ma_ge Reviews

Superman Returns (2006)

Bruce Ratner, this is how you make a good comic book movie

[9/10 · 30 June 2006]

I'm not great with words, so I'll be brief.

By the time I was done watching this movie, I felt closer to people, closer to my friends/colleagues.

I felt good about myself. I can't put a finger on why, but the movie made me feel this way.

Even though I thought Kevin Spacey was sort of flat and the diabolical plan he came up with was sort of lame, it didn't faze me like a weak idea normally would.

I spent $12.50 watching this movie (IMAX), and it was worth every cent.

I spent $0 watching X3 and still felt cheated.

Crash (I) (2004)

Fresh and captivating, but contrived and goes nowhere with its theme

[6/10 · 19 July 2005]

I went into the movie with high expectations given its IMDb rating. However, the movie seemed to be satisfied skipping along the surface of its theme of racism without ever exploring it. It simply demonstrated a sequence of contrived events putting racist characters face to face with other racist characters. It did that masterfully, but there was no coherent message in it all. Some characters undergo VERY cheesy epiphanies, the rest though stay pretty much exactly the same. Sandra Bullock's role in the movie was so pathetically one-dimensional it's a wonder it wasn't cut. Don Cheadle's role was pretty much entirely irrelevant...he contributed nothing to the movie except a sad-looking, pensive face the entire time.

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Solid conclusion that could have been a bit better

[7/10 · 21 May 2005]

I'm not a Star Wars enthusiast (i.e., nerd) so I'm not a purist by any means. But I was a bit disappointed in this movie, in how Anakin's turn was portrayed so dispassionately and uncharacteristically. It seemed contrived and could have been executed better.

Aside from that, the movie tied up the loose ends effectively, and provided nice explanations for certain events in the sequels. If the first two movies weren't so awful, this could have been better...but with a poor base to build on, this movie barely lived up to its potential. For that reason, I give it a 7/10. It certainly does NOT deserve a place on the IMDb top 100.

Casshern (2004)

Mediocre premise, great CGI scenic visuals, drawn out plot

[6/10 · 22 January 2005]

The good: Very beautiful scenes.

The bad: The movie was about 40 minutes too long, with repetitive flashbacks, scenes unnecessarily drawn out even after the dialogue and action has ended, a meandering plot (with plenty of plot holes), characters that act inconsistently or unbelievably, a forgettable soundtrack, and one -awesome- action scene/battle roughly around the 15% mark that makes you think the rest of the movie will feature scenes just as great, but it's just one long anti-climax after that point.

It also asks many naive questions about war/mankind/humanity to make a pretense at being remotely philosophical. It doesn't discuss what possible answers there could be to those questions, but it takes a mediocre movie and supposedly makes it 'deep.' Strangely enough, it seems that it's this very aspect of the movie that resonated with females (alongside the great visuals), who uniformly gave this movie high ratings.

This movie is barely a 6, for me.