Tag: movie review

Have I Got a Story for You

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I’ve been so busy lately with a lot of annoying stuff so it’s been hard to concentrate on what to write my posts about.  I don’t feel like talking about current events today.  Let’s talk about the movies.  I feel I’m unqualified to discuss the state of cinema because in the last five years I’ve gone to so few movies.

But I do think I can talk about what direction science fiction and fantasy movies should go in.  I guess I’ll start with where it shouldn’t go.  And that would be the way it’s currently proceeding.  What we see for the most part are movies that provide a science fiction setting (interstellar civilization, advanced technology, humanoid robots) but uses it as a backdrop to play out sociological scenarios of interest to the film makers, specifically, wish fulfillment about various sexual and race grievance issues.  A good example is Disney’s decision to turn their various Star Wars productions into propaganda films for why women and blacks are the only acceptable heroes in the galaxy far, far away.

This is a really dumb strategy.  They took a wildly popular and lucrative franchise and tanked it in the name of race and gender equity.  And this with a franchise whose primary market were white boys.  Let us say this was ill-advised.  So, there is the counterexample; what not to do.  Now what would be popular and lucrative?

Well, it probably doesn’t take a genius to say write a story that plays to the people who like science fiction (boys and men) and make it imaginative and exciting.  Look at the original Star Wars movie for a simplistic and not highly original plot that allowed the audience to get lost in the likeable characters and impressive special effects and smile along to the space opera that followed.  And there are hundreds of old pulp stories from Barsoom to Dune that do exactly that.  Whether it’s weird aliens or human galactic empire or some combination of the two we want to see the same story dynamic that’s been around since the Odyssey.  We want to see the hero on his quest to:

  1. Find his way home.
  2. Or, save the princess.
  3. Or, defeat the evil sorcerer.
  4. Or, invent the FTL drive.
  5. Or, whatever! As long as it’s not boring and doesn’t involve girl bosses and racial grievances.

And it’s about time that someone put together another science fiction (or fantasy) franchise to replace the tired ones that are currently limping along.  Star Wars is tapped out.  The Republic, the Empire and the Rebellion have become stale and boring.  Nobody cares.

As have the superhero movies.  We’ve used up everybody’s interest in Marvel’s and DC’s stables of 1940’s to 1960’s spandex wearing heroes.  It’s enough.  Nobody is clamoring for more Captain America or black Captain America or Gay Hispanic Spiderman or She-Hulk or any of this.  It’s now a bore.

And it doesn’t have to be legacy space opera.  Although I wouldn’t mind a Doc Smith or a Heinlein storyline.  It could be anything as long as it appeals to the male audience that enjoys this genre.  It needs action, adventure and maybe a pretty girl that needs saving from some fate worse than death (like middle-management cubicle captivity).  Add in some lively music and lots of cutting-edge special effects and you’ve got a billion-dollar hit.

Hey Elon Musk, if you want a trip to Mars make a movie about a trip to Mars that gets people excited about it.  You’ll even make a pot of gold while doing it.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 14MAY2025 – Review – Watchmen (2009)

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So the original story is by Alan Moore. He was fairly famous in the comic book industry in the 1980’s when this was originally published. Take a moment and find a picture of Alan Moore on the internet, I’ll wait… Are you back? Given that image you will likely be unsurprised to find out he is a notorious and unrepentant anarchist and rather unhinged (even for an anarchist). Other efforts by him include V is for Vendetta and Batman: The Killing Joke. The Watchmen Series was a 12 issue mini-series from DC published in 1986-1987 set in an alternate history where the US has Dr. Manhattan (who is more overpowered than even say super man, his abilities verge on the godlike).
It was rather cutting edge for its period with its serious antihero vibe.

The movie came much later in 2009 after many years of wandering into development hell. In many ways its cinematography and dialogue come straight from the comic series art by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s dialogue. It does skip/compress several subplots, and change the method of the ending though not its source (Ozymandias/Veidt) nor its intent (forestall or avoid WWIII). It was one of the first R rated comic book movies (previous having limited themselves to PG-13/PG) and also one of the first to release in the late February slot to take advantage of College spring break.

