As a kid who had come to realize that he was a geek I so wanted to grow up to be the Val Kilmer character in this movie. Cool and intelligent as hell.
Tag: review
I did really enjoy Lars and the Real Girl. Very sweet and charming movie. It good have been farcical or overly sentimental but managed not to veer into either territory and ended up being a fantastically enjoyable film with real heart.
My Brother is an Only Child. I was expecting a great deal from this film. Set in Latina, Italy it covers around about a decade from the mid 60s on and concerns two brothers one of whom is a communist and the younger of whom grows up to be a fascist. In spite of their differing personalities and being politically polar opposites they end up being in love with the same girl.
The problem I have is that the filmmakers have built a structure in the story that gives great scope for dramatic tension but then they completely undercut it by not really going anywhere with these story threads. Accio the younger of the two brothers turns out not to be much of a fascist and only joined up to be different from his elder brother Manrico and go against the wishes of his family and he ultimately sides with his brother and becomes a communist himself. The second possible dramatic thread never really goes anywhere either as Manrico never finds out that Accio is in love with his on-off girlfriend Francesca.
Great film in a lot of ways but ultimately unsatisfying.
If only it were 88 minutes long but unfortunately it is an entire 108 minutes and at least the final 20 minutes are pure garbage. There certainly are a lot of better ways to spend a couple of hours than watching 88 Minutes.
Pacino is exactly the same character as he has portrayed in virtually all of the movies of the last 10 years of his career. Ridiculous action scenes that make no sense and really poor unconvincing acting from half the cast.
Uneven thriller that is largely intelligent and well written but is let down by being afflicted with massive illogical plot holes.
It is surprisingly well written in regard to creating the triangle of betrayal between cop Enrique, terrorist Veronica and Javier the assassin. But a double for the president who is willing to stand in to get shot! That the Secret Service would use that as a means of keeping the president safe when they have just received confirmation that it’s a real threat is not credible.
Interestingly for a Hollywood film made post 9/11 it shows the terrorists to be very competent and the secret service to be incompetent other than the near superheroic Dennis Quaid as Thomas Burke.
In the end the plot is foiled more by luck than anything.
Season five of The Wire has come to an end with the episode titled -30-, a ninety minute long finale, which also ends the entire ‘televisual novel’. There will be no more of The Wire other than in our memories now, so raise a glass and lament the end of one of the greatest television shows ever.
What can one say about the conclusion to a show like this? Well I think I’ll let show creator and writer of this episode David Simon gives his own take by way of Jay Landsman’s eulogy at the ‘wake’ held for Jimmy McNulty.
He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah. He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given. He learned no lessons; he acknowledged no mistakes; he was as stubborn a Mick as ever stumbled out of the Northeast parish just to take up a patrolman’s shield. He brooked no authority. He did what he wanted to do and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end he gave me the clearances. He was natural police. And I don’t say that about many people, even when they’re here on the felt. I don’t say that often unless it happens to be true. Nat’ral po-lice. But Christ, what an asshole.
And I’m not talking about the ordinary gaping orifice that all of us possess. I mean an all-encompassing, all-consuming, out-of-proportion-to-every-other-facet-of-his-humanity chasm — if I may quote Shakespeare — “from whose bourn no traveler has ever returned.” He gave us thirteen years on the line. Not enough for a pension. But enough to know that he was, despite his negligible Irish ancestry, his defects of personality, and his inconstant sobriety and hygiene, a true murder police. Jimmy, I say this seriously. If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I’d want it to be you standing over me catchin’ the case. Because brother, when you were good, you were the best we had.
What was initially supposed to be a police drama based upon the experiences of former Detective Ed Burns became a great deal more and ended up as a treatise on the failure of the institutions in small American cities. David Simon says the show could have been set in a number of American cities as they are all experiencing similar problems to Baltimore but The Wire is very much a Baltimore show set elsewhere it would be a very different thing.
The montages in the finales of each season depict the fates and lives of the shows characters but also of the city itself through the ordinary residents of the city. With the overwhelming number of characters in The Wire a good argument can be made that the city of Baltimore itself is the central character of the series.
Although there is a kind of upbeat ending to the series with many of the characters getting the happy ending they may or may not deserve this is undercut by the revelation that for all the efforts and noble intentions to try and fix the system that the failed institutions remain as they are.
Is the City of Baltimore, and therefore the other cities like it, beyond repair?