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Cairo Time (2009)
get some postcards instead
In the summary it says that the affair that takes place in this movie catches the characters "unawares". If they are unaware, they are certainly the only ones. If anybody watching this movie doesn't know exactly what's going to happen within a few minutes, then they've fallen asleep. And if they've fallen asleep, they probably probably had a dream in which people said interesting things to each other and some of the things that took place came as a surprise.
On the other hand, those of us not lucky enough to fall asleep at least get this much: At the end we are rewarded with exactly the ending we expected five minutes in.
Yes, it's beautiful to look at. If you want to look at pretty shots of Cairo and the pyramids for 90 minutes, you might do better to pick up a few postcards and while away the hours looking at them. It would be silly to waste your time doing that, of course, but it would probably be a better waste of your time than sitting through this tired old movie.
Patricia Clarkson may be a very good actress. But she is not a particularly interesting actress, at least not in this movie. And she certainly isn't playing a very interesting or compelling person in this movie. She is not helped much by a limpid script or by an uninspired director.
There are hundreds of shots in "Cairo Time" of Patricia Clarkson doing pretty much nothing. Here she is lying in bed. Here she is staring out a window. Here she is walking down a street. She looks blank all the time. It's a profound statement about loneliness in a strange city. It must be awful to be alone in Cairo. But it's probably better to be alone in Cairo than it is to be with Patricia Clarkson in Cairo.
There are many long takes of Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig looking at each other. I don't know what they're thinking. I know what I was thinking. I was thinking "could we please look at something else now?" How about some more pretty shots of the Nile?
During much of this movie I found myself wondering how Cairo could be so quiet and sparsely populated. This is not what I'd heard about Cairo. Then it occurred to me that the making of this movie probably sent people running in the other direction. I began to wonder about the poor crew that had to work on this movie. It's bad enough to sit through the long boring scenes in this movie as a viewer. Imagine how excruciating it must have been for the crew who had to endure several takes of some of these dreadfully boring "episodes". I feel for anybody who had to endure any scene in this movie more than once.
If you want to see a movie about a middle aged woman who unexpectedly falls in love with a man she is ill suited for in a beautiful location, then I would suggest "summertime" starring Katherine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi and directed by David Lean and set in Venice. Katherine Hepburn, though frequently annoying, is a much more interesting and inventive actress. Brazzi was a far more suitable foreigner to fall in love with. David Lean was a director who seemed to be engaged in what he was directing. And Venice is a better actor than Cairo.
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
Who put the dark in the dark side?
When William Holden, in "Sunset Boulevard", said "it's sometimes fun to see how really bad bad dialogue can be", he may have been reading the script for "Attack Of The Clones".
This movie includes such clunkers as
I love you I love you too.
A lot of heavy breathing. The scene that Rick Moranis played out with the little action figures in "Spaceballs" was hotter.
and
"I just killed everbody, not just the men, but the women too, and the children. Do you hate me now?" (No, actually, he didn't say "do you hate me now", it was implied. Yes, there actually may have been something implied in a script by George Lucas. My how he's grown).
One upon a time, "Star Wars" was interesting because it's creator/god had borrowed heavily from thousands of movies he grew up on, especially "The Wizard of OZ", and turned Dorothy into himself (luke), the tin man into a prissy robot, the lion into a big furry guy, added a lot of B-Western stuff, and a bickering love/hate thing, and it was all kind of fun.
Yes, there's still two guys and a girl fighting for good, but the girl isn't very feisty, the young naive guy seems to be having some sort of adolescent hissy fit about what happened to his mother (this is almost interesting in a Psycho kind of way and I'm begining to think I would like to know more about George Lucas relationship with his father and his mother. On second thought: Nah) and the other guy is just earnest (It's important to be earnest, he's a jedi knight, whatever that means).
I'm beginning to wonder what's so bad about the dark side anyway, other than the fact that they're played by Christopher Lee. Are they oppressing people? And what makes the Jedi so good? They're beginning to look like a bunch of elitists who are really little different from the bad guys. Or is this the point?
There is a lot of political theory in this movie. It goes like this:
"I believe that decisions should be made by everybody deciding what's best for them" "But what if they can't agree. Then there should be just one person making the decisions, as long as he is kind" "We call that a dictatorship"
And they said Lucas wasn't deep!
Star Wars has always had the feeling of a big overgrown kid playing with his action figures but at least the original had Alec Guinness, Chewy, C3PO and the Cantina. And it looked different. But now things look mostly the same (only more so), the boy girl love story has more mooning than a frat house movie, the funny side kicks have been kicked aside (Jar Jar's fault, I think) and the Cantina scenes are getting mighty old (oh, it's a diner now. Denny's Of Naboo or something).
I don't know what the bad guys did bad (cloned armies of dark skinned men, I guess) but all it really comes down to is which bully has a bigger army.
