Review – Kinsey

Several times in other reviews I’ve complained about movie biographies that dwell excessively on their subjects’ sex lives. In this case, however, I suppose focusing on the intimate is at least somewhat justified. It’s also hard not to read a lot of one’s personal views into this. For example, I saw a portrait of a scientist who discovers that he likes sex and sets out to understand why. However, there are other elements here. Someone who sides with the conservative group that named Kinsey’s book one of the ten most dangerous works ever published might see this as the story of a man made desperately unhappy by his abandonment of faith and his unhealthy obsession with physical pleasure. Regardless of viewpoint, I thought this was a better movie than some critics indicated. I wonder if particularly male reviewers weren’t a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more sex in the movie. Mildly amusing

Review – Hellraiser: Hellworld

And yet they keep making them. In a realm beyond pleasure, beyond pain, beyond plot and character, beyond logic, beyond special effects, beyond acting, beyond directing, in the farthest extremes of human experience, dwells crap like this. The acorn that fell from the Barker tree nearly 20 years ago just keeps rolling and rolling, eventually making it all the way to the land of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Doing the whole reflexive thing late in the series worked for Freddy Krueger, but this movie doesn’t give it enough of a chance. There’s a lot of nonsense about computer games and cell phones. Doug Bradley puts in an appearance, though it’s more for show than anything else. There’s also a smattering of soft core porn, but it doesn’t work any better than the rest of the movie. Overall, well, there is no “overall” analysis because the movie isn’t structured as a cohesive whole. Instead it’s a patchwork of dumb little ideas, most of which don’t work on their own and none of which work together. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Maria Full of Grace

So what you’re saying is that it sucks to be a drug mule, huh? Who would have thought? Pretty teen Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) hates her crummy job in a flower factory, so she quits. Unemployed and a couple months pregnant, in semi-desperation she decides to take a high-paying job as a smuggler. Overall I was somewhat disappointed by this production. Aside from a couple of too-strong-for-TV scenes, this comes across as a Spanish-language version of an Afterschool Special about the evils of the narcotics trade. A few parts are challenging to sit through, as one might expect when watching someone swallow fifty cocaine capsules or endure an international flight with a load of coke in her guts. But beyond that the story was bland, sometimes even cliché-ridden. I think the movie does what it sets out to do. I just expected a bit more. And on a somewhat irrelevant note, I can’t think about this movie without being reminded of the Weekend Update joke on Saturday Night Live reporting on a woman caught smuggling snails into the country, the punch line suggesting that she would be the subject of an upcoming movie entitled Maria Full of Snails. Mildly amusing

Review – Vietnam: A Television History

Sure, this is a miniseries rather than a movie. But after sitting through 11 hours of this, I feel a review of some sort is in order. There’s some really incredible footage here, particularly film shot by both sides on the ground during the war. Overall, as one might expect from such an ambitious project, the results are mixed. Any audience member is probably going to get more out of some episodes than others, and I’m no exception. I’m more interested in the early history of the war and the expansion into Laos and Cambodia than I am in some other Vietnam-related stuff such as the history of the protest movement. Accordingly, I’d like to watch some episodes again and others I regret watching at all. But anyone with an interest in the subject should check this out. Mildly amusing

Review – London After Dark

Half an E for effort to Turner Classic Movies. It isn’t every channel that will show a movie whose only surviving print was destroyed in a fire in the 50s. What we’ve got here, then, looks like an extended PowerPoint presentation cobbled together from a substantial supply of production stills. It’s fun to see some of Lon Chaney’s makeup, and the show gives some idea of how the plot was structured. However, there’s almost no sense at all of Todd Browning’s directing skill. As wonderful as it would have been to see Browning and Chaney paired up on the silver screen, this is a poor substitute for a real movie. It doesn’t help that the rich-guy-turned-vampire-sucking-English-blood story is more than a little evocative of another Browning production with a classic horror movie star produced just a few years later. The folks who threw this together had their hearts in the right place, and they did a good job with what they had to work with. Sadly, it just wasn’t enough. Mildly amusing

Review - Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero

Technically this is an episode of Frontline, but it’s movie-length and certainly worthy of the title “documentary,” so I’m gonna go ahead and review it. Parts of this piece were fascinating, particularly the Sept. 11 footage that many other news outlets have shied away from showing (such as people jumping out of the upper floors of the World Trade Center). Some of the interviews also made for interesting viewing. If nothing else, the film-makers did a solid job of capturing a range of reactions to the tragedy. However, some of the discourse was more than a little weak. I was particularly disappointed by the section on the nature of evil. I thought surely some of the people who had stared such experiences directly in the face would have put at least some thought into the subject, perhaps finding a way to go beyond George Bush’s “Legion of Doom versus the Superfriends” approach to the question. Sadly, most of the subjects came up lacking. But overall this was an interesting if not always enlightening exploration of the interaction between tragedy and religious belief. Mildly amusing

Review – A Comedy of Terrors

If this isn’t the all-time champion, it’s at least one of the most flagrant cases of movies that squander good casts. Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone struggle with dialogue so bad it could make an audience get up and leave a dinner theater production. Even Rhubarb the Cat looks like he can’t wait for the director to call “cut” so he can rush back to his trailer, call his agent and scream his lungs out. I suppose this silliness is supposed to be vaguely reminiscent of Poe, but if Poe is fine, fresh French pastry then this is a Twinkie that rolled under a car seat two years ago and has been there ever since. Wish I’d skipped it