The Shawshank Redemption (1994): starring Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, William Sadler, James Whitmore
The Shawshank Redemption has garnered alot of praise in the fifteen years since it's release. It's currently sitting at the number one slot of IMDB's top 250 movies of all time (then again, The Dark Knight is number six and, as good a movie as that was, I can think of more than five movies that were better). So why is it I'm just getting around to watching it now? Honestly, I have no idea. Much like Schindler's List (which I am also about to watch for the first time ever), it's one of those movies that's been lingering about for years that I'd always meant to watch, but hadn't. Well, I'll go ahead and say what everyone else on the planet already knows: it's a good movie. It touches all the proper emotions and gives the audience a satisfying ending. It is, however, also fairly cliched and doesn't really contribute anything new to the prison genre (in fact, Cool Hand Luke covered very similar themes). And some of Stephen King's weird touches find their way onto the screen, especially with the head guard's weird insults for the prisoners. I'm not saying it's bad writing, it's just typical King writing, and it's sometimes unintentionally funny. Overall, it was a very good movie, and a solid performance by the always good Morgan Freeman, but everyone else in the world already knew that.
**** out of *****
Schindler's List (1993): Starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Embeth Davidtz, Mark Ivanir
Schindler's List is the first of two WWII films made by Steven Spielberg in the 1990s, and while Saving Private Ryan dealt with the horrors of war in general, Schindler's List focuses specifically on the Holocaust and the nazi death camps. But both films have more in common than just the same director. They both strive for realism, especially when it comes to demonstrating realistic violence. Some of the things we've seen on the internet in the 21rst century (real life beheadings, for example) might've dulled the original impact of those violent scenes, but fortunately these movies were more than just a collection of shock elements. And where Saving Private Ryan is unrelenting in it's tension (the ultra-realism tends to leave the viewer with a knot in his stomach), Schindler's List never leaves us in the concentration camp too long. We thankfully spend most of the movie looking through the eyes of Oskar Schindler, a german war profiteer who at first only seems concerned with wine, women and money. That is, until the day he witnesses SS captain Amon Goeth's brutal "cleansing" of a jewish ghetto. Soon, he's using his war profits to save as many jews as he can from the gas chambers. The contrasts between Schindler's life of luxury and the jews existence under constant threat of death are sharp and pointed. One scene shows a wealthy jewish couple moved into a tiny ghetto apartment with 12 others while Schindler moves into their former home. The black and white film is at times crisp, like an old news reel that's never been shown. Other times it makes special use of the contrast between light and shadow, and it's clear Spielberg, as a student of film noir, is paying it special tribute. Perhaps, hollywood's old directors are getting more of a tribute than even the jews, as jewish characters are relegated to the background in the midst of the german characters. I realize that in real life, the jews that survived were the ones who kept quiet and didn't speak out of turn, but so many scenes in this movie seem to be from the nazi's perspective. One scene in particular, where Goeth is firing his sniper rifle from the balcony of his home down into the prison camp, is shown almost entirely from Goeth's distant perspective. Maybe it's Spielberg's intention to place us in the eyes of the murderers, to instill some sort of passive guilt in our subconscious. In any event, the film-making is quite amazing, and the story itself is both historically accurate and painful to watch. Watching this movie, one can't help but be overcome by the wave of emotions and thoughts it provokes.
*****
Feast (2005): starring Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat, Judah Friedlander, Josh Zuckerman, Jason Mewes, Jenny Wade
Lots of modern horror films attempt to spoof the cliches of the genre while still being scary. Often though, the end result is mixed between good (Slither) and bad (Cabin Fever). Feast falls somewhere in the 'bad' territory. It certainly has plenty of humor, from the way it introduces each character to the monsters' procreation skills, but what it lacks is the horror element, which is instead replaced with simple gross-out gimmicks. Much like Cabin Fever or even Hostel to a degree (I thought the original Hostel was fairly clever), Feast mistakes maggots and slime for real horror. The plot is simple: a group of bar patrons are trapped in the bar by a group of monsters, and must figure out a way to either escape or kill the monsters. The monsters are actually pretty nonsensical, they fill the typical movie monster requirements in that they're super-fast, super powerful, and super sneaky, all while being 8 feet tall. They're also incredibly ridiculous looking, as sometimes they're simple rubber latex and others they look exactly like the monsters from "The Village", minus the red cloaks. I kept hoping for something original to pop out at me during the film, but inbetween the nonsense (at one point, one of the monsters vomits slime-covered maggots all over one of the characters- twice), we get scenes taken almost directly from other, better horror movies ("Night of The Living Dead" for example). The movie itself comes from a television show called "Project Greenlight" which I've never seen, but it's produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, I think in an attempt to find the next "Good Will Hunting", or at least give young filmmakers the same opportunity they had when making that film. With Feast, they needn't have bothered.
** out of *****
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Fri May 15, 2009 1:32 am