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| BITCHSLAP STATS |
| Movies Listed: |
14208 |
| Total Ratings: |
225596 |
| Total Reviews: |
28673 |
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| ANNETTE |
"Hello Young Lovers"
Peter Sobczynski says... "If you took the typically Hollywood caricature of an auteur from Europe—a cartoonish creature wrapped up in a legend of their own making consisting of grand artistic pronouncements and a singularly bizarre cinematic “vision”—and brought it to life, it would greatly resemble the alternately acclaimed and notorious French filmmaker Leos Carax. Although not the most prolific of filmmakers—he has been working since 1980 but has only done six feature films to date—his films are so overstuffed with images and ideas throughout that both he and his audience pretty much need the regular long breaks between projects in order to recover and recharge. With his very first film, “Boy Meets Girl” (1984), he combined the emotional exuberance and excitement of a new filmmaker putting everything they have into their first (and possibly only) shot behind the camera with the kind of formal beauty and audacity of a veteran working at the peak of their creative powers. He has managed to keep that up over his followup projects—“Mauvais Sang” (1986), “Les Amants du Pont-Neuf” (1992), “Pola X” (1999) and “Holy Motors” (2012)—and while viewers tend to split evenly between those who adore his work and those who find it all to be crazily pretentious nonsense, both groups know that when they go to see one of his movies, they are going to be getting a genuine experience that they will not be shaking anytime soon." (more)
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| SUICIDE SQUAD, THE |
"Just Look For The "The""
Peter Sobczynski says... "When I sit down to write a review of a big, effects-heavy epic based on a comic book, I almost always kick things off with a reminder that I am not a particularly big fan of such thing, largely to allow readers who do enjoy such things to properly handicap what I have to say about them. In hindsight, it would seem that in the case of “Suicide Squad” (2016), I probably needn’t have bothered since even those who generally enjoyed such things largely found it to be unwatchable swill as well. Pitched as a wild antidote to the straightforward heroics of its corporate brethren, this low-level DC title, based on the premise of a group of imprisoned super villains put together as part of a top secret government program in which they would save the world in exchange for reduced prison sentences, was arguably the biggest fuckup of such a potentially interesting comic book-inspired idea since the infamous “Howard the Duck”—it was far too stupid, ugly and hateful to work as the mass-market blockbuster it was promoted as, way too restrained, timid and bloodless to succeed as the edgy anti-blockbuster that it presumably wanted to be and was little more than a haphazard assemblage of messy set pieces that were sometimes briefly enlivened by Margot Robbie’s inspired turn as the kooky-crazy Harley Quinn (a role she would find a better vehicle for in “Birds of Prey” (2020)) and dragged down to Mariana Trench-like depths during the blessedly brief moments when Jared Leto wandered on to deliver his absurdly overhyped and genuinely awful performance as Joker, a turn so bad that one suspects that the inexplicable veneration that Joaquin Phoenix received for his portrayal of the character in “Joker” was borne mostly out of a desire to ensure that Leto never tried it again." (more)
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| WEREWOLVES WITHIN |
"Tepid at best."
Rob Gonsalves says... "Something about "Werewolves Within" doesn’t sit right with me. It’s a horror-comedy, which often means that people and even dogs die and you’re not asked to care much, but even so, this is a glib and breezy affair. We may find ourselves asking why we care if the characters live, either. The script, by memoirist Mishna Wolff, based on a video game, hands the actors lumpy mouthfuls of dialogue that they mostly turn into sentences that sound like real people might say them." (more)
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| FEAR AND LOATHING IN ASPEN |
"Once again into the woods with Uncle Duke."
Rob Gonsalves says... "They keep dredging up Hunter S. Thompson’s bones, even as the passage of time pegs him as a cautionary tale, an Icarus who flew too close to his own inner sun." (more)
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| JUNGLE CRUISE |
"River Of Diminishing Returns"
Peter Sobczynski says... "“The Jungle Cruise” is one of those films that is so obviously constructed of ideas borrowed from other movies that some may be tempted to make a game out of it with their fellow audience members by seeing who can come up with the most titles of obvious inspirations—mine ran the gamut from the expected likes of “The African Queen,” “Romancing the Stone” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” to such comparative curve balls as “Medicine Man” and Werner Herzog masterpiece “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.” Unfortunately, it never quite lives up to the standards set by its inspirations and if you are a movie cannot manage to equal the accomplishments of the likes of “Medicine Man,” you know that you are in trouble." (more)
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| GREEN KNIGHT, THE |
"What Becomes A Legend Most?"
Peter Sobczynski says... "There have been any number of movies over the years inspired by the legends of King Arthur and/or the various Knights of the Round Table and while many of them have been quite silly and forgettable (remember that one directest by Guy Ritchie that had Jude Law controlling what can only be described as a giant sex squid?), I can think of three (well, four, but “Knightriders,” George Romero’s magnificent modern-day take doesn’t quite count as a true Arthurian saga) that I would describe as great. There is “Lancelot du Lac,” an arrestingly austere take that remains my favorite film from the late Robert Bresson. There is “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which is not only one of the funniest films ever made but quite possibly the most accurate in terms of depicting what life was really like back then (not counting the coconuts). Lastly, there is John Boorman’s classic “Excalibur,” a film truly worthy of being described as visionary and one that remains as visually extraordinary and emotionally devastating as it was when it came out 40 years ago. In all three cases, the films succeeded because, at least in part, because they were put in the hands of strong and distinct filmmakers who presented the familiar stories in new ways that made them striking and unique, even if you otherwise had no particular burning interest in the subject." (more)
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| OLD |
"The Night Is No Longer Young"
Peter Sobczynski says... "After a period of dormancy that allowed some to think that it had gone away forever and that we would be spared from its horrors, that most terrifying of entities once again returned a few days ago to infect otherwise sensible souls in a manner that made them seem as if they had gone well and truly mad. I am, of course, speaking of The Discourse—specifically, the thing that pops up on the Internet every once in a while where some mad soul attempts to convince others that the films of M. Night Shyamalan are not only not utter gibberish but are actually—I kid you not—good. Now I am not an unreasonable person and so when The Discourse sticks to the likes of “The Sixth Sense” (a film that I didn’t much care for but which I will concede is well-made and worked for most people more than it did for me), “Unbreakable” (to my mind, the one film of his that comes closest to greatness) or “Signs” (which is undeniably spellbinding until those damned last ten minutes), I am willing to allow it. However, when the rot sets in so deeply that The Discourse turns to offering up defenses of such lunacies as “The Village,” “The Happening” or “After Earth,” that is where I have to draw the line. On the bright side, at least the discourse has not, to my knowledge, tried to make a case for the likes of “The Lady in the Water” or “The Last Airbender” as of yet—a lucky thing because such a thing would be the auteurist equivalent of a “Do Not Resuscitate” order in the minds of most sane people. Although The Discourse can be cruel and insidious in the way that it forces once-dignified people attempt to explain just how truly powerful and moving “The Village” really is, the bright side to it is that it usually only crops up when Shyamalan has a new movie coming out and tends to peter out soon after it hits theaters and moviegoers discover that they have been ripped off by his nonsense once again." (more)
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'RUG-MAN! IT'S BEEN A FEW MILLENNIA. SLAP ME SOME TASSLE!'
- Genie, Alladin
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