.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Tale told by an idiot

[2/10 · 26 September 2020]

Imagine someone tells you they want to tell you a story. They begin normally, but after some time an association of ideas causes them to they drift away into a memory. They return to the story, but a little later drift into something they imagine. Then they drift into what they think the future might be like. And they drift all over the place into apparently meaninglessness. There might be meaning in their mind, but it means nothing much to you. The story gets completely blurred with all the rambling, the associations and digressions and the drifting away until you're not sure if there ever was a story the person intended to tell you at all, and you wonder whether the person hasn't lost his mind. You are sure, of course, that the person must be some kind of genius, a great artist, a magically talented manipulator of narrative tropes and a wonderful disrupter of conventions and expectations. Right? No, you think he's nuts or a bore and you can't wait to get away from him. Thus, I'm thinking of Ending Things.

It's all a shame. The film starts off quite interesting - until it begins to go off the rails in the name of art.

Color Out of Space (2019)

Is this junk what people like?

[1/10 · 28 July 2020]

Pure crapola. A meteorite falling in a family's yard is the excuse for every horror movie cliche - lots of stealthy walking into darkened rooms (eek! eek!), light beams coming out of eyes, lots of gore and sticky, slimy gunk, people dying slowly and horribly, the usual, usual.

Did writer, producer and director, did nobody anywhere notice one gigantic contradiction? At the end, we're told that the evil force is just "color," color coming from out of space, some kind of alien, immaterial energy. OK, that's supposed to be spooky, I suppose. But what about the brief scene, lasting about 20 seconds, when a pink insect looking like a well dressed praying mantis comes out of the well, and seems to inspect the nearby boy with its multiple eyes? What happened to the rest of the insect aliens? Were they the aliens or was it just the immaterial force, the pink colour that kept turning on now and again throughout the film?

This movie was just so stupid!

Our Betters (1933)

not witty and delightful to me

[3/10 · 10 November 2019]

In an Oscar Wilde play, cynicism is a pose that allows characters to utter amusing epigrams and paradoxes. In Our Betters, the characters are themselves cynical, and their remarks are therefore depressing and ugly. There's much about how society will put up for any kind of bad behaviour provided the culprit has bags of money, how marriage and "love" are based on the search for money and rank, and especially a great deal on extra-marital affairs as normal and accepted, even expected, provided society can pretend they don't know about them. Everyone seems to be manipulating everyone else. Pretty awful stuff.

There's a good deal of people striding about and striking poses with long cigarette holders in the way the magazines of the day portrayed them.

A long scene of women walking into a room and curtsying before the King and Queen seemed pointless and unnecessarily drawn-out

Gilbert Roland as a petulant, kept man (in his pre-moustache days) does an awful, a truly painful bit of amateur acting.

I didn't understand the relationship between Pearl and the older gentleman. He was giving her money on a regular basis, declared his love for her repeatedly, and when he found out she'd had an affair, he said he felt betrayed. Are we to understand that she was sleeping with him? Yuk. Was she that mercenary?

It's worth watching as a period piece and out of curiosity for its being by Somerset Maugham, but other than that I didn't find any pleasure in it.

Jupiter's Darling (1955)

Worst movie ever. Laughable

[1/10 · 4 October 2019]

The only way to watch this turkey is in a repertory cinema late on a Saturday night with friends where everyone gets to laugh as loud as they please at the ridiculousness of the movie. Who can say what is worst -- the clumsy, childish narrative, the clumsy, childish dialogue, the ridiculous battle scenes? There's no saving grace at all in this absurd, amateurish waste of time. It's as if a group of tenth graders were given a few million dollars to write and produce a movie based on a few paragraphs they read about Hannibal. Laugh, if you can. Otherwise, don't bother. It hurts watching as if it were a real movie.

Lady of the Tropics (1939)

Hollywood preposterous mish-mash of "asia"

[3/10 · 21 February 2019]

Supposedly set in Saigon, Vietnam, yet the dancing scene at the temple was from Bangkok, Thailand. When Robert Taylor struggles to communicate with a shopkeeper, he tries to make her understand 'god' by saying 'Allah'. Was Hollywood really as stupid as all that, or did it just not give a damn?