As a fan of the original comics I thought it rose to slightly above meh say 6/10. It loses much of the complexity of the original, which given the size of the 12 issue series was somewhat unavoidable even with its bloated 3 hr+ run time. As Chemist notes if you don’t already know some of the plot points it is going to be a whirlwind. Heck as the original comic book doled out over a year it was confusing until the last few comics at the end where all the threads got tied together and many of the hints in the original lurk in the subplots that were excised.

There is an animated retelling done by DC Animation scripted by J. Michael Straczynski and Dave Gibbons from the original It is split into 2 90 minute subsections. It does a better job at keeping more of the necessary beats to help you see the solution and keeps to the original ending. It is maybe a 7.5/10.

Honestly, if you like comics, find a perfect bound version of the original comic books is available this is available for ~$20 the price of 4-5 fancy coffees. It is less than the $24 I paid in 1986-87 for the original comics. Do not try to go buy these at a comic book store (except for the perfect bound single volume version). They’re moderate collector items at $20-30 a each for even poorish quality copies and the first the last and (potential Spoiler) the one where they break Rorschach out of prison run for probably twice that each. As much as a crazy tinfoil hat wearing jerk as Alan Moore can be this is easily in the top 5 of comic series I have read in 50 years of reading comics and is probably better than 90% of most comic/SciFi writing.

Watchmen (2009) – A Science Fiction-Fantasy Movie Review

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Watchmen is a movie based on a DC Comics comic book series from the 1980s written by Alan Moore and directed by Zack Snyder.  Moore is a self-identified “anarchist” (read weirdo) and the fictional world of this story reflects his hatred of anything conservative (read normal).

The story takes place in an alternate reality of 1985 where Richard Nixon is in his fifth term and a band of “superheroes” called the Watchmen have been disbanded after they were used for such actions as winning the Vietnam War for the Americans.  Apparently, people became afraid of their impact on society.  The movie starts with one of these retired heroes; the Comedian being murdered by another extremely powerful masked individual.  He is thrown through the window of a Manhattan skyscraper.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

We are introduced to the former heroes.  By the way I recognized none of the actors.  I’m sure some of them would be familiar to anyone who has gone to the movies much in the last fifteen years.

Except for Doctor Manhattan who is some kind of god-like being with psychic abilities and atomic power that can destroy cities, the rest of the heroes are just humans who are strong and trained as fighters.  Doctor Manhattan got these powers while he was working in the American nuclear weapons industry.  He is able to become enormously large, teleport to Mars at will and able to invent whole new power sources for Earth’s future.

When the Comedian is murdered the other Watchmen suspect that someone is trying to kill all of them.  When an assassin tries to kill another one; Adrian Veidt (AKA: Ozymandias) they get the gang back together and look for the killer.  There’s all kinds of action and adventure.  But in the final act we find out that Ozymandias is responsible.  He stages an atomic attack on New York City, London and a couple of other cities and the leaders of the world assume it was Doctor Manhattan that did it as a warning against nuclear states (like the US and the USSR) threatening nuclear war.  This brings the countries of the world together out of a sense of common defense against Doctor Manhattan.  And Doctor Manhattan approves of the peaceful result of the hoax so the secret is maintained.  But one Watchman; Rorschach objects and has to be killed by Doctor Manhattan to keep the secret.  Rorschach’s friends are angry but agree to keep the secret for the sake of world peace.  At the end of the movie, it appears that Rorschach was able to leak the secret before he was killed.

Okay, so what did I think of this movie?  To start off we have Richard Nixon in his fifth term pretty much as evil incarnate.  So, there’s that.  The movie has a dose of sex and violence so this isn’t a kid’s superhero movie.  So, there’s that.  The story itself and the characters have interesting moments.  The question comes down to, is it worth the time to watch it?  I’ll have to qualify this.  If you like comic book stories there is a decent chance you’ll like this movie.  The effects and the acting aren’t bad.  The plot isn’t reasonable but it is clever.  If you don’t like comic book stories, you won’t like this movie.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 08MAY2025 – More Dune

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The fever dream that is David Lynch’s Dune owes far more to the earlier Jodorowsky attempt at a Dune Movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune#Background ) than to Frank Herbert’s novel. These things include

  • Stunt casting Sting mirrors Jodorowsky’s intent to cast Mick Jagger for Feyd Rautha
  • The art work in the Lynch version is greatly affected by both Jodorowskys use of H.R. Giger (then mostly unknown) and Jodorowsky’s use of Moebius (of Heavy Metal Comic book fame) to help create the cinematics and layout
  • The bizarre ending involving the Weirding Modules and Rain on Arrakis steals from the Jodorowsky ending (though doesn’t go QUITE so acid trip as Jodorowsky) and totally diverges from the Dune Module

I did see it in the theater when it came out. It has some good points ( Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck, the overall look) but it is of its time and strongly affected by the Jodorowsky work which is NOT what a Dune originalist would like. Here, 41 years on it seems very dated and of its time. Of the three attempts at Dune that got to the screen it is probably the weakest.

