Frightened Inmate No. 2's Reviews

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I think I'm gonna take a break from reviews for a while. I feel like I have to force myself to write them, and it just isn't enjoyable anymore. I will still post all of the movies I watch in the Movie Tab, so you could still follow my Altman exploration and the rest of the movies I watch.



I think I'm gonna take a break from reviews for a while. I feel like I have to force myself to write them, and it just isn't enjoyable anymore. I will still post all of the movies I watch in the Movie Tab, so you could still follow my Altman exploration and the rest of the movies I watch.
Did you watch The Player yet?
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Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019



I'm gonna save that for my Altman finale, after I watch the other ones I want to see. I feel most confident that I will like that one, so I'm gonna try to go out on a high note. I watched 3 Women the other day (and liked it), and I want to see Secret Honor and Cookie's Fortune still, then I'll watch The Player.





hey, i'm gonna start doing these again, although maybe not quite as regularly as i used to. my taste has changed a lot since i last did these, so hopefully my reviews won't be as bad this time around, but i'm not making any promises. i look for different things in movies now, so my reviews won't just be "this had a good story and good characters. A+" and writing about them may actually help me digest the various themes and stuff, rather than just being an obligatory writing exercise that's just me spouting vague nonsense. i'm only going to write something if i have something to say, so i'm not going to give any plot summaries or add any superfluous sentences in an attempt to make myself sound like i have any writing skills, which i don't. my next review will be on godard's band of outsiders.


and i'm gonna try to force myself to write my reviews using capital letters, but don't hold me to that.



alright, so i wasn't very happy with how my band of outsiders review was turning out, so i'm not going to do that one. if you're curious, i thought it was really good and i gave it an 84/100. instead i'm going to review rocky, in what turned out to be far longer than what i expect most of my future reviews to be.


Rocky

This wasn't very good. Hating this movie requires far too much cynicism, because it's ultimately just a harmless little underdog film that probably accomplished everything it wanted to accomplish, but that doesn't mean it's good. For one thing, I didn't really like how it treated the "American Dream" as some sort of corporeal concept, rather than something metaphysical, and I find that definitive stance to be much less interesting than something that deals in more ambiguities like, to use a recent example, James Gray's The Immigrant. These movies are completely different, but I find Gray's much more interesting.

This also probably had of the worst romances I've ever seen. It starts off as some stupid opposites attract sort of thing, although it's impossible to care about because it forgets to give Adrian a personality beyond "shy." And then it gets worse, because after those one or two scenes of them building a relationship it decides to phase out what was left of her personality entirely. I really can't think of a single thing she does for the rest of the movie, besides that horribly cliche kiss at the end. It all just kind of makes that ice skating scene pretty pointless. It makes me wish they would've just given him a girlfriend from the beginning instead of spending time developing their incredibly hollow romance.

All of the characters were basically just lazy archetypes, with the possible exception of Rocky himself, I suppose. This movie is very up front with the fact that its a bunch of cliches and it fully embraces them. In an ideal world, embracing cliches would go along with maybe some sort of subversiveness or at least doing something kind of interesting with them, but there's none of that here. It was hard to even get very emotionally involved, since all of those iconic and uplifting scenes were really tonally out of place and way more awkward than they should've been. It probably could've elicited some sort of emotion towards the end if the fight scenes were shot better. I guess it gave me a greater appreciation for something like Cinderella Man, which is also full of cliches, but the fights are crafted to where you can feel every blow, to make the payoff that much sweeter.

As I said, I didn't hate this movie or anything. It's just kinda dumb.
56/100




Carl Weathers is awesome, though.



reading this thread is so surreal. i was literally 13 years old why was i allowed on the internet
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Most Biblical movies were long If I Recall.
seen A Clockwork Orange. In all honesty, the movie was weird and silly
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however i am considering bringing this thread back with new reviews, if only so i can forget about them for several years before eventually rereading them in the year 2033 while reflecting on the ignorance of youth



That sounds like a great idea! I'm excited to read your reviews. I haven't seen Say Anything in a while, but I remember liking it. Hope you enjoy it too! Let us know what you think.



