Quest for Fire

A bunch of primitive humans go on a quest for fire. I thought this was pretty unique – most movies that take place in this time period (and there aren’t many) don’t do a really good job… of course, it’s hard to know just what things were like on a day-to-day basis back then. It’s difficult to make a movie with no dialogue (except for the grunting). Though, I’ll have to say that humans of this period probably did have language – it’s a fundamental characteristic of humans.

Puppetmaster

Your typical cheeseball “aliens take over human bodies” movie. This time, they’ve picked Iowa as their starting point. There were a lot of “missing” scenes in this movie. It was like they figured some scenes would just be too expensive to film, so they just skipped to the next one. That was a little annoying. I was pretty darn impressed with the “hang on to the helicopter” scene at the end – chilling.

Prospero’s Books

Wow. Only Peter Greenaway could pull off a movie like this. This is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “the tempest”. John Gielgud speaks every line for every character. The costumes and sets are beyond dreamlike. I think this movie also set an all-time record for sheer number of naked people. Don’t expect to understand it, just let it melt your brain.

 

Popeye

I suppose it had to be done. I guess it couldn’t have been done a lot better either. One of the few movies where Robin Williams isn’t “Robin Williams”. This doesn’t even compare to the really old b/w popeye cartoons from the 30’s though, where he’d beat up on people for just looking at him wrong – before the Hollywood morality police took over.

 

The Postman

Yes, the Kevin Costner movie that nobody saw. This movie had possibly the worst trailers I’ve ever seen. They made it out to be this epic story… I remember turning to the guy next to me in the theater and asking “is this a joke?”. I was serious, but… so was Kevin Costner. I’ve seen a lot of worse movies, I think ‘The Postman’ just got a bad vibe and was doomed before it ever came out. Some people have called this “waterworld without the water”. That’s actually a pretty good description. It’s about a loner in a post-apocalyptic world who accidentally finds something to believe in, and rises up against a tyrant (oh, he falls in love with a strong, independent woman too). Except in this one, Kevin is trying to get to the water (some ocean-side village) instead of land. The story & writing in this movie is a little better than waterworld, but the special effects weren’t as numerous. Remember how you felt about waterworld because you’ll probably feel the same way about this movie. If you haven’t seen either movie, you didn’t miss that much.

 

Pleasantville

I’m sorry if you liked this movie, but I thought it was completely full of itself. After a half hour, I was sitting there saying “ok, I get it… when people ‘wake up’, they turn into color… oooh! a metaphor or something”. But that was the whole movie. This was just stupid, they were living in an artificially constructed reality in the first place, any growth of the characters was just stupid.