Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: This animated feature (a co-production between Ireland, Belgium and France) deals with what is surely one of the oddest subject ever for a movie: the creation in the 9th century of a famous illuminated manuscript, the book of Kells. In this fantastic retelling of that story, a prepubescent boy named Brendan, living in a monastery ruled by his uncle, a stern abbot who is worried preparing the defenses of the abbey from the impending attack by the feared vikings, must get into the forbidding surrounding forest to find the materials that a master illuminator named Aidan needs to finish the book. To do that task, in the forest he unexpectedly finds the help of a friendly fairy named Aisling.Gorgeously and delicately drawn by hand (there is some computer animation in a few key passages) in a manner that wants to resemble both medieval and traditional Celtic art, and with a very creative use of color and all sorts of geometric shapes, this film is relentlessly strange, but is a good strange, not of the off putting variety but of the eye opening sort. If one were to nitpick - beyond some anachronisms, like an African monk in 9th century Ireland one would have to say that the blend of Catholic mysticism with Celtic paganism in this movie never really coalesce. And the comic relief is sometimes a bit too broad. That's why I cannot give them the highest ranking. But these are minor problems with an otherwise delightful and superbly imaginative film.
Problem: OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive negative
=++++=
Answer: Having seen the first ten episodes, I must say this show sucks.

What bothers me the most, is that the show was shot in Canada. I know it's cheaper, but they should have shot it in California, so we could have had scenes in the desert. That would have been more true to the movie. The first scene where they are outside in another world is in the mountains, with lots of pinetrees where it looks cold. That does'nt feel very Egyptian. What worked so well in the movie was that it felt like you were in the ancient Egypt. Here it feels like they're running around fighting aliens in a Canadian forrest. And it's so lame that appaerantly, on other planets, the fall comes as well. You can see leaves on the ground in the forrests that all look like forrests outside Vancouver. It just makes the show even more unbelievable and dumb.

And then there is Richard Dean Anderson. He is no Kurt Russel. Sure he does a decent job and he tries to copy Russels performance a little bit, but he is just not as cool as Russel. And not nearly as good an actor as Russel. And Russells way of playing O Neill, well he was much more cynical. Andersons O Neil, is way too soft. I liked it that Russels version just did'nt give a s*** and had no trouble detonating the bomb until the very end of the movie.

Michael Shanks does a really good job as Jackson though taking over from James Spader.

Teal'c is a really annoying character. He is Jaffa. Not a Jaffa. Just Jaffa. Aaaarrgh!! A former bodyguard of a pathetic Ra character, seen only in the pilot and in one other episode so far. Teal'c speaks talks and acts like a robot. I've seen better acting from Jean Claude Van Damme.

And the fact that Teal'c and the Ra character and the people they saved in the movie, can speak English all of a sudden is also incredibly dumb. What made the aliens so scary in the movie was that they spoke an ancient language and were real monsters.

As for the special effects, they are really good in the pilot. But the very rare effects in the actual show are badly done and looks cheap. Especially a planet they visit with crystals. It's so obvious they walk around on a soundstage with a badly made painting in the background. It's an insult to us viewers that they made it look so cheap. Especially when they could have made it in front of a bluescreen with cgi backgrounds.

The X-files had better effects when they aired their first episodes in 1993. That was 4 years before SG-1 started. And they did'nt have the apparent two million dollar budget per episode, that SG-1 supposedly had. They must have spend all the money on catering. Because I don't see it on the screen.

Incredibly boring and pointless show, that could have been great if they had shot the show in Hollywood with a bigger budget and better writers and better characters.
An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: It'd be easy to call Guys and Dolls great. It's got Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando (and, contrary to Sinatra's original wishes, the casting works), it's got a really cool 1950s feel, even if it is basically transposed from stage to screen with only a little interruption. And most of the songs are often a lot of fun, and catchy, and performed with that wink and nod to the wonderful escapism inherent in the form itself. If it's not entirely as great as some others of its ilk, it shouldn't be any fault of the filmmaker Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Not all the songs entirely click, and a little of the dialog feels like it's being performed for the stage as opposed to film (it's hard to tell at times- Brando and Sinatra straddle the line so often that one has to watch carefully to tell when one plays for the camera or for the "stage", while the actress playing Adele is better for stage than screen).

