I personally find him extraordinarily inspirational.
His ego must be bananas but it’s justified – he started from zilch and made it to the summit through body and mind. I would buy him a pint. I’d vote for him also.
Despite some big boo-boos that he openly admits to, he remains the definition of hero.
Classic songs you’d expect in a Scorsese movie ruined by their despairing accompaniment to threadbare scenes of Travolta and Alley mugging it, that’s Look Who’s Talking (1989) summed up.
I don’t get the point of any of it. It’s coarse, crude, cheap, and frankly just a minging watch. How is the interior monologue of a baby amusing? Oh, Bruce Willis does the voice of the critter. What genius!
A movie that can’t decide if it’s family fare or an R rating, it’s somewhere thrashing in the middle, daft and pointless. I suppose this got Travolta through his ‘wilderness years’ as it beguilingly scooped up a fucking fortune. But audiences know nothing.
I watch a lot of shite. I seem to enjoy it.
Warren Beatty was/is a movie star powerhouse, combining glamour looks and supreme acting talent, a 2 in 1. His notorious obsession with control over projects is confusing here, as he didn’t direct this. Anyway, he is magnetic as always, charming and unnerving and frequently hilarious. From his tantrums to his child-like enthusiasm and naïveté, he is totally credible. I suppose that’s acting.
An impressive movie if not quite great, its best attributes are the pacing and the fact it trusts its audience. There are none of the usual biopic pitfalls of the lengthy exposition which explains everything, and the schematic insertion of historical facts for the audience.
A glossy borderline melodrama which does it just the right way. Worth a watch for Beatty.
Whiplash (2014) is a cracking movie, eh. I would say … draining. It promotes a bit of an American Dream fallacy, though, namely that hard work = success. Nonsense. I could work like a sheep dog for 19 hours a day for seven years trying to fathom how the Tim Robbins character managed to escape Shawshank State Penitentiary yet perfectly place the poster (from the assembly point of the tunnel he dug) back on the cell wall … and still have no answers.
It makes no sense.
This was pathetic from the very first second, the opening a superhero movie-style newspaper headlines montage to make up for the lack of a well-written exposition.
It’s so dull, the script going like this:
Character one: “Something is happening.”
Character two: “What is happening?”
Character one proceeds to explain what is happening and then reeling off a line with a time and date of an event in order to segue to the next scene.
What else? No one in it appears to be affected by anything that happens to them in a case of ordinarily excellent actors phoning it in. It is so badly edited, cut to the max in desperation yet still dull. Framing is without purpose. Music is better suited to a two-hour sequence shot of a pigeon napping. This movie is an abomination.
Watch Manhunter (1986) instead.
I must confess, I loved this.
It is unabashed glossy trash of the highest order, with Douglas at his peak of sleaze. It’s how I image Gordon Gekko would be in his private affairs. I didn’t care much for the machinations of the plot, but merely for the level of smug on display, though David Suchet’s detective seems to think it’s an actual Cannes-worthy art piece he’s in.
I’ve never seen the Hitchcock one. A new quest.
The take-home image is of Bobby De Niro and his cool-as-milk beard. And his cool hat.
It’s not exactly a funny movie (not a single laugh was had) but more of a witty satire that stays just on the right side of absurd because you can genuinely see this stuff happening for it sort of has happened.
Politicians and their helpers are mostly reptiles and will do anything to win power – history tell us this, and Wag the Dog (1997) exposes the techniques spin doctors use and the cynicism of distraction, PR in its essence, if you will. It also draws our attention to the collusion between the media and the political class. More films should do this.
Denis Leary is highly annoying, though. He doesn’t seem sincere. His persona is a grating act and I don’t get his appeal or why he is in films.
But he’s not in this much.
Thank fuck.
I never thought much for John Grisham with his seemingly bottomless supply of the same sledgehammer page-turners for the courtroom lay person. But this is Hackman and Hoffman in their only film together, the “least likely to succeed” still chewing up the scenery.
This is glossy and decent enough as expected but with an intriguing premise offering something quite different from the usual going-through-the-motions drama. Jury selection/packing/tampering/whatever is the focus, and it’s quite the line-up: Cliff Curtis, Luis Guzmán, and, somehow, Uncle Frank with no eyesight.
And it doesn’t skirt around an issue, guns, that is still an … issue. Because it’s never not going to be.
Worth a watch.
The reasons multiple, I put off watching this for a long time.
My two cents:
Again, the needy references to superior fare, the sheer desperation of bad writing, the mindless action with seemingly nothing at stake.
The ‘characters’ here buy the premise so instantly that you’re immediately questioning their validity, and as they have no dimensions it’s doubly irritating. They are chucked into unimaginative shoot-outs from the get-go. Who are these people? No idea, so I don’t care. There’s an antagonist who is as threatening as a poodle slurping a bowl of Bacardi Breezer, a hero sent from the future who is just plain dull, and Linda Hamilton looks more bored than I was watching her being bored.
I got to 48 mins. I couldn’t take any more torture and turned it off before Arnie arrived. So boring, so without logic or merit, so pedestrian on every level. This has to be the end of this extended shower of shit.
No more.
A surprise.
If you wish to see a labyrinth of corporate greed which the financial lay person (me being one of them) can almost understand, then this is one limited series for you.
It’s an addiction. And this is in spite of the cringe slow-motion visuals every other minute of a Madoff doppelgänger circling his office with the same rictus grin, a “financial serial killer” in his element.
As a history lesson, it’s impeccable, and none of the willing participants are let off lightly.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 