That Was Entertainment

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If you’re older than fifty then you remember when entertainment was big business.  Big American corporations made our movies, published our books, recorded our music and amused us sitting around the television set every night.  And they made good money doing it.  Going to the movies was a national pastime and buying records of popular music was what teenagers did relentlessly.  And everyone watched must-see-tv whether it was a Thursday night sit-com or the late-night show with Johnny Carson.  Entertainment was bankable.

Well, that’s all over.  Kids don’t buy music.  They stream it for almost nothing.  They stream movies too so they don’t go to theaters.  And they really don’t want to pay for it either.  Same for books, same for television.  The only thing that still kind of pays is cable television.  That’s because cable is set up so the fees are lucrative.  But guess what?  Millennials and zoomers have now cut the cable.  Only old people pay for or watch cable.  So, the change is complete.

The result is that except for truly bankable extravaganzas like Marvel superhero movies (mostly) or Taylor Swift concerts entertainment producers aren’t spending the money needed to make entertainment entertaining.  Case in point, have you looked at broadcast television in the last five years?  Don’t.  It’s unbelievably bad.  The production values are awful, the actors can’t act but worst of all the writing is putrid.  It’s as if it were written by emotionally disturbed cretins.  The characters are unlikable and the plots are idiotic and completely predictable.

After what passed for Oscar nominees this year, we don’t even have to bother talking about how bad Hollywood has become.  Up until recently the only bright spot was that some of the cable channels and corporations like Amazon and Netflix were spending generously on good writers and good actors for some of their series.  It could be debated whether these shows were as well made as Hollywood movies were in their heyday but without a doubt, they were head and shoulders above anything that was on broadcast television in the last ten years and they absolutely entertained.  But now even these shows are starting to fall apart.  Amazon recently spent a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings adjacent production called “The Rings of Power” and it flopped very badly.

So, what is next for entertainment?

Well, the answer is confusing.  What young people like is video games.  And because of this they consume other entertainment in a way that relates to this medium.  They like to read fan-fic about those games.  In other words, fans of the video games write amateur stories and post them to websites so that other gamers can read them.  And now these writers are even seeing their fan-fic turned into videos or even movies of these video-centric stories.  These stories adhere closely to the limitations and conventions of the games.  The characters are constantly referencing their health levels and skill levels as they attempt to conquer different challenges.  So, the plot is very much tied to the experience of the game.

I find all of this confusing and somewhat disturbing.  I don’t doubt that these video games are exciting and maybe even challenging but how much of the same thing can you stand to consume before something more original and intellectually and even emotionally stimulating will be needed?  And at some point, wouldn’t it be reasonable to want a movie about real life where normal people overcome the challenges that happen in the real world?  Or how about a comedy or a drama?  It can’t all be video games, can it?

Well, anyway that’s what I was thinking about today.  I don’t know how all this ends but it’s something that is worth thinking about.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) – A Movie Review

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When I watched and reviewed the earlier chapters in the John Wick “saga” I noted that the number of bullets and kills had increased orders of magnitude between the first and second installments and if that trend were to be continued into a third movie it would be necessary for Mr. Wick to slaughter whole sectors of the galaxy to provide the sheer numbers necessary.

Well, I was wrong.  In this third movie, John Wick is still only killing gangsters within the confines of the borough of Manhattan.  Well, except for a short sojourn to Casablanca to get some help from Halle Berry in finding a mystical Arab mafioso who requires John to cut off a finger Yakuza style and rededicate himself to “The Table.”  While there, he barely kills anyone at all, less than a hundred.

Okay, forget about plot.  It’s entirely too stupid to even mention.  Suffice it to say that John Wick is fighting and killing assassins so quickly and continuously that he must have single-handedly used up all the ammunition on the planet.  He even depleted all of the armor piercing rounds on Earth.

