Shmendrek

Bio: Movie reviews span several years. Took a long hiatus. I don't see a lot of pictures these days. Reading a lot of literature, taking in a lot of baseball, and focusing on my job for the time being.

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2 _33%

Dirty Harry (1971) - Rated 15 Mar 2010

Unabashedly authoritarian cop-porn, legitimized by a couple of unrealistic "ticking time-bomb" scenarios which force the audience to side with the "lesser of two sociopaths" i.e. Harry Callahan. A more honest film would have seen Callahan shredding the U.S. Constitution, blending the fragments, freezing them into a bullet, and putting it through the head of a black guy without reading him his Miranda rights, all while singing the Star Spangled Banner off-key.

2 _33%

Dracula (1931) - Rated 27 Feb 2010

After seeing a few of these adaptations, I'm convinced that the Dracula mythos has an anti-Semitic subtext. Dracula is an Eastern or Central European Slav who immigrates to England, bringing pestilence in his wake. He parasitically feeds off the "life force" of the Western European bourgeoisie. And he's repulsed by Christian symbols like crucifixes. Fuck, Max Schreck in Nosferatu even has a giant, hooked nose. Interesting. As to this adaptation: good atmosphere, awful pacing.

6 _99%

Vertigo (1958) - Rated 14 Jan 2009

Like a long, slow-burning fuse leading to a pile of dynamite. Even better, just when you think you've recovered from the initial blast, Hitchcock drops another bomb on you. When it was over, there was nothing I wanted to do more than watch it again. Brilliant work.

1 _10%

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) - Rated 27 Feb 2010

Where you all see an incompetently directed slasher film, I see trenchant social commentary. In an early part of the story, Jason inhabits the body of a young black man, a "hellish" fate in the America of the early 90s. Consider the film's temporal proximity to the Rodney King trial and the-- ahahaha, just kidding, this movie is a piece of shit.

2 _33%

V for Vendetta (2006) - Rated 29 Feb 2008

It's like it desperately wants to hit you hard, right in your gut, but all you see are pale, skinny arms weakly slapping at your face.

6 _99%

Casino (1995) - Rated 15 Feb 2008

Like a gaudy, coke-fueled Greek tragedy about the meteoric rise of an ancient lumpen desert civilization and its eventual destruction at the hands of its greedy, corrupt rulers. Throw in the beautiful "Theme de Camille," and you got yourself an unforgettable (though admittedly flawed) small-scale epic. Lots of folks will call this "Scorsese on autopilot," but for me its neck-and-neck with Taxi Driver as his best.

0 _0%

Date Movie (2006) - Rated 26 Mar 2008

6:12 And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; 6:13 And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

4 _83%

Apocalypse Now (1979) - Rated 09 Jul 2007

Prefer the original. Some of the additional material grinds the entire thing to a halt, specifically the scene with the French colonists. Still, enormous, sweeping epic about the Vietnam War made even more enormous and sweeping by an extra two hours worth of material.

1 _10%

Fight Club (1999) - Rated 23 Mar 2010

Even when you look past its hyper-macho posturing, it's little more than a facile, liberal critique of consumerism which lacks the chutzpah to go for the jugular. The film is so worried about Ikea end-tables and underwear ads that it doesn't even mention class, which is a sign that your little "anti-capitalist" movie stinks. The best part is when Durden assaults a worker and threatens to kill him unless he "bootstraps" his way out of the social relationship that is capitalism. That's so Raven.