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yakmanyhad
Reviews
Mirrormask (2005)
Smart, original, lovely, yet lacking
What amazing prospects for a fantasy film, to have two prolific artists; Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman combining their talents to create a work (in Gaiman's words) "sort of in the same style as Labyrinth." In fact, Jim Henson's Workshop did a lot of the visual effects for the film. The concept makes you want to drool with anticipation.
The direction was superb, the art was scintillating, and the dialogue was engaging. However, Mirrormask never really seemed to come together as a fantasy film in the way that Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal did. The story (though Gaiman has been and remains my favorite author of all time) seemed a bit contrived. That "through the looking-glass" trope has really been done almost to death since Lewis Carroll made it a literary fantasy staple. And Mirrormask, sadly, adds little to it. The film made me recall a lesser film, The Pagemaster, a fantasy footnote in the annals of film-making. The big lessons in Pagemaster were that reading is good, and you can do anything you can imagine; asinine little glossy aphorisms that attempt to convey meaning without doing the legwork. Unlike Labyrinth, where nothing could be taken for granted, Mirrormask asks the viewer to take almost everything for granted, including the fact that nearly every scene is green-screened to death. Again, I am reminded of a lesser movie, Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow, which sacrificed substance for flashy (and fake-looking) CGI manipulation. Like the latter film, Mirrormask purports to show the viewer a fantastic reality by overusing a method we KNOW to be fake. The interaction between the characters and the fantastic environment, rather than bridging the gap between reality and fantasy, widened the rift by underscoring the "cleverness" of CGI technology.
All criticism aside, it really is a competent fantasy flick. The characters are multidimensional even if their surroundings are not. The dialogue is very well done, and the conceptual art is awesome. It's not the best fantasy film ever made, but I would watch it again.
Tourgasm (2006)
Sorry, No Comedy Here
I love stand-up comedy. I love watching it, I love listening to it. If I didn't have a fear of public speaking, I would love to do it. So I think I should warn the next person who rents or buys Tourgasm thinking it's going to be about comedy.
The premise for Tourgasm is actually quite good; stick a gang of stand-up comics on a bus for 30 days and see what happens. Admittedly, there are a few genuinely funny moments in Tourgasm. Are there enough to justify its pretentiousness? No.
There are many reasons why I wish I had never shelled out the money to watch this gawd-awful series. Reason one: the lack of actual stand-up comedy. A show about comics, and you'd think that there would be a fair amount of comedy involved, right? The footage of actual comedy, taken together out of all the episodes of this monstrosity, would not add up to a single stand-up act. That's just pathetic. Tourgasm might have been tolerable if there had actually been a fair amount of comedy in it.
Which leads me to the reason why I loathe Tourgasm. Dane Cook. I never heard his name before watching the series, never saw one of his acts. He seems like a pretty funny guy, but if all I have to judge his character by is this series, my assessment would be that he is a narcissistic prig who really likes hearing himself talk, and does a LOT of talking on these DVDs. Tourgasm should not be in the stand-up comedy section of your local video store, it should be in documentary. And even then, it is a bad documentary. Ninety percent of the series is Cook languishing on about himself and the secrets of his success. It was so boring I started to do other things while the DVDs were playing, make food, take out the trash, dust. Every now and then a juicy little comedy tidbit would come up and I would have a little chuckle, but then it would just dive back into the same self-obsessed introspective. Even the special features were mostly Dane Cook talking about his wonderful self. (And, by the way, you can also replay the episodes with commentary - with commentary! - so you can hear Cook talking about talking about himself). The only people who could enjoy this series would have to be super-devoted fans of Cook's, and I mean their heads need to be way up his ass. He even had the gall to think that he was pretty much the first person to make rock-star status out of stand-up comedy. Hmmm. Are we forgetting about Carlin, Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Denis Leary, even the most recent Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle?
Though truthfully, after watching this show, he strikes me as kind-of a dirt bag. I mean, his "friend" Jay Davis gets him his first major stage work, and how does Cook repay him? Invites him to tag along for Danefest while making him look like a complete stand-up comedy failure. Yeah, I'm sure that Davis will get plenty of work now that he's been portrayed as a comic hack. What a friend!
The only breath of fresh air comes with level-headed Gary Gulman, who seems reluctant to jump on the "Dane train" (i.e. he doesn't worship the ground Cook stands upon). It was good to see him in something big after his top-notch performance in Last Comic Standing (which had PLENTY of comedy in it, by the way).
When Cook reads this (and he will, because I'm sure he Googles his own name at least 100 times per day) he should take some good advice and leave directing a series to the people who know how to do it, and just do what it is he's good at; talking about himself in ways that people actually find funny.
Silent Hill (2006)
As a movie, or as a VG movie?
I have never played the game, Silent Hill, therefore I am judging the value of this flick as a horror movie, not as a horror movie based on a video game. The visual effects were absolute madness. The concept of the ghost town is realized with a dreamlike hellishness that is often missing in most contemporary horror flicks. The characters and settings seamlessly blend with the overall ethos of the story to create a mood that is heavy and palpable, jolting the viewer with paranoid urgency and a claustrophobic, no-way-out mentality. The imagery is poignant, the camera work exploiting each scene gracefully.
Silent Hill has a few glaring issues. While most people who see this movie will know that it is based on a video game, hardly any audience member wants to be reminded of it. I recall the battle scene with the super-zombie at the end of Resident Evil 2 (one could almost imagine life-measurement bars next to Milla Jovovich's character). Silent Hill contains one of these scenes, a scene that takes you right out of the movie to remind you that it is all based on a video game. For VG fans, that is probably OK, but for horror movie fans that is a big "no no." The acting and plot are very instable, as well. The speaking characters are simply vehicles for the plot, pushing it along to it's eventual conclusion, rather than shaping the course of the story. Granted, a whole lot happens between A and B, and to squeeze in development would derail the whole film, but S.H. relies too heavily on it's flawed plot structure to make up for it's lack of character development. Does anyone truly know what the outcome of the movie is, gamers and movie buffs alike?
Overall, Silent Hill is a nice, gory, entertaining nightmare, stylish in it's use of effects but staggering under the weight of a busy plot and it's obligation to viewers who played the game first.