On a personal note, Keanu Reeves is looking very old.  It’s clear that all this fighting is taking a terrible toll on him.  And it’s no surprise.  Without a serious count I’ll say conservatively Mr. Wick was hurled through several dozen panes of glass, thrown off a four-story building, shot a half dozen times, stabbed several times, crashed his motorcycle into a building, had a finger amputated then cauterized, he was branded and punched close to a thousand times.  That’s got to take it out of fellow.

Look I get it.  These movies provide a video game-like environment where the audience experiences the adrenaline rush of a non-stop first-person shooter experience.  And looked at from that point of view John Wick 3 gets the job done.  There are knife fights, endless gun fights, fist fights, dog fights, karate fights, there are even fights on motorcycles.  Some of the assassins even turn out to be fans of John and tell him during the battles that they really admire him and killing him isn’t personal, it’s just business.

And the end of the movie isn’t really an end.  It looks like just the end of round three.  But I’m not sure there will be a round four.  The net profit from the movie was only $89 million.  And as blockbusters go that’s small potatoes.  So, this might be the final installment of the adventures of John Wick.

As far as recommendations, see the first John Wick movie.  It’s the best one.  Unless that movie strikes you as incredibly fun don’t bother with the sequels.  Neither of them materially improves on the action and as far as storytelling they lack the emotional rationale of the first film.

One little interesting cinematic moment in the film is where an homage to the spaghetti western, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is included.  Wick is in a gun store looking for a gun to defend himself with and he takes components from several revolvers and matches them together and listens to the gun’s action to see if the composite is smooth operating.  Of course, he barely has time to use the gun before abandoning for the next scene so it is purely a staged moment in the film.  But I still liked it.

This Happy Breed (1944) – A Movie Review

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This Happy Breed is a fictional portrayal of life in working class England from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second world War.  I won’t give any spoiler warnings because it’s not that kind of movie.  It’s an intimate look at a family in suburban London between the wars and all of the important and trivial things that make up human life.

Frank Gibbons (played by Robert Newton) returns from war to his family; wife Ethel (played by Celia Johnson), his teenage son Reg, his daughters Vi and Queenie, his mother-in-law Mrs. Flint and his sister Sylvia, all living under his roof.  His next-door neighbor Bob Mitchell is a war buddy and becomes Frank’s best friend.  And Bob’s son Billy will eventually become Queenie’s boyfriend.

Over the course of the twenty years that the movie covers we watch the children grow up, navigate the troubled economy of Britain between the wars, fall in love, marry and in one case die tragically.  Children rebel against their parents’ expectations and mores and come out the other side older and sadder and much like their parents.

The movie is a slice of life in three acts and a total of nine scenes spread across those twenty years.  I guess what I liked about the film is the feeling of believability about the characters but at the same time the likeability of most of them.  Even though they were Brits and from a time period before I was born, they felt strangely familiar.  And I was invested in their stories.  You could actually care how things turned out for them because they were decent people trying to muddle through their lives during a period of history when England was still reeling from the loss of a generation of young men in World War I and staggering under the global economic changes that would reduce them to a poorer nation.  Frank and Ethel love their family and try their best to steer their children in the right direction.

There are moments of pathos and humor.  And the acting is top notch without any flashiness or highbrow dialog.  Just simple people living their lives.  I’m not sure who I would recommend this movie to.  First remember that for Americans the British locale might make it a little strange.  But actually, I didn’t think it was off-putting.  Events like the death of their king or the 1926 General Strike might seem unfamiliar but not mysterious.  If the description I give here doesn’t sound interesting then give this a pass.  But I consider it a gem of a film that I’m surprised I never saw before.  Highly recommended.

The Steel Trap (1952) – A Movie Review

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The Steel Trap is a crime/suspense thriller starring Joseph Cotton as Jim Osborne an assistant bank manager in Los Angeles who is tempted to steal a million dollars from his bank.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Jim has become bored with the slow plodding progress in the career of a bank manager and realizes that his bank has close to a million dollars of cash in its vault every Friday at closing which will not be missed until Monday at about 8:30 am.

