A camp and conspiratorial spoof along the lines of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, in which Count Dracula (Hamilton), dispossessed by the People’s Commissar in his native Transylvania, moves to New York to secure a bite out of the Hefty Apple and Susan Saint James. Atrociously directed and full of groan-making jokes, but the irregularity are having such a good time that it’s difficult not to respond in a similar clearance. Have a word with it when you feel at your silliest.
28 Şubat 2010
27 Şubat 2010
The Road to El Dorado (2000)
An spirited combo of the knowledgeable Bob Hope–Bing Crosby “Road” pictures and “The Restrain Who Would Be Ruler,” DreamWorks’ third notable main film cartoon, “The Byway to El Dorado,” is a strained and pallid concoction that won’t fire the collective imaginations of today’s children. The instinctive kidpic audience will turn out for this high-heritage production, but dearth of a story that pre-teens will deal involving and six of the least memorable songs Elton John and Tim Rice have written leave calculate this at best a moderate earner, one certainly unavoidable notwithstanding bring B.O. than the studio’s “Antz” and “The Prince of Egypt” and more likely to reach the numbers of “Anastasia” or less.
Five years in production, epic buddy picture went through two sets of directors and numerous evolving concepts, arriving finally at a middle ground between outright romp and a serious take on the arrival of the conquistadors in the New World. Subject matter is rife with possibilities, even for a moppet-oriented effort that obviously isn’t going to grapple with such heavy themes as conquest and subjugation. “Pocahontas” showed that it is possible to tread this sensitive terrain with a degree of balance and sensitivity in terms that kids can grasp.
But whenever “El Dorado” threatens to get serious, it backs off, retreating into loud shenanigans between its two mischievous heroes, complete with annoyingly anachronistic mannerisms such as high-fiving and shouts of “Yes!”; vampy scheming on the part of its heroine, who looks and sounds like a Las Vegas tart; rambunctious action sequences and montage-oriented musical numbers that tend to center on general concepts (”The Trail We Blaze,” “It’s Tough to Be a God”) rather than on immediate emotions.
First quarter-hour introduces dark-haired Tulio (voiced by Kevin Kline) and blond-maned Miguel (Kenneth Branagh) as Spanish rascals who delight in creating scrapes and extricating themselves with devilish aplomb. After one prank too many, however, they find themselves trapped in barrels and placed aboard one of Cortes’ ships headed across the Atlantic in 1519. With Cortes’ noble horse, they escape in a lifeboat and finally wash up on a beautiful beach bordered by jungle.
Quickly captured by imposing bronze-skinned natives, the boys think their goose is cooked upon arrival at the fabled city of gold, El Dorado. But the coming of such “gods,” as they are perceived to be, has been prophesied, and, after a bit of lucky shuffling and hocus-pocus, Tulio and Miguel are installed in exclusive quarters atop one of the city’s many pyramids. Local babe Chel (Rosie Perez) is on to their game and blackmails the flummoxed pair into including her in their plan to escape El Dorado with a bounty of gold, courtesy of a large boat to be built especially for them.
Although there is a local chief (Edward James Olmos), he, along with the rest of the community, is dominated by high priest Tzekel-Kan (Armand Assante), a commanding figure who pays elaborate homage to the white strangers at first but gradually becomes skeptical of their presumed divinity. The severe holy man is especially offended by the newcomers’ oh-so-sensitive objections to human sacrifice, first when they prevent an execution, and later after the “gods” manage to win a furious ball game and then insist that the losers, contrary to custom, be spared. In a direct lift from the film “The Man Who Would Be King,” Tzekel-Kan realizes that the visitors are just human beings after all when Miguel bleeds from a cut.
Far too much time is devoted to the two charlatans’ silly arguments about if and how they’re going to pull off their charade, and to contretemps concerning Chel, whom they declare to be off-limits romantically but who manages to come between them nevertheless. By contrast, one of the script’s more promising elements — Miguel’s sudden surge of feeling for the local citizens and their gentle lifestyle when he mingles with them, to the consternation of his anxious partner — is given unduly short shrift. Even if “the allure of the primitive” reps a cliche in the adventure/exploration genre, a bit more time devoted to it would have brought the setting and its inhabitants more to the foreground; as it is, there is no individuation among the native people.
Kline and Branagh (last paired in “Wild Wild West”) give boisterous, spirited readings to their characters, even if Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio’s script provides them with few shadings or interesting traits. Assante registers strongly as the powerful priest.
