MondoTrasho

by Tania

Oh, yeah...
And yet another one...
Most people say it's a bad movie, but I do not agree with 'em.
I thought it was gripping all the way through. Uterly emotional, nerve breaking stuff. I'm pretty sure I would have left the theater room without any nails (either fingers' or toes') if only I had the habit of biting them.
And let's cut the crap. Cruise does deliver a rather good performance on this one. Him and everyone else on the cast. Especially Fanning. The best of them all for sure.
I'm not gonna say it's a terribly brilliant movie, but I honestly don't think it deserves all the bashing against it either. The way people were criticizing this film back when it was released, I was expecting it to be just another stupid, dull Hollywood production. And, well... It really wasn't that way at all.
Still, I guess the ending could have been a lot more incisive than it actually was. I mean, I liked the ending. I just didn't like the way it came out. Too little impact considering all the tension throughout most of the film.
But, in this case, the ending itself doesn't make it a bad movie. Only a not so great one.
Something I was able to cope with rather well, since the rest of the film was good enough to pay off for the time I've spent watching it.

by Quinto

"The End... or the beginning?" I love when they do that, and it also kept me laughing how everyone seems to be yelling their lines all the time. As for the film itself, very entertaining and I found the gore satisfying. A nice, bloody time.

by Kevin

You know those little movies that you absolutely LOVE but hardly anyone else has ever heard of? Those movies that you watch and wonder why no one ever talks about them or praises them or includes them in their list of favorites? Do you know those movies? Well this is one of those movies.

Jason Robards is a middle-aged, unemployed bachelor who is raising his 12-year-old nephew (Barry Gordon) in the heart of New York City. When confronted by representatives from NY social services, Robards is faced with the choice of either conforming to "acceptable" standards (getting a job) or risk losing his nephew to the bureaucracy of the child welfare system.

I have an affinity for cerebral comedies and this is definitely one of the best I've ever seen. It stimulates the mind, tickles the funny bone and touches the heart.

*Thank you Audrey and Stella for bringing this wonderful, wonderful film to my attention!

by Stella

francis ford coppola's first film, produced by roger corman; a kind of gothic homage to psycho. cheesy but fun! and u can watch it here: http://www.archive.org/details/Dementia_13

by Veronique

"the good earth" is the earliest massive hollywood productions for oriental epic in exclusion of fu manchu series. it has great ambition to interpret the national spirit of china, its farming business under a bunch of stagy performances from caucasion yellow-face. and the issue has no relevance of its chinese authenticness but how old america views china.


it is a story about wang lung the farmer(paul muni), who marries a slavegirl in the big house named o-lan. and together they strive for their rocky future with mettle with their conventional chinese virtues. they've been thru harvest prosperity, drought, famine and the revolution of republic china as well as wang's illict affair with courtesan lotus.

mostly it depicts the condescending perspect of man's derogatory viewpoint on women which is actually true in ancient china, and women are merely usable products who help men to plow the rice fields and bring them extensions. without that, a woman could be considered worthless, and the dichotomy of benevolent saint and malevolent siren reflects on the two major female characters: o-lan, the slavegirl turning to the farmer's wife; lotus, the insidious temptress who drains men's wealth. eventually the conclusion would be good woman is like earth which provides everything with endless flourishments.

the earliest chinese star then anna may wong was keen to obtain the role of virtuous o-lan to alter her dreary image of malicious sirens in a bunch of negative orient-themed movies where she has to die "a thousand times" in the end. but the studio refuses to grant her that becuz of the racial segregation principle then: a caucasion male cannot make love or pair licitly with a oriental female on screen (so asian women are neither mistresses or villainy on screen), even as roles of yellow face. even the temptress lotus goes down to another actress with approved ethnicity despite the role lotus is literarily inspired by the oriental femme fatale image in wong's early silent pictures.

the point of making "the good earth" itself is a campy articce, so why bother to use a real chinese or not since the story won't present the real china anyway? as for anna may wong, she is thorough america-nourished american except her ethnicity, and she doesn't even conform to the corny chinese virtues of obediency or dependency on man anyway, further more she has never been with a chinese man for all her life at all. so in exclusion of her chinese outlook, there's not really any that much of traditional chineseness in her. so it won't be really a shame or a pity for her abscence as o-lan in this piece, but she would probably make an adequate lotus.