He quickly and uncarefully concocts a plan to steal the cash and fly to Brazil with his family before the theft is discovered.  From the very beginning holes in his plan appear.  The upcoming weekend is the last time the bank won’t be open on Saturday until next year so the theft has to be tomorrow.  This means getting passports for himself and his wife will have to be expedited.  His wife Laurie balks at bringing their young daughter so a babysitter has to be located for the “two weeks” that Jim tells Laurie he’ll need to be in Brazil on the bank’s business.  He didn’t know that plane flight reservations to Rio De Janeiro are booked weeks in advance and now he’ll have to chance getting cancellation seats.  And he’ll have to fly first to New Orleans and then connect to his flight.

And all the things that can go wrong do.  His wife isn’t in time to get the passports while the Brazilian embassy is open so Jim has to break in after hours and is caught by a building security guard and only some luck with an embassy worker who vouches for him saves him from arrest.  The one-hundred-and-fifty-pound suitcase full of cash catches the airline’s attention and they have a customs agent open it and find the cash.  Jim has to tell a bunch of unlikely stories about how the bank needs cash to transact a business deal in Brazil and barely survives the calls to his boss when it turns out he’s on the golf course.  But eventually all of this is for nothing when the cancellations on his flight never materialize.  Now Jim is faced with catching a flight on Monday after the bank has discovered the theft.

At this point Laurie has put two and two together and figures out that Jim has stolen the cash in the suitcase and confronts him.  When he admits to it, she refuses to continue with the plan and goes home to her daughter.  Meanwhile back at home Jim’s work friend dropped off a present at Jim’s home and hears about Jim making an unscheduled “business trip” to Brazil.  Finding this strange he tries to get in touch with Jim’s boss to get the details on the trip but has trouble reaching him.  Meanwhile Laurie reaches home and finds out about Jim’s friend hearing about their trip so she calls him and makes some excuse about how it wasn’t a business trip but a story they used to disguise a surprise for their daughter.

Early Monday morning Jim calls up Laurie at home and tells her he realizes he’s made a terrible mistake and says he’s going to try to get the money back in the vault before anyone knows it’s missing.  He flies home and reaches the bank right after the security guard has opened it.  He manages to get the suitcase to the vault and the money back in and hide the suitcase just as the opening team reaches his position outside the vault.  At this point the actual strain of the deception overcomes Jim and he sinks to the floor.  His colleagues think he’s been struck with a flu and tell him to go home.  In the last scene Jim reunites with Laurie at their home in an embrace that shows their relief at the end of the nightmare.

Now this must sound like a ridiculous story.  And it is.  It’s absurd.  But it’s also enormously suspenseful.  Jim Osborne has done such a poor job of anticipating the multitude of things that need to be coordinated for a successful theft of this type that he’s left himself open for an almost endless series of problems that provide suspense.  His bad humor and fear grow from minute to minute and alarm his wife because they clash with his normally friendly and calm attitude.  The tension is ratcheted up throughout the movie.  I was surprised just how much I enjoyed it.  Highly recommended.

Even Barabbas Couldn’t Dampen This Day

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Such a good day.  Camera Girl cooked up a storm.  Beef and pork roasts, vegetables, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, stuffed mushrooms and more.  And then the desserts. At my insistence there were five different flavors of ice cream.  That’s because I know the kids crave it (well me too).  But she also made eclairs, tiramisu, ricotta cheesecake, chocolate cake (for the kids) and pineapple upside down cake.  I never even got to the pineapple cake.  I was too stuffed.  And the coffee was hot, strong and good.

The kids were busy with all kinds of silly games and gadgets.  But they were good.  When they started to get bored, I put on the original “King Kong.”  The family Godzilla aficionado was unimpressed with King Kong’s susceptibility to fifty caliber machine gun bullets.  He informed me that a real monster is unkillable with anything up to and including a thermonuclear warhead.  What could I say?  I pointed out that he did manage to kill a T Rex and also a Manhattan elevated subway train.  But apparently Godzilla is so incomparably superior to actual dinosaurs that conquering them is as nothing in the context of what Godzilla can do.  I was made aware that if Godzilla needed to, he has a mode called “thermonuclear” whereby he can emit the equivalent of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb against his surroundings.  This I was informed would utterly consume everything within a forty-mile radius around him.  I confessed defeat and asked if we could still watch the end of the movie where Carl Denham tells the cop that “It was beauty killed the beast.”  He rolled his eyes at the screen and shook his head.  Well, anyway, I still think Fay Wray is pretty good looking.  I don’t blame old Kong for carrying her off twice.