Hedy Lamar is pretty, though.

Nightcrawler (2014)

Excellent piece of acting, but pretty standard stuff

[6/10 · 12 July 2018]

There's not much to say about the story of Nightcrawler. If it rises to the category of satire, as many of the reviewers here think, it's hardly original in attacking TV news for featuring crime and blood as a way to boost their ratings. That's been done a hundred times, and often much better than this. Most of the action consists of a guy rushing up to a n accident or crime scene and pushing his way into the chaos to get video footage. Not much of that sticks in your memory.

The movie's one saving grace is the driven, manipulative insanity of the main character. Gyllenhaal has a gleam in his eye that, even in the quietest moments, makes it clear that this guy, for all his attempts to charm people, is crazy and dangerous.

There are plenty of time-wasters worse than this.

The writers deserve special credit for one scene. The main character's attempt over dinner in a Mexican restaurant to seduce the woman who's in charge of buying his videos is so wacky, so remote from any normal relationship, that it's humorous at the same time that it's appalling. There the dialogue carries the scene on its own, and Gyllenhaal doesn't have much to do beyond speaking the lines.

American Vandal (2017–2018)

Should have stopped at one good episode

[5/10 · 6 December 2017]

I watched the first episode and found it amusing, often. By the end it got rather tiresome, and I was relieved to know that I wouldn't have to hear any more about dicks and childish high school pranks. Enough was enough. I wondered what would come next -- another mockumentary? How could they do that under the title "American Vandal"? I was really shocked to learn that the second episode, in fact the entire series, would prolong the rather tired joke of a "serious investigation" of the dick prank. I bailed. I don't understand how anyone could continue watching.

The Front (1976)

Good movie, important, but unfortunate love story, Woody Allen miscast

[7/10 · 29 November 2017]

It's important to tell the story of the blacklist of the 1950s. It may slow down a recurrence, although Donald Trump is showing how effective it is to play on fears and hatred, and a repeat of the Red Scare can easily show up again as a Muslim Scare.

However, I was disappointed to see a ridiculous love story being added to the mix for no particular reason. It added nothing, distracted from the theme, and seemed to exist only to appease the popcorn-chewing part of the audience. Woody Allen playing the romantic lead was completely nuts. A beautiful girl would never show interest in him, not only because of his looks but also because of his nervous, semi-spastic demeanour, his lack of confidence, his whiny voice, his patent cowardice. To see the girl turning to kiss him was slightly disgusting but mostly preposterous. Not in one scene, not in one moment, did he seem like she would find him attractive. (Don't give me that, "She was attracted to what she thought was his brilliance as a writer." She would also want him to be charming or appealing in some way on a personal level. On a personal level he doesn't even show a sign of the brilliance that is supposed to be in his writing.)

Zero Mostel showed an unexpected weakness. He is brilliant in exaggeratedly insincere emotions, as in the manipulative slave in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. In this movie, when he was pleading with the agent responsible for checking his "reliability," begging not to be put on a black list, showing photos of his children, saying he was on his hands and knees, and so on, none of it sounded sincere. It all sounded like a schtick that he would soon pull out of, only to fall into a different one.

Rope (1948)

False on several levels and James Stewart badly miscast

[3/10 · 22 July 2017]

I didn't like this movie at all and am surprised at how highly many people rate it, some even considering it among Hitchcock's greatest.

First, it's less a movie than a filming of a stage play. Everything about it is stagey, from the often artificiality of the dialogue to the relentless confining of physical space to a couple of rooms. You can almost see the actors moving to their assigned places, fading toward the back of the stage or moving toward the front according to which conversation the audience is meant to hear. The use of close- ups is a transparent attempt to mask the fact that it's only a filming of a stage play.

There's not a trace of believability in the premise of a professor insisting he is completely serious in his Nietzsche-like views about some people being above morality, expounded at length, thinking murder is actually entirely acceptable, but later shocked and horrified when confronted by a real murder. It's one of those stock pieces of artifice common to drawing-room mysteries.

