Reviews
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
A film that's not for angry proletarians
Hey, fkk: What are you so p*****-off about? A film "for self-satisfied intellectuals of a literary bent"? (Note hyphen in there.) Is this supposed to be an insult? The film is riddled with hundreds of puns, plays, and joshes based on Shakespeare's work and his legend, as well as the obvious stuff about theatre lore. Is it any worse to enjoy that stuff than for a hip-hop kid to get a kick out of recognizing obscure samples put to a new beat? Your reverse snobbery is pretty dull stuff -- why is "intellectual" a pejorative, anyway? -- and here seems to mask a lot of frustration at the movie, or the love affair (with the principals "gazing idiotically at each other"), for being somehow beyond your grasp. This is a wonderful flick, and you might want to figure out why it makes you so upset. Just a thought.
Die Siebtelbauern (1998)
Time and place check
I guess it's a measure of how effectively placed the class-war business of Austria's "The Inheritors" is, since so many people seem to think it takes place in the 19th century. Actually, the film is set in the early 1930s, with the shadow of the coming storm of Nazism and WWII ready to obliterate everything we're seeing, anyway.
American History X (1998)
Worst film of the year.
Yeah, it's stunning, all right -- in the way a cattleprod up the old wazoo is stunning. Alleged director Tony Kaye should be grateful to New Line for taking away this ad-hoc piece o' crud, which he admits he winged from a script he never even liked. (Gods of videotape and DVD, please spare us his cut, which he never completed, by the way.) From the very first frames, it's clear that Kaye has no rapport with his actors, and has zero idea how to get decent, let alone consistent, performances out of them. As the buffed-up skinhead leader, Norton tries hard, but he has three different personalities in the film, with the transitions between them either patently phony or (mostly) non-existent. A worthy subject, but this "X"ecrable effort proves why some people are cut out to do 30-second commercials and not grandiose "masterpieces". In short, this guy makes Oliver Stone look the subtlest man on the planet. For all you message- seekers, here's the flick's big payoff: "Hate is baggage". There, you've just been saved eight bucks and two tortured hours.
American History X (1998)
Worst film of the year.
Yeah, it's stunning, all right -- in the way a cattleprod up the old wazoo is stunning. Alleged director Tony Kaye should be grateful to New Line for taking away this ad-hoc piece o' crud, which he admits he winged from a script he never even liked. (Gods of videotape and DVD, please spare us his cut, which he never completed, by the way.) From the very first frames, it's clear that Kaye has no rapport with his actors, and has zero idea how to get decent, let alone consistent, performances out of them. As the buffed-up skinhead leader, Norton tries hard, but he has three different personalities in the film, with the transitions between them either patently phony or (mostly) non-existent. A worthy subject, but this "X"ecrable effort proves why some people are cut out to do 30-second commercials and not grandiose "masterpieces". In short, this guy makes Oliver Stone look the subtlest man on the planet. For all you message- seekers, here's the flick's big payoff: "Hate is baggage". There, you've just been saved eight bucks and two tortured hours.
Gods and Monsters (1998)
Atmospheric acting hindered by anachronistic script
I agree that the acting was superb here, with everyone coming up to McKellen's level. But was anybody else bothered by the many lines in the script that didn't fit with the period? Brendan Fraser's ambiguous (and dramatically hazy) character keeps saying things like "Damn straight!" and "No way" -- expressions totally off for the mid-1950s. There's also a bar scene with some rock guitar in the background that's about ten years too modern for the movie. It's a drag when people put so much care into developing a detailed, truth-based story, and then blow it on the little things.
Contact (1997)
Not "profoundly impactful" enough
Aside from the jargony script, as in cringeworthy line quoted above, the film was singularly lacking in the kind of imagination - not to mention religious feeling - it was trying to invoke. Clarinets ahoy! By the way, when Ellie Caraway Seed got to her special faraway place, did anyone else expect Bill Clinton to emerge from the haze? He showed up everywhere else.