Collecting Movie Reviews

Well, the plot isn't quite THAT nonexistent. In fact, a lot of the episodes are really solid in their plots. Unfortunately, there are a few episodes that seem to leave out details that would have been really nice to know about. You have to do quite a bit of guesswork and extrapolation on your own at times, which can become a bit tiresome after a while.

As for the characters, well... they'd be really interesting if I could know more about them. Details as to how the four women met each other and became Knight Sabers are far and few in between, as well as serious character development. (Except for Nene, that is ... [dreamy sigh]) Apparently, there is a separate music video that explains the origin of each Knight Saber, but it's not part of the actual series. It would have been nice, though.

Animation is generally pretty good, especially in the action scenes, but the soundtrack is what most fans of this series love most about Bubblegum. If you like Japanese pop at all, you'll love the soundtrack and themes to this series. One warning, though: the dubbed version of Crisis is not quite up to par. Voices are usually quite mismatched, and the voice acting falls flat precisely in the scenes where convincing acting is most important for credibility. If you can, get the subtitled version, but the store I rent from only carries the dubs. :-(

The feel is heavily reminiscent of Blade Runner, and the creators of Crisis cleverly intersperse references to Blade Runner throughout the series (one of the less subtle references is how Priss's rock band is named The Replicants). It's not all gritty, though, and the occasional humorous touch adds a nice light feel to the series.

Overall, not a bad watch. In fact, at times, Bubblegum Crisis can be really good. Unfortunately, oversights and carelessness here and there keep this series from being all it can be.

"Bubblegum Crisis" is an interesting production that seemed to get exponentially better as the series continued. The first three episodes almost completely turned me off to the series. But, it was sunday, i had nothing to do, and only 5 more episodes to complete the series.

When i sceptiacally threw in the second DVD i was pleasantly surprised. The first three episodes were very bland. Dark film was waay overused the voice acting was nothing to write home about(English) and the stories ...well, there wasn't much. Just work your way to the climactic fight at the end of each episode.

Episodes 4 through 8 were Much Better. The Artwork remained the same, but the intros improved and all of the sudden we have some really interesting stories that involve outside characters (kind of how Bebop did with "Heavy Metal Queen" and "Jupiter Jazz"...deviating from a concrete plot line) It really worked. I am very surprised that the series was only 8 episodes long. That was kind of dissapointing. It wasn't toward the middle of the series that i started to really enjoy it. And there was no conclusion to the series at all!! None!!!

On the Plus side, I was really impressed with the artwork. Considering how spoiled we are with recent releases, "Bubblegum Crisis" is drawn very well and you can easily see how Anime Titles like "Iria," and others were infulenced.

Let's talk for just a few seconds about the Unnessary but very enjoyable "Boobage" shots! There were only like 4 during the whole series and they were super unneccesary. I guess the production team was like "Hey.. wanna see what they look like without their uniforms??" Well, there you have it!" These not sexual in nature, but really funny. I guess you could say they remind me of the girls-locker-room scenes you would see in "B" movies from the eighties. 2 seconds of lacy underwear and brief nudity going from civilian clothes to fighting armor (with some kid always trying to sneak a peak) just made me laugh to myself! It's really funny !

Anywho - Even after seeing it, I really don't know all that much about "Bubblegum Crisis," other than what i've told you + only 8 episodes long and dated 1987. Was it an OAV from a manga series?

I was a little turbed with the length of this series, and that lack of closure. I hope the sequals are somwhat enjoyable, I'll have to rent them.

To sum it all up, "Bubblegum Crisis" is a Very enjoyable little series with enough for everyone. Good fighting, A little graphic violence, motercycle chases, Androids, and a little "boobage" What i thought was going to be just an average anime gets 4 stars from me. I really liked it

**** Good

I only have two qualms about this series, only one of which will really influence you purchasing this set. One, which doesn't really matter, is the sorriful absence of the English-version soundtrack to buy on CD. Oh yes, they dubbed the songs into English, but they're painfully difficult to find, I doubt they've even been released.

