| Movie | Rating | Review | Date | Your Rating | Match | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avatar - PG-13 | December 21, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Blood Diamond - R |
"Blood Diamond" is a cynical, particularly nasty little film which reinforces every single negative stereotype about Hollywood productions. Rarely has a film managed to offend me so, but that is nothing when compared to the sickening adoration the film is constantly lavished with. This is an arrogant, lazy, racist, simpleminded little job that was engineered for the sole purpose of filling a niche, fulfilling a quota. Los Angeles is permanently trying to convince the rest of the United States (and itself) that it is a progressive, open minded, knowledgeable bastion of artists and free thinkers. Films like this allow them to maintain that illusion while also raking in the dough. By dealing in stereotypes, short cuts and the assumed ignorance of its audience, the film tries to both have its cake (be a rallying point for Hollywood's chic social cause du jour) and eat it too (assuring a considerable profit and recognition by not risking the alienation of mainstream audiences offending potential big money investors). Thus, I find the film guilty of the following sins: Sin #1: Despite being set in Sierra Leone, two of the film's three main characters are white. This is what is known as a "gateway" in Hollywood. Studio bigwigs are afraid that audiences will not be able to relate to a foreign culture so they opt to provide a character or characters for the target audience to empathize with. In short: we don't like black people, we do like white people, if we see white people we like being nice to black people we don't like, we'll grow to care about those black people. Edward Zwick ("Glory", "The Last Samurai") specializes in this. Offensive? A tad. Sin #2: From its opening scene the film reveals contempt for its audience. Not only does it expect us not to know what african conflict diamonds are (despite the fact not all of us are ignorant drones, and the fact it was even the key plot point in Pierce Brosnan's last James Bond film for god's sake) but it expects us to be so stupid that the only way we can be told, for our own good, what they are is via the use of verbose, repetitive exposition in a scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the film. Every single character at that meeting knows full well what blood diamonds are. There is no reason whatsoever to call said meeting save for our benefit. The fact is, the studios felt we as an audience are so stupid that using any other means but the most direct and illogical exposition would be to go over our heads. Sin #3: The film uses key issues as mere plot points and refuses to deal with any of them as anything other than action film set pieces, oversimplifying them to the only language big studios think we, the audience, understand: good guys, bad guys, explosions. One of the film's early sequences has the rounding up of children by a rebel militia. As the film progresses, the children will be indoctrinated and become part of the militia itself. The issue of rebel militias and civil war in Africa is, of course, incredibly complex and stems back as far the arbitrary establishment of territorial borders by the United Nations in the 1950s. The film sees it as a decidedly simple issue: rebel militias are clear cut bad guys who exist solely to enrich a lazy, immoral, debaucherous, gleefully evil warlord. He exists solely to cause evil and strife and has no other agenda of any kind. Any other "issues" that the film "raises" are simply mentioned, in passing, by Jennifer Connelly's character for no other reason than for the film to say it took place in Sierra Leone. Sin #4: The film relies on ethnic stereotypes as shortcuts. I've already mentioned that the militia leader is a cartoon of a character, evil for the sake of being evil. What I haven't mentioned is why the film expected us to take it at its word without expecting an ounce of character or idiosyncrasy. The warlord is a large, muscular black man with a deep voice, a penchant for wearing sunglasses and a gun. This is such a pervasive ethnic image that is plastered day in and day out all over film, television, newspapers, magazines, t-shirts and album covers that the film felt it was enough merely to present it. In screenwriting theory 101, stereotypes are used for economic character development, giving a film the freedom to focus its energies elsewhere. The fact "Blood Diamond" felt that the we would accept the warlord's cartoonish behavior simply because he is a black, muscular, deep voiced man with a gun (an image that, studio bigwigs feel, mainstream audiences are immediately threatened by) speaks for itself. Sin #5: The film is reliant on Hollywood's confused immoral-morality. Our one black lead, a pacifist, resorts to violence at the end of the film. It was perhaps justified as a portrayal of the lengths a father will go through for his son when the script was written, but in the film it plays as all action films do: the bad guy is evil and must be killed by a good guy, and good guys are not truly "good" until they have proven their valor via physical combat. Then and only then can we, the audience, root for them as "heroes". As if that weren't enough, the film's ending seems to argue that the solution to Africa's trouble is for it (and its inhabitants) to become more westernized either metaphorically (Djimon Honsou eventually learned "valuable lessons" from the supposedly-south-african-but-really-western Leonardo DiCaprio) or literally (by moving to England). These sins are hardly the film's only faults, but any other problems I may have had with it (DiCaprio's on and off accent, the editing, the direction) are secondary and terciary. The fact remains, watching "Blood Diamond" in theaters was one of the more uncomfortable, unpleasant things I had experienced up until then. I felt dirty and cheated by the times the credits rolled, but above all else I felt angry. As this film proves for the hundredth time, when vile exploitation gets delusions of social relevance the results are infuriating. |
