input: Personally, while I'm able to appreciate really good movies, I also have a strange ability to somewhat enjoy even the most crappiest of crap. You know, those times when you just want to sit there and watch some horrible cookie-cutter action movie to kill time. This is the only movie that I can remember actually shutting off in the middle, and I have absolutely NO intention of going back to finish it. The plot was so contrived and predictable, I was calling out what the next scene would be easily (and I'm usually not very good at this). The actors were horrible, I've seen better acting in middle school plays. Even the scene cuts were bad, the flow was all wrong.

This movie is like a parody that forgot the funny.

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input: This series gets 2 stars solely because it puts some of Dickens' Bleak House on film and perhaps someone will read the book. Contrary to what is probably received opinion, Diana Rigg was poor as Lady Dedlock. She was clunky and wooden. Lady D. is a reserved character but not a martinet. Denholm Elliot is wrong, wrong, wrong for Mr. Jarndyce. So I'll interrupt myself and respond to all those people who are saying: "I didn't read the book, so I don't have to take this guy's opinion because he's basing his evaluations on the book." True and not true. For ex, Diana Rigg is bad in her role because of poor acting whether or not you've read the book. On the other hand, Denholm Elliot is a passable Jarndyce (although too old). The series fails not because it's unfair to compare it to the book, but because the various plot lines and characters just don't coalesce to make a coherent, dramatic, mysterious andcompelling entertainment. It is dull and flat. If you want to make apossibly good Bleak House, you need to expend 20 hours of film in 10 two hour episodes. But I suggest that producers etc. leave Dickens alone (even A Christmas Carol). Television deadens the genius of Dickens as manifested in his ingenious plots and unforgettable characters.

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input: A group of forest rangers and scientists go into the woods to find fossils.They stumble on a Bigfoot burial ground eventually (the didn't notice it in the dark), The scenes of the CGI Bigfoot are horrid, but better than the endless scenes of talking that they rarely punctuate. I used to think that there just might be a good Bigfoot movie to be made. But now after so many sad sad movies about the legend, I'm having serious doubts. To pour salt in the wound of watching this film, the ONE good-looking girl just doesn't get naked once. And while this one MAY be better than "Boggy Creek 2" (no mean feat there), it's still sad that the best non-documentary film on Bigfoot remains "Harry and the Henriksons"

My Grade: D

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input: It's sort of hard for me to say it, because I so greatly enjoyed both "Targets" and "Paper Moon", but I thought "The Last Picture show" was a somewhat fascinating but overly self-indulgent film. Its main positive, as far as I'm concerned, is the stunning photography. But for me the film had nothing to offer beyond surface beauty (and a kind of hidden beauty, at that). The characters were very hard to relate to or to care about. Basically you had this very slow pace and this naturalistic style of acting, but it was all there to prop up a very formulaic and predictable story, complete with all the trappings one would expect from any small town melodrama -- everything from the boy cheating with his teacher's wife to the handicapped kid who everyone picks on. It was like "American Graffiti" without the joy of life.

Some might say this film is more realistic -- nowadays a lot of people seem to think that realism is the only virtue a film can possess. But for me the film was simply oppressive, and I want to see it again about as badly as I'd like to spend a few hours in that miserable town the characters live in.

Maybe this film really just belongs to its time -- perhaps if I'd seen it in 1971 I would have been impressed by its novelty, just by seeing something different on the screen. But that would basically assume that I had never seen anything like, say, Godard's "Breathless". Maybe the overt references to classic films would have appealed to the movie geek in me and helped me to overlook some of the film's weaknesses. But in the post-Tarantino world that hardly seems unique or special either.

It is interesting though how he uses the films in the film to give his own film more depth. We see 3 films as I recall in the picture show. First we see Vincente Minnelli's "Father of the Bride" -- Liz Taylor's exquisite looks provide a contrast to Sonny's girlfriend and Minnelli's studied upper-middle class milieu contrasts to the character's "real life" surroundings in a similar way. Later, clips from Howard Hawks' "Red River" emphasize the theme of a broken friendship between a mentor and a protege. It really just reminds me that Bogdanovich is kissing his own mentor's butt, much as he did if I remember correctly by selecting a Hawks film as part of his own on-screen reverie with Boris Karloff in "Targets". I guess in 1971 this kind of thing was new but looking at it today it just seems self-indulgent, like so much of the rest of this film.

Ultimately, I'd rather see another film by Hawks, Ford or Minnelli than to have Bogdanovich's film remind us of why they were so striking in such a less-than-subtle way. Maybe he intends to remind us of the giants whose time had passed -- all he really does is remind us how small he and most of his contemporaries are in relation.

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negative