decision to leave



was somewhat put off by the first 45 minutes of this, despite immediately recognizing it as surely one of the most precise and formally-audacious movies of the last 10 years. i found it stylistically and narratively overcooked in a way that was overwhelming. filmmaking so slick it's just slippery. it's basically one of those examples of a film teaching you how to watch itself, as we must grow accustomed to the rules the film is going to break in order to go along for the rest of the ride. eventually i realized i had passed my entrance exam when i began gradually warming to park's hyper-detailed version of the romantic thriller, in which our motivations and desires are as inexplicable to ourselves as they are to others, and by the end i was really (spoiler alert) digging it. perhaps the virtuoso filmmaking was doing a lot of work to disguise how underdeveloped the pathology of the central romance must read on the page, but that's why movies are movies and not scripts. these characters are linked not merely through words but through collapsing time and space. you feel the connection before you can even process it. and you certainly feel the shattering of park hae-il's self-image upon realizing his love for tang wei has done nothing but damage, to himself and to others. the ending is a powerful bit of dramatic irony, even if idk how much sense it makes from a character perspective. i can't not approve of a movie with so much formal and narrative experimentation deployed so confidently it somehow coheres into a perfectly-compelling piece of alluring pulp. it also can't really be overstated how much fun it is to look at.

+



What's Eating Gilbert Grape


I really don't have much to say about this movie. It was certainly good, but it wasn't that good. It was generally just kind of bland, but it was just entertaining and interesting enough to keep my interest. Donnie Brasco made me a Johnny Depp fan, and he gave another great performance here. Leonardo DiCaprio played his mentally challenged brother, and he did a great job making it realistic and believable, but I wish they would have done a bit more to make his character endearing to the audience, so you would have more reason to care about the character, besides just the fact that he's handicapped. I would have liked one more scene with Depp and DiCaprio bonding. Besides that, I really liked Depp's character, and I thought their family was interesting in general, and I liked his relationship with Juliette Lewis, but none of it was particularly great or intriguing. I don't mind having a movie without any gimmicks, but then the movie would need exceptional characters and character relationships, and this movie was just about average in those departments.


3.3/5
I liked this kovie a lot more than you did. Here's my review:


https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/...ert_grape.html



Rain Man is great, but I think it's Cruise's performance that makes the film what it is. However, it took me about 4 or 5 viewings before I started to think that way, so I can't blame you for thinking as I did the first time out.

I've not seen What's Eating Gilbert Grape? in forever, so I don't know how it feels these days, however, back in '93, OK, it was probably '1994/95 by the time I saw it, you didn't see too many small, independent smalltown America films. Especially ones about 'everyday/real people'. Now, of course, these films seem to be two a penny, but I remember this being among the first of the, post Reservoir Dogs, American Independent cinema that found its way over here and everything was just so small and intimate. So unlike what we were used to seeing from the US. It really had quite the effect.
Cruise's performance in Rain Man is so underrated and I think if he had allowed himself to be nominated in the supporting category than lead he might have received his first nomination for it.



Changing Lanes



Last night I watched Changing Lanes. As many people have noted before, it is not at all what you expect it to be. It is much more of a character-study than a revenge film. Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson both give strong performances, and make you feel for their characters, especially Jackson. They both try various ways to ruin each others lives, and you can see the character starting to change. There are some very nice character-analyzing scenes, such as the scene where Samuel L. Jackson talks with his sponsor, William Hurt, and is told that he is addicted to chaos, rather than alcohol. Jackson gives a fairly reserved performance, except for the times when the character really cracks, and destroys his bankers computer. Even then it doesn't go over-the-top, and you can't help but feel bad for his character. Some scenes might seem silly to some people, but they are handled well. You also see Ben Affleck growing fed up with the corruption in his law firm, after initially being a heavy part the corruption. The character change happens very gradually, yet very effectively and noticeably. The more I think about this movie, the more I like it.



EDIT: I'm gonna change the rating to 3.4/5, because the more I think about it, the more I like it less than when I was liking it more because I was thinking about it more.
Changing Lanes is a terrific film that has never gotten the acclaim it deserves.