Movie Reviews – October 2007

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

Marie Antoinette

We tried to watch this movie three different times but the DVDs wouldn’t play past the FBI notices. Finally after 3 different disks, I had to watch it on my computer which did work for some reason. The movie documents the life of Marie Antoinette from the time she is sent to France to marry Louis XVI to just before she is introduced to Madam Le Guillotine. She is painted fairly sympathetically. The movie does a great job illustrating the oppulance of the French court at that time. There is very little of the terrible conditions of the common people. I think the movie would have benefitted from a comparison of the two but maybe that wasn’t Sophie Coppola’s intent. The dialog seemed pretty good throughout but in the last 20 minutes it turned wooden. I’m also not sure I cared for the modern background music. I saw Marianne Faithful’s name in the credits and couldn’t tell who she could be. She turns out to be Marie Antoinette’s mother. What a difference 40 years will make in one’s appearance.
Netflix – 3 stars

Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure

A mother Dolichorhynchops (Dolly for short) has two babies and this 3D movie is the story of the baby female’s life. Their rapid growth to adolescence in the shallow seas and eventual migration to deeper waters brings them in contact with the others in the cast of characters. Some of them are small and are Dolly’s prey. Others are gigantic and are fearsome predators that Dolly herself is not safe from. Eventually she dies of old age and is buried in the sea floor where her fossilized skeleton is discovered in modern times. My granddaughter Rachel and I are 3D fans and I take every opportunity I can to let her see 3D movies. This was the latest. The animation of the beasts was very good and the 3D was almost perfect. The surface rendering of the skin was not quite as realistic of some of the other prehistoric beast movies we have seen, Jurassic Park for instance, but the way they moved and the way they handled the 3D was spot on. Very realistic. The movie had a couple of things that were less than perfect; the live shots of the paleontologists suffered from too wide of lens positioning and they used a Model A Ford pickup for a scene supposedly shot in 1918. Most people wouldn’t notice that however and it was more of a little easter egg than a problem.

Here is National Geographic’s web site for the movie:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/seamonsters/
Theater – 3 stars

Grand Prix

This was a favorite movie of mine from 1966. I was really interested in grand prix racing and it was at the time when the cars were at their absolute most beautiful. Those wonderful little cigar shaped Lotus Fords and Ferraris. The movie is about one season’s competition for the world championship. Our hero, a young British lad is out ahead but he is competing as much with his dead older brother as the others. Early in the season his American teammate blocks him from going around and causes an accident which cripples our boy who may never race again. Then the teammate runs off with our boy’s wife. Over the next several races the old French champion, the young Italian, and the American all win races. Our boy, against all odds overcomes his injuries and returns to the game. It all comes down to the last race. Whoever wins among the four will have the most points and be the champion. I’m not telling who wins. The American is played by James Garner and I hated his character so much that I transferred that hatred to him. I hated him for years. When Rockford Files came out I tuned it in one time despite my dislike for Garner and as luck would have it, he got the crap beat out of himself by the bad guys. GREAT! I started watching regularly because Garner got beat up in just about every episode. But that was such a great show, I learned to like James Garner. I wondered if I would feel the same as I did about him when I saw the movie again, but I still like him.
Turner Classic Movies – 3 stars

2010

The spaceship with the deactivated HAL still on board starts to have its orbit degrade as it sits next to the mysterious monolith. The Russians are sending a mission and are way ahead of the US in their preparations, but know nothing about the spaceship. They invite the Americans to participate in a joint mission. When they arrive, they reactivate HAL and realize why there was a problem in 2001. There is tension between the US and the Russians back home and the various crew members are ordered to go to their own vessels and have no contact with each other. But that is not to be. Right then, a dark spot appears on the surface of Jupiter and it appears to be growing. They have to rejoin forces to get away in the nick of time. The monolith has started to duplicate itself and it’s having an effect on Jupiter which eventually implodes and turns into a dwarf start. One interesting thing is that the movie was made in 1984, before the disintegration of the Soviet Union so there are lots of hammers and sickles still in evidence.
AMC – 3 stars

The U.S. vs John Lennon

This was a documentary about the Nixon administration’s persecution of John Lennon for his anti war views. It was a pretty straightforward chronology. It was fun to see the old events but otherwise is was fairly uninspired.
Netflix – 3 stars

A Scanner Darkly

This was one of the strangest movies we’ve seen in a long time. Set 7 years in the future, a narcotics officer is hot on the trail of drug dealer who peddles Substance D, the drug of choice which has addicted 20% of the population. Substance D has the side effect that it causes schizophrenia and unbeknownst to the narc, the dealer is his other personality. The plot gets tricky after a while. Mostly the movie is seen through the eyes of four main characters, all druggies with very distinct personalities. Because of this it is hard to tell exactly what is going on as a result of their drug addled brains. The ending is a bit of a surprise. This was done with the same type of effect as Sin City or 300 with animation drawn over the top of live action footage. Very wierd.
Netflix – 3 stars

The Matador

A businessman on a trip to Mexico gets drunk with another guy who turns out to be a hit man. They become friends and while at the bull fight, the businessman asks the hit man if his assignment was to kill one of the attendees of the bullfight, right here, right now, how would he go about doing it. The hit man shows him. They go their separate ways. After some time, the hit man starts to lose it and clinches at the decisive moment and thereby puts his job and life in jeopardy. A total wreck, he looks up the businessman and convinces him to help him with one last assignment.
Netflix – 3 stars

Into the Wild

This is a story of a young man who graduates from college in the early 1990s and drops out to head into the wild. He travels from the South across the United States to California and then up to Alaska. The movie starts when he is in Alaska and develops the story line by alternating flashbacks of the people he meets on his adventure with what is happening to him in Alaska. He has lots of experiences and hardships and as a writer, keeps track of everything in his notebooks. Beautiful scenery and an interesting life.
Theater- 3 stars