109 posts categorized "ZERO STARS"

January 11, 2025

THE BRUTALIST

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

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ColeSmithey.com

 

A PRISON OF ONE'S OWN DEVISING

Brady Corbet Paints Himself Into a Corner

By Cole Smithey

 

ColeSmithey.com

Director/co-writer Brady Corbet has made an overwrought, unlit, postwar [fictional] epic with an unreliable protagonist that is as frustrating as any movie you will ever see.

An utter lack of pacing variety, dangling sub-plot threads, and a tacked-on ending make this four-hour audience investment hardly worth the effort.

Fictional Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) celebrates his liberation from a Nazi concentration camp by escaping to America, the land of a colder more hidden version of Nazi ideology.

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László's Philadelphia-based furniture store-owning cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) proves to be an ersatz Nazi collaborator who, since moving to the States, has married a shiksa and switched to Catholicism. In no time at all cousin László wears out his welcome with considerable help from Attila's racist wife. Welcome to America sucker.

ColeSmithey.com

A gratuitous subplot involving a black coal worker (Isaach de Bankolé) and his son, gives way to László being hired by Guy Pearce's little Hitler Harrison Lee Van Buren, a narcissistic millionaire intent on subjugating László as his own personal Jewish architect slave. Van Buren has a real hard-on for his self-imposed prisoner László.

ColeSmithey.com

Under Van Buren's thumb (cough), László designs a gargantuan monolithic "institute" (church) that looks every bit the prison of claustrophobic holocaust nightmares.

ColeSmithey.com

László Tóth is no Frank Lloyd Wright.

Is László taking a piss at his blue-eyed capitalist warder by designing the ugliest fucking prison-like structure you've ever seen? Perhaps.

ColeSmithey.com

The claustrophobic building's focal point involves an upside-down crucifix that sunlight shines through.

Weird.

The sexually impotent, heroin-addicted László fulfills his updated concentration camp existence when he forwards his payment for Van Buren's project toward its completion to his own specifications.

Victim-hood is its own reward.

ColeSmithey.com

László's wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters the movie a half-hour too late, and even then does little to relieve the fictional narrative's doom and gloom trajectory.

"The Brutalist" doesn't know what it wants to say. Is it anti-Zionist? anti-Capitalist? anti-socialist? anti-Bauhaus? No idea.

ColeSmithey.com

I do know that "The Brutalist" is an exploitation movie in love with its own misery.

No amount of editing or color-correcting can save this film from itself.

Save the back-slapping for Sean Baker's "Anora."

Rated R. 215 mins.

Zero StarsZERO STARS

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

December 15, 2024

QUEER

Jo JoWelcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.

Punk heart still beating.

This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

Cheers!

ColeSmithey.com

 

ColeSmithey.com"Queer" searches for a story, but never finds one.

There's good reason that the producers left  William S. Burroughs' name off its title, considering that nothing lines up regarding Daniel Craig's rendering of Burroughs' character from his 1985 novella.

Daniel Craig's "William Lee" ("Bull Lee" in Kerouac's "On The Road") is so obsessed with screwing a handsome young man with all the personality of a mildewed hand towel, that Lee never once sits down to write.

A more boring sex addict/junkie you'll not find on the big screen.

David Cronenberg's filmic adaptation of "Naked Lunch" remains the best cinema adaptation of any Burroughs novel to date.

ColeSmithey.com

Most lacking is any chemistry (sexual or otherwise) between Daniel Craig and Drew Starky's Eugene character. Drew Allerton is a poker-faced ex-G.I. ex-pat with nothing but time on his hands.

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"Queer" is an open-handed insult to its audience and to William S. Burroughs in particular.

By the time the movie gets around to its big fuck scene, it's too little too late. Not to mention Mr. Lee taking the top position.

ColeSmithey.com

Anyway, Jason Schwartzman steals the movie as Joe Guidry, an old Jewish queen who's part of Will Lee's '50s era social circle in Mexico City.

Will Lee's heroin addiction takes over his lost sex addition and all roads lead to a deeply unsatisfying audience experience.

ColeSmithey.com

It's cool that Daniel Craig goes full queer Queen but so what? It's just not that interesting to watch when there isn't a cogent storyline to hang the movie on.

ColeSmithey.com

Everything about "Queer" screams failed experiment. Luca Guadagnino has no natural instinct for narrative structure.

Guadagnino's cinema is a fake formal style without any foundation whatsoever, save for whatever depth Daniel Craig brings with a brave but limited performance.

Luca Guadagnino is a phony wannabe queer; is there anything worse? ColeSmithey.com

Even Donald Trump sucks fake microphone cock — another phony wannabe queer.

ColeSmithey.com

Good sucking vs. bad sucking?

John Waters come back!

Rated R. 136 mins.

Zero StarsZERO STARS

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

October 20, 2024

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT — SHOCKTOBER!

ColeSmithey.comColeSmithey.comColeSmithey.com

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Punk heart still beating.

ColeSmithey.comGet cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

ColeSmithey.com

ColeSmithey.comColeSmithey.comColeSmithey.com

ColeSmithey.comWes Craven's debut film is everything wrong with exploitation cinema. Mean spirited to its core, this film's overriding theme seems to be that society is broken up into three categories: killers, victims, and witnesses.

Amateur filmmaker Craven switches tone between horrific sexual abuse, lighthearted comedy, and hippie crushing thriller.

Schlock.

Just ugly.

ColeSmithey.com

Actor David Hess's folk guitar songs point in a dead-end direction. Hess takes a piss at Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" with a too often repeated song that states, "And the road leads to nowhere."

I suppose it is fitting for such a piece of shit movie.

ColeSmithey.com

David Hess plays Krug, a cigar-chomping killer living out his perverted obsessions on two hippie girls that Krug and his "family" kidnap to torture. 

Wes Craven reworks Ingmar Bergman's significant "Virgin Spring" into something cruel and disgusting.

The specter of the Viet Nam War only hangs over the movie with the thinnest of threads.

ColeSmithey.com

The sexual abuse and murder scenes are treated without regard to any meaningful subtext. This is a movie without a soul.

There is no social commentary to be found. This is exploitation for exploitation sake.

ColeSmithey.com

Gene Siskel put it succinctly in his review of the movie.

"My objection to The Last House on the Left is not an objection to the graphic representations of violence per se, but to the fact that the movie celebrates violent acts, particularly adult male abuse of young women ... I felt a professional obligation to stick around to see if there was any socially redeeming value in the remainder of the movie and found none."

Rated R. 84 mins.

Zero StarsZERO STARS

ColeSmithey.com ColeSmithey.com ColeSmithey.comCozy Cole

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