Z/Web

Director: Peter Weir

I wasn’t too excited about this film, but when I heard the promos compare it to Gladiator — it’s one of the worst movies of all time). However, it was supposed to be good, and I decided it was my duty to see it. You know what? Unlike the pawning Gladiator, this one gives us a more subdued Russell Crowe. Sure, he’s the ship’s captain, but he’s not perfect, and we sometimes see the doubt in his eyes, and we definitely see the tremendous burdens he carries (the lives of his crew, the fate of Britain, etc.). The story is unusual in that it’s about the cat-and-mouse game between two ships off the coast of South America in the Napoleonic era. Crowe is the British captain and he faces a phantom ship, a French privateer that is larger and more powerful and seems to sneak up on them like a ghost. In the film we get an amazing look at what life was like in those days: how extraordinarily difficult even the simplest things were, and what primitive weapons and medicine were like. The film strives for authenticity and does an excellent job; however, the frentic battle scenes at the end are so realistically chaotic it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. You just basically hear explosions and see wood splintering and swords slashing and musket’s flashing and people screaming and have to wait until the end to figure out what happened (you can’t tell which side is which in the battle). The film’s too long, but the story’s different and interesting, and the visit to the Galapagos Islands was neat (though I wish they’d left out the superfluous and unrealistic hints about Darwinism). Overall I liked the film. It’s not great or wonderful (not hugely original), but well-done, and the fact that we haven’t seen a film like this in a long time makes it appealing. But it feels a little more educational and than entertaining.

Hideously bad, even worse than I expected. The film opens with the cliche of the dancing girl about to audition to Juliard, angry because her mother isn’t there, intercut with her rushing mother crashing her car and dying.

Bizarre film. I wish I’d known more of what to expect before I saw it. This is one of those odd, quirky movies that seems to be idiotic and inane but you eventually realize actually has some real intelligence deep down. Unfortunately, 90% of people won’t see that intelligence because the incomprehensible weirdness will turn them off and they’ll stop watching. The story goes like this. An alienated teenage boy hears a voice in the middle of the night that causes him to leave his house. He wakes up on the golf course. When he returns home, he discovers an airplane engine has crashed into his house and landed right on his bed! The voice saved his life. Later, the voice turns out to be the head of a giant rabbit — yes, I said this can seem idiotic — which warns him that the world will end at the end of the month. The voice encourages him to do all sorts of vandalistic behavior: break the water main at the school, burn down a self-help guru’s house, etc. None of this is clear, however: we don’t see him do this so we’re not even sure it’s him, but we strongly suspect it. The kid’s already in therapy so we wonder if he’s just insane. But he seems quite intelligent, smarter than his idiot teachers at school, so we aren’t sure. He begins to research time travel and becomes obssessed with the topic. Eventually — and this is a spoiler — he learns that the rabbit guy is an alien and this is all some sort of a twisted plot to take over the earth or something. For this plan to work they needed the boy alive, which is why they saved him from the airplane engine. So the boy goes back in time and doesn’t leave his bed, allowing himself to be crushed by the falling engine, thereby sacrificing himself for the world — only no one will ever know, of course, since that other timeline never happened. Pretty cool ending and great idea. The film’s direction is also unusual, and the 80’s period music distinctive. The school’s idiot teachers and community are strongly reminiscent of classics like Heathers. However, it takes so long for you to figure out this movie has a point (and unless you already have a warped sense of humor it’s difficult to tell the rabbit guy and other things are meant to be ironic and funny) that few people will wait that long and give it that chance. In many ways this is similar to do that, if you know what I mean. I can see a glimmer of profoundness inside the film, but frankly, I just don’t want to work that hard to understand something that doesn’t seem like it should be that complicated. I’ll watch it again someday in the future.