But the Chel character is so contemporary, and in a vulgar way to boot, as to be incredible and off-putting, and Perez’s urbanite voicing doesn’t help. Even Chel’s motivation is unbelievable: El Dorado is presented as a Shangri-La–like paradise, and no one in this sealed-off city would even know about another place to which he or she would want to flee.
Visual design as overseen by directors Eric “Bibo” Bergeron and Don Paul is colorful, sometimes attractive but never breathtaking. Animation, compositions and editing favor dramatic angles and fluidly changing perspectives that keep things interesting, while the characters are more commonly conceived; a few elements, notably the gold, are rendered with near-photographic realism. The animals on view comprehendingly participate in human endeavors but aren’t anthropomorphized in traditional Disney fashion, while the tunes are vigorous and well sung but, at least at first listen, not catchy or distinctive.
24 Şubat 2010
Halloween: Resurrection review
In the 1930s and 40s Hollywood gave us the Frankenstein barbarity, Dracula, and the Wolfman. Time after adjust they kept coming back with a view more, despite their being burned, buried, shot, and staked. Definitely, they died of their own conformity, victims of overexposure and sequels that became steadily more repeated and redundant as they went along. Today we have Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger, all of them facing the identical decreed downfall as their predecessors and for the constant reasons.
“Halloween: Resurrection” is a cogent example. This, by my reckoning, is the eighth entry in a series that should have ended in the matter of six or seven sequels ago. You’ll rescind it all started promisingly in 1978 when scribe-manager John Carpenter primed homicidal loony Michael Myers loose to terrorize a small village on Halloween night. The film almost single-handedly started the entire slasher craze (OK, maybe with a little inspiration from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” some eighteen years before), and slashers became a subgenre of panic that was imitated by countless clones thereafter and headed downhill categorically fast. By the time “Resurrection” came along in 2002, the “Halloween” series, long earlier jilted by Carpenter, had degenerated all but to unqualified, sanguinary camp.
As a horror-silent picture booster, I concede to having seen all the entries in the “Halloween” saga, even the nonsensical many-three, “Season of the Beldam,” that didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the pictures. But that doesn’t mean I thought any of them but the before one were any good; it nothing but means I’m an optimist. Fans of Jamie Lee Curtis will be both pleased and annoyed that her character, Laurie Strode, is back–pleased that she’s in the coating at all; annoyed that, well, if you watch this thing, you’ll repossess out.
You see, at the end of “Halloween: H20,” Laurie was supposed to have on the agenda c trick killed Michael concerning good, but it was the wrong person, and Michael escaped again. On occasion, Laurie is locked away in a sanitarium, presumably having gone zealous at the kind-heartedness of her wrongful killing, but in fact she’s patiently waiting for her brother Michael’s renewal. Quiescent, that’s not what the big is involving.
The actual setup this time around has a group of college students invited to participate in a dwell Spider’s web programme to be spent all Halloween night in the old Myers house. The viewer can leak in an direct what’s going to happen, and it does. In fact, it seems so undeniable contrived and corny, the audience expects every half a mo destined for some clever bow to occur, some ironic turnaround to come about. Don’t bet on it. The single purpose in these slasher flicks is to suspect the order of the murders and to enjoy the gruesome creativity of the deaths. Yet even these petite, delinquent pleasures are made mundane by a plan wholly lacking in any innovative begin. I employing, not even its strategy of “Halloween” meets “The Blair Witch Project” can do anything to liven things up.
The students who spend the night in the old, dark house are Sara (Bianca Kajlich), Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas), Jen (Katee Sackhoff), Bill (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Donna (Daisy McCrackin), and Jim (Luke Kirby). The Internet programmers administrative notwithstanding placement up the depict and placing Web cams in every room are Freddie (Busta Rhymes) and Nora (Tyra Banks). As expected, with a bank of up a dozen idiot box monitors in the control room, no one is watching when the triumph majority drops.
It seems humongous that after all these years, with the passing of so innumerable slasher-movie clones and so many parodies of the genre, another one could be made that follows the timeworn formula so religiously. Depend upon the requisite number of red herrings, false alarms, stuff dropping out of cupboards, decapitations, and the like. There’s even a subplot about a pair of teenagers watching the show on their conversant with computer, one of whom figures incorrect that what they’re seeing is for real, but he can’t twig through to 911 emergency. If he had a passenger car to stab to the rescue, it undoubtedly wouldn’t have started.
I found “Halloween: Resurrection” so bad, it was unintentionally funny. Maybe it was no more than me. At any scale, the movie is rated R for in sum nudity, blood, gore, violence, and the occasional harsh word. I suppose that’s all anyone expects from this description of film.