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| marantzo |
 Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:35 am |
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| That's what I was going to ask. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2012 8:27 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 6954
Location: Black Hills
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Everybody Wins (1990)
If you wonder what the worst Debra Winger movie is, this may be it. A convergence of talent - Winger, Nolte, and script by Arthur Miller - that fails to happen. I made it in about 40 minutes and then had to bail. Nolte's a PI in Connecticut, Winger's a mentally unbalanced hooker, who draws him into some swamp of local corruption. Look away from the screen for five seconds and you lose all interest in, or memory of, the narrative. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2012 5:27 pm |
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I don't remember ever hearing of that movie. Maybe it's supposed to be a comedy?  |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2012 5:30 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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| Everybody Wins is indeed a terrible movie. Haven't seen it in years, but it was instrumental in the diminution of Debra Winger's career. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2012 5:55 pm |
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Location: Black Hills
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| You may be right, Bill. I had thought she just took a long mommy hiatus, as was claimed, but that gig could leave you radioactive. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2013 1:48 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12902
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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I forgot this forum existed:
Phantom: F. W. Murnau feature that is mostly tedious and overdramatic, utterly destroyed by a miscasting of the central role by an actor (Alfred Abel) who was at least 20 years too old for the part, and who drains the life out of every scene he's in. Murnau's usually a great director, but this was a lost film that should have stayed lost.
Given Abel's miscasting and the actress playing the mother having a perpetual woeful look, it was hard to get into the movie. Some of the other performances are quite good, like Aud Egede Nissen playing Abel's sister, who has a promising future as a prostitute. There's a reason the mother has a haggard look.
The story is told as a flashback, with the framing device being Lorenz's (Abel) wife convincing him to write his experiences, and he starts these by telling us he's an ex-convict who has atoned, which takes some of the drama away. Abel actually looks older in the flashback than in the framing story. Basically, he's a city clerk who is a part-time poet when he is struck by a horse-drawn carriage driven by a beautiful and wealthy young woman, and he begins to obsessively pursue her and otherwise act erratically. Lorenz shows his poems to a friend who thinks they're works of genius and should be published, so Lorenz is convinced he's going to be famous and rich so he starts borrowing money, not realizing the publisher has refused his work. Eventually Lorenz finds a prostitute who looks just like the woman of his dreams, and things really go downhill. 1 1/2 of 5 stars. |
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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Fri May 08, 2015 8:34 am |
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Location: Black Hills
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| I also forgot it existed, but knew there was a need, after watching 20 minutes of the 2014 film, "The Bag Man," a complete waste of talent. Jhn Cusack has a penchant, in his roles, for standing in the rain and staying at weird hotels or motels. It doesn't work here, and Robert DeNiro is a sad clanking caricature of all his previous mobsters: unwatchable. And has the most pathetic use of a maguffin (gee, what's in the bag man's BAG?) I've seen in a while. It's all supposed to add up to a quirky pomo noir, but the result is cruelty plus tedium. Think Tarantino on a really bad day. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 7:43 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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A gloomy heroine, a forbidding mansion, dark family secrets..."Stoker" starts out on a faux Gothic note but then turns into a clumsy and pretentious attempt at a chilling coming-of-age story which wastes (sigh) Mia Wasichowska, Matthew Goode and Nicole K. The writers try various methods to apply shocks to the viewer - incest, murder, tiny children buried in sand, irrational refusals to eat ice cream - but somehow everything seems predictable, as if taken from Bob's Handy Manual of Psychopathy for Screenwriters and plopped down on a script conveyer belt, without any sense of real character development. A deeply stupid movie.
(This goes in Hate thread because a) Syd and Gromit have some really interesting reviews lined up in Couch, and b) I heart Mia W. and hate to see her so ill-used.) |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 11:55 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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Now that I remember this forum exists, I just have two words:
"Inherent"
and "Vice." |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 11:25 am |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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I have four more words:
I'll Follow You Down.
A 2013 Canadian techno-thriller (supposedly) that stars Gillian Anderson, Rufus Sewell and the "I see dead people" kid, now grown up. My sixth sense told me this was a stinker before I took it out of the box, and it was right. Anderson is wasted, and kills herself in the third act, because her husband (mad physicist Sewell) has disappeared at a physics convention at Princeton and she's never gotten over him. The grieving son, now a gifted physics student, figures out from an old 1946 newspaper clipping that dad went back, through a wormhole machine, to that year and got mugged and murdered in an alley. (we learn he had a technical question for Albert Einstein - a question that, presumably, couldn't be answered by going through the great man's many papers, or the papers of the many great physicists who followed him and refined and elaborated upon his theories....) I think you can figure out the plot from here. The one thing you might hope for in a time travel plot - the elegant unraveling of intricate knots of causality and paradox - doesn't happen, and the film settles for a dumb gimmick.
Gillian Anderson seems to be having a fine career, everywhere from screen to tv to West End productions that draw accolades, but IFYD is an ugly slush-filled pothole along that career road. |
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He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2016 5:00 pm |
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Joined: 30 Oct 2014
Posts: 278
Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
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| Well I hated Captain Fantastic. |
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Big bang, shmig bang; still doesn't explain how anything starts. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2016 10:39 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: New York City
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marantzo wrote: Well I hated Captain Fantastic.
It's eminently hateful despite several nice touches. Viggo is sorely miscast and that's just for starters. The ideas are a mix of new-age and old-fashioned smarm, and they're preposterous. |
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| billyweeds |
| Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 4:18 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 20618
Location: New York City
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What are your least favorite films of all time? My bottom five (in order from top to bottom)
1) Gangs of New York
2) The Last Emperor
3) The English Patient
4) Damsels in Distress
5) Synecdoche, New York |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 4:59 pm |
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Joined: 30 Oct 2014
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Location: Winnipeg: It's a dry cold.
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| I didn't like any of the five that you also hated. |
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Big bang, shmig bang; still doesn't explain how anything starts. |
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| bartist |
| Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 7:03 pm |
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Joined: 27 Apr 2010
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Location: Black Hills
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| Well, 4 out your 5 I would endorse and join you in a good ol' Scorn Heapin' shindig. The Last Emperor, however, seems to have evaporated from my memory so that I can't really hate it. That's a sort of indictment, too, I realize. I assume your list is of films greatly hyped, which sort of makes the loathing more fun since it's combined with toppling icons and shooting sacred cows and all that. |
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