Ok, here's the deal. Periodically, I'll put a movie review on this page. My scale is as follows:
Utter crap; a total waste of 90 minutes of your existence
Possibly worth watching if you're suicidal or drunk or high or immortal

Slightly below par of standard Hollywood fare

A decent movie, worth seeing once


A good movie; a candidate for multiple viewings


An excellent piece of cinematic work; worthy of high praise and a spot on your video rack
Life is Beautiful - (1999; approx. 2 hrs.; reviewed 4/5/1999) This is the new film by Roberto Benigni that surprised all the Oscar pundits, picking up an Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film and another for Best Actor for its director/star Benigni. The concept behind the film both intrigued and repulsed me. Could you really make a film about the Holocaust that's a comedy?! Well, it seems I was a bit off the mark. The film is really not about the Holocaust in the same sense that Schindler's List is; the Holocaust serves as a backdrop to a story about an unusual man and his son. The man, Guido Orefice (Benigni) comes to an unnamed Italian city in 1939 with his friend to work for his maitre d' uncle and open a bookstore. He leads a charmed life for a time, and it is a confluence of Guido's cleverness and fortuitous circumstances that allows him to marry the girl of his dreams and open his bookstore, against the odds. It is here that the tale takes a turn, and I note that the movie could almost be divided into two parts: one before and one after the Orefices are shipped to an unnamed concentration camp. Yet the second part depends critically on the first for establishing the personality of Guido, which proves central to the story. All along Guido tells his son, Joshua, that they are playing an elaborate game. He shields his son from the horrors of the camp by persuading him that the guards are really just pretending to be mean, that the other kids are really only hiding, that their separation from his mother is all part of the game. This could not possibly be credible if we did not know Guido the clown, the trickster, from the first part of the movie. And yet the movie's greatest triumph is its downfall. Though Benigni tries very hard to tell a story of a man and a boy, what is meant to be a backdrop overwhelms his plot and drowns everything else in its bloody abyss. A Holocaust scholar once wrote that everything in art, literature, and every other human endeavor, was forever changed by the Shoah; he noted that there would now be two standards--before and after Auschwitz. After Auschwitz, I find that the grim reality overshadows the small story of personal triumph Benigni tries to tell. We know that the camps were not really run the way Benigni shows; the children too young to work and the adults too old and feeble to work were murdered immediately. Guido would have had no chance to save his son, and Benigni would have had no story to tell. It is in this sense that I wish the movie had been divided into two; the first part would have made a wonderful comedy, but the second part leaves one with the feeling that it simply isn't possible to set a comedy during the Holocaust. My rating:
William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream - (1999; approx. 2 hrs.; reviewed 5/17/99) This film represents the first of a new series of Shakespearean films in the works on the heels of the success of Tom Stoppard's clever Shakespeare in Love. There aren't many really bad things I can say about this movie; on the other hand, there isn't much that recommends itself to you, either. I should point out, to be fair, that the performances were largely quite competent, and the screenplay followed the source to a reasonable degree. The problem has much to do with the source material. Shakespeare's greatest strength was his profound understanding of what it is to be human, of what William Saroyan called the "human comedy," the tragic circumstances that befall us, and the tragedies that we make of our own lives. Stage comedy, on the other hand, frequently seemed to elude him. Only a handful of the comedies are actually funny, and I've never considered this to be one of them. This story of fairy-crossed lovers lacks the wit of Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, and this particular production suffers from a few flaws that are the fault of the screenwriter. The Theseus of the film doesn't appear to be the benevolent and wise ruler of Shakespeare, and Hippolyta's sudden warmth at the end of the film seems more than a little artificial. In addition, Puck troubled me. Stanley Tucci's mischevious sprite is more like an incompetent journeyman pixie. This is unfortunate, as Puck serves as both the link between the fairy world and the world of humans, and the link between the play and the audience. A consequence of these problems is that there are about 10-15 minutes of actual mirth to be found in the movie, and those are thanks to Kevin Kline's show-stealing performance as the sincere, but clueless Nick Bottom. Bottom reminds me of something else. From reading the play, one gets the impression that these tradesmen are fairly poor, but they all seemed fairly well-dressed for peasants. Bottom was another character who bothered me. I enjoyed Kline's portrayal, but the scriptwriter seems to have inserted a weird poignant and almost tragic element to the Bottom character. Calista Flockheart should probably be very annoyed with her agent. Her role as Helena, at least as she played it, is practically Shakespeare's Ally McBeal; there's a serious danger of typecasting here. These gripes aside, the bottom line on this movie is not that it represents a critically-flawed adaptation of a superb play, but rather that it is a fairly good adaptation of what is one of Shakespeare's more mediocre works. My rating: