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Reviews
The Contender (2000)
Oh, yay, another Hollywood political movie!
I don't know about you, but I've been waiting and waiting for another one. And here it is--swelling, patriotic music in the background as a character makes a soul-stirring speech; instant, standing ovations from an audience of BOTH political parties (har-dee-har-har); villains run out on rails; and a couple of 'surprises' that you'd have to be blind and deaf not to have spotted coming down the track an hour before. Throw in some titillating sexual innuendo and you've got it--the perfect lefty-p.c.-patriot movie. Oh, yes, and a president whose character is written SO skillfully; every time you see him, he's on the phone ordering another gourmet meal from the White House kitchen. What a fun guy. What a gimmick. Pass on this one. Read a good book instead.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
This must be the most overrated movie in Hollywood history
This film has a silly premise, a lousy script, an implausibility factor of about +100 and a dreadful performance by Anthony Hopkins. It's the last point that I'll mention about first: has a more pretentious, breathy performance ever been seen on film before (outside of the Richard Burton oeuvre)? As for plausibility: can you imagine the FBI sending a trainee to interview a serial killer, seeking information about another serial killer on the loose? That was a major flaw in the (also overrated) novel. I guess it's easier to write about, or make a movie with, a younger woman who's still apt to get all scared-ified and emotional and who doesn't have those annoying crows-feet. The script is terrible, too--it tries to present Hannibal Lecter as being some kind of 'psychic vampire'. Witness Hopkins' expression after Jodie Foster tells him her tale of lamb-napping woe--like a famished person who's just been given a good meal. Give me a break! And don't tell me that the FBI couldn't have made a connection between the missing skin pieces on the dead girls' bodies and figured out what the loony-tunes they were chasing was doing. It takes Jodie Foster's character seeing a dress pattern with darts on it to make the connection. What a group of dim bulbs. And they wait until HOW MANY young women are killed before they scratch their heads and say, "Hmmmm, maybe the killer knew one of the victims!" How did this stupid waste of celluloid ever garner any critical praise? I mean, I know the Oscars annually bestow 'Best Motion Picture' awards on undeserving titles, so I don't care that this movie won so many--but what were the nation's film critics thinking when this made so many 'Top 10' lists?
Lolita (1997)
I'm going to give this a wishy-washy review. . .
Sorry, but this film just can't hold a candle to the novel. (Of course, with the exception of 'Lawrence of Arabia' and its source, 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom', I can't think of one movie based on a novel that can.) I won't dwell on its more obvious flaws, but will mention them in passing: Jeremy Irons is too old for his role; Dominique Swain is a convincing 14-year-old but not a pregnant 17-year-old; the character of Clare Quilty, a figure of black humor both in the book and in Kubrick's version, is rendered by this script as a sinister, charmless pimp. The role which has taken the most heat on this site, and which I believe is the most impressive, is the role of Lolita's mother, acted by Melanie Griffith. I've read several comments that state that this character was intended to be fat and unattractive. What these viewers may have forgotten (or perhaps they have never read the book) is that every character in the story is seen through the eyes of one person: Humbert Humbert. Therefore Lolita is described as being an enticing, irresistible nymphet, although most people who actually came into contact with her would find her to be a rather unattractive, slatternly little brat; and her mother Charlotte is described as being a 'fat cow', when the fact probably was, was that she was a normal, healthy woman who had those secondary sexual characteristics (hips, thighs, breasts) that Humbert wasn't too crazy about and which he recoiled away from as 'fat'. Nabokov deliberately romanticized Humbert's predilection for girl-children by portraying him as a man haunted by a lost childhood love (rather like Charlie Chaplin); if he hadn't done this, the reader (and viewer) could have interpreted this aversion to grown women as more of a latent homosexuality than to pedophilia. That digression aside: the movie is gorgeously photographed and beautifully scored, and the ending is as likely to bring tears as the ending of the novel. Superior in many ways to the Kubrick version--I preferred Peter Sellers' Quilty in that film, but hated the way he kept intruding so obviously throughout the movie--and inferior in others.