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It's about food! It's about sensuality! It's about slurping! But most of
all, it's about a woman who is determined to learn how to make the best
noodles for her restaurant. With the help of a passing truck driver,
Tampopo is taken to a number of different chefs to learn the essentials
of each aspect of making noodles: the noodles themselves, the broth, the
meat, the vegetables. It is an art form, and she is going to learn how
to perfect it. The story is interspersed with random tales of food,
oyster diving, benign torture, sex, table manners, and Japanese life.
It's quirky. It's strange. It's bizarre. It's playful. It's ironic. It's
fabulous!
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This film is woefully mis-titled. It should have been called This
Pathetic Girl, or This Tedious Film, or This Annoying Story, or
something along those lines. It was boring boring boring. The girl was
anything but charming. And what is really sad is even when you finally
learn why the girl is the way she is, which is completely unexpected and
the most exciting part of the film (in a grim and horrible way), you
find
you really just don't care.
I was so bored and annoyed with her that I
couldn't even make myself feel too terribly sorry for her, even though I
wanted to be. I just had no investment in her. She was a non-person to
me and any sympathy I had was more superficial than genuine. Which is
really a pity, because her situation was very sad and should engender
more emotion than just annoyed resignation and disappointment. I think
the film could have been good if it been acted, directed, and edited
completely differently. *chuckle* Okay, I guess that's saying that it
would have been completely different if it had just been completely
different. Sadly there was just nothing there to sink your teeth into
emotionally and way too many shots went on and on and on endlessly for
no good reason. I don't need to watch someone weeping for 3 minutes
onscreen to understand that she is sad and grieving. I got it in less
than one minute, thanks.
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This was the Zucker brother's mother's favorite film out of all of their
films! Honest! Though it did not receive the same acclaim that
Airplane! or Airplane 2 did, this rough little gem is
still worthy of your attention and support. It is definitely funnier
than Airplane 2, though I'll probably have to arm-wrestle ya to
convince you it was as good as Airplane!.
Val Kilmer plays rock'n'roll star Nick Rivers, who is touring East
Germany during WWII. While he is there he finds himself embroiled in
kidnapping, politics, espionage, and the French Resistance as he tries
to aid a beautiful young woman. Poking fun at various rock styles and
idols along with WWII war and spy films, Top Secret takes you on
a ridiculous roller coaster ride with all sorts of
twists and bends. Nothing is sacred and the humor is pure 80's,
sometimes a bit raunchier and further "out there" than I remembered the
80's being. There is the brilliant song, "Skeet Shooting" done a la The
Beach Boys, River's amazing hips and pelvis in homage to the King, and
parodies and rip offs of a number of famous and infamous films such as
The Great Escape and The Blue Lagoon. Cheesy good fun to
be had by all!
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This was just fabulous. Really good. By turns extraordinary and insanely
good, but not consistently so. Part of this is because the movie is
about a percussionist artist (who happens to be deaf, which is pretty
unique and interesting), and I love percussion, and part of this is due
to the creator of the film, who is the same guy that made Rivers and
Tides, the documentary about artist Andy Goldsworthy. This director
has
an incredible visual eye and often instead of showing us her making
music continually, he would intercut visual textures, patterns, rhythms,
and images that complimented and visually illustrated her music and
sounds. These moments were intensely beautiful and on a few occasions I
found tears streaming down my cheeks, though I think it was in artistic
pain - wanting to be able to make what these people made/make and not
being an artist of that caliber.
One of the things that is intriuging about this movie is that even
though it is about a percussionist who is deaf (or almost completely
deaf), there wasn't any sort of faciliation for a deaf audience. No
subtitles. I found this rather curious, personally. The woman is amazing
too - she lost her hearing as a child and you would never guess that she
is deaf from watching her and listening to her. She reads lips, doesn't
sign, speaks perfectly normally, and of course plays amazing music which
she hears not with her ears, but with her body. Very cool.
There is only one flaw in this film. While I admire this film-maker
greatly, he does not
have a very good sense of creating a solid thread on which to hang his
film. I noticed this in Rivers and Tides as well, which tended to
have
moments that were extraordinarily fascinating or beautiful or poetic,
but also moments that were dull, random, and even a bit pointless. He is
He is
a genius in bursts, but not consistently. His films are like
rollercoasters - an uneven ride.
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There is nothing that I hate more than a film that starts off cool,
stylish, and swank and then pisses it all away. And that, alas, is
exactly what The Transporter is. His job description is simple -
transport anything, anywhere, for a price. He has three rules. Rule #1,
once a deal is made, it cannot be altered or renegotiated. Rule #2, no
names. Rule #3, never look in the package. But of course through a
number of circumstances and curiosity, he breaks his own rule and looks
in the package. This leads to a number of complications and disasters,
events colliding one into another like dominoes tumbling down in a row.
And it's great! He's a little amoral, a man who just wants to do his job
and live his life peacefully and alone.
At times the film is reminiscent
of To Catch a Thief, with the criminal that
has a slightly tarnished heart of gold, the
woman who complicates his life, and the relationship with the local head
of police that is based equally upon deception and exceptional manners.
And like Cary Grant, he must take matters and the law into his own hands
in order to prove his innocence and capture the bad guys. Too bad the
bad guys are dull and uninteresting villains with stupid evil plans,
henchmen too numerous and incompetent, and without an ounce of
interesting characterization in them. So here's my advice. Watch the
movie for the first 48 minutes and then turn it off, before it devolves
into a mindless action film filled with clichés, over-hyped fight
scenes, and a pathetically redundant storyline that you've seen fifty
times by now. Unless you want to check out the greased-up oil fight.
That's different and amusing to some.
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It's so refreshing to see a movie that takes a tradition in film-making
and shakes it up. Two for the Road challenges the conventional
linear storyline, taking the tale of a couple through several years of
their lives together, tossing it into a blender, and mixing the whole
thing around. We see, in time-travel tidbits, the birth, rise, and fall
of a love relationship - from first meeting to atttraction to marriave
to disillusionment to divorce. The film moves seamlessly through shifts
in history and circumstance by using landscpaes, visuals, sights, and
sounds as the catalysts.
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This could have been a pretty entertaining little movie about the
hardships of a Chinese couple trying to raise two imported sheep who are
completely unsuited for the cold harsh climate of this small village.
Forced to take on these sheep, in an effort to honor the local
government officials and bring income into their poor arid village, the
couple instead find themselves slaves to the well-being of these two
animals and at the mercy of the authority, who constantly berate them
for not taking better care of the sheep when it is impossible to do so.
There is beautiful scenery as you watch these poor folks run all over
hither and yon, walking miles and miles and miles to get from one place
to another. But after awhile that gets really old and you want to start
yelling at the screen, "Yes! I know! I get it! They don't live near to
anything and their lives are nothing but endless toil and running around
for others and at the cost of themselves!" I mean really, enough is
enough. I picked up that clue phone over a dozen times. I got it. In
talking with another viewer we both agreed that it was probably a film
reflecting some situation of either culture or politics or both that is
happening in China, but not being "in" on such things, all allusions
went right over our heads. In the end they were not "great sheep" by any
means and this was definitely not a great movie.
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