Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: There's no shortage of bad dialogue in David and Bathsheba "I was quite a hand with a slingshot," "The King of all Israel out there in the darkness exposing himself to the enemy" (full marks to Dennis Hooey for delivering that one with a straight face), "Go and sit with the concubines." And somehow I doubt a bored David ever told the prophet Nathan "Whatever you say." He even tries the old "My kingdom doesn't understand me" routine on desperate housewife Bathsheba at one point. So it's probably a tribute to Henry King's direction that the film isn't at all bad despite the pitfalls much of the first third provide. Maybe it's the censor-baiting nature of the plot a married man kills a femme fatale's husband and gets away with it! but King brings out the growing moral and theological complexities in Phillip Dunne's script rather than upping the sin and sandals hokum. This is the conflicted David on the downhill slope, abandoned by a vengeful God he no longer understands, and the film doesn't back away from the awkward unanswerable questions about why a loving deity would choose to wreak vengeance on the innocent rather than the guilty. It even offers a genuinely surprising criticism of the sexual inequality of the law, where the failings of husbands result in the punishment of their wives.

Unlike King David, which sidelined the king in favour of the admittedly more interesting Saul, David is firmly at the centre of the drama and despite an interesting display of shoulder twitching and a frankly gormless overlong close-up when visiting the site of Saul and Jonathan's death, Gregory Peck's performance grows in stature as David shrinks. Susan Hayward is pure Hollywood pro, Raymond Massey is an appropriately theatrical prophet (why be naturalistic when you've got a voice that makes the very heavens quake?) and Kieron Moore's Uriah such an intransigent unreconstructed chauvinist that you can't exactly blame David for putting him in harm's way, but despite threatening to soft peddle the film doesn't allow David a moral get out of jail free card over his death. With surprisingly strong but subdued design and Technicolor photography this is definitely a cut above most 40s-50s Biblical epics.

Fox's new DVD is a good transfer, including an incredibly hokey 'candid' behind-the-scenes short and a trailer with brief shots deleted from the film's sole battle scene.
An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
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A: I commend pictures that try something different. Many films just seem like re-treads of old ideas, so that is the big reason I so strongly recommend Passport to Pimlico.

The movie is set just after WW2 and the post-war shortages and rationing seem to be driving Londoners "barmy". The film centers on a tiny neighborhood in London called Pimlico. They, too, are sick of not being able to buy what they want but can see no way out of it. That is until they accidentally stumble upon a hidden treasure and a charter which officially named this neighborhood as a sovereign nation many hundreds of years ago! With this document, they reason, they can bypass all the rationing and coupons and live life just as they want, since it turns out they really AREN'T British subjects! Where the movie goes from there and how the crisis is ultimately resolved is something you'll need to see for yourselves. Leave it up the brilliant minds of Ealing Studios to come up with this gem!
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Sometimes you need to see a bad movie just to appreciate the good ones. Well, that's my opinion anyway. This one will always be in the bad movie category, simply because all but Shu Qi's performance was terrible.

Martial Angel tells of Cat (Shu Qi), a professional thief turned straight after leaving her lover, Chi Lam (Julian Cheung), two years before. But her past returns to haunt her as Chi Lam is kidnapped for the ransom of security software belonging to the company Cat works for. In order to rescue him, she calls on her old friends from her orphanage days, six other feisty women, to save the day...

I may have told the synopsis cheesily, but this is a cheesy story. In fact, the whole script and direction lacked any quality at all. Much of the dialogue was meaningless and coupled with a plot that was as thin as rice-paper in water. If I could sum it up, take a bad Jackie Chan movie, remove the comedy, remove the choreography, throw away the budget, and you have Martial Angels: a formulaic piece of work with no imagination at all.

Mind you, I do have to give credit where credit's due, and Shu Qi was probably the only person to emerge unscathed from the terrible action, as it was her performance that shone through. Okay, you can't say she was excellent - after all she had absolutely nothing to work with - but she did manage to dig some character out from her role. Other than that, only Sandra Ng and Kelly Lin made any other impression - although these were mostly glimmers and very brief.

Elsewhere, the film just fell to pieces. Scenes and dialogue were completely unnatural and unbelievable, special effects were obviously done on the cheap with no attempt to clean up edges between persons and the mask of the blue screen, poor editing involving numerous discontinuities in fight scenes, camera angles that were elementary and unflattering, and direction I've seen better from a lost dog.

I guess this film was a too many cooks affair. Most probably, the budget was blown away on the over-enthusiasm to have seven babes on the same silver screen. That didn't leave much else.

Frankly, the way this film was made was like a cheap porn movie without the porn. Charlie's Angels, it ain't. In fact, while sisters can do it for themselves, none of that was really that apparent here.

Definitely one to forget.
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Answer:
In fact, Marc Blitzstein's off-Broadway adaptation of "Threepenny" was not so "bowdlerised" as is generally believed.

(I have a special interest in "Threepenny"; my dad was part of the first full production in the US; U of Illlinois Theatre Guild did it around the end of WW2. HJitler had been so nearly successful in suppressing the play that they had to reconstruct the script and score from recordings in two different languages {neither English}, a German prompter's script and similar sources.) Blitzstein's adaptation -- not a "translation" -- which had the full approval of Lotte Lenya -- was a lot closer to the original than generally believed.

The problem is that the version thereof that most people know is the MGM cast recording (recently available on Polygram on CD)(which includes Beatrice Arthur {as Lucy, the "big complete girl", and can't i see her hands on hips and shoulders thrown back on that line -- Bea was a major babe in the 50's}, Paul Dooley and John Astin) was heavily censored by Mike Curb, head of MGM Records -- i mean, 17 (i think it was) "Goddamn"s got cut to just "damn".

(At one time, MGM also offered a 2-LP set of the *entire* play, doubtless as heavily censored.)