Change Your Image
mgerity-1
Reviews
Catch-22 (1970)
Baffling jumble
If I hadn't just read the book, this movie wouldn't have made one lick of sense. We don't even find out Yossarian was refusing to fly until his meeting with Cathcart. That's kind of the main theme of the book, but here we get it as a single sentence said only after the fact. They cut out things, and unnecessarily changed other things, that were needed to understand the plot (or at least the plot of the book). We even get a parade at the end of the movie with zero explanation of how parades tie into the story. The funny thing is that the book is all about how nothing in the war makes any sense, but the movie doesn't even convey that message very well--sure the movie doesn't make sense, but not in an intentional sort of way. The humor and wit of the way things don't make sense (intentionally so) in the book is completely lacking.
Then there were other things that just feel way flat. Nately is supposed to be having an emotionally charged debate with the old man, but Garfunkel plays that like he's a confused kid having a playful chat. We get no indication that Nately's whore is repeatedly trying to kill Yossarian, which is necessary to understanding how it is that somebody (we don't find out who until Yossarian tells us, again after the fact) stabs him while he's walking around the base. The Snowden scenes utterly fails to convey the concept that Yossarian tho't he saved him before finding the more serious wound. That scene and the whole walk through Rome completely fail to convey what are supposed to be overwhelming and cumulating horrors for Yossarian.
I get that it's hard to jam entire books into 2 hours, but they made a lot of wrong choices when deciding what to cut. If you haven't read the book, this movie does nothing to let you know what the book is really about.
The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
Why does the movie feel the need to make Anne the older sister?
Pretty decent movie, but there is one thing I just don't understand. Historians seem to be pretty much in agreement at this point that Mary was the older sister of Anne, not the other way around. Despite that fact, this movie goes out of its way (way out of its way) to set forth repeatedly that Mary is the younger sister. Twice Anne calls her "my younger sister" and once the King says something about what it is like to be in the shadow of her older sister. The thing that is bizarre about this is that it adds absolutely nothing whatsoever to the movie--it's not important to the plot and is essentially unrelated to the story. So, the movie goes out of its way to establish something that isn't true, and even if there is legitimate dispute on the issue, why not just steer clear of the topic altogether? There was no point to or reason for the movie going down that path at all, so why do so?
Alexander (2004)
I didn't know the Greeks were all Irish
After reading the comments on here, I have to say that I am stunned that anybody liked this film at all. I don't lightly say that I rank this as the worst non-B grade movie I've ever seen--ever. To begin with, all of the "Greeks" in this movie have Irish accents. Well, most of them, that is. Inexplicably, Angelina Jolie has a middle-eastern-meets-Russian kind of accent, and some have no accent at all. This hodge-podge of ridiculously out of place accents was so distracting that it was hard to stay focused on the movie. I laughed out loud when one of the soldiers actually said "aye" when confronting Alexander--I almost expected him to follow up by asking for "me Lucky Charms". I kept wondering how it was even possible that nobody in the production chain ever caught this absurdity and put a stop to it.
Beyond that glaring issue, the movie was bombastic and melodramatic to the extreme, it was too long, and the battle scenes were incomprehensible. I almost turned it off about 10 times, but I kept thinking there was no way it could get any worse. It did. Horrible. Oh, and did I mention the accents?