The second one being the fact that the series is only 8 episodes long, it was cut short after a dispute between the producers. Bubblegum Crash and 2040 seriously DO NOT count.

However, there are three DVDs, thus explaining the price.

But it's definately a must-have, for fans and newbies alike ^_^

In the original, the only characters on the island are Zaroff, his servant, and the shipwrecked Rainsford. Naturally, though, Hollywood needed romance, so Fay Wray, no stranger to playing a damsel in distress, makes a fine heroine. Robert Armstrong, on the other hand, grossly overplays the part of the drunken American boor. But overall, it's a good, enjoyable picture.

By the way, the original story is politically incorrect from every angle and could not possibly be faithfully adapted to the screen today. (Zaroff expounds on how easy it is to hunt men of certain races.) And some otherwise intelligent people insist that "dangerous game" in the title refers to the game Zaroff plays of hunting humans. But it obviously means that, for the hunter, the most dangerous game to stalk is man.

A Very British Psycho, BBC4's amusing documentary about Peeping Tom and its writer, Leo Marks, says that Peeping Tom is the film that got Michael Powell barred from the British cinema, sent him into exile in Australia, and destroyed his career. It's not quite as bad as all that; Powell did return to make another British film (The Boy Who Turned Yellow), and his interesting 1937 docudrama The Edge of the World was updated and re-released in Britain in 1978. He also ended his life on British soil in 1990, dying of cancer. In the interim, though, he made some wonderful Australian films that were, in general, well-received (of these, American audiences are probably best familiar with The Age of Consent, starring James Mason and a young, tantalizing Helen Mirren).

It is impossible, writing in 2003, to go back to 1960 and understand the effect Peeping Tom had on the British film world. Released four months before the similarly-themed American film Psycho, Peeping Tom, already cut, was pulled from theaters less than a week after its release, and remained banned for another thirty years; ironically, the version released after the lifting of the ban (theatrical premiere 16 September 1994) was uncut. To stay banned for thirty years, especially in the wake of Psycho (now considered an American classic), there has to be something pretty distressing going on.

There are, in fact, two things going on that are the likely causes of the distress: Pamela Green's nude scene (according to Green in the aforementioned documentary, the first in British film history on the big screen), and the sympathetic portrayal of the main character. Either alone, and it might have slipped past the censors; the combination was enough to get it yanked.

Peeping Tom is the story of Mark Lewis (German Academy Award winner for Lifetime Achievement Karlheinz Bohm), a serial killer whose particular quirk is filming the deaths of his victims and rewatching them over and over in his home theater. He works for a film studio as an assistant cameraman, but is truly of the once-idle rich; his inheritance is mostly gone, and he makes much of his money renting out rooms in the erstwhile mansion of his parents. After a chance meeting, he begins a tentative relationship with one of his tenants, Helen Stephens (Anna Massey, recently seen in The Importance of Being Earnest and Possession). Lewis struggles to keep his relationship with Helen normal while still indulging the seamier side of his nature, with the expected consequences.

Lewis is a far more sympathetic character than ever was Norman Bates, and thus in many ways Peeping Tom is a superior film to Psycho in its depth of character. In every other way, however, Psycho's British older brother falls short. The cinematography, the music, the building of suspense, all are realms where Hitchcock had worlds of experience, while Powell had relatively little; Powell was in his element with the drama, rather than the thriller. And presented as a drama. with Lewis' inner struggle the center of the action, this might well have made a lot more 100-best lists than it did. It makes a few too many bows to the lurid side, however, and most of them seem somewhat gratuitous. he mystery angle, too, seems a bit overdone; it's as if the writers decided that a mystery had to be worked into the plot, and 'how can we handle this so it seems as if James M. Cain wrote it?'

Still, a must-see film for those interested in the history of the thriller. Criterion's DVD leaves a little something to be desired in the sound transfer (especially at the beginning), but the picture quality is unmatched in a film with this many years on its back. And if you can transport yourself back to 1960, in those few months between the release of Peeping Tom and your first viewing of Psycho, you might even get the intended effect. ***

Enter Ingmar Bergen, cinematic genius. He brings new life into this terribly ancient story, and captures the essence of the sotry for the cinematic medium. It is sung in Swedish, but retains Mozart's music, which is the reason why we are seeing this movie.

