stevec-35 Reviews

Ad Astra (2019)

Pretty bad - a big disappointment

[2/10 · 18 January 2020]

I was really looking forward to this movie. Boy was I disappointed! The makers of "Ad Astra" would have done well to watch the TV series "The Expanse". The expanse is s great example of how a story about a future solar system should be done.

To summarise, Ad Astra was a ridiculous story, with bad science and mediocre acting all the way. The hero has to travel to Mars to send a message to Neptune to attempt to stop damaging signals coming from there. Why? On the way he stops at the moon and gets involved in a local war where the protagonists battle each other in Apollo era moon buggies. Really? Surely we have progressed beyond there by the time when this film was supposed to be set. The visuals are acceptable but only just.

I can only give this 2/10. As a near future hard science fiction movie it's an epic failure.

Eight Days That Made Rome (2017)

Nowhere near her best work

[5/10 · 27 February 2018]

I've only seen three episodes of this series so far and Bettany Hughes has produced far better historical documentaries than this. The overall production is sloppy, one example being that Pompey, although six years older than Caesar is played by an actor that looks younger. The whole thing just seems to be dumbed down. The most recent episode that I saw dealt with the conflict between Mark Antony and Octavian. There is no mention of Lepidus (the third member of the second triumvirate) or Maecenas, one of Octavian's key allies. Antony's marriage to Octavian's sister and its subsequent dissolution is not even mentioned. Everything is just over simplified.

Overall this would rate as the worst Bettany Hughes documentary series that I've seen and I'm not sure if I will be watching the remaining episodes.

La La Land (2016)

Highly overrated!

[4/10 · 9 January 2018]

I simply cannot understand why this film rated so highly. The best part was Emma Stone's acting but other than that there is virtually nothing worth praising. If this was an attempt to revive the classic film musicals of the forties and fifties it fails utterly in my opinion. The main problem is that Emma Stone can't sing and Ryan Gosling can't act. Another problem is that in many of the other musical numbers including the opening one in the LA traffic jam you can't hear the lyrics. As an actor Ryan Gosling reminds me of sixties actor David Jansen who played Richard Kimble in the Fugitive TV series - he has one or at the most two facial expressions. Overall the story is fairly boring too. I'm writing this review about two weeks after seeing the movie and I have no desire to see it again.

I'm probably being generous in rating this 4/10.

A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014)

Not as bad as some of the reviews indicate

[8/10 · 14 April 2015]

A Million Ways to die in the West is obviously not perfect and there is a definite over supply of potty humor but I still felt entertained and isn't that what watching a movie is all about?. Some of the jokes made me cringe but there are definite laugh out loud moments. This movie is definitely nowhere near as bad as some of the IMDb reviews indicate.

The two strongest elements in my view were Charlize Theron who plays the wife of the gunfighter outlaw Clinch and the musical score by Joel McNeely. McNeely has come up with one of the best western musical scores ever written in my opinion. Seth McFarlane mostly does a good job and Sarah Silverman is often hilarious as the town prostitute who still keeps to her Christian values.

Sure it's often very silly but it still pushed the right buttons for me. 8 stars out of 10.

L.A. Story (1991)

Steve Martin's ultimate feel good comedy

[10/10 · 10 March 2011]

Basically I go to the movies to be entertained and if I walk out at the end of the movie with a warm satisfied feeling I feel that the film has done its job. LA story is completely in this category.

I've seen LA story several times since it first came out and I've always felt thoroughly entertained. The best way to categorize it would be as a romantic comedy with some extremely zany humor. It's about Harris K Telemacher (Martin) who runs the weather segment on a LA TV news channel. The LA weather doesn't change very much so he just mostly clowns it up, in fact the segment is called "the wacky weather guy". In the course of the film he meets and falls in love with a UK news reporter (Tennant - his wife at the time) and has a fling with a delightfully air-headed shop girl (Sarah Jessica Parker).

Most of the humor arises from a light hearted look at the California life style. Probably my favourite joke is the scene at the ATM with two queues but there is so much more. I've always been a Monty Python fan and much of the humor is in this category. There is a fantasy element involving a freeway sign and a soundtrack with some hauntingly beautiful Enya melodies.

I can see from the other reviews that some people didn't get the humor and I can recall showing the film to two friends who sat through it with mostly straight faces. All I can say is that it totally worked for me and I would rate it as Martin's finest work. Sadly he was never this funny again.

If you haven't seen LA Story then give it a try. I think you may be pleasantly surprised. It's 10/10 for me.

All That Jazz (1979)

Simply Great

[10/10 · 7 December 2005]

It's a real pleasure to comment on a real movie given the amount of unadulterated rubbish coming out of Hollywood these days. All that Jazz is director Bob Fosse's homage to the Broadway world and follows the life and death of Joe Gideon a, brilliant director and choreographer as he develops a new show while struggling with numerous health and personal problems.

Gideon, played by Roy Schneider, is a hard drinking, drug taking womanizer but he still comes across as a warm and likable person. This is a tribute to Schneider's acting and I can't think of any film where he has done better than this. All the acting is first rate but I was particularly impressed with Erzebet Foldi who played Gideon's young daughter. I don't know if she went anywhere after this film but she certainly deserved to.