December 21, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Body of Lies - R |
Dumb, racist garbage. Ridley Scott must either have lucked into "Kingdom of Heaven" or realized after it bombed that nuanced portrayals of Arabic characters do not generate sufficient revenue for megabudgeted productions. Best moment: Leonardo DiCaprio, who would fit right in at a SoCal frat party, passing himself off as a native Iraqui during the early portions of the movie and having no arabic character be the wiser. |
December 20, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Sharks in Venice - Unrated | December 20, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Is it Fall Yet? (Daria in Is It Fall Yet?) - Unrated | December 18, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Is It College Yet? (Daria: Is It College Yet?) - Unrated | December 18, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| 20 Million Miles to Earth - PG | December 16, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Earth vs. the Flying Saucers - Unrated | December 16, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| It Came from Beneath the Sea - Unrated | December 16, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Day the Earth Stood Still - PG-13 | December 16, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Teenagers From Outer Space - Unrated | December 16, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Invasion of the Saucer Men (Invasion of the Hell Creatures)(Spacemen Saturday Night) - Unrated | December 16, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Slumber Party Massacre III (Stab in the Dark) - R |
Everything slashers have ever been accused of being by critics and parental groups. Lacking the subversiveness of the original and the sheer insanity of its sequel, this third encarnation is nothing more than a throwaway cheapie. References to its predecessors (a scene involving a pizza, phallic commentary, voyeurism) feel forced and tacked on and, despite not being as obviously padded as "Slumber Party Massacre 2" there was no reason it should have been longer than an hour. To be avoided. |
December 15, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Bang - Unrated | December 14, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| La Terza Madre (Mother of Tears: The Third Mother) - Unrated |
Completely devoid of atmosphere, class, stylishness and any semblance of direction, "La Terza Madre" is a tremendous disappointment and perhaps the final nail in the coffin of what has become Dario Argento's career. His outpùt over the last decade had been of systematically decreasing quality, but the hope always remained that going back to his roots would breathe new life into his art. After this, however, there are no two ways about it: the man truly has lost it. That the film was either shot or (for some incomprehensible reason) transferred to digital should tell you all you need to know about just how far he has fallen. Much like the work of his contemporary, Lucio Fulci, "La Terza Madre" is nothing but an excuse to pile on the gore. The film goes completely out of its way (and much to the detriment of its already troublesome pacing and what little mood it had reluctantly managed to generate) to focus on the violence. The first kill,: poorly edited, amateurishly staged and drawn out beyond comprehension, is enough to reveal where the film's priorities lie: blood and guts uber alles. Throw in an insurmnountable ammount of expository dialogue (a necessity, perhaps, due to budgetary restraints but no more the pleasant for it), putrid acting (Dario Argento tends to bring out the worst in his daughter) and a point-and-shoot directorial approach that any hack with a camera could have duplicated and you are left with a lifeless mass cobbled together seemingly at random by people with nary a clue as to what they were doing or, more importantly, why. The horror frat boys (as exemplified by Eli Roth, their idol and patron saint) will no doubt love the film, laughing and hollering their way through it and that is perhaps the saddest thing of all. If this film is any indication then Argento has become everything he was always unfairly accused of being, a parody of what he actually was, a one note running joke. Forget style over substance: his trilogy capper is gore AS style AS substance, and all the cameos in the world from former collaborators can't save it from itself. |
December 14, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) - Unrated | Just about flawless. | December 12, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Watership Down - PG | "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenevet they catch you they will kill you. But first, they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, Prince with the Swift Warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed." | December 11, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Sherlock Holmes - PG-13 | December 11, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| The Slumber Party Massacre - R | Despite poor word of mouth, surprisingly smart and incisive. | December 8, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Be Kind Rewind - PG-13 | December 7, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama - R | December 7, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Slumber Party Massacre II (Don't Let Go) - R | I'm tempted to give it a positive rating due to the sheer, anarchic insanity the film made me privy to, but I can't overlook how incompetent the vast majority of it is. | December 6, 2009 | N/A | |||
| Sleepaway Camp II - Unhappy Campers - R | December 5, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Sleepaway Camp - R | December 5, 2009 | N/A | ||||
| Rear Window - PG | December 4, 2009 | N/A |
1042 ratings
611 reviews
