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

Answer: It's interesting that all who (so far) seemed to like this film had no expectations--I guess that's the trick. In contrast with them, I had optimistic expectations, and that was a mistake. As soon as I saw how close to the faces the camera always was, I knew we were in the hands of an extremely amateur director--that's always a clear sign of them, they think it is arty or effective or intense to hold the camera about two inches away from the actors. The actors in this film, though, had only one facial expression each.

If the close camera wasn't enough, the lack of light in the film killed it. The film seemed to be entirely filmed in the dark. So now we know that the cinematographer was a rank amateur, as well. "Ooh ooh, we're going to light the set with a flashlight! That will make it all seem intimate!" No, that made it all seem invisible.

On top of the serious technical flaws, there was absolutely no story beyond the barest hint of an idea that was never developed, and nothing new about this kind of relationship was illuminated. (Perhaps this is a new kind of film for Germany, but in Los Angeles, forget about it.)

The fact that this film won a couple of film festival awards doesn't indicate the quality of the film, but besmirches the quality of these particular festivals. I can assure you that this film won't win anything in the festival where I saw it. In fact, two times during the film it seemed that it was finally over and people started to get up to leave (this was one of the side effects of the cinematographer's "total darkness" technique). But when the film shuddered on, instead, there were moans coming from the audience. And once the movie finally DID end, it was clear that it hadn't mattered if it actually had ended at either of the two earlier points. An earlier ending would have saved the audience from yet more monotonous scenes of domesticity (folding sheets, cutting vegetables, spreading honey on bread). Yeah, we get it, the life of the lonely old man was boring-- but we figured that one out at the very beginning.

I recommend that audiences miss this one, it has absolutely nothing to offer sophisticated movie-goers.
Problem: OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive negative
=++++=
Answer: I personally found this movie to be terrible, first it was hardly objective, and provided one side of the debate. The only people who were presented as the side saying he did exist being a bunch of people coming from a Billy Grahm Revival. Secondly it deviated heavily from its supposed topic did Jesus (Yeshua) exist, to talking about how violent Christianity is, and showing scenes from Mel Gibsons "The Passion". In the end it has the director con his former Principal of a Conservative Private School into being interviewed, and attempts to trap him about teaching the kids there faith. Oh and also the Techno Music just made the film harder to watch.
An example of a movie review. negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: This isn't a movie. It is a collection of unrelated, ill-conceived and poorly assembled scenes that look like the unedited results of a dim 10 year old with a mini-DV camera. In fact, I have a theory that the extremely abrasive girl in the train corridor - the one with the greasy hair, dead-pan stare, ipod and nervous tic - probably shot it herself in a creative phase.

If you made it further than the ten minutes I did, don't bother trying to fit what you saw into the context of the European Artiste mentality praised above. This is a true and complete waste of time, money and film that would have made William One-Shot Beaudine cringe.

The unfortunate part is that the endless series of vacuum-packed characters is representative of what now passes for much of humanity.

