veeckasinwreck Reviews

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Like watching paint dry

[3/10 · 2 March 2020]

To be fair, it is not completely terrible. A lot of it is visually arresting; many of the scenes are composed in a satisfying manner and when we see the paint being applied to the canvas, that holds our interest for a time, although not nearly long enough to justify the length of these scenes. It brings to mind films like "Black Swan" and "The English Patient", which were similarly incoherent, static, and wrongheaded but got great reviews by pandering to the audience, implicitly praising the movie goer with high-flown cultural references ("I like this film because I am so deep. I get all the High Culture stuff; this movie is for people with a profound artistic soul-like me!"). In the case of "Portrait of a Lady on Fire", the cultural touchstones are the "Orfeo" myth and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons". Interestingly, all these films promise an erotic experience, but fail to deliver because none of the characters bear any resemblance to real human beings. There is a discussion of Orfeo in which one of the main characters fatuously pronounces that Orfeo looked back at Euridice because he was at heart an artist, not a lover. This is the movie in a nutshell, a mock-profound statement that becomes more and more meaningless the more you think about it. There is nothing resembling a plausible conversation in "Lady on Fire". Most of what is said consists of aphorisms that would fit nicely inside a fortune cookie. There is a halfhearted stab at feminism, as the women create an idealized society when they can live in a wonderful world without men, and there is a subplot involving abortion, airlifted in from some other movie.

Timbuktu (2014)

Hard to watch but a brilliant achievement

[9/10 · 18 February 2015]

I don't believe there is one frame in this film that is not gorgeous, that couldn't be displayed as a photograph at a gallery. The muted colors of the desert, the medieval architecture of the town, the tragically expressive faces always glowing in a magical light--all of it is almost painfully beautiful. The story is beyond tragic. By seemingly digressing into numerous anecdotes illustrating the quirks of the population, the director allows us to appreciate deeply the texture and social fabric of the community that is being poisoned by madness. We see in particular its effect on an extremely appealing but by no means sanctified family. This is one of the film's extraordinary strengths as well. No character is oversimplified; even the appalling jihadists are granted their humanity. I've seen "Boyhood" and "Birdman", the apparent favorites for the Oscar. "Timbuktu" utterly blows both those fine movies out of the water.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

A train wreck

[2/10 · 11 October 2014]

Oh my God, what a mess! There is no narrative flow; indeed anything resembling typical plot devices to keep the story going has approximately the same role in this as dialog has in porno movies...just marking time until the next payoff (in this case, violence, not sex). The women in this movie are invariably employed in one of three ways. They either 1: Expose their breasts; 2: Scream in terror; or 3: Scream in terror with their breasts exposed. Poor Bob Dylan, who from the looks of him was going through a very bad time in his life, has a few scenes looking very uncomfortable atop a horse, for no apparent reason.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

this movie still disgusts me 40 years later

[1/10 · 21 June 2013]

I remember watching this in the theater when it came out, in a privileged college town. When Nicholson abuses the waitress in the iconic scene that everybody else seems to love, all the well-off punks in the theater cheered ecstatically. How heroic to humiliate a poor waitress in a lousy diner! Nobody involved in the movie could be bothered to see the world from the waitress's point of view. And classical music as a symbol of privilege, a short-hand for the bad guys--isn't this the tiredest cliché in movies (The Bond villain in "The Spy Loved Me", Hannibal Lechter, etc etc etc etc....)? The movie also features one of the worst sex scenes in cinematic history. Jack Nicholson puts the moves on his brother's lover (The brother is a graceless geek, cause, you know, that's what all classical musicians are like) by destroying some of her possessions and going all he-man and violent on her. She explodes with passion! Because that's what women want, after all. In a scene near the end, an insufferable bitch at an insufferable party condescends to Nicholson's girlfriend. And he goes out of his mind with Nicholsonian rage. Maybe the falsest scene of this whole fraudulent movie--he has been treating her with utter disdain for two hours on the screen already. What does he expect? This movie still makes me sick.

Magic Mike (2012)

More than skin deep

[8/10 · 22 July 2012]

I'm not the demographic associated with this film's audience, but I was pretty sure my wife would enjoy it. I ended up very impressed with it as well. Soderbergh, as always is very good at what he does. The stripper scenes have a palpable, toxic energy, and he has not lost his knack for highlighting the exact detail in the frame that truly tells the story. The acting is extraordinary across the board, and in a real upset, the most interesting character is a woman. Cody Horn is transcendentally beautiful, and her attraction to Magic Mike, an attraction that she strives to will out of existence, is utterly compelling. At heart this movie is their love story, and the end is not entirely satisfactory; it is at once too pat and yet leaves too many loose ends. Still, it is without question one of the better films I have seen in some time.

Strangers in Good Company (1990)

beautiful in every way; not a misstep in the film

[10/10 · 20 August 2011]

To begin, the craft in making this film is extraordinary. Every camera shot is purposeful and arresting. The lighting is magical. The music is gorgeous and perfect; the Schubert excerpts are heartbreakingly beautiful. The natural setting is miraculous. The women in the cast are completely natural, unaffected, and suck you into their lives. You grow to love them all, and care intensely about them. You feel for their pain, but they have far too much dignity to be mere objects of pity. The sheer humanity of this modest little film is overpowering. I saw it when it first came out, and just saw it again on NetFlix, maybe 20 years later. If anything, the experience of watching it the second time was even richer. One of the three or four most affecting films I have ever seen.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

A glorious fairy tale

[9/10 · 28 May 2011]

Woody Allen plugs along decade after decade, stolidly churning out films. Every once in a while, he catches lightning in a bottle. This film is beautiful to look at, beautifully paced, beautifully acted, and pure pleasure from beginning to end. The lead dresses like Woody, although he has a physicality that makes his attraction to women more plausible. Is it just me, or does he sound like Jimmy Stewart? The women are absolutely gorgeous; Woody has not lost his knack for bathing women in a transcendent light. The bad guys(a pompous professor, the fiancée and her parents) are brutally sketched with perfect telling details. And best of all is Paris itself, looking at least as beautiful and magical as the New York of Allen's classic films of generations past. It is a movie about nostalgia, idealism, and those of us who feel out of place in our own time, and it is nearly perfect.

Black Swan (2010)

so many talented people...such a bad movie

[2/10 · 21 January 2011]

A little something for everybody. Girl-on-girl sex, the biopic cliché of the tortured female star (Edith Piaf, Janis Joplin, Fannie Brice etc. etc.) who may or may not make it through the performance, the preposterous thesis that a controlling parent will make you insane ("Shine"), grotesque blood and guts ("Friday the 13th", "The Exorcist, etc.), ah, but you see...it is so ARTISTIC. Natalie Portman acts the part beautifully, yet she is a cipher. You don't feel that you know her and so you don't care about her; all her perils just come off as more transparent manipulations from the director. Actually, none of the wonderful actors in this movie can overcome the preposterous plot to convince you that they are recognizable human beings. Tchaikovsky's music is wonderful.

Yogi Bear (2010)

My kid loved it, I rather enjoyed it myself

[7/10 · 10 January 2011]

I was expecting to hate this movie after reading the reviews, but my son had seen a lot of the publicity for it, and his friends liked it. So we sucked it up on a bitter winter day and went for the full-on 3D version. I'm not sure that the 3-D adds anything to it, but it was amusing and diverting. Dan Ackroyd and Timberlake were wonderful as the primary voices. People on this board complain about the plot. Come on--it's a kids cartoon! To expect a compelling plot would be like buying "Hustler" to read the articles. The plot, such as it is, keeps the film moving along and provides motivation for the pratfalls and physical humor, which are executed better than for most movies of this kind. It doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is, and it is good at what it does. I'll sure take it over "Fantastic Mr. Fox".

