Change Your Image
berlin45
Reviews
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
Couldn't even meet my low expectations
I was stuck in a small town one weekend, and decided to see a movie. The whole town had only one multi-plex, showing the latest crap from hollywood. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I guess I've been spoiled. Decided to see Tomb raider, since I figured there's at least two things in the film worth checking out. I wasn't expecting much, but this awful waste of celluloid drove me to check out Swordfish in an adjoining room. That film is bad too, but at least in an entertaining Steven Seagalish way.
The Pledge (2001)
Unpredictable
The more I think about this film, the more I like it. It's not your typical Hollywood blockbuster (a good thing!), so I can understand why some folks don't like it. It reminded me of an early 70's film. The premise is a typical child rapist/serial killer manhunt story ( throw in handsome young leading white actor with an older black man sidekick) that goes off in another direction. I have to admit at one point about 2/3rds of the way I started getting restless, wondering where the film was going, but I told myself to trust that Sean Penn knows what he's doing, and I was right. Definitely Nicholson's best performance in many a year, I can't forget the scene with Helen Mirren as the child psychologist. One disappointment: I was happy when I saw the shots in downtown Reno, and I thought they filmed it in Nevada, only to find out it was, once again, British Columbia.
It seems to me that now, unlike a decade ago when there were all these fresh new independent films coming out, you have to be a big name in Hollywood to get anything original or different produced.
American Beauty (1999)
crap.
So this is what great cinema is nowadays? It's sad that moviegoers are so accustomed to crap that they hail American Beauty as a masterpiece. I don't even want to get into it. Todd Solondz and Harmony Korine are making great films...this is just some screenwriters wishful thinking. I used to grow and sell weed and that part of the story was totally bogus. One dimensional homosexuals and homophobes. It felt like Annette Bening's character was written just to make Kevin Spacey feel superior. Good acting, but the rest of the film unworthy of all the praise it has received.
Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane (1998)
Good idea for a tired genre
This could have been a good film if it had a good director and someone to edit the script. Writer-director Joe Carnahan is a little too enamored with his Tarantino-like dialogue, a little goes a long way. Some of the acting is good, I like Carnahan and Dan Harlan as Danny Woo, but other times it is painfully low-budget. I give the film-makers credit for coming up with some visually interesting ways of filming the violent shoot-outs. Overall, the good bits are just a little too few and far between to make this really enjoyable.