Oh, yes , there is the big laser battle at the end. You knew that was coming too. Would it be giving away too much to say that the biggest (actually the only) cheer of the opening night crowd I saw it with
Bedazzled (2000)
What were they thinking?
It's hard to believe that the director who made the terrific "Groundhog Day" and the clever, and sometimes very funny "Analyze This" , along with the wonderful actor from "The Scout" and "Gods and Monsters" could have made this mess. Not one joke (there really is only one joke here, misstated wishes) works, and nothing plays out.
To make matters worse, there is the jaw-dropping performance by Ms. Hurley. Does she really think that bouncing up and down when she walks ( and even sometimes when she's supposed to be standing still) is funny or sexy?
It's really not Brendan Fraser's fault, and it's not the first time that he's been seen over-playing in a desperate attempt to make unfunny material work (see "dudley do-right" for a textbook example of desperation), but what was going on with Mr. Ramis? Did he just give up on the project at some point?
They should have burned this
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
It's by Billy Wilder, so it's worth seeing,Stupid.
While this movie certainly doesn't compare to Billy Wilders many msaterpieces , it's certainly an odd an interesting movie,
well worth seeing. The sometimes misguided attempt to take an Italian sex farce, and transfer it to a small town somewhere in the desert results in a movie that doesn't quite feel right, but certainly has a lot of fascinating elements.
the early sequences, featuring an insanely jealous Ray Walston, absolutely convinced that his pretty wife (felicia Farr) is having an affair with everybody from the milkman, to the dentist, to the 14 year old boy he's giving a piano lesson to are perfectly timed, and result in classic comedy. Things may go a little wrong when Cliff Osmond, as Walston's song writing partner, and the owner of the gas station across the street, gets involved, in a performance that is a little too broad.
The movie becomes even more interesting, to me, when Dean Martin enters the story, playing a parody of himself that few stars then or now would agree to. Martin is almost literally playing himself, a crooner named only "Dino", but he not only is
a drunk and a womanizer, he is positively seedy and disgusting. At one point he basically says that if he doesn't get laid every night he'll get a terrible headache, and he makes it abundantly clear that he has every intention of bedding Zelda (Walston's wife). The lack of ego, pretensiousness, and security he must have felt to be able to do this certainly says a lot for Martin.
Sadly, the same is not true of Walston, who may be the weak link in this movie. He seems to almost dissapprove of the somewhat smutty nature of the script, and rather than play the humor straight, he plays it with an almost nasty seriousness that underscores the unpleasant nature of the movie. When Walston is attempting to start a fight with his loving wife, in order to get her out of the house and away from "Dino", rather than playing it for the farce that it is,Walston makes it ugly and sad. Further, there is no chemistry whatsoever between Walston and his fellow schemer Osmond, who is grotesque to begin with and is playing a truly unscrupulous character.
For me one of the most interesting turns in the movie comes when Kim Novak enters the story. She is the "loose" Polly The Pistol who is recruited to be Walston's wife for the evening. While Walston is trying to force his "wife" on the swinging Martin, and Martin is certainly interested in Novak, she seems to be completely turned off by the womanizing singer. Again, one can only marvel that Dean Martin was willing to play along as the butt of the joke. His image as a likeable drinking womanizer , which he played to the hilt on teevee and in other movies, is turned into a joke that would be at his expense, if he didn't play the whole thing so gamely. Novak, who never seemed to get credit for much, is simply terrific, as she fights off Dino, and falls for Orville (walston), trying to help him out.
Felicia Farr, as Zelda, also does a lot towards humanizing the movie. In fact, rare for a Wilder movie, the women are the strength here.
It always amazes me that Billy Wilder is so quickly condemned for bitterness in his comedies. He's no sentimentalist, thank god, for there are enough Capra's around, but he does have a compassion for this characters that most filmmakers can only pretend to have, and underneath the bitterness there is a human decency that even in a movie as distasteful as this one sometimes is, comes through.
I think that the big problem with this movie was not so much the smuttiness that apparently bothered so many people at the time it was made, but the fact that the script never really makes the most of the comic situations ,that many of the quips are not up to the usual Wilder/Diamond standard (which is very very high), and , perhaps most of all, the miscasting of Ray Walston. Originally it was supposed to be Peter Sellers, who left after a few weeks because of a series of heart attacks, and Walston was a last minute replacement, but I suspect that the script was originally intended for Felicia Farr's husband, Jack Lemmon, whose decency and incredible comic ability humanized a few Wilder characters over the years, and who would have, I think, changed the tone of this movie considerably. Certainly "The Apartment" and "The Fortune Coookie" are both brilliant movies, and comedies that were both timely and have stood the test of time, but they were also both movies whose themes were somewhat controversial, and whose protagonists were somewhat unscrupulous. I suspect that if it hadn't been Lemmon in those movies, if it had instead been Peter Sellers or Ray Walston, the tone of both of them might have been a lot less pleasant.