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miguelbgood
Reviews
1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (2021)
This documentary is totally from a British perspective
While this is an interesting documentary, it does not reflect the experience of 1971 here in the United States.
This documentary spends way too much time on T-Rex and Alice Cooper and other music that wasn't really that big of an influence here in the USA.
This documentary makes it sound like the hippie movement and the idealism that it embraced was over in 1971. That is not the case at all when looking at it from the American perspective.
It seems obvious to me, looking at this documentary, that Britain was quite a few years behind the United States in terms of being a progressive society.
While the documentary starts out good with the importance of the Beatles and the British invasion of rock bands, episode 2 spends far too much time on Charlie Manson and that whole negative scene, and Altamont.
Altamonte is always painted by the media as being the death of hippie culture. That is not the case. Hippie culture was alive and well at the time of Altamont.
Altamont was simply a mistake in that they hired a motorcycle gang, the Hell's Angels, to manage security. Too many beers and a simple stroke of fate led to there being violence that day. It had nothing to do with the rock music or the end of hippie culture as they like to paint it. It was simply an isolated event that turned out very badly due to poor decisions on the part of management.
All in all, I am finding this documentary series to be not at all what my friends and I experienced in 1971.
We didn't care about T-rex, we didn't care all that much about Alice Cooper, and we certainly were not watching the kind of pablum that Britain was apparently watching on TV.
For American rock/hippie culture, the idealism of hippies was still very much present in 1971, and Altamont had no real effect on it.
I will say that the Renaissance of '60s music did begin to diminish somewhat by 1971, but there was still a lot of great and meaningful music in 72 and 73.
So this documentary series is not totally wrong, that things died out, both creatively and politically in the early seventies.
But hippie culture and hippie idealism was still very strong in 71. And Mark Bolin and Alice Cooper are certainly not representative of what was going on in the music scene in the early '70s.
That is the main criticism I have of this documentary.
In America at least, T-Rex and Alice Cooper were barely blips on the radar screen.
Crosby Stills and Nash, Jethro tull, King Crimson, Neil Young, Dave Mason, Joni Mitchell, Jackson browne, the Miody Blues, the solo Beatles and many others were very strong in the early seventies.
In conclusion, all I will say is that I think this documentary may or may not represent the British perspective on 1971. But it definitely does not represent the American perspective on 1971. I was there. I experienced it.
If I were to make a similar documentary, I would do it about 1965 or 1966. That is when music really had a big effect on the world!
All in all, a somewhat interesting documentary about the '60s, but produced from a British point of view not an American point of view. Two different animals.
Get Smart (1965)
This series is an all-time classic that is still hilarious even today
This was re-run a couple years ago and I watched quite a few episodes again, having watched it when it was first aired.
I was amazed how funny it still is.
So many funny lines Max said, and of course the Cone of Silence jokes never got old and are still funny today. Jaime the robot. Agent K-9. And the lovely Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 who every teenager was "in love" with at the time.
The Chief was a great character as well!
The show was a Perfect 10 and that's why it gets 10 stars from me.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
An Unexpected Failure
I was very excited to see this after considering The Lord of the Rings a resounding success, one of my favorite series of movies of all time!
But when I found out it was going to be a trilogy of movies, I thought "Why are they making 3 movies out of a very short introductory book to the Trilogy?"
Why, indeed?
Basically they RUINED it by making it 3 movies.
The first one is boring, the 2nd one is more boring and the 3rd one I didn't even care to see.
They took a successful idea (being faithful to Tolkien's books!) and turned it on its head and decided to invent all kinds of scenes that never existed, and make a really great short book into a way-overlong trilogy of movies!
DUMB IDEA!
If you are a kid who just likes Hobbit stuff you *might* like this. If you're an adult who loves Tolkien's books, you are almost surely going to dislike it.
My advice: Skip this one and go back and re-watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy again! Or better yet, spend your time reading the books, starting with The Hobbit!
Marco Polo (2014)
Very slow moving... Interesting but not exciting
This series moves very slow. It almost always puts me to sleep.
I don't mind a slow movie here and there but a slow SERIES... well that's kinda not worth my time.
Nevertheless I am making my way through the last episode of Season 1. But I will not watch Season 2.
One other big problem I have with this series is that when I was inspired by this to do some research on Marco Polo, I found out that it is hardly based on fact at all. It is largely made up. Pretty much complete fiction. I always like it when a show is based largely on fact so I found this very disappointing.
The acting is good. there are lots of beautiful Asian women, the sets and costumes and cinematography are all great....
... yet overall I give it only a mediocre rating because it just did not inspire me to keep watching it. I made it only through S1 but had my wife not been enjoying it more than me, I'd have bailed about half way through S1.
The Giver (2014)
This is SO much better than "Divergent"!
I have not read the book "The Giver" was based on so I am not comparing it to the book, I am only judging it based on the movie itself. Movies are almost NEVER as good as a great book. If they are as good as the book, then they have achieved a great accomplishment, and I imagine this movie was at least as good or at least almost as good as the book.
I consider this a "Great!" movie. Why? It's a great movie because it examines many deep and relevant issues of society and does so in a way that makes us viewers understand the message it was conveying. It's about joy, love, and happiness and how these related to their opposites of sadness, hate, and the pain of living.
This movie showed what a mess humans have made of this gift of life, and how a future society chose to erase all feelings of love and joy rather than to allow the sadness and anger and hate and war and violence that normally accompany them.
