AliceG's reviews

This ridiculous, contrived, and artless bore of a movie, in one of its countless aesthetic miscalculations, mistakes a stately pace for depth and profundity. It rises above the typical summer film pap for a single reason -- it thinks it has Ideas about Big Issues. It automatically plunges back to a suitable level, however, as it demonstrates this broad lack of ideas at an interminable pace.

The makers of this shallow dreck seem to think they have made a thinking person's summer popcorn movie about Death, and The American Family, and Love, and The Breakdown Of The American Family, and The Loss Of Love. But really, it's just another jumble of the same old crap: cardboard characters in prefab situations, behaving as they do because the plot needs them to, not for any intrinsic reason, and not -- resolutely not -- with any underlying impulse or motivation.

Aside from its laughably sophomoric spiritual pose, The Sixth Sense is also shoddily constructed. Most of the scenes are either fake and stagey, redundant, irrelevant, obvious, or all of the above, and they are edited together with the sloppiest imprecision. There is no sense of drama, mystery or anything else.

Although some of the imagery is imaginative and the production design is superb, they are placed in the service of an inert, smug and witless vision, presumably that of its writer/director. This unintentionally comic garbage makes "Jacob's Ladder" look like Bergman.

The Sixth Sense is strictly for amateurs.

British period pieces typically suffocate under the dull weight of precise costumes and historically accurate settings, offering nothing but boring, predictable and comforting aesthetics. Here is a stronger number, true to the tired genre but beyond it -- a period piece with strong, well-developed themes and balanced, multidimensional characters liberated from crusty, faux bourgeois literariness. Aside from haunting, perfectly pitched performances, it examines questions that matter: What constitutes personality? What constitutes class? Is one contingent on the other? If a "coarse" man can be transformed into a convincing "gentleman," what is he really? And if the class boundaries are truly porous and arbitrary, what is their true function and purpose? Don't let the superficially "Masterpiece Theatre"-ish trappings fool you -- this mysterious, stimulating picture has a pulse.

More like To The Devil A Rubber Puppet. Or maybe, To Richard Widmark, A Quick Paycheck. Reasonably well-directed but pointless Omen/Rosemary's Baby rip-off, salvaged to an extent by the classy B-movie cast. Unfortunately, the players are uniformly listless, particularly the young Kinski, who seems too aware of being on camera, especially during her obligatory nude scene. Aside from that particular moment, this movie is a dull, humorless timewaster.

The defining moment of this film is watching an inhumanly bored Charlie Watts staring morosely at commercials on a hotel television screen. In fact, you'll find yourself slumped in a chair somewhat like Charlie as you watch this haggard, limply compelling shambles of a documentary. The Stones themselves come off less as satan's own emissaries on earth and more as boring, boorish, and mundane teenagers -- emissaries of casual personal disintegration. It all leaves one feeling icky, stained, and disrespectful of rock legends, which is probably why it's impossible to see today. That, and the scenes with groupies having sex and roadies shooting up and nodding off. Interminably boring and unstructured, but probably a dead-on accurate portrait of a travelling rock band.

Don't believe the hyperbole: this is a resourceful, effective and bold scare movie, but it is far from original. The narrative conceit of this film is lifted whole-hog from Ruggero Deodato's notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1979). Astute cinema aficionados will recall that film's similar but entirely more convincing and properly established recovered-documentary-footage-of-film-crew-lost-in-the-wild motif. The promotional campaign tactics (which are, of course, contributing much to the film's effect) are a subtle reworking of the scare-em-before-they're-even-inside-the-theater technique immortalized by the great William (13 Ghosts, Homicidal, The Tingler, et al) Castle.

TBWP is intermittently nerve-racking, unpredictable, and surprising, but is badly marred by unjudicious pacing, an unsustained mood and some nagging technical oversights (read: slick sound mixing, over-precise editing) that will likely un-suspend the knowing viewer's suspension of disbelief.

That being said, it's nice to see ultra-low-budget scare movies back in the theaters where they belong.

Limbo does not rely on blandly beautiful starlets and vacantly hunky poster boys. It does not rely on $30 mil in CGI. It does not rely on $30 mil saturation advertising campaigns and Taco Bell tie-ins. It does not rely on what they teach young fools in screenwriting class. It does not rely on drunk-freshman-clever repartee. It does not rely on convention and easy pay-offs. It does something that most American films -- independent and studio-made alike -- never do. It tells a good, engaging, believable story with round, well-developed characters and it does so with unimposing intelligence. It depends on an alert audience capable of asking relevant questions and providing reasonable answers without being spoon-fed generic plot and contrived motivation. The ending will NOT leave an attentive, sympathetic, reasonably intelligent viewer in a blustery, enraged state of limbo. It is good and right, and you should see it.

An illuminating, direct, and honest look at San Francisco's transgender, cross-gender, non-gender community. A number of people in varying states of gender introduce their lives, their choices, and their perspectives on gender -- its creation, reconstruction, definition, redefinition, and "natural" state. There are "women" becoming "men", "men" becoming "women", and "" remaining "". An Army veteran, a video artist, a Penthouse model and nightclub performer, a porn star, musicians, and writers are portrayed sympathetically (indeed, many scenes play almost as home movies among friends) and without sensationalism. The ins and outs of hormone treatments and surgical modification are discussed. Although some will be repulsed and uncomprehending, the very human tone should, hopefully, negate condescension and encourage understanding. A good documentary that should be seen.

This is the perfect film for the dimmer bulbs in the comic book geek population. The laughable "profundities" -- unaccountably uttered with deep foreboding and a straight face -- sound like a bad mix of Yoda, Rod McKuen and your average neighborhood stoner. And how are we to not laugh outright at the sight of a toddler yogi bending spoons with the power of his mind? The "what-is-reality?" theme is as old as the dream state itself, and The Matrix offers no real contribution to the debate. The imagery, while lovely and inventive, and the direction, although deft and punchy, mask (all too effectively for some) the lack of a true, unique vision from the filmmakers, who demonstrated so much more on a much smaller scale in Bound. However, if your sense of film history only extends back to Dark City and your philosophical preoccupations were ignited by The Sandman, this whole muddled film is all gonna seem mighty big and new. But, hey, at least it's entertaining.

I originally thought this movie was a sly, cynical, masterfully-made, audience-hating parody of action/disaster film cliches. The plot, of course!, was stretched beyond all plausibility. The situations, of course!, were preposterous. The science, of course!, was ridiculous. The characters, of course!, were cardboard cutouts sliding from dumb predicament to dumb predicament. Then, listening to the commentary track on the Criterion (!) DVD, the filmmakers revealed that they were absolutely seriously trying to make a straightforward mainstream action flick for teenage boys. People apparently cried at that mawkish stuff that seemed so knowingly planted to trigger obvious emotional tugs. This movie is simply entertaining crap, and the impulses of the Hollywood sludge factory are far worse than previously suspected. The gag reel and supplementary material on the Criterion DVD has more personality than the whole movie.