The film contains flashbacks to Gideon's earlier life interspersed with interludes where he converses with the angel of death, personified as a beautiful young woman and it's funny, sad and uplifting all at the same time. The dance sequences are spectacular, right from the opening audition scene to the final farewell and I loved the musical score. Some people may find certain sequences a bit raunchy and I remember this being an issue with a few parties at the time the film was released. All that I can say is that everything contributes to the overall story and I didn't find it a problem at all.

It must be pretty obvious by now that I Liked this film and I did. I'm giving it a 10.

Spartacus (2004)

A worthy successor to the original

[9/10 · 26 September 2005]

The 1960 version of Spartacus remains one of the best historical epics ever made but this new film rates very well beside it. It is more historically accurate and much more faithful to the original Howard Fast novel on which both films were based.

All the actors did a good job. Goran Visnvjic was an effective Spartacus and Rhona Mitra a feisty Varinia very much in keeping with the book. Alan Bates is at his best in the role of a senator playing a behind the scenes role in trying to stop Crassus in his drive for power over the Roman state. I was least impressed by Angas Macfadyen in the role of Crassus although it's still a competent performance. I guess that Lawrence Olivier who played Crassus in the 1960 movie is a hard act to follow.

The battle scenes are competently performed but the armies look much smaller than the historical record said they were. I guess the original Spartacus had more money to spend on extras. A long standing wish of mine is for a Roman epic to get the armor right. The Roman soldier of this period wore short mail shirts and used oval shields. The segmented armor wasn't introduced until about a century later.

I couldn't fault the history. Everything seems to be done right, from the first battle when the slaves abseiled down the cliffs of Vesuvius to attack the Roman camp to the splitting up of the slave army when Crixus and Spartacus had a falling out. The gladiator scenes are just as good as the original too.

All in all, a great movie that even die-hard fans of the Kirk Douglas version should enjoy.

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

Much better but still not great

[6/10 · 25 June 2005]

I've always regarded the Star Wars films as mostly enjoyable special effects driven action flicks and never been particularly impressed by the story. Episode three certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. It's much better than episodes 1 and 2 but is still let down by a rather simplistic plot, occasionally awful script and poor acting although Hayden Christensen is marginally better than he was in episode 2. He does tend to get worse as the film proceeds though and overacts terribly during his transformation into Vader. The scene where he is told of the death of his wife is laughably unconvincing. The worst acting in my opinion though is from Natalie Portman. She is truly awful and most of her scenes with Christensen just made me cringe.

Annakin's metamorphosis into Darth Vader isn't very convincing in my eyes and the overall plot is fairly weak although the tie up with episode 4 is handled pretty well.

The special effects are of course excellent although you get the impression that Lucas is just showing off at times. The space battle at the start, for instance, looked just a bit too cluttered.

In a more generous mood I would give this 7/10 but I'm going for 6.

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Gritty realistic view of the Crusades

[8/10 · 5 May 2005]

Coincidentally, I saw this movie just after viewing El Cid on DVD. Both are great movies but El Cid presents a more sanitised view of the middle ages. Kingdom of Heaven presents the period with the gritty realism that is much more common today. The colour is rather drab and the lighting in many of the interior scenes is rather dim which may have been the way it really was but can be slightly frustrating at times.

The story follows Balian (Orlando Groom) who begins the film as a village blacksmith in France and winds up as a landed knight in the Kingdom of Jerusalem who plays a major part in defending it from the Saracens under Saladin.

I'm a stickler for historical accuracy and as far as I can see, this film gets it almost exactly right. All the historical characters from the last years of the Kingdom of Jerusalem are there. The tragic leper king, Baldwin IV, the evil Reynaud De Chatillon who more than anyone else was responsible for the fall of the kingdom and the beautiful Sybilla, the eventual queen.

I couldn't fault the acting. All the characters, both Christian and Moslem, are very convincing. The battle scenes are very well done and, on the whole, I liked this movie better than Ridley Scott's last epic, Gladiator.

Kingdom of Heaven has been criticised for being biased toward the Moslem view of the crusades but, like it or not, this is the way it happened (see Steven Runciman's "History of the Crusades"). The moral of the movie is as relevant today as it was then. All it takes to destroy a peaceful relationship between two nations in the middle east is the presence of bigoted people on either side.

Highly recommended for lovers of historical epics and anyone who likes a good story that is free of car chases and explosions.

El Cid (1961)

A very competently done epic

[8/10 · 28 April 2005]

I watched this movie for the first time in a long while recently and was frankly surprised at how well it stands up after all these years.

I'm not very familiar with the historical El Cid but the film seems to relate his story reasonably well in broad outline which is about the best that Hollywood usually does with real history anyway. Charlton Heston's El Cid is perhaps a little too good to be true as the real Cid apparently had a few more character flaws, but this is a relatively minor problem since this film is, after all, intended to be a homage to the Spanish hero. There are some inconsistencies in the script but nothing that detracts too much from the story.

Where El Cid really stands out in my opinion is in the quality of the photography and costumes. Many times you almost seem to be looking at a live version of the Bayeaux tapestry or some medieval painting. The battle scenes are also very well directed. The acting is never worse than competent and the musical score is one of Miklos Rosza's best although it sometimes sounds a bit syrupy by today's standards.

I've often wondered why this film didn't pick up an Academy award or two but perhaps the competition was tough in 1962. In any case I would highly recommend El Cid to anyone that likes an entertaining movie with a historical theme.