Jesus Christ Cyberstar (Versatile)

Meanwhile, Gandalf has receded into Old Testament prophet mode, and seems to have no emotions of his own whatsoever. Granted, even in the books Gandalf seems more distant and unapproachable after his reappearance, but he still had the old irritability and humor underneath.

Arwen, after being used so well in the first movie, again becomes an annoying hindrance to the plot. Gimli, at least, has improved somewhat since The Two Towers; he is still being used as comic relief, but the humor is now more of a deliberately self-deprecating kind than the humiliating pratfall jokes he had to suffer through last time.

Also, I have to complain about some of the things that Jackson left out. I will concede that he was right to omit two of my favorite parts: But the confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch-King of Angmar at the ruins of the Gate could have been done in thirty seconds, and the parley with the Mouth of Sauron would have required less than one minute to deliver one of the dramatic high points of the whole book. Art direction has been the one consistent strong point throughout this whole trilogy. In all, The Return of the King is a good movie.

Certainly far worse ones have won Oscars.

Musical groups from Montreal

I just hope that the award doesn't lead to people imagining that this is the best movie of the trilogy. Go see it on a big screen. But watch The Fellowship of the Ring first. I'm not going to comment on the whole movie, since I only saw the last three or four hours of it. But those hours present a point that most of the viewers and perhaps Stephen King and his adapters themselves miss. There is a story, much beloved by Christians and dog lovers , of a man walking along with his dog, his faithful companion of many years.

The man and his dog come to a brilliant gate of pearl with a golden road leading inside, and a shining winged figure who tells the man that this is Heaven. But when the man starts to enter, he is told that no pets are allowed. The man turns away and continues down a different path. Some time later, he comes to a simple green pasture with a humble old hayseed farmer who invites the man in for a drink. The dog, too, is welcomed and refreshed.

The man asks the farmer where he is, and is told that this is Heaven. The pearl-gated place back down the road is Hell, and it serves the useful purpose of screening out those unpleasant people who would willingly abandon their friends. Many of the viewers of The Stand imagine that the three people who complete the journey to Las Vegas to be martyred are admirable. If you pay attention though, you will see that before they ever arrive in Las Vegas, all three of them fail the test that the man in the dog story passes.

Simone is a delightfully funny movie that nevertheless gives us a good look at the life of its main character, movie director Viktor Taransky, played by veteran Al Pacino. After Taransky's star, Nicola Anders played by a delightful Winona Ryder storms off the set of his latest movie, Taransky replaces her with a digitally rendered artificial actress provided to him by a dying admirer of his work.

The programmed woman, named Simone, is a blonde with more glamour than beauty, and wears quantities of lip gloss that have been found fatal in laboratory animals. But she is a massive hit with audiences, and Taransky is tested to the limit to keep her identity as a piece of software secret.

And even though Simone, docile as only a computer program can be, urges audiences to focus on Taransky's work, the work remains irrelevant to the audiences. It's Simone they love. That the movie strains credibility is an understatement. Director-screenwriter Andre Niccol does not come close to dealing with all the problems arising from keeping a digital star's real identity secret.

But the key point is, the problems that we do see Taransky solve, he solves so cleverly that we can believe that he has found off-screen solutions for the off-screen difficulties. Just as any heist movie depends on making the audience complicit with the thieves, Simone depends on making the audience complicit with Viktor Taransky's fraud. The story pulls this off without a hitch. Having taken some acting lessons and drawn on her own experiences and emotions, Nicola gives Taransky a screen test that wows him, and he realizes that Nicola should play the lead role in Taransky's new movie.

Simone could never have surprised Taransky in this way; while the cyber-star does everything he tells her to, she has nothing of her own to contribute. But Taransky cannot cast Nicola in the lead; audience demand requires Simone to get the starring role. Regrettably, a number of flaws keep this superb story from being a genuine classic. First, the photography is frequently awful. I don't know whether to blame the cinematographer or the director for the weird filters that must have been used to make the footage look this bad. Second, most of the actors, including Pacino, are not doing their best work, and that's usually a sign of bad direction.

