Movie Reviews – March 2007

Here are the movies we saw this month:

Here are my reviews:

North By Northwest

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic from 1959. An unsuspecting advertising man gets mistaken by criminals for an agent they think is investigating them. They try to kill him but he escapes. He is led on a cross country chase that ends at Mount Rushmore. You figure out pretty quick that the love interest is another agent, deep under cover. Ok action yarn but to me, it doesn’t seem to deserve the acclaim it has received.
Turner Classic Movies – 3 stars

Greenfingers

A criminal is transferred to a minimum security prison where he takes up flower gardening. He meets a master gardener who takes a shine to the prisoners but is concerned when she finds that her daughter is in love with the hero. Of course, they go to the big flower show. It’s sweet and a little sappy. There is no evil here despite the fact that a couple of the prisoners, including our hero, are murderers. This is the first movie that I recognised Clive Owen. We saw him not long ago in Children of Men. After that, you look him up and see that he has been in a lot of things you’ve seen but you just didn’t notice. Helen Mirren as the master gardener is a kick. In one scene she is standing below a portrait of the queen wearing one of those horrible royal type hats. You just know that the casting director of “The Queen” saw this movie and said, “I know who gets that part!”
Netflix – 3 stars

Pan’s Labyrinth

A young girl intrigued by fairy tales travels to the post of her step-father along with her pregnant mother. The stepfather is a captain in the facist army in Spain in 1944. The Facists have won control of the country and the captain’s job is to mop up the resistance. The girl discovers a secret labyrinth and turns out to be the lost fairy princess who must pass three tests to be able to return. What? This is really two movies but somehow they do seem to work together. The fairytale part is predictable. Heroic deeds, unflagging courage and some thoroughly evil European style monsters (they eat fairies and children, really Brothers Grimm stuff). The realistic part of the movie is quite disturbing. The captain is a real nasty sort. He commits lots of really graphic violence on the resistance fighters and the camera it there to capture it all. This is not for the squeemish. I maybe could give this one 4 stars.
Theater – 3 stars

Paradise Road

High society British women in Singapore at the beginning of WWII flee the soon to be invaded city, only to have their ship sunk out from under them. They fall into the clutches of the Japanese and are put in a prison camp. There’s lots of “learning their place” action. Deaths from malaria. Executions for disobediance type stuff. And through it all, they find the time and will to create a vocal orchestra. Sort of a classical Swingle Singers. Predictable and heartwarming.
Netflix – 3 stars

Why We Fight

The movie opens with Dwight D Eisenhower delivering his farewell speech, the one that warns about the military/industrial complex. The rest of the movie lays out, step by step, how his nightmare came true. As bleak as Syriana, the movie leaves little hope that anything will ever be able to be done about it. Not only are the military and industry in cahoots, they have recruited the congress and now, think tanks whose job it is to come up with more ways that liberty and freedom can be subverted. In one sad story a barely literate kid is recruited in the army, convinced he will be a pilot.
Netflix – 3 stars

Charlotte Gray

When her pilot lover disappears over occupied Vichy France in WWII, a young Scottish woman volunteers for service behind enemy lines. She parachutes in, delivers her package to a contact that gets caught, and tries to find out what she can about her lover. She discovers his plane was shot down. In the mean time she works with the resistance, living in the house of the chief resistance fighter’s father. Along the way, two Jewish boys are orphaned and also come to live at the house. She takes them under her wing. Eventually the two boys and the father get hauled away and she returns to England. After the war her lover shows up having been convelescing all this time. She discovers she is no longer in love with him and returns to France to find the resistance fighter. Happy ending.
Netflix – 3 stars

CSA: Confederate States of America

CSA is a mockumentary. Supposedly it was produced by the BBS (BBC) and follows the history of the Confederate States of America after they defeated the Union and maintained the institution of slavery. Even through today. There are commercial breaks, station IDs and news updates interspersed with the documentary. All make you squirm and groan. Ads for Niggerhair cigarettes and Darkiebright toothpaste are a couple of the most uncomfortable. In the story the North must be the one to undergo reconstruction. To make the tax burden easier, anyone in the North who buys slaves is exempt from their tax burden. Abraham Lincoln is captured wearing blackface and being helped by Harriet Tubbman on the underground railroad heading for Canada. Which is where all the liberals and abolitionists end up. The South then sets out on wars of expansion, conquering Mexico and the Carribean and trying to take over South America too. Real historical figures appear in the footage too, but sometimes with the details changed. Kennedy is a Republican and Nixon a democrat. The movie is not serious and there is a lot of humor. You are not quite sure what to think when it is over.
Netflix – 3 stars

Shooter

A master sniper is left behind on a mission and retires when he gets back. Three years later they ask him to be an advisor who will help to figure out who is going to attempt an assasination of the President and how they will do it. In fact, the assasination targets the archbishop of Ethiopia who is standing next to the President and the bad guys are framing our hero. The rest of the movie is him showing off his shooting skills and trying to clear his name. Standard action film. OK but not great.
Theater – 3 stars

Sahara

Dirk Pitt is on the trail of some lost Confederate treasure hidden in an ironclad that makes its way to Africa after the Civil War, then disappears. Along the way he runs into a beautiful WHO doctor who is investigating a strange and terrible illness that is affecting people in the surrounding area. It turns out the villain is trying to burn toxic waste with a gigantic solar array. It is not working very well and the waste is entering the water table making everyone sick. Dirk saves the day as usual and finds the lost gold too. Surprise, surprise. There is lots of James Bond type humor. Another action adventure film.
Netflix – 3 stars

The Sentinel

A Secret Service agent gets a tip that there is going to be an attempt on the President’s life and that there is a mole helping the bad guys. Hey, does this sound familiar? Everyone on the team is ordered to take a lie detector test. This is going to be a problem for our hero because he is having an affair with the First Lady, and someone knows and has taken pictures of them together. He flunks the lie detector test and goes on the run. Another frame up. True to his job, he keeps investigating in parallel with the official team who thinks he is the mole. The internal affairs detective is his old best buddy but who thinks our hero had an affair with his wife. So now there is lots of hostility. The First Lady finally comes clean to the IA guy who then realizes that our hero is not guilty. They team up at the last minute to save the day and kill the bad guys. Another action adventure film.
Netflix – 3 stars