The plot is one of those winners that works well for its period, even if one wonders if its influence has stretched to the likes of 1999's She's All That (well, not quite, but close). A gambler (and 14-year betrothed), played by Sinatra, wants to host a big-time game, but is told that the "heat is on", meaning the cops are on watch. So, he has only one choice to host the game, with a thousand dollar tab. The only way he can get it is through a big-time bet with fellow gambler Brando, who's put on to make a wild wooing job of a mission worker. It allows for the predictable twists in the story, in the sudden turn-on-turn-off of the charms of the character, of the idiosyncrasies of people from the streets (gangsters and dancers and the "saitn" played by Jean Simmons who falls for Brando). It is, in its basic concept, about this whole world of guys and dolls, and how to balance one or the other- obviously without getting married or too compromised.

Mankiewicz brings a lot of energy to the piece, even when keeping still with the camera on the subject, and his stars are properly reeled in. Hell, even Brando works excellently for a musical as he goes beyond being simply THE method actor and shows his chops for singing and big-star quality. The story and characters eventually wind down to what you'd hope will happen, and that's fine. All we ask for- and what we get- is entertainment in good spurts of witty, involving dialog, and a few songs and dances that bring the house down (my favorites were the number with the lady-cats at the club, Luck be a Lady, and the two numbers down in Havana, Cuba). A-
Problem: Write a negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer:
I find it heart-warming and inspiring that the writing team behind such hopelessly mainstream Hollywood movies like INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, American Graffiti and HOWARD THE DUCK would begin their career with a low-budget exploitation horror film like this. Perhaps as a testament to the talent that would earn Willard Hyuck and Gloria Katz an Oscar nomination later in their respective careers, Messiah of Evil has potential, but sadly becomes frustrating exactly because it can't muster the film-making prowess to pull it off.

The premise involves a young girl who travels to a small coastal town in search for her painter father who went missing a while back. It doesn't take long for the fragmented narrative to abandon all hope and dive headlong in disjointed absurdity - and for a while it works admirably well to the point where you begin thinking that maybe Messiah of Evil needs to be reclaimed from the schlocky gutter of 70's exploitation as an example of artful mystery horror.

The surreal non-sequiturs keep piling on as the daughter stumbles upon a young couple in a seedy hotel room who are in town to conduct a research on the local legend of the 'blood moon', a scruffy and half-mad alcoholic (played by the great Elisha Cook Jr. in perhaps the best scene of the movie) who warns her about her father only to be reportedly found dead in an alley 'eaten by dogs' a little later, the blind old lady that owns the local art gallery and who has inexplicably removed all of her father's paintings from the shop and last but not least a retarded, murderous, squirrel-eating albino.

Part of the movie's charm is precisely this brand of bargain-basement artsy surrealism that defies logic and genre conventions every step of the way. Whereas with Lynch it is obviously the mark of a talented creator, with Messiah of Evil the boundaries between the 'intentional', the 'unintentional' and the 'didn't really expect it to come out this way but it's good enough - WRAP SCENE' blur hopelessly.

Take for example the double narration that flows in and out of the picture in a drug-addled, feverish, stream-of-consciousness way, one coming from the daughter as she wanders from place to place in search for her father, and the other narrated by her father's voice as she reads his diary.

While we're still talking about a 'living dead' picture, Messiah of Evil is different and only loosely one - at least with current preconceptions of what a zombie movie is supposed to be. The origin of the living dead here is a 100 year old curse, bestowed upon the town by a mysterious 'Dark Stranger' who came from the woods one day. In the meantime Hyuck finds time for snippets of mass-consumption criticism in a flesh-eating supermarket scene that predates DAWN OF THE DEAD by a good number of years (you can hear the MST3K line already: 'man is dead, only his capitalist food tins remain') and a nicely thought but poorly executed similar scene in a movie theater.

I generally think that the surreal works in careful, well measured doses - how is the absurd to work if it's not hidden within the perfectly normal? Hyuck seems to just smear it all over the picture and by doing so dangerously overplays his hand. When the albino for example picks up a girl hitching her way to town and eats a squirrel in front of her, you can almost imagine the director winking meaningfully at the audience, amused and satisfied with his own hijinks.

The general film-making level is also pretty low - after the half-way mark, the pace becomes muddled and the story tiresome and evidently going nowhere and not particularly fast either. Add to that the choppy editing, average acting and Hyuck's general inability to capture true atmosphere - the empty streets of coastal town are criminally misused - and I'd file Messiah under 'missed opportunity' but still grindhouse afficionados will find enough to appreciate - even though it's not particularly gory, trashy or sleazy.