Reviews
Nappeun namja (2001)
One of the worst movies I've ever been forced to see
Recently, a friend and I visited Hollywood Video, the panacea of good, bad, more bad, and TV on DVD. So long as I rented what I wanted, he got what he wanted, which was this absolutely horrible, horrible movie.
Why is this movie horrible? It's horrible because it has no point, no moral, no good characters, no good acting, no plot, no subtext, no context, and, most importantly, no logic. The protagonist is a vicious, callous, brutal man who beats up women and men alike. His comrades are toothless goons who get what they deserve after they rape, kill, and get drunk, which they do often.
What's in this movie? What happens? The movie has no internal logic. A woman is hoodwinked into selling her body after she steals some money from a wealthy man. Her boyfriend never calls the cops even though he knows precisely where she is and her parents and friends don't seem to exist. Consequently, she is trapped in a world of drunken sex and voyeurism masquerading as "art". The protagonist watches her through one-way glass as she cries herself to sleep or gets assaulted by customers. We see him grimace, glare, and occasionally react to what he sees. He's angry and violent. The movie wants you ask why. It wants you to feel for him in some way. The truth, however, is that he's scum and every time he gets knifed you pray for him to die and for the movie to come an end.
What else happens? There's rape. There's more rape. There's blood. There's piano music. There's attempted murder. There's more piano music. Oh, and there's lots of art-house pretension, lots of shots through the one-way glass trying to connect both the brutal man and his sex slave on some fundamental, emotional level.
Avoid this lousy movie. It's a pointless exercise at art-film without the necessary characters, acting, dialogue, or plot that a good film requires. I'd recommend a root canal instead.
Melinda and Melinda (2004)
Really terrible
Only a complete Woody Allen apologist would like this film. His self-indulgent need to have an actor represent him, as in this movie and Celebrity, is increasingly annoying and distasteful.
When Allen is at the top of his game, which he seems to be less and less these days, the comedy is funny and smart while the drama is real and unforced. This movie feels contrived all the way through; all of the actors are wooden and nothing feels even remotely spontaneous. Melinda's character in both venues, especially her "tragic persona," is incredibly hackneyed... Monologues about terrible events are delivered with a quaking hand and a cigarette, telling us in no uncertain terms that she's unhappy instead of allowing that unhappiness to reveal itself slowly or truthfully. When she tells the black piano player that she did violence to her ex-lover, his response is so ho-hum, like everything he says and does, that one has to laugh at the sheer absurdity of their relationship. His responses, like all of his revelatory and romantic speeches, sound more like prescriptions from her gynecologist than anything you'd expect from her lover. And Will Ferrell's performance nearly drove my foot through the TV.
On top of all that, the characters whine and bellow so much about nothing that you wish before too long that Ebola or something just as nasty will provide relief.
Just like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, the comic potential of this film is great but lousy acting and witless, contrived dialog sink the picture. You know the dialog is bad when anything written by James Cameron or George Lucas surpasses it.
The Aviator (2004)
Re: Amateurish, fictional account of part of Howard Hughes life
The prior account referenced by this comment was written by someone who obviously felt that expressing his opinions without any basis in fact was better than keeping his typing fingers busy in other endeavors.
While the screen-writers certainly took liberties with some aspects of Howard Hughes life, there is no denying that most of the important facts are public record as they were recorded in the press and broadcast on live television. The way in which his craziness was manifested is also public knowledge and has been written about extensively by many biographers. The fact that they chose to show that craziness a decade before it began to rule his life is why this movie is a biopic instead of a biography. It is a story about an enigma, and they tried to crack the nut of the enigma by taking minor liberties with his personal, tortured times in order to help us see how his insanity both informed his work and destroyed his life. That's the nature of movies. Exact movie biographies DO NOT exist. They are unfilmable and unwritable. All movies are about perspective, and this one is no different.
The acting was, by and large, superb. Leonardo DiCaprio finally made a major movie alongside major stars and demonstrated how versatile and subtle his characterizations can be. Cate B.'s performance was more of a characterization. She didn't need to mimic Ms. Hepburn as strongly as she did. She came off as more of a cartoon than a human being.
The script was also surprisingly superb. John Logan's previous scripts for Star Trek, Gladiator, and The Time Machine were pretentious and meandering. This was tight, smart, and powerful.
The direction, especially during the Hell's Angels sequences, was also superb. There are few like Martin Scorsese who can paint on such a big palette and still keep things delicate and intimate. It is also gratifying to see him return to telling stories about complex, passionate people without relying on overcooked scripts or overcooked actors.
This was a very fine movie. In my mother's words, "I can't believe he made me cry for a man like Howard Hughes."