the title song for "the good earth" would be "the jasmine song" which has nothing to do with farming but a common folk song praising the beauty of jasmine flower in spite of its melodius smoothness. and in the scene of new infant birth, it's accompanied with the song celebrating the feng-yang drum which is my father's regional folk song in old china. so it would be highly phony to deem "the good earth" as a chinese epic, and even pearl s. buck who writes the original novel might have some bias for china. but it does bare some worthwhile process of collecting crops from the rice fields which i have never paid attention before. and the photography has its contived oriental aesthetism under the helm of four directors, including victor fleming from "gone with the wind".

so allow me to put it this way, the pleasure of "good earth" would be the brass flatulency of vintage caucasion hollywood's eccentric perception on "the inscrutable orient". ABSOLUTE CAMP!

by Quinto

The fairy-tale angle of the film is pretty cute and entertaining, though the romantic one is certainly uneven. Still, Christina Ricci looks very adorable. I just kept wanting to have eskimo make-out sessions with her. I also really liked the wardrobe and the production.

by edwin

Ravenous is a picture just weird enough to match its strange subject matter. For that it did itself no favours with the public, but it gained a certain amount of respect and admiration from a good many.
Captain Boyd (Guy Pearce) is sent to a Californian Fort in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as punishment for his cowardice. He is celebrated as a hero publicly after overtaking an enemy stronghold, but as he points out he was only able to do so by an act of cowardice. He played dead, and was stacked in with other dead men piled on top of him, their blood running into his mouth. This he says changed him, gave him strength, and he was subsequently able to fight his way out from behind enemy lines. Since it would set a bad precedent to explicitly punish him, the army sends him to the isolated post.
Fort Spencer is cold, lonely, and quite unsettling. There is but a skeleton crew - Col. Hart (Jeffrey Jones), Pvt Toffler, the religious one (Jeremy Davies), Pvt Cleaves (David Arquette), Knox (Stephen Spinella), and Reich, the soldier (Neal McDonough). Also at the post are two Native Americans, George and Martha, who it is said more or less came with the location.
One night a mysterious man shows up, claiming to have been lost on an expedition for three months now in the mountains. They survived by eating whatever they could until the first casualty, then they ate the body. Their taste for human meat was peaked, and they began killing eachother off to quench their evergrowing hunger. That man is Calhoun (Robert Carlyle). He claims that he ran away from the group, and that there is only one woman left, and a man who's hunger could not be sufficed, Col Ives. He leads the soldiers to a cave where it turns out he is actually the real Col Ives, and has tricked them into a trap.
The film turns from there into a cat and mouse game between Boyd and Ives, and a tale of to eat or not to eat human flesh, which the Native George explains allows the eater to gain the power of the eaten. Director Antonia Boyd, a vegetarian, makes scenes of eating rather repulsive, and uses music as a focal point for highlighting the strangeness of the picture. She makes Ravenous not a horror-gore fest (though there are moments horror in nature and occasional buckets of gore), but a pitch black comedy-thriller-suspense-mystery.
The film is ambitious, maybe a little too ambitious for its script. It gets lost at times shifting between its genres and intentions, which likely was the directors intention though. This film is not just offbeat, its a mish mash of entirely different tempos. That could have been a recipe for disaster, but Bird handles things at just the right pace, and just the right oddity to create what really is a very unique and entertaining film.
I like to think of Ravenous as something of a cult favorite of mine. I admire greatly the work here. Bird makes the locations feel cold, dirty, and uncomfortable, and the actors all hit their marks with the right resonance. Carlyle is particularly menacing, and darkly amusing, as Ives/Calhoun. The actors should all be commended, not least for their courage to take on such a strange project that was clearly doomed to fail at the box office.
The music is more or less a star in the film itself. Its strange, amusing, bewildering, and fascinating all at once.
Yes, the story loses its way at times, and seems to be there simply to suffice the films style and texture, but Ravenous is a film that cries out for such style. I don't know if its necessarily aiming for greatness, but its reaching high into uncharted skies, and for that I am one of those who's admiration and respect Ravenous has earned.

by Tania

Pretty watchable movie.
And quite easy to review also.

Wanna bet?

- Sudden zombie boom;
- film students catching zombies on camera;
- zombies roaming around all over the place;
- film students running away from zombies while catching them on camera;
- normal people turning into zombies;
- film students witnessing normal people turn into zombies while catching them on camera;
- ...

... And so on and so forth.

