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Reviews
The Majestic (2001)
Worst movie I have seen in a long time.
The best part of this film was the cameos of Bruce Campbell acting his B-movie best, in the movie-inside-a-movie in this film.
The worst part was .. well, everything else.
The screenplay was schizophrenic. Is this a movie about the McCarthy era? Is this a movie about a man who loses his memory and falls in love? Is this a movie about a town that finally starts to heal from its lost boys in WWII? Is it a satire about the Hollywood system?
No problem! Let's make it a movie about all of these things!
Unfortunately, because this movie doesn't know what it wants to be, it fails to resolve in any meaningful way any of the plot threads.
A friend and I just watched it and we were laughing ourselves silly - the film is so cliché, we predicted pretty much every important plot twist.
Unintentionally funny, and at 2 and a half hours, unbearable agony to sit through.
I read Roger Ebert's review, and Ebert fawns over Darabont here, saying "Darabont makes films long enough to sink into and move around in.", comparing the length of this film to The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.
Except those were good films, Roger.
I guess Roger thinks any movie that bashes McCarthy is automatically a good movie. This is one of those cases where Ebert's political bias makes him overlook a film's fatal flaws.
Dreck. Painful, interminable, dreck.
Ellektra (2004)
Difficult and challenging - but rewarding
While the central plot of Ellektra is not unique, the full context of the film was astonishing.
I give this film a 10 for technique. The visual style was compelling and challenging - and combined with the ambitiousness of the story (many different characters) it required some effort to keep track of what was going on in the first few minutes. But once the film had introduced all the characters, it settled in and it flowed readily.
Gert Portael as 'Sam' turns in a remarkable performance. She makes you believe that she is a woman in pain. She was completely *real* here - not some Hollywood bimbo with a little makeup to make her look like an addict. From her first frame you see a lifetime of agony on her face. A *great* choice.
There are many other fine performances - I connected with all the characters which makes the first third of the film hard to bear, but also makes the payoff at the end of the movie work. And this is a difficult film. There are a few moments of intense violence - and in each I cared about what was happening, as compared to victims in movies like Reservoir Dogs who suffer excruciating violence but which generated no emotion for me (other than disgust).
I was at max adrenaline through the whole thing - for me, this was one of those beautiful moments of cinema. I can't wait to see "Ellektra" again.