This movie is WAY better than "Divergent". "Divergent" was boring to me. It was the concept without the feeling. It made me feel nothing. But "The Giver" made me FEEL - joy, sadness, pain, anger, love...
Jeff Bridges has created a true classic but like some of his other movies they are not appreciated by the masses. This will change over time, and people will realize what a genius Jeff Bridges is, and recognize this as perhaps his greatest accomplishment.
So weit die Füße tragen (2001)
Great story
I would like to comment on those who say a German should not be portrayed in a positive light.
We do not know what the German soldier in this movie knew or did not know about his country and what they did at the time he went to the war.
All we really know is that he was called upon to serve his country and so he did. Did the American soldiers during the Viet Nam war know that their fellow soldiers would commit atrocities? Did they know that later, historians would consider it an unjust and useless war for the U.S. to have been involved in, even though we bombed Cambodia and North Viet Nam to hell? So, for the sake of this movie we are to assume that this was a man serving his country, nothing more. We only know that he himself was treated very unfairly and cruelly by the Russians in a P.O.W. camp and that he endured great suffering in order to escape and arrive back home.
So in that sense it is a beautiful movie about the human will to survive and get back to one's family.
This movie is about a human being who suffers. Aren't we all human beings who suffer? I am not apologizing for or minimizing the horror of what the Nazis did, and I don't think the movie is meant to do that, either. It's just a story about a German who happened to endure an amazing journey, that's all. And as such it is a very good movie and an amazing story.
Blue Skies (1946)
Not a great movie but Astaire is worth seeing here!
I agree with most of the other reviews: This is not a great movie, story-wise. In fact it's quite a dumb story about a girl who can't make up her mind which guy she wants to marry.
And I agree that Joan Caulfield adds nothing to the movie. Too bad they didn't use someone with more appeal.
But it's fun seeing Bing and Fred together, and some of the songs are pretty good.
But by far the main attraction is the Puttin on the Ritz tap number in which Fred Astaire once again out-does himself! This time, literally, with mirrored images...
And the magically jumping cane had me going "Huh?! How'd he DO that???!!"
I wish someone could take all of Astaire's dance numbers with Ginger AND with all the others and put just those on a DVD! Now THAT would be a great DVD to own! And would prevent us from having to watch some of these so-so movies just to get to the "good parts" where Fred dances and/or sings!
All in all, though, this isn't that bad of a movie. Not nearly so bad as some of the other later Astaire movies. (Again, Fred was always good, but sometimes the supporting cast and/or the scripts were just plain bad.)
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
This movie completely sucks
I'd rate this movie 0 stars if I could. It was just horribly bad, a disaster.
It does have a couple of funny scenes, but not funny enough nor often enough to warrant watching it.
Aside from having a lot of jokes or comedic scenes that aren't funny, it also has a terrible plot that doesn't even make sense. Why would a hot "liberated" woman hook up with a complete chauvinist ass? It reminded me of the humor of those Adam Sandler movies which I hate, so if you like Adam Sandler movies you might like this piece of crap.
This movie was recommended to me by a couple of people and I'd heard some clips from it which sounded funny, so I was very optimistic that it would be funny. I was wrong.
I really wanted to finish it, to see if it got better, but I just couldn't take it any more after about 1/2 way through.
Bad comedy, bad acting, bad writing, bad directing - Four negative stars!
Road Trip (2000)
This movie is just plain dumb
Admittedly I am not a teenager, so who knows, maybe if you are a teenager this movie is funny!
I thought "American Pie" was pretty funny, and I laughed at "Something About Mary", so that should give you some idea of my sense of humor.
This movie is just plain un-funny. Tom Greene adds nothing to it, in fact, I could not understand why they even wrote in his part. He has a running gag throughout the movie which is so NOT funny, it isn't even funny!
The premise is okay - a guy has to go cross-country in order to intercept a sex tape with some girl (Amy Smart) before it gets to his girlfriend where it was mailed by mistake. Seeing Amy Smart get topless for 10 seconds or so was pretty much the highlight of the whole movie.
The plot gets dumber and dumber towards the 2nd half; it seems like the writers were going "Okay, we've got these guys running across country in a mini-bus, now what can we have them do that would be funny?" They came up with some ideas, though none of them are very funny and none of them make any sense. There are a couple of funny scenes, but nothing worth wading through all the bad ones to get to.
Don't bother with this movie. It sucks.
My First Mister (2001)
Great dramedy!
This could have been written by Albert Brooks. His character shines through as one of his own creations. But it's a little bit more serious and "meaningful" than his movies, which isn't a bad thing in this case.
I found it to be a true hidden gem, a great movie that no one has ever heard of, and luckily an oddball friend of mine recommended it to me.
Okay, what makes it good? I already mentioned Albert Brooks' character. But it is Leelee Sobieski, who is eerily like a young Helen Hunt, who makes the movie rise to the top. She is fantastic as the goth chick who hates her family, who hates herself, who hates life, but begins to change her tune when she meets up with similarly disenfranchised (but from a different perspective) Albert Brooks.
They are an odd couple, sort of Harold and Maude-ish, you could say, and their friendship, and the humorous and touching dialogue are excellent.
True, the movie does get a little corny and unbelievable in the 3rd act, but it works. In fact, it left me a bit melancholy and misty-eyed, and that is a good thing for a movie, isn't it?
This is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Rent it. If you like Albert Brooks you'll like it. If you like good acting, you'll love Leelee Sobieski. If you like movies that do what movies are suppposed to do, you will like it.
5 of 5 stars.