Only Winona Ryder is at the top of her form. The denouement flubs badly; not only is it predictable, but it requires the Taransky who met all of the problems engendered by Simone's presence with intelligence and imagination to meet the problems engendered by her absence with no moxie at all.

Niccol wrote an outstanding script that he should not have tried to direct. And finally, I must really, seriously object to the untruth that the movie's publicity machine fed us, that the title character is merely a digital creation. The title character is played by the very much flesh-and-blood Rachel Roberts. Would that someone had taken to heart Taransky's daughter's last line: See it on video or DVD at your earliest opportunity. There are some movies where stupid things happen in order to give us thrills, chills, or tears.

Swashbuckler is not that kind of movie. This is a movie that is just stupid, without any payoff gained by being stupid. You want to know how it's stupid? The movie's idea of excitement is to match larger than life heroes not against larger than life villains, but against useless stumble bums who could have been defeated by any jerk with a pocket knife. The movie's idea of romance is simply to display Genevieve Bujold's body, with no emotional exchange of any kind going on between her and Robert Shaw.

The movie's idea of humor is to have Robert Shaw and James Earl Jones sit on rocks and tell each other bad limericks. The portrayal of women in Hollywood action movies has not been an uninterrupted forward progression, as Genevieve Bujold proves here. Her principal job is to be held hostage by the incompetent villains. She is given a sword a few times, but she is useless with it. It is a crying shame that there are so few good pirate movies out there. The and versions of Treasure Island are about the best there are. Pirates of the Caribbean and Cutthroat Island are silly, but genuinely fun.

Beyond that, even the so-called classics of the genre have little to recommend them: The Black Swan has a revolting hero, and Captain Blood is rendered bearable not by Errol Flynn's most wooden performance, but by the energetic villainy of Basil Rathbone. But it needs no defense. It is no insult to call a movie a popcorn action flick; many of the greatest movies ever made are popcorn action flicks, and a well-made popcorn action flick deserves more praise than a shoddily made art house film. And while some patience is required, The Seven Samurai is very much capable of being enjoyed simply as a popcorn action flick.

But if you care to invest some effort, it can be enjoyed in many other ways: In war-torn 16th-century Japan, a band of forty outlaws plunders a farming village. Unable to survive another such attack, the village farmers try to hire samurai to defend them against the bandits. They manage to find Kambai Shimada, a grizzled, unflappable veteran. Kambai in turn locates six more samurai.

The ones we get to know the best are Katsushiro, a devoted young samurai liable to serious bouts of hero-worship, and Kikuchiyo, a blustering, demonically driven impostor who poses as a samurai. Director Akira Kurosawa was challenging his own country's conventions on the portrayal of the samurai. He deliberately includes, for contrast as much as anything else, one samurai who closely matches the Japanese samurai archetype: Kyuzo, who concentrates on the art of the sword to the exclusion of everything else, and lives in a state of tranquility and calm in the Zen tradition.

The other samurai are quite different.

Black Rumania –

They can run away from battle and learn from the experience instead of wasting their lives uselessly in a lost cause, like Kambai. They can overeat and become fat. They can show compassion for human weakness. They can have their heads turned by beautiful women. They can be human and still be warriors. Psychologically, the most interesting samurai is the impostor, Kikuchiyo. In an impassioned monologue, Kikuchiyo reveals a dramatic combination of conflicting emotions: Fighting off the bandits is a cooperative effort; the farmers are as much involved as the samurai are.

Indeed, for all the heroic and perilous service that Kambai does with his sword and bow, it is clear that the most valuable work he does is his planning for the defense and his direction of the spear-wielding farmers in battle. Few military movies are so successful in showing that battles are won by brains as much as by swords and guns. The movie follows Kambai as he successfully applies one principle after another of the military art: One issue that always arises when discussing The Seven Samurai is how it compares to its western retelling, The Magnificent Seven.

