Q: If this had been done earlier in the Zatoichi series it could have been one of the best. It is good enough, as most of them are, but the plot and the characters seem too complicated for the series at this point. The situation is unusually intriguing: the farmers in the province have two champions, a benevolent boss (for once) and a philosopher-samurai who starts a sort of Grange; both run afoul of the usual local gangsters, who want the crops to fail because it increases their gambling revenues and their chances to snap up some land; their chief or powerful ally is a seeming puritan who is death on drinking and gambling but secretly indulges his own perverse appetites. (He also resembles Dracula, as the villains in the later Zatoichi movies tend increasingly to do.) These characters have enough meaning so that they deserved to be set against Zatoichi as he was drawn originally, but by now he has lost many of his nuances, and the changes in some of the characters, such as the good boss and the angry sister of a man Zatoichi has killed, need more time then the movie has to give, so that the story seems choppy, as if some scenes were missing. Other than that, the movie shows the virtues of most of the others in the series: good acting, sometimes lyrical photography, the creation of a vivid, believable, and uniquely recognizable landscape (the absence of which is obvious in the occasional episode where the director just misses it), and a technical quality that of its nature disguises itself: the imaginatively varied use of limited sets so their limitations seem not to exist. And of course there is the keynote actor, whose presence, as much as his performance, makes it all work. This must be one of the best-sustained series in movie history. OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: positive
Q: To be brutally honest... I LOVED watching Severed. That's why I

gave it a 1/10 stars because of its starkly unimaginative

story/filming/acting/everything. This film was a RIOT to watch. If

you enjoy watching bad films in order to poke fun at them, you will

really get a kick out of Severed.

The story really doesn't matter, it involves some guy who's bald

and has a sword and goes around beheading random people.

But he has a supernatural twist... nobody ever sees him do it.

Even when, in one very memorable scene, he walks into a

jampacked night club and whacks off some girl's noodle and

nobody sees it.

Severed doesn't merely look like it was filmed on video- it WAS

filmed on someone's home camcorder. The filmmakers had

knowledge of lighting (very thin knowledge) and composition

actually holds together in some scenes. But mostly you can't hear

the actors... you can't understand what they're doing, and you laugh

when the next vicitm gets his pumpkin detatched from his body.

Go and rent this movie. Support films like this- they are a hoot and

a hollar! OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: negative
Q: Jim Carrey is good as usual, and even though there are quite a few "Jim Carrey moments", it's definitely not a "Jim Carrey movie".

It's targeted mostly at children, and I managed to enjoy it as such movie. It was promoted in Israel as another Jim Carrey movie, so those who expected a weird over the top comedy were disappointed.

The movie has nice moments and works well as a movie for kids. I can't say I LOVED this movie, but then again I'm not its target audience! OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: positive
Q: Nicole Kidman is a wonderful actress and here she's great. I really liked Ben Chaplin in The Thin Red Line and he is very good here too. This is not Great Cinema but I was most entertained. Given most films these days this is High Praise indeed. OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive
A: positive