kelvin@ut-sally.UUCP (Kelvin Thompson) (08/04/85)
_Pale_Rider_
by Kelvin Thompson
_Pale_Rider_ is bad.
Mishandled grievously ... amalgam ... Eisenstein's _Old_and_New_ or
Renoir's _Grand_Illusion_ ... shades into a meditation on the transcience
of not so much life as existence ... an ideologically ambivalent
dystopia.
Less a devil than a walking conumdrum ... Jenny Agutter (_The_Eagle_Has_
_Landed_, _Equus_) ... the muted rhetoric of naturalism ... supple zooms,
pans, and tracking shots ... fascination with the tonalities of light ...
serious new offering ... the Church is a curious and pervasive target
here ... oddly comic pathos ... misanthropy as bold social criticism ...
unsentimentally asserts that self-deception and paranoia are the
accoutrements of survival ... a dispassionate mimicry ... individual
selfhood.
Or so it says.
Illustration of how superfluous ... delineate its entrenchment ...
shallow formulas ... don't add up ... misleads in suggesting a systematic
development of story and theme ... sleekly condescending ... betrayed by
the stage production ... beer belly ... awkwardly contrived ... degraded
by stupid, shabby filmmaking ... exaggerated privatism.
A reason is not so easy to pin down ... cannot have what it acutally
needs ... wild Brazilian crooks ... curdled hatred and hysterical
vengeance ... symbolic castrator ... tends to submerge the archaic ...
destroys the viewer's confidence ... something has been demonstrated
rather than grasped, felt, and conveyed.
Mockery is still propoganda.jeffh@brl-sem.ARPA (the Shadow) (08/06/85)
> _Pale_Rider_ is bad. > > Mishandled grievously ... amalgam ... Eisenstein's _Old_and_New_ or > Renoir's _Grand_Illusion_ ... shades into a meditation on the transcience > of not so much life as existence ... an ideologically ambivalent > dystopia. AHA!!! I knew it! Kelvin Thompson is not a real person. Kelvin Thompson is just the code name used for an experimental program at U of Texas to write critical reviews. This would explain: 1) Why Kelvin hasn't answered any of the many flames he (it) has recieved. [it isn't programmed to] 2) Why every review starts out with "_Fill_in_the_Blank_ is a bad movie." [an obvious bug] 3) Consistency problems: like calling _Star_Wars:_A_New_Hope_ worthwhile in one place, and trash in another. Or using `Orwellian' after pretending not to have read _1984_ [not necessarily a bug. real reviewers are never consistent] I must admit that it is nearly as good as most of the reviewers one reads in the newspapers. It says a lot for the future artificial intelligence; we can make programs as stupid as real people! The problem with this review must have come when the developers tried to fix the "this is a bad movie" bug and broke something else. > Mockery is still propoganda. You betchum, Pale Rider! "Never argue with a fool ... People might not know the difference!" the Shadow ARPA: <jeffh@brl> UUCP: {seismo,decvax}!brl!jeffh
masuma@drupa.UUCP (Masuma Rahman) (08/07/85)
Okay 'Kelvin' ( I don't believe that's your real name . . no one in their right mind would post the stuff you post and reveal your true identity) . . your reviews are getting boring. I just thought you might like to know you are letting down some of your readers -- you see, they ( the reviews ) are getting sooooo predictable. C'mon, you can do better than that!!!! All your reviews seem to have the same (monotonous) tone . . 'take a passable to good movie, and give it a terrible review, just so die-hard fans of those movies can get mad at you'. That was an interesting and even funny (sometimes) idea -- for a while. But they are getting kind of boring. So, here's a suggestion, why don't you take a nice, and worthless movie, like _Tarzan, the Ape Man_ (with the Derek in it), and tell us how intellectually and philosophically educational you have found it!!! And give us some profound insights into the director's, actor's, actress's (!!) minds!!! If nothing else (which they would be) they would be amusing to read . . (unlike your most recent reviews on _Return_ and _Pale_). Amusedly, M.R. ATT-ISL, Denver