Unfortunately, it is de rigeur for fans of one film to dismiss the other as inferior, instead of recognizing them both as masterful, but different, stories. The Seven Samurai does not develop all seven samurai characters as thoroughly as The Magnificent Seven develops its principals. Also, the Magnificent Seven, true to the Hitchcock maxim that a movie is only as good as its villain, provides us with a doozy of a bad guy in Eli Wallach's Calvera, while The Seven Samurai's ronin leader is an anemic antagonist. On the other hand, Sturges cannot match Kurosawa for the intricacy and detail of the military planning or the depth of the tense relationship between the village and its defenders.

Nor could the energy of all the performances in The Magnificent Seven combined equal Toshiro Mifune's fiery dynamism. You may prefer one movie or the other, but you certainly should not miss either one. Should not be missed; it belongs in every cinephile's library. Contrary to some reports, Pirates of the Caribbean is not a movie about a band of pirates seeking to raise an Aztec curse by some mumbo-jumbo ritual, or the heroic rescue of a beautiful maiden who has fallen into the cursed pirates' hands. Oh yes, the cursed pirates, the Aztec ritual, the rescue and all that rubbish are IN the movie.

But, fortunately, they're not what the movie is about. Pirates of the Caribbean is really about white canvas sails and creaking cedar hulls, gleaming cutlasses and flintlock pistols, sailors' tattoos and golden earrings, sun-spattered islets and towering Caribbean cliffs, moonlit seas and driving storms. It is not about any particular pirates, but about the aura of pirates, their atmosphere. And if you love the pirate aura, as I do, you'll forgive the picture the preposterousness that it wears on its sleeve. The best thing about Pirates of the Caribbean is that the actors and the crew show real love and affection for the screwy B-movie they are making.

Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, and Geoffrey Rush all look like they're having fun, and director Gore Verbinski's shots look like he loves watching the scenes he's making, lingering on the pirates and the ships and the islands instead of hustling them on and off. This movie is much better than such dreck as Die Another Day, not because it's any smarter, but because it lacks the air of cynicism, of contempt for itself and its audience that mars productions like Tamahori's.

Die Another Day was made by people who didn't care a flying fig for espionage or intrigue; Pirates of the Caribbean was made by people who loved piracy, adventure and the sea. The scene where Captain Sparrow finally swings aboard, caresses the ship's wheel like a long-lost lover, and murmurs, "Bring me that horizon," is inconceivable in a typical heartless summer blockbuster; most action filmmakers wouldn't be caught dead expressing such embarrassingly sincere emotion.

This is not to say that Pirates of the Caribbean deserves comparison with the handful of real classics that have also been summer blockbusters, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars. Those movies had stories; Pirates of the Caribbean has a muddle that passes for a story. Just because Verbinski's movie is better than the average summer fare we get nowadays does not mean that it's great art, or even good art. But unlike most movies about which people say, "Don't think about it, just have fun," Pirates of the Caribbean actually IS fun.

Lovers of pirates and the sea must catch this one in the theater, but others can wait for video. Turn your course ninety degrees north or you'll run aground on Spoiler Island! That's about as close as the movie gets to the real events. Everything else, even the names of the participants, has been changed to serve the story. But it's a good story, with interesting people, conflict over important things, and jaw-hurting tension.

Captain Vostrikov and XO Polenin are excellently portrayed by Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson and their accents aren't as bad as all that; aside from varying in intensity they were decent enough. Vostrikov really is a bad and irresponsible commander; every criticism that Polenin levels at him is true. That makes Polenin's actions in supporting him all the more interesting.

