An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: Depardieu's most notorious film is this (1974)groundbreaker from Bertrand Blier. It features many highly sexual scenes verging on an X-rating, including one of Jeanne Moreau doing a hot 1970s version of her Jules and Jim menage a trois with the two hairy French hippies (Depardieu and Deware). There is no such thing as a sacred territory in this film; everything is fair game.

It's very odd that Americans tend to not like this film very much while many French people I've met consider it a classic. Something about it goes against what Americans have been programmed to 'like.'

Gerard and the late Patrick Deware are two bitch-slapping, hippy drifters with many sexual insecurities, going around molesting women and committing petty crimes. They're out for kicks and anti-capitalist, Euro-commie, slacker 'freedom.' Blier satirizes the hell out of these two guys while at the same time making bourgeois society itself look ultimately much more ridiculous. Best of all though, is the way the wonderful Stephane Grappelli score conveys the restless soul of the drifters, the deeper subconscious awareness or 'higher ideal' that motivates all the follies they engage in.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Probably the worst film I've ever seen, the acting and story were terrible and I almost fell asleep. The only good actor was Colm Meaney. I had the impression to see the same scenes again and again until the end, no emotion, no charisma...nothing !
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive) movie review.

Answer: Joan Crawford had just begun her "working girl makes good" phase with the dynamic "Paid" (1930). She had never attempted a role like that before and critics were impressed. So while other actresses were wondering why their careers were foundering (because they were clinging to characters that had been the "in" thing a few years before but were now becoming passe) Joan was listening to the public and securing her longevity as an actress. The depression was here and jazz age babies who survived on an endless round of parties were frowned upon. Of course, if you became rich through immoral means but suffered for it - that was alright.

This film starts out with a spectacular house boat party. Bonnie Jordan (Joan Crawford) is the most popular girl there - especially when she suggests that everyone go swimming in their underwear!!! However, when Bonnie's father has a heart attack, because of loses on the stock market, both Bonnie and her brother, Rodney (William Bakewell) realise who their real friends are. After Bob Townsend (Lester Vail - a poor man's Johnny Mack Brown) offers to do the "right thing" and marry her - they had just spent a night together when Bonnie declared (with abandon) that she wants love on approval - she starts to show some character by deciding to get a job.

She finds a job at a newspaper and quickly impresses by her will to do well. Her working buddy is Bert Scranton (Cliff Edwards) and together they are given an assignment to write about the inside activities of the mob. Rodney also surprises her with the news that he also has a job. She is thrilled for him but soon realises it is bootlegging and he is mixed up with cold blooded killer, Jake Luva (Clark Gable). Rodney witnesses a mass shooting and goes to pieces, "spilling the beans" to the first person he sees drinking at the bar - which happens to be Bert. He is then forced to kill Bert and after- wards he goes into hiding. The paper pulls out all stops in an effort to find Bert's killer and sends Bonnie undercover as a dancer in one of Jake's clubs. (Joan does a very lively dance to "Accordian Joe" - much to Sylvie's disgust). The film ends with a gun battle and as Rodney lies dying, Bonnie tearfully phones in her story.

This is a super film with Crawford and Gable giving it their all. Natalie Moorehead, who as Sylvie shared a famous "cigarette scene" with Gable early in the film, was a stylish "other woman" who had her vogue in the early thirties. William Bakewell had a huge career (he had started as a teenager in a Douglas Fairbanks film in the mid 20s). A lot of his roles though were weak, spineless characters. In this film he played the weak brother and was completely over-shadowed by Joan Crawford and the dynamic newcomer Clark Gable - maybe that was why he never became a star.

Highly Recommended.
Problem: OPTIONS:
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=++++=
Answer: This is Peter Falk's film. Period.

I was 10 years old when this film came out; I was already a film maven at the time. Of course neither my parents nor I saw this film when it came out, but I was in love with the typeface of its ads & the aura that this was An Important Film. Okay, 34 years later I've finally seen the film--having never seen any Cassavetes-directed film previously. He's a hack, overall. Zero sense of timing, editing. Gena's performance reminds me too much of Dustin Hoffman's stint in "Rain Man": technically on par but entirely one-note. As Tom Cruise stole "Rain Man," Falk takes the cake for this film.

I was annoyed with Gena's performance, really throughout--it seemed better suited for "Awakenings" (blecch!). It's not all her fault: she's a basket case from first scene to last. We never find out why?? But Falk's character seems real & is performed WONDERFULLY by Falk as a seriously flawed man.

Shave off at least an hour (an editor needed!), and this would have been an arresting portrait not of a woman under the influence but of a simple, Cro-Magnon, man coming to grips with a wife who doesn't work & yet cannot deal with her three kids & her husband's long hours of work.