Bergan presents "Flute" as a play-witnin-a-movie, so we fade in and out of the story. especially avant-guard was the intermission where we see cast mebers behind the scenes smoking and playing chess. This worked for me. Then again, I believe that Wellles' "The Trial" outstripps "Citizen Kane."

There was some editing, and costuming descisions that I personally object, however, on the whole, this film meets the standards of hisgh art.

Superb singing. The arias "Dies Bildnis", in which Tamino looks at a portrait of Pamina and falls in love, is well made. Papageno's character is sharply defined as comic, earthy and human. In this film, he wears no feathery costume or plumage, and is instead an actual human man with earthy appetites for food and lovemaking. The Queen of the Night's two arias "O Zittre Nicht" and "Der Holle Rache" are full of dramatic prowess and coloratura technique, both escalate to high F's. Pamina's "Ach Ich fuhls" which she sings in a backdrop of utter darkness, is melancholic and moving. Finally, Sarastro's character is divine, with a sonorous bass-baritone voice, and a final scene almost likens him to Jesus or God. As a bonus, this film presents us a view of the going-ons backstage during intermission. Tamino and Pamina play chess, the Queen of the Night puffs away on her cigar and Sarastro reads the manuscript to Wagner's opera Parsifal, all the while the interlude "March Of The Priests" plays in the background. This is superb performance, quality drama and on DVD, this is a must have for all opera fans who put opera DVDs on their collection.

Why only 3 of 5 stars? First technically speaking: only English Mono, no original Cantonese (also available as Region 2 version, need region free player), films are very good remastered for wide screen, but no special bonus features or other languages or subtitles except English.

Second, there are 3 original movies, 1 is a patch-work after his death + 1 biography of good quality (watch out, others are often rip-offs).
1) Fists of Fury (AKA: The Big Boss) [1971]
2) The Chinese Connection (AKA: The Fist of Fury) [1972]
3) Return of the Dragon (AKA: The Way of the Dragon) [1973]
4) Game Of Death [1979]
5) Bruce Lee: The Legend [1984]

1-4) Rated: R - Not for sale to persons under age 18.
5) Is not rated, I would suggest min PG-13, not for kids.

1) Fists of Fury (AKA: The Big Boss) [1971]
Details: average 3 of 5
Message: 2, (lack of) discipline, fidelity, revenge
Plot: 3, young country laborer comes to foreign city
Techniques: 4, good kicks, incredible attitude
Realism: 2, wired jumps, strange logic of plot
Humor: 2, not really funny
Blood: 1, too much
Nudity: 1, one scene of nudity, including drunkenness

2) The Chinese Connection (AKA: The Fist of Fury) [1972]
Details: average 3 of 5
Message: 2, revenge, racism, (lack of) discipline
Plot: 3, young student revenges murdered master
Techniques: 4, good kicks, jumps, weapon defenses
Realism: 3, hand/sword fights in restricted areas, psychology
Humor: 2, not funny
Blood: 0, far too much
Nudity: 1, one scene of nudity

3) Return of the Dragon (AKA: The Way of the Dragon) [1973]
Details: average 4 of 5
Message: 4, Family bounds, courage, NEVER give up
Plot: 3, cousin helps family restaurant in Rome against Mafia
Techniques: 5, awesome foot work, kicks (against Chuck Norris!)
Realism: 4, no wire jumps, but VERY patient Mafia boss (?)
Humor: 3, serious & funny scenes
Blood: 3, not too much
Nudity: 4, cut out in this collection ("Friendly Native" scene)

4) Game Of Death [1979]
Details: average 2 of 5
Message: 4, courage against evil, NEVER give up
Plot: 2, young action star against the Mafia
Techniques: 3, Bruce Lee's = 5 (about 20 minutes), doubles = 1
Realism: 1, film was cut together from unfinished scenes
Humor: 1, not funny, mostly tragic
Blood: 4, very few scenes
Nudity: 5, none