Media registration opens

But Vostrikov does learn from Polenin's example. The heart of the movie is the reactor near-meltdown, and the terrible consequences it has. Military movies all too often portray courage as simply risking one's life to kill other people. But what you see in this movie is REAL courage: I'd rather go into battle ten times than do what the reactor techs have to do in this movie.

Bigelow's portrayal of the chief reactor officer's breakdown is a touch of genius; it shows us what the people who did go into the reactor chamber felt, and overcame, and what the reactor officer himself overcomes later in the movie. This movie should never have been marketed as a blockbuster; it works best as a simple and touching tale of heroism. Regrettably, Bigelow felt she had to cheat to keep the audience's interest, specifically by selling us the preposterous story that the reactor meltdown could have caused a 1. This changes the story from one that merely didn't happen, into one that could not possibly have ever happened.

Nuclear reactors cannot cause nuclear explosions, because they don't use weapons-grade uranium. Even if they did, it would require explosives, not just heat, to crush the uranium to a sufficiently supercritical density to detonate it. Why did Bigelow resort to this? Did she believe that a Western-world audience wouldn't care about the fate of mere Russkies, so that she needed to pretend that the fate of the whole world depended on K to keep her viewers watching? If so, she lacked confidence in the story she told. I was, and am, a partisan of the West in the Cold War, and am glad that the West emerged victorious, but neither am I inclined to blame these Soviet Navy sailors for the evils of the tyrannical system that they were born into.

I would have enjoyed the movie every bit as much had Bigelow admitted that the sailors were fighting only for their own lives and the lives of their fellow crewmen. And for those chauvinists who would see these sailors as less than human for being Russian, pretending that they saved the world doesn't help. See it in the theater, and bring your suspension of disbelief along; it needs a workout. I'd like to be kind to Paul Matthews. He was clearly trying to make a good western movie. He failed, but these days it's rare to find someone who even makes the effort.

The movie opens with a harrowing scene of Union soldiers attacking and destroying a small Texan town during the American Civil War, murdering the inhabitants indiscriminately. I don't know if anything like this actually happened in Texas, but it's to the credit of the movie that I believed it at least could have happened. The son of a townswoman called Hannah is killed, deliberately shot in the back. Several other women are raped, lose their families, and are otherwise victimized. After the soldiers leave, the women shoot some stragglers who attacked them, but also shoot some officers, including a general, who were appalled at the massacre and, had they been allowed to live, might have brought the soldiers who ran amok to justice.

The indiscriminate nature of the women's revenge, their indifference to who suffers for their grievances, is brought out from the start. In keeping with this theme, the women form an outlaw gang and begin robbing banks all over Texas. Some time later, the hero named Wes and his gang of friends, all former Union soldiers, ride into town to find the bank robbed. Wes is the son of the general whom the gang murdered, and Hannah has conveniently left behind a medal belonging to Wes' father near the scene of the bank robbery.

Wes accurately concludes that the bank robbers are the same people who killed his father, and he and his friends Ride for Revenge. This is a movie that could have worked. Each scene arises logically out of the scene before it. The women wear almost no makeup, adding to the rough atmosphere. There is a real, if thin, effort at characterization and motivation, certainly more than you would expect in a movie whose subject matter looks so exploitative. There is a real and successful effort to make Ellie, Hannah's murderous and psychotically jealous lover, a pitiable figure instead of a totally repulsive one.

There was also a genuine, though unsuccessful, effort at realism. In a nifty early scene there is a gunfight in a saloon. This saloon is a dark and dreary place; the only light is what comes in through the windows, and you can smell the poverty, the bare-bones quality, of the frontier here. In a unique shot where Wes ambushes Hannah and shoots her horse out from under her, we see Hannah in close-up with Wes' hiding place several hundred yards behind her; the puff of smoke appears and drifts away in eerie silence, and only some seconds later do we hear the boom of the rifle firing.

