Review of Sullivan's Travels (1941) by Heist ! — 11 May 2005

==Ocean's Twelve==.

Ah ah! George Clooney and friends come back to the screen to remind the viewer that unless you're a celebrity, your life is not worth living. Okay, I'm exaggerating. But Ocean's Twelve is still filled with hollywood circle-jerking and apart from the cast, nothing ever really works in it.

==Evil Dead Trap==.

A dumb japanese reporter is sent a snuff tape with directions on how to get where the killing took place. She decides to go there with a crew of 3 other women and a nerdy dude. Various gory deaths ensue. And two sex scene. And a flying fetus. There's some good gore 'n boobs in there but until the very end, everything is a bit cliche and the characters are too stupid to be believed. But... it has a flying fetus.

==Sullivan's Travels==.

Some director who makes funny movies wants to make a sad, profound and pretentious movie about poverty. But since he doesn't really know what poverty is, he decides to pretend to be a bum for a while. Then he meets Veronica Lake. Up until that point, the movie was hilarious. After that, I couldn't concentrate hard enough to understand the jokes. Veronica Lake... hot.

Anyway, the movie turns around at some point and the director must suffer real pain for a while. There's a nice twist of atmosphere in the movie from that point on.

==The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou==.

Hit & Miss experiment on Anderson's part. The hit part is that the basic idea of the movie works, the part where it misses is with the characters, who are never as funny or entertaining as the ones in his previous movies.

==Alone in the Dark==.

Ah, Uwe, you crazy fool. Following House of the Dead is no small feat and while Alone in the Dark has its fair share of incompetence, overall, it's still clearly a better movie. Better special effects, better plot (and basic) continuity, less idiotic dialogues and better acting might make this a disappointment for those expecting another Uwe masterpiece. Note that there are still massive plot holes, an action scene almost worth to be compared with HOTD's iconic center-piece, the worst sex scene I've seen in a long time and plain Uwe goodness.

The commentary track with the man himself doesn't disappoint though. The man lashes out on the movie industry, Tara Reid, chinese people, every horror movie that has been released in the past two years, dumb audiences, his own movie, IMDB users, Keanu Reeves (he calls him static and flacid (or flat, not sure) and parts of his own crew. The part where he complains that you don't see Tara Reid's boobies is nothing short of awesome too.

The best part is that, most of the time, the man is completely right. He is spot-on when he says that the movie industry's way of doing things is rotten to the core. He is 100% right when he says that the audience have been going to see the same movie over and over again for the last couple of years. When he's analyzing his own ending, an open-ended one which he preferred to a big, dumb fight against a some super-monster, which the dumb audience might've prefered, he's right again.

He also compares his own work to David Lynch's, german expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, no less) and Equilibrium. Yup.