5 reviews
This movie had an awfully slow set-up, along with some pretty trite dialogue and situations I felt I'd seen in dozens of movies before. The opening fuel truck crash and rescue was exciting but completely pointless. Dennis Quaid's family was one long "Kodak moment", and John's break-up with his girlfriend ("I left six months ago; you just didn't notice") was groaningly clichéd. Once the radio communication got going, things really picked up, and the movie became quite enjoyable. In the end, though, we get another slow-motion Kodak moment. Quick! Someone rescue the good parts of this film from bad writing and Hallmark sentiment.
An extremely interesting use of talent. Who would have imagined that Brooke Shields, Mike Tyson and Claudia Schiffer could turn in such performances. This movie was quite fascinating and not the usual Hollywood fare.
"Ravenous" was good fun, and I was certainly on the edge of my seat a good bit of the time. But it wasn't what it could have been. The comedy could have been more plentiful and funnier; the horror could have been, well...more horrifying. The classic black-and-white "Night of the Living Dead" from 30 years ago was much creepier in the chomping human flesh department. Robert Carlyle was suitably demonic as Ives, but Guy Pearce spent most of his screen time looking attractively forlorn. Flattering camera work helped him pull that off rather nicely, but "LA Confidential" it wasn't. Nor "Priscilla", for that matter. Several other featured actors, David Arquette and Stephen Spinella included, had roles that were essentially cameos. The stars who didn't disappoint were the stunning Tatra Mountains of Slovakia and the cinematographer who filmed them. All in all, it's a movie worth catching.
I really wanted to like this movie more than I did, especially since I love Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix. But it took an awfully long time to get going. The situation seemed flat, the action slow, and the characters neither compelling nor especially believable. Things really picked up, though, when Janeane Garofalo came on the scene. What an inspired piece of casting! No one can deliver a dead-pan sarcastic one-liner the way she can. Yet she stays completely and believably in the character. After her arrival, it became a completely new movie, and I wound up enjoying it in the end. The gorgeous countryside didn't hurt either. Worth seeing.
Just what I needed, a gay "Your Friends and Neighbors." Not. Add to the down, tired material dialogue that sounded as if it were being read off cue cards, boring camera work, dull locales, and endless conversations, often as people plodded along in some park. Ugh! What a disappointment! I kept waiting for it to get better. It didn't.