Kudos to Matthews for trying to pay attention to the physics of firearms. Unfortunately, Hooded Angels is undone by a number of problems, the severest of which is the poor performance of the leads. Playing Hannah, Chantelle Stander deals chiefly in numb expressionlessness. Perhaps she and Matthews were trying to show her character's inability to feel love, but they overdid it by a mile. Hannah is supposed to be a successful bank robber, and should be confident and alert; when she leads her gang toward the bank with wooden, staring eyes, she looks like she's either dazed or terrified.

Paul Johansson as Wes is no better. He is supposed to be in love with Hannah, but he strikes no sparks with her at all; he shows not the slightest tenderness or passion, even when they are having sex. In secondary parts that presumably received less direction, Amanda Donohoe and Juliana Venter do fine jobs; Donohoe upstages Stander so consistently that you wonder why she's not cast in the lead. Venter is over the top, but she is playing the over the top character of Ellie, and restraint was not called for.

Also, Donohoe is the only important player who keeps a consistent voice; Stander's and Venter's South African accents come and go wildly. Also, the movie's efforts at realism failed far too often. With South Africa standing in for Texas, somebody forgot that Texas is hot in the summer. We see these so-called Texans riding around wearing multiple layers of vests and overcoats that wouldn't have been out of place in Montana or Wyoming.

In the aforementioned sequence where Hannah's horse is gunned down, we hear the gunshot just BEFORE the supersonic rifle bullet strikes Hannah's horse. Good idea, poor execution. Hannah, who certainly ought to know something about gunfighting after her bank robbing career, leads her gang out of a nearly impregnable position to confront Wes and his friends in the open, with predictably disastrous results. The photography is mediocre, with TV-ish color and focus.

This is not helped by poor use of special effects. Notably, in one scene Ellie sticks a knife through a character's hand. But I will be on the lookout for Paul Matthews' next work.

• Of Tanz Victims | Revolvy.
• Red Tales: Polish Delight.
• TV Guide by Statesboro Herald - Issuu.
• What Happens in Bora Bora... (Picture This Erotic Romance - Book 2)?
• Miss High-Heels: The Story of a Rich but Girlish Young Gentleman Under the Control of His Pretty Step-Sister and Her Aunt.
• .

I think he has a good movie in him somewhere. Both Western fans and exploitation fans should avoid it. Dangerous Beauty pretends to be the story of real-life 16th-century Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco. In reality, it is an attempt to rewrite history to suit the wishful thinking of pseudo-feminist ideology. I have no objection to making a professional prostitute the heroine of the story. The contempt that society, then and now, showers on such women while excusing the men who pay them for their services is rank hypocrisy. And it is true, just as the movie claims, that many Venetian courtesans became wealthy, well-educated, and independent women.

The nightmare of drug addiction, violence and de facto slavery to a pimp that is prostitution in modern America was not true of prostitution in all places and times. The movie still glamorizes the profession far beyond what the historical record will support. The historical Veronica Franco suffered frequently from the occupational diseases of prostitutes, but this Veronica is always hale and hearty. Hilariously, we also discover that 16th-century Venice has already invented a safe, effective morning-after pill, enabling Catherine McCormack to avoid the real Veronica Franco's numerous pregnancies.

Still, if Dangerous Beauty had done no worse than this, it could still have been enjoyable, if silly, for these historical absurdities do not amount to gratuitous slanders against Veronica's non-courtesan contemporaries. Much worse is the pretense that prostitution was women's only path to education and influence in Renaissance Italy. Excuse me, but Isabella d'Este and Beatrice Sforza might have a word or two to say about that. Indeed, Castiglione was careful to include education as one of the attributes of the ideal female courtier.

Still more disgusting is the movie's attempt to disparage love itself. I have no personal moral objections to prostitution: No person is hurt by the exchange. Well, loveless marriages have always existed, but there have always been loving ones too, even in the days when bride and groom never met before their wedding. There was never a loving trick turned. It is not only the movie's attitude toward women that is unhealthy; its view of men is warped, too.