It's not a great film, as you may suspect already, but it isn't all that bad either.
The amateur camera work adds a nice touch to it. Makes it feel a little different from other zombie movies and a bit more realistic.
As far as realism can go in this genre, that is.
But, yeah, the directing style helped the rating a great deal. And considering that I only gave it 3 stars... You can imagine how it isn't such a must-see movie.

by astro

NICOLE 4 PRESIDENT!!!!!!!!

by Quinto

Jason Statham steps back from his usual ass-kicking, car-chasing, explosions-surviving persona and lets a good, solid story deliver the thrills and suspense that keeps you glued to the screen.

by Tania

Pretty interesting to follow the life story of an emerging sociopath such as Myers.
This is exactly what captivated me the most in this film: the chance to follow the evolution of one of the most mind-blowing psychopathologies in the history of mankind. (Well, at least in my book it is a very mind-blowing one.) Here we get the chance to take a peek at its implications while it is still in a sort of incubation stage. While the child is still discovering his abnormal anti-social tendencies as well as his compelling urge to slice open every breathing being.
And although I wouldn't have minded witnessing the whole thing right from the very start (right since the moment that little psycho brat was born), Myers' already a young man when the movie begins. Pitty! But the way this story is portrayed, I guess watching him in his earlier years wouldn't be much of a help when it comes to shed some light on his condition.
And it is in fact the whole story behind the main character that makes this movie worthwhile. Not the chills (which are very few), not the bloody scenes, not the suspense,... Nothing like that. It's really not all that scary to watch. But it is rather unsettling, though. At least until Myers grows up, that is. Then it's just like all the other horror movies portraying serial killers. Nothing new in that department.
Still, the first half makes up perfectly for the 'been there, done that' rest of the film.

by Quinto

Everything looks shiny and brand-new; the cast is dynamic and easy to look at, but the fun comes and goes way too fast and the story doesn't really grab you until the last half hour of it's two-hour running time. Also, the two asian supporting characters were more interesting than its leads and they didn't get enough screen time.

by Markus

If you like Mad Max, this is your bag baby.

by Jessi

A veteran of the Vietnam war comes home to all new horrors that force him to seek revenge, with a little help from some friends.

Absolutely brilliant. William Devane is mad, and its wonderful. The ending of this flick keeps it from falling towards mediocrity.

Delicious grindhouse flick.

by Felice

What a slasher flick. It gets straight into the violence and doesn't let up for the entire film. The ending will have your jaw dropping.
Slickly shot, suspenseful and fast-paced, this film is a horror lovers dream.

by Tania

Meh... Too sweet for my taste.
But I'm not gonna say it's a bad movie. I'm sure you'll love it, if by any chance you're into this sort of films.
And Carell is quite funny as this 'How the hell am I supposed to deal with these teenage girls who happen to be my daughters' kind of father. I personally liked him better on the Daily Show, but I must admit he doesn't do bad here either.
This was a first for me, you know? I mean, watching him perform in a movie. And I was quite pleased to find his talent for comedy is still in shape.
But as it turns out, it wasn't enough to win me over. The romance factor is too much of a presence and spoils just about any laughs Carell's silliness may provide.
And besides, Binoche's being part of the cast didn't help all that much either. I don't know why, but that woman really gets on my nerves sometimes. I think maybe it's because of her annoying naive look and persistent silly-cute smile. A real pãozinho sem sal as they say in my country.
Roughly translating it, a real tiny bread without salt.

What?
It makes sense where I come from.

by B.

I'm speechless! I'm still in shock at this masterpiece called The DARK KNIGHT. I walked out of the theater in awe and realized this movie is something special and cannot be measured on a scale of 5 stars. Beautifully orchestrated and the actors all fell into perfect place, they weren't there for eye candy, they were all execellent in their roles. This is a movie you must watch, comic book fan or unfan, this is by far the best film of 2008. Director Christopher Nolan surpasses "Batman Begins" and blows the roof off with this installment of the Batman series. So well written, each scene with tension and drama that made Batman real and honest and got to the heart of who he is. This is a film based on a comic book, not a comic book trying to be a film. It evokes real life human emotion within the characters, not only Batman's character but questions our morals as well. Christian Bale is Bruce Wayne and Batman in every sense, perfect. Heath Ledger left me wanting for more and plays the Joker superb! He is menacing, demonic and scary on screen, loved his one liners! Finally seeing them duel it out on film was way over do and loved every minute of it. Batman versus Joker! This was it and the battles they had were intense and action packed! I applauded, I cheered and thats what movies should do! Two thumbs up for Dark Knight.
Favorite Scene:Batman and Joker, face to face in the interrogation room. Classic! Favorite Line: JOKER; I'm like a dog chasing cars, but I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. I just do!