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| EFC STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
31213 |
| Total Ratings: |
247503 |
| Total Reviews: |
27813 |
![[164366686 Hits]](/cgi-bin/gd.cgi?164366686)
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| BEIRUT |
"Interesting spot and story."
Jay Seaver says... "A movie's name just being its location doesn't always mean that the filmmakers had a sense of that but not the story, but it's not a bad way to bet. Certainly, it's not a theory that "Beirut" seems keen to debunk; much of the film's first half is explaining to the audience that Lebanon in general and its capital in particular were nervously cosmopolitan melting pots before the civil war, and then touring the blasted remains afterward. It takes a while for the specific story to really kick into gear." (more)
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| CLAIRE'S CAMERA |
"Doesn't entirely point its camera inward, and so finds a bit of life."
Jay Seaver says... "Cannes has become so associated with its film festival that just setting a movie there seems to warp perception of it and the people involved; it becomes part of this insular world that means something to filmmakers and influential critics who perhaps don't realize how many people it can leave on the outside. "Claire's Camera" mostly avoids that - it's set in that world and in many ways about it, but not so much so that it loses its basic charm." (more)
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| LET THE CORPSES TAN |
"Prettier than the typical action movie - and louder!"
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL XX: "Let the Corpses Tan" isn't the same sort of ultra-violence as high art as other films you might describe that way - it's more about the striking image than the impeccable choreography, the sort of thing that you can screen-capture and show to someone who doesn't necessarily go for big action rather than the clips you dissect looking for cuts and doubling. Fortunately, it's in the hands of some of the best in the business at creating striking images and just enough to stitch them together, and they're happy to dispense with subtlety." (more)
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| RAMPAGE (2018) |
"Where Is Bert I. Gordon When You Need Him?"
Peter Sobczynski says... "Although the credits for “Rampage” remind you that the film is at least technically based on the popular arcade game that ate up many a loose quarter back in the Eighties, any film fan with a basic working knowledge of films involving giant monsters stomping familiar cities into rubble while square-jawed heroes try to figure out a way to save the day in the ta-daa nick of time will recognize it as being more of an antecedent of the 1957 schlock movie classic, for lack of a better word, “Beginning of the End.” In that film, for those of you whose childhoods were filled with fresh air and the like, scientific experiments into making things really big have the detrimental side effect of making a swarm of grasshoppers grow to enormous size and inspire a wave of destruction that eventually culminates with them attacking Chicago. In terms of quality, let it be said that it more than earned its placement in the pantheon of B movies that found themselves being skewered on “Mystery Science Theater 3000”—the story was preposterous, the dialogue more so, the acting was more wooden than the sets and the visual effects were not so much “special” as “deeply dubious.” (The aforementioned attack on Chicago, for example, was staged by getting some regular-sized grasshoppers and filming them walking on top of photos of notable landmarks like the Wrigley Building—a gimmick that might have worked were it not for the moment when a grasshopper steps off the building and seems to hang there in thin air.) However, for all of its faults, the film does still have a certain junky charm to it, especially for anyone living in Chicago, and as bad as it is, people still remember it more than 60 years after its first release while so many other titles from that era have slipped from the cultural consciousness. “Rampage” essentially takes the formula established by that film, adds untold millions to the production budget and comes up with something that matches “Beginning of the End” in virtually all the particulars I cited above—except, alas, for the stuff about the junky charm and being memorable." (more)
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| MY NAME IS MYEISHA |
"Tries to stretch a few minutes into a movie, and can you blame it?"
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL XX: It's a challenge to build a feature-length film around a specific, brief incident; the options generally seem to be providing enough background to lead up to it (and risk swallowing the important moment) and pointedly attacking it from different perspectives in a way that risks making the audience numb to the moment. "My Name Is Myeisha" tries to do a little of both, and there's no doubt that, by the end, the audience can feel the filmmakers stretching, although many will find themselves not exactly begrudging it that extension." (more)
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| PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING |
"All of the Robots and Monsters, None of the Fun"
alejandroariera says... "I think I owe Guillermo del Toro an apology after having seen "Pacific Rim: Uprising." Yes, Guillermo, I was way too harsh on my original review of "Pacific Rim." Yes, I found the dialogue in "Pacific Rim" goofy and dumb and I missed the lyrical touches of your best films. But, man, your film was still fun! Today, whenever I stumble upon it while flipping through channels at home, I can’t help but stop and watch it for at least ten minutes regardless of the scene I stumble into, whether it’s that glorious shot of the Jaeger dragging a cargo ship to later use it as baseball bat on one of your Lovecraftian Kaijus or that equally beautiful shot of the very young Mako Kori standing alone, in the debris-filled streets of her city, staring upwards at the Jaeger piloted by Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba). You may be the producer of "Pacific Rim: Uprising" but what director Steven S. De Knight (better known for his work on the Starz series "Spartacus") and his three co-writers –Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder and T.S. Nowlin– have done to your original vision is more than shameful." (more)
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| WRINKLE IN TIME, A |
"A Literary Wrinkle Flattened By The Blockbuster Iron."
Peter Sobczynski says... "I suppose that I should confess upfront before getting into the eagerly awaited film version of “A Wrinkle in Time” that I have never read the award-winning 1962 science-fantasy book by Madeline L’Engle on which it was based. This is not meant to be a slam on the book by any means—fantasy fiction has never been one of my favorite literary areas and when I was 10, which is probably the optimum age for reading it, and reading way beyond my years, I was too busy trying to puzzle out exactly what happened during the driveway scene in “The World According the Garp”—and I know plenty of people who have themselves read and cherished it over the years. Therefore, I cannot really answer the question of how the film is in comparison to the book in any way. However, I can tell you what the film is like judged strictly on its own terms and merits and in that regard, it is an unmitigated disaster of such epic proportions that it almost—almost—begins to exert a strange sort of fasciation as you ponder whether it is just a massive botch of an adaptation or if generations of readers have been wrong all along and the story was crap right from the get-go." (more)
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| GATEWAY, THE |
"There's probably a slightly (but crucially) better version in another world"
Jay Seaver says... "SCREENED AT THE 2018 BOSTON SCI-FI FILM FESTIVAL: "The Gateway" (also called "Alpha Gateway" because there's a good chance your cable company lists its pay-per-view options alphabetically) is a reasonably capable parallel-worlds bit of science fiction that relies an awful lot on security procedures being terribly lax in all versions of Australia, even the paranoid violent one. It's the kind of thriller that simultaneously hopes you'll be impressed by its twists and not notice the really questionable things necessary to get to them, but at least it's got a decent-enough cast to make the good bits work." (more)
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'YES! UM, NO. WE'RE BETWEEN LAWYERS RIGHT NOW.'
- Wayne Campbell, Wayne's World
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