James Stewart excels at the end in his decency and humanitarian outrage after discovering that his former students have committed murder. But he is totally miscast in the earlier parts where is is supposed to be a professor overtaken by unconventional ideas about morality and murder. He puts on a slight smile, trying to present an air of intellectual superiority, but it doesn't work at all. It doesn't suit James Stewart-- not because we know James Stewart from other roles but because it is too far from the man's essential nature (or perhaps beyond his acting abilities). George Sanders or Clifton could have pulled it off, but not James Stewart.

In Jackson Heights (2015)

Be forewarned--ordinary mortals will be completely bored

[2/10 · 2 July 2017]

Be sure you know what you're getting into before you commit yourself to watching this dog of a movie. Maybe you're such a lover of Jackson Heights that anything about the place will do for you. If that describes you, then good, this will please you--it gives you anything (and everything) about the place, a random assortment of little scenes, 3 hours in total, of ordinary people doing this and that in the neighbourhood. But if an endless series of daily scenes- -a routine sermon in a mosque, an inconsequential community meeting, etc.-- doesn't sound fascinating to you, then spend your time and money somewhere else.

I came to this movie because of a NY Times piece on "The Best 25 Movies of the 21st Century So far." Well, so far, of the 4-5 I've seen, they're all a waste of time, the usual film school stuff that sniffy reviewers love to love in order to display their ineffably superior taste, pretending not to notice, or maybe reveling in, the formlessness, pointlessness, dreariness, boringness.

Panic in Year Zero! (1962)

Wow, what a stinker!

[1/10 · 12 April 2017]

Whatever drew Ray Milland to direct and star in this piece of junk? Was it the chance to direct? Had his career hit a low point?

The real blame goes to the writer. The script is terrifically plodding and predictable, clunking from one incident to the next with no finesse whatsoever. The dialogue--my god, the dialogue!--is completely cringeworthy. Most of the time it's just functional, but on the rare occasion when it tries to rise to something higher, it becomes ridiculously awkward. Dad tells Mom, "I was looking for the worst in others and found it in myself." Whoa, so pseudo-profound.

Niney percent of screen time is given to Milland. Ninety-eight percent of the dialogue is given to him. Frankie Avalon and some young actress play Milland's teenage children--she probably has no more than six lines of dialogue. Apart from lots of "OK" and "Sure" Avalon may have eight or ten lines.

Many scenes are shot on sets that are about as convincing as an episode of the Twilight Zone or an early episode of Star Trek. You can hear the voices echoing on the sound stage. The bushes and rocks are only rough approximations of the real things. The lighting is pure studio lighting, without even a pretense of being outdoors.

Finally, the music is awful. I know it was the fashion around that time to use a kind of very intrusive jazzy score--like in In the Heat of the Night. But it puts up a wall between you and the action, its blatant artificiality a constant reminder of how false and patched-up the whole production is.

For a summer drive-in movie, it might be worth the 25 cents, if it came with a second feature and some good cartoons. But why reviewers here have such good things to say about it, amazes me. It's the worst movie I've seen in a little while.

The Heavy Water War: Stopping Hitler's Atomic Bomb (2015)

Very good, but portrayal of Heisenberg is terribly unfair

[8/10 · 9 April 2017]

After watching this, I mentioned to a friend of mine with a degree in physics that Heisenberg really was compromised working for the Germans during the war. He corrected me and suggested I read "Heisenberg's War" by Thomas Powers. Thank goodness, I did. It's an excellent book, and sets the record straight about what Heisenberg did and didn't do, and did and didn't think, during the war.

The miniseries show him trying to dazzle the German military with the destructive potential of his nuclear research, and it shows him working diligently on developing a bomb. What Powers shows, though, is that Heisenberg and the scientists who worked closely with him tried in various ways to discourage the Nazis from pursuing a bomb. And they were successful. After a critical meeting with Speer in 1943, in which Heisenberg emphasized all the problems and pointed out that a bomb, even if it could be developed, would take too long to be used in the war, bomb research stopped, and nuclear research was aimed at a reactor or "energy machine." The Heisenberg group were so horrified by the idea of an atomic bomb that they even signaled to scientists outside Germany that Germany was not working on a bomb, hoping to prevent a world of nuclear weapons. (This was misunderstood by many distrustful Allied scientists, who feared Heisenberg was trying to stop their work so that he could proceed without competition on his own.)

