Reviews

The scope, depth, and attention to detail of this 10 episode miniseries are awe inspiring. Though they share some big name producers, Band of Brothers makes Saving Private Ryan look like a cartoon. The story is compelling and accessible, yet it demands the viewer's active attention, and every episode rewards repeated viewing. Despite the enormous cast, acting is consistently of the highest quality. BoB is so good that you may forget that you already know how WWII comes out. In every scene, you see what's happening as the soldiers themselves saw it. BoB recalls the grandeur of WWII movies made in the 50's and 60's, yet it focuses unflinchingly on the price paid by the soldier, including the intense psychological damage done by combat. By the end, you may have slightly different definitions of valor and courage. An achievement; a demonstration of what can be done in the medium of television; absolutely not to be missed.

This is where it all went wrong -way before the lame modern films. Return of the Jedi was lousy in almost every way a movie can be lousy. How did the following "ideas" not get thrown out on day one? -Have a climactic saber battle between Luke and Darth Vadar so someone can get their hand chopped off again. -Build a new deathstar so we can blow it up again. -Reveal that one of the good-guys is the child of one of the bad guys again.

The script is awful, the directing is awful, the score is a witless mish-mash of the first two movies, Mark Hamil couldn't act, Harrison Ford had long since forgotten the difference between the Han Solo and Indiana Jones... I could go on and on but I don't want to think about it anymore. God, it was just... awful!

This is not a movie about fighting; it is a movie about values, honor, and sacrifice. We see tremendous sacrifice from nearly every character as they journey closer and closer to realizing perfection in their martial arts. Ultimately this journey, and the movie itself, transcend martial arts, and we are left with souls grappling with the question of what, truly, is the highest possible of ideals.

The conclusion that Hero draws may not be fully understood by western audiences, but that only underscores the essential Chinese-ness of this movie.

This is the most breathtakingly beautiful movie I have ever seen, and no movie without Zhang Ziyi in it will ever be able to rival it. In addition to the sublime beauty of miss Zhang, the landscape, the colors, and the imagery are all dazzling.

This movie is flawless in form and structure, order and symmetry, beauty and correctness. This movie gets a 10 -if only to prove, as the movie itself seems to posit, that perfection is humanly attainable.

Wow. This should be mandatory viewing for the entire human race. Con men of all stripes hate this show, and with good reason. If enough people see it, they'll be out of business. To re-cap the first season: Bottled water is the same as tap water. Your penis can't be enlarged. "Intelligent Design" isn't. ESP -an old con debunked 10,000 times over. When will people learn. As for "talking to the dead" -these people deserve prison.

And already in the 2nd season we've seen that PETA is a terrorist organization.

Of course, I already knew a lot of this stuff, but Penn and Teller do a fine job of presenting the truth with humor.

I can assure anyone who has looked at the user rankings for this movie that the 10's are jokes. Indeed this movies is so bad that parts are funny, but I truly doubt that even those rating it a 10 have had the stomach to watch the entire feature. Out of morbid curiosity, I once did just that. This is a trauma I am still in therapy trying to recover from.

There is one reason to watch this film. If you wish to know how bad a film can be, then this is the golden standard by which all other should be judged.

I really can't be any more specific than that, I'm afraid. Any attempt to describe the plot of this movie will surely send me into convulsions.

Star Wars is absolute genius.

The characters, scenery, action, pacing, and rich mythological symbolism combine to create a story so compelling that few are not swept away. I saw Star Wars when I was seven years old, and have seen it at least once a year since then. (Some years many, many, more times than that, but lets not get started.)

One of the things that is so brilliant about this movie is that it works on every conceivable level. At seven, I didn't even fully understand the plot, but was still in awe. At seventeen I began to understand the movie on a deeper level. At 23 I had read "The Hero with 1000 faces by Joseph Campbell, and I understood that Star Wars was nothing less than the "Proto-Cultutral Myth." Star wars is the communal dream made glorious reality by the genius of its creator, George Lucas.

Today, as a writer, I am constantly awed buy this film. The way the plot subtly hooks the audience in from the very first instant is undeniable. The way the film makes the audience care about characters within minutes of their introduction should be studied by every future writer.

Star Wars is the Prolegomena to any Future Film.

For those lucky enough not to have seen AI, it is a ham-handed attempt to update the fairy-tale of Pinocchio into a modern science-fiction film. Unfortunately, AI fails as both fairy-tale and science-fiction. The plot seems to have been strung together from the abstracts of several other movies, as if the studio couldn't decide which film it wanted to make, and just decided to make them all. Spielberg doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on whether he is trying to make a film which makes literal sense, or one which casts aside realism in favor of deeper mythological truth. Over explanation, (often well past the point of absurdity,) plagues this film at every turn.

There are some high points in this total failure. The special effects are fantastic. I also found the story of Jude Law's character Joe, the robot gigolo, to be very entertaining. Law's performance is truly magnificent, but like every other side point which nearly works in AI, it merely serves as another opportunity for the audience to think, "Why didn't they make a movie about this instead?"

Would Kubrik have fared better at the helm? I don't know. He might have stayed away from some of the more gag-worthy schlock, but it is hard to imagine how this script could have been salvaged.

The bottom line is that AI is a long, boring story, told in a self-important, condescending tone. Time and time again, details which would have been better left to the imagination are explained until Spielberg is certain that even the dumbest member of the audience understands them. If that's you, you might actually enjoy this film.

The Beatles, in the role of Sgt. Peppers Lonley Heart's Club Band fight against the Blue Meanies for control of people's spirits. Here the power of psychelic music is viewed as an antidote to violence and oppression in society.

The animation is very interesting, as many techniques were used in this film for the first and last times.

The jokes are a bit foolish, and the attitude may seem naive, but these problems probably didn't matter to the highly altered audience it was initially intended for.