5) Bruce Lee: The Legend [1984]
Details: average 4 of 5
Message: 5, What makes a man GREAT: vision, attitude, dedication, hard work, humility
Plot: 5, life is often the most impressive plot
Techniques: 5, including slow motions
Realism: 3, mixture of film characters with real life
Humor: 3, funny and sad parts (death)
Blood: 3, few scenes
Nudity: 5, none

As a part-time martial artist (Judo, Ju-Jutsu, Karate, Aikido, now Hapkido) for over 10 active years, I despise violence, especially blood shedding and normally don't like R-rated movies. My admiration for Bruce Lee grew thanks to my Ju-Jutsu trainer in the '80s who had cut together the fight scenes for training videos that helped us greatly.

Will a single respondent feel threatened, unhinged, pressured, or destabilized by Godard's film in any way? Will palms sweat? Will nerves twitch? Will pulse-rates tweak their median? Will personae jangle into self-scrutiny? More tellingly, will anyone identify *personally* with Von Braun, or the Tracheotomy 6000 supercomputer, or the starry-eyed meat puppets of Alphaville? Or would it be the pomo gunslinger Lemmy Caution who would centrifugally soak up the room's empathic vibes?

As any Wired magazine subscriber knows, today's technocrats perceive themselves as Byronic cyber-noir blade runners who shoot from the hip with the same stiff-lipped abandon as Eddie Constantine. They are, in effect, much closer to the alchemical thaumaturgy of Doc Faustus than the neurotic, pre-Wittgensteinian positivism on display in Godard's profoundly silly, genre-slumming film.

*Alphaville* is not quite schlock -- it is, rather, an artfully contrived, theoretically-riven visual artifact that models itself precariously on, well, schlock. Less a node of useful, psychosocial critique than a metaphor-laden Soviet theme-park of the hyperreal. For when played counterpoint to the culture is traduces, *Alphaville* reads like a closed parenthesis. A cryogenic monoculture with as much relevance to today's raging technosphere as Walt's EPCOT or Roddenberry's Enterprise -- a flimsy, hermetic, cardboard future that substitutes over-allegorized cartoons for concrete historico-political analysis. To wit, in today's wired world, *Alphaville* is rather like a sugar-pill trying to fight cancer (read globalization), an over-ironized audiovisual strobe of kinaesthetically potent nothings.

Godard never seems to get *past* Orwell, to say or do anything Orwell didn't already say and do better. Complacent, ivory-tower critics who persist in hailing *Alphaville* as "prophetic" are bluffing behind a weak hand, victims of a syndrome Lewis Mumford once called "the myth of the machine": a knee-jerk iconography of industrial monoliths, top-down hierarchies, concrete-and-steel quicksilver cosmopoli, gleaming white terra-cotta, ultra-noir culverts and back alleys, circuit-board labyrinths, lobotomized citizen-automata, Kafkan corridors of misdirection and telescoping distance.... Godard's film contributes to this secularist melodrama of centralized power, giving us solitary Lemmy Caution-like figures penetrating into the heart of vacuum-tubed mainframes, liberating all of humanity through a pistolwhipping Chandler-esque machismo. Even before the age of ubiquitous, non-centralized networks, things were *never* this simple. The "swarm intelligences" of modern capitalism make Godard's film something of a hokey, cheesy, laughable nonthreat.

For today, the computational power of Godard's Alpha 60 has been subsumed by portable high-end laptops. Hacker subcultures of Kabbalistic programming-visionaries and radical biologists unleash their entrepreneurial insect-clouds of indie start-ups, and the nodal points and acupuncture meridians of Western tech-wealth become radically de-centralized. Godard must have known that true-blue globalization could never triumph if its customers were grinded down into cold, somnambulant, serotonin-deprived techno-drones. If the Alpha 60 did not allow us the fickle, insatiate, fluctuating palette of a poetic vocabulary, how could we be expected to *articulate* our myriad addictions to a toxic surplus of products and services? If we're not permitted to "think" and "feel," how can we conceptualize and poeticize our perverted need for more *stuff*? Godard's Alphavilleans don't seem to consume much of anything, champing the bit of an Eastern Bloc-style fascism as quaintly irrelevant as some dead-tech Byzantium.