So enjoy the series, but please don't do as I did and take it as factual about Heisenberg's participation in a German atomic bomb program. I suppose that part of the story was added to crank up the excitement and drama.

Incidentally, after the destruction of the Norwegian hydro/heavy water plant and the sinking of the ferry carrying the heavy water, Germany's was completely crippled in its supply of heavy water, never to recover.

The Letter (1940)

great, but let's keep in mind how racist it is

[8/10 · 14 October 2016]

This is one of my favourite movies. The gripping narrative, the acting, all the riveting scenes of high drama -- great stuff.

But I wonder why we give a pass to its racism? We speak out against the racism of Westerns and their portrayal of indigenous peoples, and it's with a sense of embarrassment that we watch those old movies. Similarly we recognize the stereotypes and racism of the Charlie Chan movies. But I think we still need to acknowledge quite clearly how racist The Letter is. I am tempted to list some of the outrageous examples from the movie, but there are so many at every level that it would be a dreary task.

Hollywood, of course, was dealing with a story set in a racist society, written by an English author. Yet Hollywood did nothing to undercut the racism, there is no distancing from the contempt the whites have for others, the language they use about them. Without exception the Asians are crafty, untrustworthy, degraded, living in the shadows, prowling by night, and ultimately murderous.

Enjoy The Letter, by all means. But let's not overlook the ugliness of the milieu. Let's not accept such rank injustice as normal and dull our eyes until we barely notice it.

The Cockleshell Heroes (1955)

waste of time -- plus annoying, abysmal use of music

[3/10 · 11 October 2016]

The reviewers here so far like this film very much but seem to have various kinds of sentimental attachments to it. I don't have any--no memories of seeing it when I was young, no family, friends or acquaintances involved in the mission, no external notions from reading about it. I just watched it as a general moviegoer from the early 21st century. In my opinion The Cockleshell heroes has worn badly over the years.

The first part, covering the selection of the participants and their training, has very little information in it--a tiny bit about limpet mines, a scene of soldiers climbing rock cliffs (no such landscape shows up later in the mission), perhaps one potentially interesting challenge forcing the men to use their wits to move around the countryside, but more close-order drilling than anything.

Apart from the two officers and one soldier who goes AWOL to beat up a man who's been having an affair with his wife while he's away, there is almost nothing to distinguish one character from another. And there is no acting. The little tension between two officers leads only to a few moments of the two exchanging their points of view. Jose Ferrer delivers pretty much all his lines in the same tone of voice: it's a nice voice, it would be great narrating a documentary on some serious subject, but it has no emotional inflection in this movie.

But what really spoils this long first section of the movie is the abundance of "cute" vignettes. A parachutist lands in cow manure, a hitchhiker gets a ride with a ridiculous fast-talking matron, the near-naked men run past a group of nuns. Tired, old tropes even for 1955, and far, far too many of them.

Once the mission begins there is almost no dialogue, mostly scenes of men padding in their kayaks (called "canoes" in the movie). It's pretty dull stuff, and the director obviously thought music would be needed to keep audiences interested. But what awful music! On and on it goes, a symphony orchestra playing meaningless, vaguely military-sounding riffs non-stop, not in the least adapted to what's happening at the moment on the screen, just mindless orchestral noise that never stops. After a while I actually turned off the sound on my television to escape from the never-ending assault on my ears. And-- this is incredible-- during one supposed scene of deep thoughtfulness, when after a night of drinking an older officer is alone in a board room telling the sad story of his life to another officer, the same nonsensical orchestral tooting and shrilling continues ridiculously from beginning to end. It really should go down as one of the worst uses of music ever in the history of film making.

As for action scenes, there's not much and not presented with any suspense. The climax, with explosions, is depicted with a few models in a studio.

It's really terrible writing, terrible directing and an absence of acting.