Jarhead (2005) movie poster - small

Jarhead (Yahoo! movies page)
My rating: D+ (Poor effort)
Directed by: Sam Mendes
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard
Released by: Universal Pictures

I rarely give movies a rating below C and its derivates. Jarhead deserves special mention, because it takes an interesting thing and turns it boring. It’s based on a book by a real-life US Army Marine Corps soldier, on his experiences during Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War. I haven’t read the book, but it seems from the movie that the book’s content - i.e., a personal diary of a Marine in Eye-raq - just isn’t suited for the big screen. It’s gritty, and it’s boring. An almost 2-hour long video diary, except that it has been shot on Hollywood movie quality footage. I’d have been more interested if it was actually shot by some Marine during the war. There’s no philosophical angle either - just the usual sanctimonius holier-than-thou crap of we’re-better-than-Eye-raqis. Uninspired performances, unrealistic performances. Except maybe Peter Sarsgaard, because he can keeps quiet and shoots nasty looks, which is a good thing when there’s no script; Peter Sarsgaard being highly talented in the shooting-nasty-looks business. The funny thing is, major American critics (even Ebert) ALWAYS fall for this sanctimonius patriotism. That’s OK, when a movie is GOOD, like Black Hawk Down, but not this…this abomination.

Jarhead trailer

Gattaca movie

Gattaca (Yahoo! Movies page)
My rating: C (Mediocre)
Directed by: Andrew Niccol
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Jude Law, Gore Vidal
Released by: Sony Pictures

I saw Gattaca on Set Pix a few days ago…and I was greatly disappointed. I’d come across this movie on many ‘Greatest Sci-Fi Movies of All Time’ sort of lists, and had come to expect a lot from this movie. It must be something to have stayed at the top of so many lists. Sadly, it falls short of expectations. It’s hardly a ’sci-fi’ movie at all! It’s more of a human drama, a love story maybe with a futuristic setting, but true-blue science fiction it most definitely isn’t.

Plot development is very one-dimensional, because it focuses only on the fact that societies in the future may base a lot of their structure on genetic engineering. Ethan Hawke as the genetically invalid trying to go to a space settlement in Titan (a moon of Saturn) - that’s the end of the story. Oh, and with a love affair thrown in as an afterthought, which only develops in the last few minutes of the movie. I understand low budget, but this movie is pants! Those black-and-white monitors which act as biometric security gates look like they’ve been bought second-hand from the sets of 1984! They should take a few lessons from Kurt Wimmer on how to make a classy looking sci-fi movie on a low budget, like Equilibrium. It would also help to take advice on how to work with pathetic actors like Ethan Hawke.

Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of the character, while not as wooden and expressionless as other actors like Christian Bale, leaves a lot to be desired. I rather thought Jude Law as the crippled but genetically superior guy was exceptional in his role. He was the only person who gave a stellar performance in that movie. You also get to see a young Uma Thurman, who for once looks good; unlike her later movies where her age clearly shows. Uma Thurman’s character hardly gets to play anything, except in the last few minutes; that too seems like an afterthought to give a romantic angle.

Gattaca was a great disappointment for me, specifically because it was pitched as a science fiction movie, which it isn’t. Maybe if I had seen it expecting a drama, I’d have given it a higher rating. Maybe. Because Ethan Hawke isn’t going to win any awards soon.

photo credit: wil pI dunno if you’ve heard of Professor Randy Pausch and his ‘The Last Lecture’ series appearances. Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and was widely regarded as an authority in the field of virtual reality. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and instead of giving up on life and feeling miserable, he decided to spread his message of reaching for your dreams among the people of this world. This is what the Last Lecture series was all about, and by Bob, it’s so touching. Unfortunately, the inevitable happened, and Professor Pausch died yesterday. May the departed rest in peace.

Barely a few months ago, WITH the knowledge that he’ll be dying soon, he had such a jovial mood during the lectures. You can view the videos of his lectures online, or download the transcript of Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture; and you should. It’s THAT inspiring. His official site is this one.

Watch the video of the Last Lecture. Don’t miss this one folks!

photo credit: plynoiThe Departed (read my review of The Departed here) truly is one of the best mob movies ever. Certainly not up to the pedestal where The Godfather is, because that’s unattainable. These movies stick on for generations because of the deep impact that they have because of their stellar acting, direction, script and cinematography. Take away any of these pillars, and the movie crumbles to sawdust. The reason why I’m writing this is because HBO recently showed The Departed on television, and having seen it twice in theater earlier I thought of seeing it again now. True to HBO’s style, they publicized it as ‘Premiering for the first time on Indian television’. They really need a bloody dictionary to understand that ‘premiering’ MEANS ‘for the first time’.

Anyway, what HBO did was that it cut out scenes from the movie, and made it awfully boring. Not a SINGLE expletive remained! Not a single f-word, when the opening lines of the movie itself would have somewhere around half-a-dozen f-words. And I don’t mean ‘fountain’ or ‘Fenchurch’. Unlike normally, they just didn’t silence or beep out those portions, they actually snipped them out. The end result was that what they were showing could very well have been a fucking Disney movie. Sadly, it’s Jack Nicholson’s character Frank Costello that suffers the most because of all this editing because his menace doesn’t come across that well. You don’t get the idea that he’s a dangerous mob boss until you see the actual version where he, er, shall we say, threatens to harm Matt Damon’s fiance. Then there’s the scene where Costello meets Damon’s character in a porn theater, and says “I own the place”. You don’t get to SEE what the place is in the ‘HBO-version’. They could have been meeting at PVR, for all we know!

Absolutely THE worst editing is done where they’ve cut out that AMAZING scene in the movie where Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb is playing. THAT was SO amazing, and they censored it out. With that scene gone, the suspense at the end about whose child Vega Farmiga’s character is carrying is also not there.

Take any of the shooting sequences too. All of them had over-the-top gore, with loads of blood splatter on the walls. In the version HBO showed, we hardly even get to see the bullet hit a guy when the scene is cut short.

Frankly, HBO should either show a movie without edits, or not show it at all. Someone who hadn’t seen the original might end up wrongly thinking that this was a boring movie, when it isn’t. Heaven knows which other movies have suffered the same fate and been written off by Indian audiences because of THEIR fault. It’s Martin Scorcese at his best, and we didn’t get to see it. A mob movie seriously doesn’t hold good if it has no expletives.

Watching it was a fun experience, though the suspense of watching it the first time wasn’t there. I particularly found Mark Walhberg’s character funny when I saw it again, his performance probably being one of the most underrated in that movie. I leave with this scene from The Departed, which is one of the best from the movie.