What's next? Six directors shooting social intercourse at the Wal-Mart snack counter?
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: I cannot believe that I wasted five hours of my life on this rubbish. The previous five day offering by this author was highly enjoyable and I was really looking forward to this. But most of the dialogue was completely incomprehensible. Suranne Jones was the principal culprit since she either mumbled or gabbled her lines, but most of the rest of the cast followed her example. Notable exceptions were Bernard Hill and Anne Reid, old stagers whose diction was exemplary. Do producers not listen to productions before they are aired to make sure the dialogue is audible? As a result I suppose I lost track of what was going on, and since the original plot line seemed to metamorphose into to the standard them-and-us thing between Muslims and the rest I soon lost interest. The ending was a complete anti-climax. A complete dud.
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: Highly enjoyable, very imaginative, and filmic fairytale all rolled into one, Stardust tells the story of a young man living outside a fantasy world going inside it to retrieve a bit of a fallen star only to find the star is alive, young, and beautiful. A kingdom whose king is about to die has said king unleash a competition on his several sons to see who can retrieve a ruby first to be king whilst a trio of witches want the star to carve up and use to keep them young. These three plot threads weave intricately together throughout the entire picture blended with good acting, dazzling special effects, and some solid sentiment and humour as well. Stardust is a fun film and has some fun performances from the likes of Claire Danes as the star(I could gaze at her for quite some time) to Michelle Pfeiffer(I could gaze at her at full magical powers even longer) playing the horrible witch to Robert Deniro playing a nancy-boy air pirate to perfection. Charlie Cox as the lead Tristan is affable and credible and we get some very good work from a group of guys playing the sons out to be king who are constantly and consistently trying to kill off each other. Mark Strong, Jason Flemyng, and Ruppert Everett plays their roles well in both life and death(loved this whole thread as well). Peter O'Toole plays the dying killer daddy and watch for funny man Ricky Gervais who made me laugh more than anything in the entire film in his brief five minutes(nice feet). But the real power in the film is the novel by Neil Gaiman and the script made from his creative and fertile mind. Stardust creates its own mythology and its own world and it works.
Problem: Write a negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer:
The film "52 Pick Up" simply does not work. See it if you are at all interested in Elmore Leonard or John Frankenheimer, or anyone in the terrific cast, especially John Glover who's admittedly brilliant. But the book--a slow-burning, noir thriller with lots of pulp--should have translated into an Oscar-contending film instead of this dud that couldn't figure out whether it should faithfully portray the hard-boiled, gritty crime story of the book, or opt for a 1980s Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up spree. Shifting the scene from the original locale in the book, Detroit (an area where Leonard has resided for years and knows very well), to Los Angeles makes for a substantial problem that Leonard tries to fix in his script, but ultimately can't. It was, for example, a clever device making Mitchell's wife a City Councilwoman (she had no job in the book), if you think about it: that's the only way you could ever plausibly blackmail someone in a sex-crazed city like 1980s Los Angeles for adultery, or any type of potential sex scandal. Even then, it's more plausible in a more conservative Eastern state like Michigan to believe that a) its tiny porno "industry" is a sleazy, money-grubbing hell where three losers could desperately set up a not-so-stupid upper-middle-class fellow going through a mid-life crisis, and b) adultery alone might be something you could blackmail someone with, if their upstanding careers and old-fashioned wives couldn't handle the shock. As consultant Ron Jeremy will tell you, 1980s Los Angeles was a colorful, stylish porno Mecca, more like the movie "Boogie Nights" than Leonard's dark, shadowy world of hijacked tourist buses, grimy apartments, and drug deals in depressed urban squalor. Then again, Los Angeles could be the backdrop of such a tale if one arranged the scenery more carefully--there are still plenty of dark crannies and psychopaths there. Unfortunately, Roy Scheider's Harry Mitchell comes off in the film as a sexy, handsome Uebermensch dancing through his problems without even working up a sweat. In the book he was fending off a jerk union official while struggling with a business that was failing. He also had a skeleton in the closet during the war involving friendly fire that he was responsible for, but never appeared to come to grips with. Elmore Leonard's stories usually have a central image involving a bizarre civility between criminal and law-abiding citizen. Here, Harry Mitchell sitting in his office with his blackmailer, Alan Raimy, turning over his financial books to him and negotiating a more practical ransom, makes for such a central image. Glover's blackmailer plays the scene with convincing intelligence, but Scheider portrays the victim here as a cocky "good guy," in charge of the situation as if he were more a Rambo with an M-16 than the everyman barely staying afloat as his world crumbles around him. "52 Pick Up" ends with one of the worst throwaway conclusions ever, considering all the thought that went into the original story and then the film. Trapping Raimy inside Mitchell's Jaguar and blowing him up with marching band music blasting out along with a sadistic monologue by Mitchell, plays to an audience wanting the "sweet revenge" conclusion of a Chuck Norris movie, not the intelligent balanced world of Leonard's book, where Mitchell barely escapes in the end and the conflict between good and evil could easily go either way. I left the theater shaking my head and depressed. What a waste of talent.