Laurie Anderson once remarked that Virtual Reality wouldn't look "really real" until the engineers learned to put some *dirt* into it. The motive behind "antiseptic" science-fiction of the Godardian cast (all gleaming orthogonal surfaces and industrial techno-mazes) is to allow the artist-auteur to foreground allegorical iconography against a glass-and-steel canvas of postmodern nothingness. In Godard's future, "logic" is the totemic overlord of a culture that has elevated science to the mutant edge of theocracy, brilliantly visualized through Godard's cinematic language (a perennial fetish for tenure-track academic code-breakers). But such visionary/symbolic foregrounding gives the lie to the squishy, dirty, fluxional, irascible hyper-minutiae that affords science-fiction its long-toothed visceral bite, its qualifying *worldliness*. Ergo, we cannot *enter bodily* the world of Alphaville any more than we can "enter" into a Piet Mondrian painting. The angles are too sharp, the allegories too thick, the personae too ornamental, the phantasmic aura too boiled-down and hypostasized. Big heavy cinderblocks of Metaphor.

The American religion of cinematic *pyrotechnia* that Godard helped create and define (the paganized moving image coopting the ascetic, linear grammatology of we People of the Book) had stormed the citadel of Alphaville long before Lemmy Caution started pumping its functionaries full of lead. Many SF writers of the 1960s already understood that technological advancement is, at its far-flung mutant edge, too destabilizing a force to produce a Godardian future. The threat of nuclear devastation may have nihilized and benumbed us, brought Alphaville closer to the center of things, but the competitive techno-fervor that Sputnik ignited between East and West spawned the gooey, messy, paradigm-shattering waves of information technology that would transpose global power to the private sector. The "intelligence wars" between Russia and the U.S. are the quaintly antediluvian fossil-record to the economic and culture wars now being waged in virtual realities more byzantine than the mind of a Borgesian librarian after three cups of psilocybe tea.

Godard's metaphors say nothing interesting or original about this society. It's all French-Fried Orwell, a tendentious art-house riff on Soviet-style infrastructures that no longer exist in the First World. Godard's hamfisted treatment of SF tropes is a permanent embarassment, an introverted quirkfest, a famously bad film that takes the poseur's road of cobbling together the trashy, desultory, pop-culture elements of the genre, with nary a breath of futurological fresh air to help remit our escalating future shock.

Postmodern irony and comic-strip *bricolage* just doesn't cut it when you tout yourself as a "political" filmmaker. Godard's *Alphaville* is a crude anthology of faux-Orwellian logorrhea and slushy, maudlin swill about "logic" and "the human heart." A strange and appalling artifact.

As the story unfolds, we meet the character of Abbe Faria, who teaches Edmond facts about many things and reveals that he was imprisioned by Villefort's father.
Villefort had imprisioned Edmond for the possibility of reading a letter and carring out the motions to get Napoleon back on the French throne.
Wanting to protect his father, Villefort has no qualms about throwing Dantes into prison and letting him rot. What he wasn't counting on was that Dantes would come back and give out swift justice.
However, there were two other people who wanted Dantes out of the way. One was Ferdnand Mondego and the other was Eugene Danglars. Mondego wanted the girl that Edmond was going to marry and Danglars wanted something else, I'm not exactly sure what it was but I think it had something to do with being the Captain of a ship.

To get rid of Edmond Dantes, Mondego and Danglars wrote an anynomos letter denouncing Dantes and claiming him to be a traitor.

Therefore, Dantes gets thrown in prison, Mondego gets the girl, Danglars gets what he wanted, Villefort gets promoted to head gazeek of the French justice system of the early 1800's, and Dantes comes back for revenge and makes them all pay for what they did nearly 20 years before. And then he gets to be with the girl he was going to marry.