On the other hand, we are shown that sadistic rapist-murderers present no danger at all, if you know what they really want, which is to be dominated. Why didn't the thousands of women killed by such creeps think of that? Having said all this, I must reluctantly admit that the acting by all parties is good, and the sets and costumes beautiful. If you think that excuses this movie's lying in an evil cause, you're wrong. Leading man Rufus Sewell had the honesty to admit that this movie was unadulterated horse manure. Better that the rest of us admit it, too. Unless you're writing a thesis on pseudo-feminist distortions of history, give this movie a wide berth.

I might have enjoyed this film more if I were a foreigner completely ignorant of America's political system. The story, if it had been set thirty years ago or on another planet , was good enough in itself: I didn't like Laine Hanson much, but I admired her. Anyone who has observed the American political scene with any care at all knows that this is balderdash.

Not one American female politician has experienced nearly so much uproar over some alleged sexual misconduct. Less important, but even more bizarre, is the script writing Hanson into the Republican Party. Hanson is an avowed atheist who is pro-choice, advocates banning not merely restricting private ownership of handguns, and gets livid not only at school prayer but even at the mention of Jesus' name in a public classroom. In other words, she is well to the left of many Democrats, and would not belong in any wing of the Republican party.

I think this stupidity was inflicted on us to make the Republicans on display here appear to be anti-woman rather than merely anti-Democrat, by showing them attacking a woman from their own party. There's another significant overlooked point in the movie, but I'm not sure whether it's a flaw or a subtle lesson. Hanson has in fact done something that is very seriously wrong; she has betrayed her best friend, Cynthia Charlton Lee, by stealing Lee's husband away from her.

Hanson even tries to defend her action, saying that she fell in love with William Hanson even though she didn't mean to. Well, people do fall in love without meaning to, and they cannot be faulted for that. But is this an excuse for Hanson taking her friend's husband from her? Is it possible that Cynthia Charlton Lee was also in love with William Hanson, and that, being married to him, her love deserved priority?

And is Hanson's treatment of her best friend a relevant measure of her trustworthiness? But, the whole affair of Hanson vs. Lee barely makes a blip on the radar screen. What obsesses the public, and takes up far more time in the movie, is not what Hanson did to her best friend, but what she did with a couple of drunk frat boys when she was a single woman in college, even though this is clearly irrelevant both to Hanson's professional qualifications AND to her moral character.

I don't know what to make of this. Maybe the director is blind to the fact that Hanson's treatment of Cynthia was wrong, and means us to take at face value Hanson's defense of her own outrageous behavior. The movie's stance on privacy is clear, but still thought-provoking. I do think that moral character is relevant to picking political candidates.

Nothing in politics is done without resistance, and character determines whether a leader will fold in the face of resistance, try to compromise, or stand fast. Joan Allen does a superb job doing a delicate balance between strength and pain. Jeff Bridges gives a great performance as a cynical politico who finally discovers his principles, while Sam Elliott is wonderful as another cynical politico who never does.

And don't overlook Gary Oldman: Unquestionably, his methods are evil, but you're never quite sure if his goals are equally evil. At first it appears that he is persecuting Hanson just because she is female; as the story progresses, he claims to have other reasons. You sense that he really believes this, that he wants to give up the fight against Hanson, but feels obliged to go on because he honestly thinks she can't be a good vice-president.

But you never learn just what his reasons are. Watchable; just set your bunkum detector in high gear. Whoever thought Owen Wilson could carry a major action film should be shot. He would have ruined even a good action movie, and this is not a good action movie. I can't think of any living actor more totally lacking in charisma or more irritating to listen to where does he GET that nasal whine?

