Geordie-4

Well, when I heard of this film, I was very excited. Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore (and Nicole Kidman). A "literary" movie. I really expected more. This is a pretentious mess. This is basically 2 hours of women droning on about how much their lives suck. To emphasize the importance of living each day as though it were your last, Daldry certainly takes a strange tack. Meryl Streep (in an excellent performance) allows Ed Harris (solid as usual) to berate her over the "emptiness" of her life when she has cared for him for 10 years?!! I'd be out of there if that was his thanks. Julianne Moore was excellent. I didn't think that we got to know her well enough though to care that she was depressed. Why? I think that should have been fleshed out a bit more. Nicole Kidman....oh brother. Oscar voters are getting all excited coz she plays a literary figure and wears a prosthetic nose. Yee haw! Give her the damn trophy now. I did not find her very persuasive. I thought the guy playing her husband was better in controlling his frustration over how difficult it was to live with her. I don't think Nicole Kidman's performance was particularly good. I don't think she revealed much depth or shed much light on the character, as Moore, Spillane, and Streep did. How the hell is she winning these awards? I don't know. I didn't laugh once during this film. It just seemed like a pretentious mess. If you want the audience to really get the message that one should take life by the horns, carpe diem etc. this movie doesn't inspire one. I nearly fell asleep several times. Good performances, but I didn't feel we got a sense of why we should care about these characters.

I have to say that as soon as I saw the commercials for this film, I thought it would be entertaining, just coz it looked so bad. Well, it wasn't that great, but it was better than I thought. I wish that they actually hadn't revealed so much about the spiders and we might have been a bit more scared. As it was, there was no mystery after about 30 minutes. The "plot" was full of holes and the writing was stilted at best. There were a few decent lines, but by and large, if there weren't more fun with the spider chases and the spiders inflicting violence on everything and anything, this movie would have blown, big time. Still, like I said, I liked it for the sense that it seemed to have, even in the advertising, that it was gonna be a classic B movie. The violence and the chases were truly cheesy and the movie did have a lot of fun with its own badness. Still, I wish I had been scared more. Nevertheless, it was fun and I gave it 6/10 on the voting scale. It was worth the price of admission.

The story of the escape from Alcatraz is a unique one, in so far as there was only one escape in which the escapees were not recaptured. They were presumed dead in the cold waters of the San Francisco Bay, but no proof was ever obtained. The escape in itself is very interesting, although the escape doesn't really appear very interesting in this film. The film tells the story of Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood)'s escape from Alcatraz with a minimum of additional story-telling detail. It is an interesting film, but at times one wishes there were some more narrative details with which to complicate the story and provide some sort of interest beyond simply the teling of the story. There is very little evidence of life in jail unfortunately. Having said all this, one shouldn't really knock the film too much because it seems very accurate, and for refusing to buckle under pressure to make the film more interesting at the expense of accuracy, he should be credited. Like I said, at times, I wish there was more attention devoted to life in jail or to relationships among the prisoners or giving us some sense of the milieu there in order to give the movie some variety, but still, this is a clear and accurate telling of the Alcatraz escape story.