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Movies

Short reviews

Here I have short reviews of movies I've seen and of which I feel moved to write a review. I give a rating from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best. Movies under 5 are not worth watching. Between 5 and 7, it depends on your tastes. Movies at 8 and above are must-sees.

  • American Pie: 7/10. It is actually funny to watch those teenagers trying to score before they graduate from highschool. Not a major movie but entertaining.
  • Best In Show: 4/10. This is a kind of fake documentary on dog shows but not quite since some scenes are clearly not documentary type scenes. It's funny at the start, funny towards the end but the middle is just a bore. One of the script writers is one of the guys who made the Spinal Tap movie which I trudly disliked. (Had I known that before renting it, I would probably not have rented it.) A big disappointment.
  • Bridget Jones' Diary: 7/10. It's a bit hard to get past RenĂ©e Zellweger's British accent but except for that this movie is excellent.
  • Chuck and Buck: 3/10. Interesting idea but it quickly loses energy. In the end, I'd rather have been doing something else than watching this movie.
  • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: 8/10. There's action, there's romance, there's exotism! What more can you ask?
  • Don't say a word: 4/10. Not convincing. The characters often act in ways that don't seem natural for a person in the same situation.
  • Dragonslayer: 5/10. I'm sorry to say the plot is rather boring and also very predictable. None of the great surprises were surprises to me. All the magic is done in Latin though and the pronunciation is okay so they get a few points there from me.
  • Druids: 1/10. Good gods! What an abomination!
  • Dungeons and Dragons: 6/10. This movie got terrible reviews. It does have a lot of faults. Jeremy Iron is overacting and Thora Birch is reading her lines unconvincingly. The fact that the director was able to turn two fine actors into bumbling morons is an indication of the director's talent. Yes, it's full of cliches. I still found it entertaining. I might have given it a worse score if I saw it on the big screen instead of seeing it on TV.
  • From Hell: 7/10. On the longish side but otherwise pretty good. Gory.
  • Game, The: 6/10. The idea is good, the action is good but the movie would have benefited from a tighter editing. If thirty minutes had been cut or the scenario rewritten to make the action tighter, this movie could have reaped an 8.
  • Ghost World: 3/10. Boring like hell. God I love Buscemi but in this movie his talent is just wasted. It was so boring, I didn't finish watching the movie.
  • Gosford Park: 4/10. Zzzzzzzzzzzz. The movie has some great actors but the story is just a bore.
  • Harlock Saga: 5/10. This was made in 1999 and it's not the original TV series. The plot is sometimes ridiculous: well, it's an anime. The science is sometimes ridiculous: well, it's an anime. Harlock doesn't get enough screen time: no good excuse here. I used to watch Harlock on TV as a kid and he was one of my favorites. I wonder what I would think of the original series if I could watch it again now. They've decided to have the Arcadia sometimes rendered in the traditional anime fashion and sometimes in a 3D CGI rendering: quite distracting. The voice acting in English (I haven't listened to the Japanese) sucks and some of the actors show as much emotional range as a brick. This sure was a disappointment.
  • How to Kill your Neighbour's Dog: 8/10. Great movie. I just love Kenneth Branagh. It's a light comedy. Unlike most crap produced by Hollywood, this works. I didn't laugh out loud that often (and rare is the movie that makes me laugh out loud often) but the humor was actually funny and I wasn't bored.
  • Insomnia: 10/10. Absolutely great movie! A cop story that is really about a man who has lost his ethical bearings and is trying to find his way again.
  • K-PAX: 5/10. This is a movie that could have been good but somehow along the way it turned into some uncompelling piece of bore. The ideas here have been beaten to death already by more compelling movies. Spacey, who in other movies has proven to be a great actor, is also offering here a lukewarm performance.
  • Man Who Wasn't There, The: 5/10. I usually love the Coen movies but sometimes they disappoint me and this is such a case. Lots of great bones without much meat. I think this had a lot of potential but somewhere along the way the great ideas got drowned in a lame script. Great music though.
  • Memento: 10/10. Great actors, great idea. The story of a murder commited by a man suffering from short term memory loss. Yes, the story is told in reverse and no it's not a gimmick: it's the best way to give us an idea of what is going on in the mind of the main character.
  • Monsoon Wedding: 5/10. I wish I could give a higher grade but the plot was too mild for my taste.
  • Mulholland Drive: 4/10. I don't mind convoluted stories but you have to keep up my interest while going through the convolutions. I almost didn't watch it to the end. Nice attempt; didn't work for me.
  • Notting Hill: 6/10. Not a great movie but still enjoyable. Hugh Grant in his usual bumbling fumbling role.
  • Others, The: 4/10. The whole story could have as well been told in half the time. Moreover, the twist at the end has already been done in another movie that kept my interest much more that this one did.
  • O Brother, Where Art Thou?: 8/10. This is a great Coen movie. Funny and kept my interest all the way.
  • Punch Drunk Love: 5/10. It's nice to see Adam Sandler do something else that his usual toilet humor but unfortunately the writer didn't seem to know where he was going.
  • Ring, The: 8/10. This is a great horror movie. While the motivations of the characters sometimes don't seem quite logical, on the whole it was a riveting movie.
  • Royal Tenenbaum, The: 5/10. A movie in search of an interesting plot.
  • Serendipity: 4/10. Stupid movie. I'm sure somehow it plays to some romantic feminine notion of how men should behave but no real man would go through anything like the male romantic lead in this movie does.
  • Shadow of the Vampire: 4/10. It feels like the writer tried to carry a whole movie with one "what if" idea. Unfortunately, an idea does not a movie make and this is the perfect example. It's dead and it stinks. Not compelling.
  • Spiderman: 7/10. It was a good superhero movie. Actually, it was probably the best one made in this genre so far. Entertaining.
  • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (until the action starts): 3/10. Good God! Enough with the sugary love story already! The acting is also stiff.
  • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (last 45 mins or so): 8/10. This is almost as good as the original Star Wars or as The Empire Strikes back. The only problem was that the comedic relief sometimes felt out of place. And I did have a hard time with some of the CGI action sequences.
  • Supernova: 3/10. Like Alien but now the alien is a transfromed human. This is the most predictable plot I had a misfortune to see.
  • Tailor of Panama, The: 3/10. An exercise in mumbling. Geoffrey Rush: "Hmnnmnnm danmmdmn agnmnenm hahaha hmnashm." Pierce Brosnan: "Ghmnft hnmht krhnf whsmf. Haha." (Don't get me wrong: I usually love Rush and have nothing against Brosnan in general.) I think the movie is supposed to be funny but it is not. I actually didn't watch it all which is the ultimate insult I can give to a movie.
  • Waking Life: 7/10. This movie would enjoy a 8/10 but gets a -1 for its barely bearable verbosity. Note that this is a very cerebral and verbose movie: not for everybody. I'm a cerebral guy so I liked it.
  • Zoolander: 5/10. I did enjoy this movie and there were two or three scenes that actually made me laugh. Which is more that can be said of about all other teen movies I've seen after I was past the age for such movies. It's not a great movie though. I saw the DVD version and thought the 2 original Zoolander skits were better than the movie. By the way, I also listened to the comentary track and it confirmed to me that Ben Stiller is not a very bright person. I'm not saying he's a bad person or evil or anything of the sort... just not very bright.