But let's get serious, nothing holds up to Hitchcock as much as DePalma would have you compare his movie with a masterpiece like Psycho. The script is pure camp, the blood is paint red, and it's not scary at all, just funny. All of the technical mastery, such as tracking shots, plot twists, etc, all feels very very shallow when you have such over-the-top performances and laughable lines. There is no real depth to any of DePalma's movies. They can be fun and uproarious at times but never compelling.

However, for people who want everything spelled out for them, the movie might seem obfuscated. It's not, in my opinion, but as I said, some people like everything laid out in neat rows. This is not a tidy film. I admire De Palma's courage in not squaring all his corners; for me, it adds to the strangeness that sets this film apart from other good twin/bad twin films.

Some of the acting here is less than sterling, but Margot Kidder turns out a 1000 proof performance in the title role. The movie is worth seeing just for her alone. Movies with Margot Kidder are always better than the same films would be without Margot Kidder. Her drunken French accent is a thing to behold.

Give this movie a chance.

Giulietta Masina is a very great actress, it is just that there wasn't much material for her to work with. It is too bad she hitched her wagon to husband Fellini's star her entire career, because if she were just in a few movies with plots, character development and finely crafted dialogue, we could have discovered the full range of her talent.

In 1965, when this movie came out, there weren't so many movies about a woman's "midlife crisis" and her quest for "fulfillment"; By now this plot has become a cliche. As far as the story line goes, "Juliet of the Spirits" has got to rank among the worst, even losing out to the B-movies and straight-to-video films that are grist for the mill on Lifetime and The Oprah Channel.

And that is really a shame, because this is one of the most gorgeously filmed movies I've ever seen. Director of Photography Gianni di Venanzo's use of Technicolor is breathtakingly fascinating for its sumptuous use of warmth and its balance of colors and use of shocking hues. It rivals movies such as "Fantasia" and "Vertigo" for its artistic *visual* excellence.

Yet, this movie taken as a whole is rambling, unfocused and pretentious in a genre that is not too difficult to master. Some call Fellini's movies "surrealistic," and I have no argument with that. Perhaps my bourgeoise temperament lacks the patience to put up with it in two-hour-long doses. I prefer my surrealism in visual stills from Dali, Man Ray, Magritte.

The irony of it is that the best movie of the "woman finding herself" genre -- "Shirley Valentine", directed by Lewis Gilbert -- is filmed so dryly that it borders on incompetence. Imagine what a movie that would have made were the script put into the hands of di Venanzo and Fellini with a soundtrack by the great Nino Rota.

Altogether, viewing "Juliet of the Spirits" can be a pleasant experience, so long as one is concerned with camera work, editing, color timing and music.

I was--like I have been while watching other foriegn films--put off initially by the seemingly incongruous little snippets of music and visuals. I mean, couldn't those Europeans make a movie that flowed better? Jeez! I open my mind, watched it a few times and came to these conclusions. First, Giulietta, the actress, must have been a bit off to have done this apparently semi-real story abouat a middle aged woman married to a famous director who she suspects is having an affair. I mean, she was married to Fellini when this was produced. Second, albeit the digital reprocessing has made the cinema more vivid and the costuming more striking, the women more sexier, it showed it's date. When Juliet goes to confront the lady about l'affair, she should have kick the B*'s tail. That probably would have been the response for a character in a current day movie. Third, in an odd sort of way, it all but helps a more modern Eyes Wide Open to make some kind of sense. I mean, who can say how we will respond when a whiff of infidelity comes into our relationships, our lives? Juliet's response were these visions. Some of these were from her far away youth. Some just were pure Fellini bacchanalia. Tom Cruise in Eyes was thinking well, if my wife can *think* it, well, I can just *do* it and be one up on her. It starts for Tom as 'getting even', but it corrodes into something else that he had no control over. (I always say we are forever one step from a huge disaster and we don't know it....) We see Juliet almost giving into her urges with the pretty Latin kid who she meets at her neighbor's...but something just doesn't feel right.

And so, that's what this film is about. What we go thru when we suspect something or hear some painful news. We have the brilliant Guilietta Masina and the surreal Fellini to thank for giving these emotions some sort of form..