I'd rather remember Cassavetes for "The Dirty Dozen" or "Rosemary's Baby." He would have been a better director had he snipped his own tendency for excess--as he amply demonstrates with this film.

Bob
An example of a movie review. positive (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A:
It's always difficult to put a stamp on any film as being 'the best,' whether of all time, a certain genre, or what have you, but I believe a strong argument could be made that in fact, Laputa is the greatest animated film ever made. It is in my mind the masterwork of Hayao Miyazaki, the most talented of Japan's animated directors, and it best captures his strengths as a director, storyteller, and designer, as well as encapsulating all of his favorite underlying themes. The version I'm reviewing is the 2003 American dub (I know, sacrilege for a hard-core anime fan to not watch it in its native language); there is at least one other English language dub out there, I have it on VHS (I have no idea from what source), and that version is the single best dub I have ever encountered of any film. But I thought it better to concentrate on the version people can actually find.

Laputa tells the story of a boy named Pazu (voiced by James Van Der Beek here), who's growing up in a mining town when one day a young girl named Sheeta (Anna Paquin) literally drops from the sky. It seems she is being pursued by a sinister government agent, Colonel Muska (Mark Hamill), who is more interested in the magical crystal that hangs around her neck. To keep things lively, there's also a wickedly funny pirate gang after the crystal, led by the aging but still boisterous Dola (Cloris Leachman). The plot revolves around the crystal's ability to reveal the location of the fabled flying city of Laputa, a potential treasure trove of scientific knowledge and hidden treasure. It's all very much in keeping with a fairy-tale setting, but Miyazaki knows exactly how far to take the story, and the plot is peppered with 'gosh-wow' moments and threaded with his customary morality and warnings about abusing the power of nature.

The design work on Laputa, nearly twenty years later, is still revolutionary. Flying machines of all sorts abound, utterly impossible but so meticulously designed that you instantly accept them without blinking. The world is set somewhere around the start of the twentieth century, with telegraphs and ancient motorcars alongside those wonderful impossible flying machines. But it is the city itself that is sheer brilliance in execution; Laputa is both the Garden of Eden and the Fire of Heaven itself, and in that juxtaposition lies its appeal, its power, and its danger.

Besides being a thoughtfully designed and beautifully rendered film, Laputa is blessed with a wonderful sense of cinematography. From sweeping flying shots to high speed chases on tiny one-man flyers to ships submerging into the clouds as if they were water, Laputa displays a scope that most films even with the magic of CGI can only daydream about. Though we only see a small fraction of this world, its simple elegance extends beyond the borders of the frame and we have no trouble believing in it. The film also contains one of my favorite, if not the most exciting, action sequences ever: a guardian robot that fell to Earth is accidentally reactivated and wreaks havoc on the fortress it is kept in, all the while trying to protect Sheeta (who was the one who woke it up). Meanwhile, Pazu and the pirates swoop in on their little flying machines to snatch her, literally, from the jaws of destruction. From the horrific sight of the robot incinerating the countryside to the exhilarating last-second rescue, the entire sequence is a masterpiece of timing and camera angles and knowing exactly how far to take the audience.

It helps that Laputa has an amazing score. Composer Joe Hisaishi captures the wondrous beauty of this world, the dewy innocence, the exciting action, and the creepy otherworldliness of the flying city and its bizarre robot guardians. Though he re-recorded it for this DVD release (which IMO is not an improvement over his original score), adding pieces here and there, the score matches the visuals perfectly, a rare total union of sound and vision.

This isn't a bad dub. I'm inordinately fond of the older English dub, and this one over-explains things just a tad in spots, but I was almost shocked how closely these voices matched those (and those matched the Japanese pretty well). Dola in particular is hard to get right, but Leachman is spot on as the fiery old pirate woman (her sons aren't quite as good as the original). Paquin does a good job as Sheeta, and Mark Hamill, while I knew it was him early, is more than talented enough to do Muska (I liked the other English dub of Muska a little more, but Hamill's good). Much of the film rests on Pazu's shoulders, and Van Der Beek is wonderful. Listening to him made me think this crew must have had access to the other English dub, because VDB matches up very closely with the original Pazu. Although again watching a dub is grounds for excommunication among the otaku faithful, as much as I love this film, I don't think you're sacrificing a great deal simply watching this particular Anglicized version. John Lassiter of Pixar introduces it up front, and my suspicion is that he, like so many others, simply love this film so much that they tried very hard to ensure its high quality.

Miyazaki has had success in America in recent years with Spirited Away and Mononoke (one of his few films I didn't care for), but to me Laputa is still his crowning achievement. Anyone familiar with his later work will almost certainly enjoy this earlier work, and again, this film is a master at the top of his form hitting on every cylinder. I'd pay big money to be able to see this on a large screen; while that will probably never happen, it's good to know that at least this classic has been preserved on DVD.