He's a godsend to his supporting cast; my eyes naturally long to go somewhere, anywhere rather than settle on Wilson, so the bit players get a lot more attention than they otherwise would. Unfortunately, a lot of this film shows Wilson out in the wild by himself, so my eyes cannot escape this thing, this sorry excuse for an actor, that is on the screen. But the converse applies also; if Wilson would have ruined even a good action movie, not even a strong leading man say, Joaquin Phoenix could have saved this movie. There is only one good action set-piece, the missile attack against the Hornet fighter-bomber.

For the entire remainder of the movie, we are subjected to Wilson stumbling through one stupid situation after another. Wilson skylines himself while trying to communicate with the carrier crew; a sniper misses him even though he is a perfect, stationary target; at another point a whole freakin' ARMORED COMPANY misses him with everything from small arms to 20mm cannons at a range of about yards -and he isn't even taking cover!

These stupidities are important even for a lowbrow action movie from which you expect no brains: With the best will in the world, it's impossible to miss the fact that Hackman is too old to lead young, strong men into combat. He belongs behind a desk, where his mind can save their lives; behind the controls of a chopper, he's apt to cost them their lives.

...Of Tanz Victims

Worst of all, John Moore invests the military men he intends to glorify with a large dose of that most unmilitary of traits: A war without political goals is mere pointless murder. No warrior has the right to expect the country to which he pledges his life to let him endanger GOOD policies stopping genocide in Bosnia, for instance, or destroying al-Qaeda in order to save his own skin or his comrades'. I have never seen a clearer portrayal of the immense devastation that civil war wreaked on the Balkans. Nathan Crowley presents us with a bizarre, surreal moonscape of broken, twisted metal, wrecked vehicles, destroyed buildings and ruined works of art.

The sets hauntingly render the sheer waste and sense of loss. Militarism is not merely the exaltation of the military virtues: If it were, militarism would be a good thing. But true militarism is more than this. It is the belief that the nation exists to serve the professional military forces, rather than the other way around.

Watch on TV, but only if you appreciate fine production design. I'm not hard to surprise when it comes to movies. I simply can't understand how people could call it suspenseful, much less confusing. Frankly, I don't think Director Doug Liman meant to keep anything about Bourne secret from the audience. And that is stupid, because whatever potential the movie had to generate tension and suspense depended on us being as clueless as Jason Bourne as to who he was. He doesn't know who Morpheus and Trinity are, or what they're up to, and neither do we. The brief glimpse we got of Trinity just deepened the mystery.

This is aggravated by the fact that Bourne is pretty slow on the uptake. By the time he got out of the Zurich bank, he should have realized that there were only two possibilities for what he was: The audience, of course, doesn't even have that much uncertainty, since we are shown Bourne's employers early on. Very little thought went into this movie.

For instance, when Bourne discovers his pile of passports, each with a different identity attached, he should have had no way of determining which one was actually him, since he had no memory. But he just guesses right, miraculously. The Swiss police are shown as being unaware that a U. Embassy not present in Zurich anyway is sovereign U. The Marines guarding the embassy are shown as being unarmed until they get into the arsenal; I've never been to the Swiss embassy, but in Nicaragua the Marines carried their M rifles in the very door of the embassy, and even in the consulates.

The best I can say about Franka Potente is that she managed at times to distract me from the fact that she adds nothing to the story. This movie should have been entirely Bourne's show, and she's there just to provide a love interest and to be a springboard for dialogue, because Liman is too lazy to provide exposition with just Bourne himself.

Julia Stiles is window dressing; the director obviously hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with his female actors. It gets markedly better in the second half; it's no more credible than before, but at least the stupidities, like Bourne's escape scene, have a payoff in thrills.

The acting is good by everybody. Take a note of the small touches: And it has a superior car chase scene. The acting by everybody is good.

1. Pilgrims and Royalty, Vol. One: The Ancestry of the Downey and Horton Families (Greywolf Histories Book 11).
2. Henry Posada Losada?
3. Entre castes et classes: Les communistes indiens face à la politisation des basses castes (Points sur lAsie) (French Edition);
4. Longboat Observer by The Observer Group Inc. - Issuu.

