Review of Autumn Spring (2001) by Reginald R — 10 Jun 2005

Plus a Mel Brooks film called High Anxiety, which was childish and obvious, but good and watchable for a Mel Brooks film. Anyway there's only so much one can handle of a Mel Brooks film at a time, so I only watched about fourty minutes or so.

Autumn Spring is a lovely Czech film about an old man who plays all kinds of pranks on people and refuses to give in to old age. Very nice.

The Front Page is Billy Wilder's take on the popular newspaper play of which I understand there are three other film versions made as well, His Girl Friday being the most famous. And while the film does lack the explosive speed and screwball of His Girl Friday, it's still a good and solid comedy. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are in good shape.

Renegade, or Blueberry as my version was called, tries to compensate for terrible character interaction and dialogue by moving the camera all the time left or right or in or out. The outcome is not good. The whole visual style is really bad to start with, think of Cold Mountain, LOTR, Pearl Harbour, shit like that. Then the film tries to depict chemically induced hallucinations with computer graphics. Now, that doesn't come out completely as bad as you would think, but certainly not very good either. The whole film feels like it's just something they patched together in the editing room after two days of shooting. Zero attention is payed to the characters, their development, their interaction, anything. Like I mentioned, the dialogue is horrible, the music is aweful, the camera drives are mostly idiotic and messy, the environment is beautiful but the camera is totally raping it. The story is simple and most of what potential it could have is thrown to waste. Juliette Lewis has one good crying scene, but just like the other actors, she's not given much chance for more. All this means that it takes some effort for the viewer to get accustomed to the film, but it's not all bad, there's this feeling of real and honest trying. It's ok entertainment if you have a couple hours to spend.

The Men is Marlon Brando's film debut. A little bit overdramatized, but that's ok. Good dialogue and good characters. Good film.