Religulous (2008)

shooting fish in a barrel--but missing some

[3/10 · 30 November 2010]

Bill is a funny guy, and he doesn't always pick on somebody his own size. A lot of his humor is not unlike what Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh used to do on their TV shows. He finds the most incoherent guy he can who disagrees with him and then edits the tape to make his foil look as stupid as possible. I had a bit of trouble with his premise. Certainly, religion has resulted in lots of stupid and appalling behavior, but so has fundamentalism of a number of non-religious flavors--free market capitalism, Marxism, nationalist triumphalism, etc. If you believe something utterly and unthinkingly, bad things will result, whether or not what you believe has anything to do with a deity. And if your belief is leavened with tolerance and humility, your religion (or support of capitalism or socialism, or whatever) may well do more good than harm. It was weird how he chose to pull his punches at times and go for the jugular at others. He found maybe the most appealing non-dogmatic Catholic priest on earth to talk to, but did not deign to approach any adherent of Islam who was not a bomb-throwing wacko. I know that they are out there--I live a couple blocks from a mosque and have wonderful Pakistani and East African neighbors. But the Islamic people I know would not have fit into the simplistic narrative.

The English Patient (1996)

revolting

[2/10 · 26 November 2010]

OK, here's a guy who collaborates with the Nazis, which from a world/historical perspective is about as contemptible a thing as you can do. He also has an affair with his best friend's wife, which from a local/personal point of view is about the most contemptible thing you can do. But, hey--he looks like a model and has great sex so we are supposed to root for him! Yeah, it's beautiful to look at for a while, and the sound track is sort of cool in an exotic world-music "see how Bohemian we are!" sort of way. There is a scene near the end where they are swinging along in some sort of cave with a torch looking at great old frescoes. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the movie, but no doubt it flatters the target audience--"We are artistic. We are sensitive. We appreciate Beauty, unlike the rest of you swine." I made it through to the end, but just barely.

Room in Rome (2010)

It's amazing how tedious looking at gorgeous naked women can be

[2/10 · 19 November 2010]

A beautiful Spanish woman lures a beautiful Russian woman up to her Rome hotel room. They disrobe and spend the night talking and occasionally simulating sex, and we get to watch. The premise is that they slowly come to trust each other with their deepest secrets, and various revelations ooze out on an entirely predictable schedule. I found it absolutely impossible to suspend disbelief and believe that these actresses were actually living breathing human beings who had experienced the various life-changing events that they described--maybe they sound more convincing in their native languages. There is a small role for a room-service guy; I'm still trying to figure out what he had to do with the price of rice in China. On the plus side, the hotel room is stunning, with lots of cool art (Like "The English Patient", this movie will appeal to the sort of insufferable aesthetes who likes to have their taste implicitly praised when attending a movie). There is also a rather creative use of Google Earth.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

not quite as clever as it thinks it is

[5/10 · 28 November 2009]

George Clooney is pretty much the same character he played in "Oh Brother Where Art Thou". As in that movie, by far the best thing about "Mr. Fox" is the music, although "Brother" was somewhat better in that regard. Who is this movie for? It is too dark for children--I very much regret taking my 7-year-old to see it, and some younger girls nearby seemed traumatized. And yet it is not an adult movie either; animated animals, cartoon violence, and no fully realized characters. A appearance by a wolf near the end is clearly meant to be a great peroration, but is set up and executed is so perfunctory a manner as to be almost embarrassing. Wes Anderson seems to think that the movie is quite ironic and clever; to me it lacks humanity and any real insight. The animation is beautiful and the music is quite well executed. There are a few scenes that are quite good, mostly involving the relationship between Ash and his cousin Kristofferson. These are the primary strengths of a movie that disappoints overall.

A Hungarian Fairy Tale (1987)

Mozartian inspiration

[10/10 · 15 December 2008]

I saw this film more than 20 years ago, and never could get it out of my imagination--it is one of the best films I have ever seen. One detail that might be lost is how beautifully Mozart's fantasy opera "The Magic Flute" is interwoven into the plot. The boy's mother attends a performance of this opera, with fateful consequences. One of the fantastic conceits of the plot is that the boy is guided at crucial moments in his quest by the trio of boy sopranos that guides Tamino in his quest in "The Magic Flute", and just as the hero of Mozart's masterpiece eventually learns the identity of his father, this same quest is at the heart of this nearly perfect little movie.