Overall, the movie is tolerable, but the premise could have delivered a much better film. Action fans should catch it on TV. Professional intelligence case workers appeal to four principal motives to recruit their agents: Charlie, a little pro-Palestinian Jane Fonda wannabe, is kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad, humiliated, and offered the job of spying on Palestinian terrorists. She accepts because, um, because, well, the screenwriter says so. I'm not sure any woman in the world is quite so easily manipulated as Charlie in this movie. If such a woman really exists anywhere, why on earth would anyone want her as an intelligence agent?

Anyone who can be convinced to change sides that easily once can surely be convinced to do so a second time. You wouldn't dare let her out of your sight for ten seconds, and as for allowing her to join a Palestinian terrorist training camp, where she'd be out of sight and in the presence of her old friends for months on end, forget about it.

If I were politically correct, I would call it a misogynist movie, but that would probably be unfair. There's no evidence that director George Roy Hill imagined Charlie's weakness and stupidity to be typical of all women.



• !
• Full text of "Thinkdigit Magazine "?
• .
• The Kootie Kids and the Attack of the Poot Troop;
• The New Management: Bringing Democracy & Markets Inside Organizations: Bringing Democracy and Markets Inside Organizations!

I can't say precisely how realistic it is technically, but it feels authentic at every turn. The brutal interrogations of the captured terrorist, and the intense multilayered surveillance of Charlie ring very true. There's no one-man-army James Bond crap here; the Israelis assign a full squad of spies to every job. More importantly it gives us the psychological feel of the espionage profession. The stock in trade of professional spies is the betrayal of loyalty and the abuse of friendship. Naturally, this does not make for likeable characters, however much one may admire the cause for which they work.

Hill does not attempt to sugarcoat this; he shows it to us as it is. Diane Keaton should not be blamed for failing to make her ridiculous character convincing; she is clearly doing the best she can, and quite probably the best that anyone could have. Klaus Kinski steals every scene he gets as Mossad master agent Marty Kurtz. David Suchet gets a fine small role as a terrorist thug. It's not half the movie it could have been, but it's a good movie anyway.

Canada-related lists

See it on video or DVD with your friends. As the Civil War ends in defeat and despair for the South, Wales alone of his guerrilla unit refuses to surrender. He has nothing left to live for, except to fight, and he cannot give that up. This is a setup that has appeared many times in the movies, as the hero with nothing left to lose is a perfect excuse to show nonstop gunplay.

It is an action western according to the classic formula, but it is more than that. Josey Wales heals his wounds as the story goes on, and begins to replace the friendship, and then the love, that he has lost.

Jeremy's Scarecrow

And as he heals, he begins to grow out of violence as a way of life. He has the ethic of a hacker: He investigates extravagance and excces. His attitude is cut and paste trying politically the sytangm I and the world. Looking beyond and between Tara passes over the converting test of pop culture to art.

The style of pretending to be honest and an aesthtic between dirty and spectacular result into an incendiary subjective dimension. Versatile he takes the necessary distance to any emotion and any of its representation. Tara deals with a neurotic realism. He enjoys a pop noir if we accept that this kind of art has a certain aesthetic….

The expertise is a risk for Tara. As he likes anything and handles anything he can be regarded as an apotheoses of casual consume, as he proposes an agressive refuse of intrinsic quality he can easily be regarded as worthless, as he reads Romania in slang he can be himself accused of the black negative sides of Romanian society. In an area free from any ideology he stipulates the brand do-it-yourself. No matter of goods, academy, sex, social utopia, political games, history, terrorism, investment philosophy, serial movies, low music, mockery, rules, publicity, religion, red governments, alcoholism, influencial military areas, homosexuality, myths, money, conspirations….

Tara gathers concepts which others deny, changes the trash into fetish and brings new idols in fashion.