After they went home, I watched Barabbas.  That’s an old Dino DeLaurentis swords and sandals epic from the 1960s with Anthony Quinn as the title character who in the Bible is released instead of Jesus for the Passover clemency.  I’ll say with no hesitation that this is one of the worst biblical epics hands down.  Quinn is playing the same part he plays in Zorba the Greek and many other Mediterranean dramas.  His struggles in a Jerusalem prison, a Sicilian sulfur mine and the Roman Coliseum all seem self-inflicted and by the end of the movie I had to wonder if even St Peter wasn’t ready to kick his butt up and down the Roman jail.  Because Barrabas mistook Nero’s blaming the Christians for the burning of Rome with a real Christian plan to “burn the old world” Barabbas gets caught torching an oil warehouse and claims he’s doing it because he’s a Christian.  So, because of this St Peter and the rest of the real Christians are crucified by Nero.  What a genius!

As Barabbas is hanging on a cross at the end of the movie making what seem to be fairly meaningless comments, it seemed to me that the whole movie was absolutely pointless from every perspective; artistically, religiously, even logically.  As spectacle it was borderline ridiculous.  Quinn has a showdown in the Coliseum with Jack Palance in a chariot and himself on foot.  I’ve never seen a less convincing, more boring fight sequence.  At the end of the battle even the actor playing Nero looked like he wanted to be somewhere else but just couldn’t escape.

I also watched an old film noir called “Steel Trap.”  That was much more satisfactory.  I’ll review it soon.  Well, this will have to do for today.  A good day and a busy day.

The 400 Blows (1959) – A Movie Review

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The 400 Blows is reckoned one of the greatest films ever made.  I beg to differ.

I won’t give a spoiler alert because there’s nothing to spoil.  Nothing happens.  This was François Truffaut’s directorial debut.  I don’t know.  If I had been around back then I would have gotten in touch with him urging him to stop making movies, for everybody’s sake.  Mercifully, the movie is in French so that will warn off most of the unwary.  Camera Girl and I decided to watch it tonight after I recorded it from TCM last month during its “Thirty Days of Oscar” celebration of Academy Award winning movies.  Which goes to show you that the Oscars have been selecting bad movies for well over sixty-five years at least.

Wikipedia says that all of these famous filmmakers (Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg, Jean Cocteau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Richard Linklater, Tsai Ming Liang, Woody Allen, Richard Lester, P C Sreeram, Norman Jewison, Wes Anderson and Nicolas Cage) think this movie is one of the best movies ever made.  Well, that’s too bad.

A 12-year-old boy is bored and gets in trouble at school, runs away from home and gets sent to reform school for trying to steal a typewriter from his father’s office.  At the end of the movie, he escapes from the reform school and runs until he finds himself on the beach at Normandy.  The End.

When the credits came up at the end Camera Girl looked at me and asked me, “That’s it?  What the hell kind of a movie is that?”  I said, “It’s abstract!”  She was not happy.  That will probably be the last French film she will be watching.  I think she holds me directly responsible for this movie.  I think I’ve lost some stature in her eyes because I recorded it and didn’t warn her off.

While at the reform school the kid gets in trouble and one of the men in charge slaps him in the face brutally hard.  So, I was afraid the title was about some horrible beating the boy receives.  But that was the only violence in the film.  The real violence is against the audience.  After watching this film there are ninety-nine minutes I will never get back.  It should be called the “The Ninety-Nine Blows.”

I know I’m just a philistine and I don’t understand art for art’s sake.  But I contend that a motion picture has to amuse the audience in some way.  It can excite or frighten or sadden or confuse or fill the audience with mirth, nostalgia or lust or almost any emotion or intellectual state.  But at the very minimum it cannot bore the audience to tears.  That’s the one feeling it cannot summon up in the audience.  That’s the one unforgiveable sin.  The lights cannot come up on an audience that looks at each other and says, “What the hell was that?”  That unfortunately was our reaction.  If I had seen this in a theater I would have pounded on the manager’s office and demanded our money back.  That’s how bad it was.

Maybe it’s the French.  Being beaten by the Germans in three major wars over the course of less than a century may have done something terrible to their souls.  Maybe this film is a form of revenge on a world that has beaten the snot out of them, physically, psychologically and spiritually.  If that is the case, then I think they went overboard.  No one, not even the Nazis deserves to watch this film.  There are limits to revenge.