Falkeep

While I have enjoyed many of Richard Schickel's previous shows, this one is really pretty much a waste of time. The writing is very boring and pedantic. Watching the show is like sitting through a particularly boring lecture in a college class you really want to enjoy. There isn't a coherent thread of storytelling and it seems to bounce between one topic to the next with little or no transition. I can't tell what the purpose of this documentary is supposed to be... is it about the stars and directors? Is it about the style and themes of the films? Is it about the history of the studio in relation to the world it is in? Is it about everything that happened at WB within specific periods of time? I can't tell what Schickel is trying to get me to take away from this documentary. It is like he has an outline and checklist of things he 'has' to cover and is just going along "Rin Tin Tin... check, The Jazz Singer... check". Where is his passion for his subject?

Clint Eastwood's narration does not pull me into the story he is telling, but then how excited can he be reading the script he was given? The interviews are mostly uninteresting and seem to be a mix of old stuff from Schickel's Men Who Made The Movies series and dropped in to remind us who he has talked to before (and maybe to save him the trouble of doing new work) and talking to critics and academics who we don't know or care about who seem more interested in impressing Schieckel than us, the audience. The camera work on the interviews could have been done by any junior high kid with a tripod and the work of the interviewer does not bring out great storytelling from the interviewees.

Another thing which is bad about this show is the editing... usually very well done in Schickel's documentaries. Some segments show the old magic... like the James Cagney and Busby Berkely segments... which do what the segments should do... make us, the audience, interested enough in the subjects that we want to get the movies we learn about. However, such segments stand out because of how bad he rest of the editing is. I have worked as a projectionist for three decades and know that anyone can cut frames, but editing is more than that. Most of the transitions between shots are very abrupt and look like one shot is dropped down before the end of the previous shot. In addition, the movies we all know are represented by the clichéd clips that we have all seen a thousand times... can he not find anything new to give us about Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy, for example... and not only are all of the clips from those shows the 'usual suspects' he spends way too much time on them rather than spending the time on what we HAVEN"T seen and heard before.

I don't know how much Warner Brothers paid for this hack job, but it was too much and if I am expected to want to buy the DVD to watch this show more than once, sorry... once is more than enough. Maybe it is time for Schickel to call it quits and retire because he sure doesn't seem to have anything worth while to give to the public. I'm sure USC would allow him to give really boring lectures to film students and play his 'greatest hits' to them to show them how wonderful he is.

If you don't get it from my review... I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this documentary to anyone. Jeez, how does ANYONE make the Warner Brothers story a snoozefest? P.S. -- Even before the show starts, you know to expect something bad... the title card of the first part tells us it covers '1929 - 1941' and yet the shows goes back to the teen's and covers films into the 50s. Does Schickel not even know what his show is about or how to use a calendar?

Three months or so ago, when I first heard about the plan to release a movie simultaneously in theatres, on DVD and on TV, and to start with this one I thought it was a bad idea simply because I felt that to have any kind of an impact it would have to be done with a really strong, high profile movie that a lot of people would want to see and this movie would not be it. Now, having seen the film, it was an even worse idea that I thought.

I work for a theatre which opened BUBBLE today and, before the movie, most of the people who said anything said that they had read some good reviews about it. After finishing the movie, most people just rushed out but the ones who made sure to stop and comment on the movie to me were uniform in their opinion. In the eloquent words of one young woman on a date... "That sucked! No, really, I mean it, it sucked. It was awful. Oh, god, IT SUCKED! That was the worst piece of {prohibited word for EXCREMENT removed, although it's a quote} I've ever seen...? I mean, Jesus... it REALLY sucked! You should be warning people about this movie. You should give me my money back." Anyway, given that she, and many others seemed to have been "lured in" by some strangely positive reviews, I fell that it is my duty as a human being to tell people that this woman was being kind about the film.

I can only assume the positive reviews were an indication of the worst case of director-{prohibited word for INTERCOURSE removed} we have seen since Kubrick died and the media fell into a frenzy of journalistic necrophilia over his corpse the like of which the world had never seen. You remember that, don't you? It seemed like every film critic in the country rose up as one and shouted out as loud as they could "Oh, Stanley, I know you are dead, but I just have to show you how much I love you one move time before they dump your body in the grave and cover you over where it would be much more difficult to get to you... and I will provide my own Vaseline." I honestly believe that if all the critics who saw it had no idea about who was Responsible for this piece of {prohibited word for EXCREMENT removed},simply told it was made by a MAJOR, Award-Winning, Big-Budget Director who can get any project he wants made and do whatever he would want to when making a movie, they would have come out of it with a different opinion that what they have said. However, since they knew it was from Soderberg, those who wrote positive reviews were not honest with themselves or their readers/audiences.

For my own review, I will simply say that this is one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and I have seen STARSHIP INVASIONS, QUIET COOL, TERRORVISION, and SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PIECE... hell, I have even helped put on annual bad film festivals showing films like CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC, SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, ROLLER BOOGIE and many other examples of excrement permanently preserved on celluloid. This movie is right up there... sorry... I mean DOWN there... with the worst of them. If it had at least been the work of a first time film-maker with no money, paying for it with his credit cards, his blood and his children's education fund, or maybe even by selling his children into slavery, I would have some respect for it... I still wouldn't like it but I could at least, then, respect the effort. Please note... this is no EL MARIACHI! This is the product of one of Hollywood's most renowned, respected and powerful directors who could get anything made and what he gave us was this. Fortunately BUBBLE is a short film, but Christ, it doesn't seem like it. I have never before in my life looked at my watch as many times during an 70-some minute movie as I did during this one. Do yourself a favor... if you feel a need to throw away that much of your life that you will NEVER get back as it would take you to watch this movie, simply kill yourself 90 minutes before your natural death... give yourself two less hours, one less day, hell, once less week of life rather than watch this and you will be well rewarded. If killing yourself early to avoid this film is too much to ask, then simply tear your eyes out and puncture your ears and give the money you would have used to purchase tickets to rats so that they can build nests to raise baby rats and infest the world with more vermin... it would all be better than wasting any portion of your life subjecting yourself to this excruciating and inhumane torture. Trust me on this, I beg you. I honestly don't like people enough to tell them they are about to fall in a hole because that means that I can't laugh at them but even I have a heart. I say this for the good of humanity, "Do yourself a favor and avoid this movie at all costs. THIS IS A REALLY BAD MOVIE!" Oh yeah... the ones I REALLY feel sorry for are the dupes who spend $30.00 to buy the DVD before they see it on screen for only the price of a movie ticket and before they have a chance to hear what other actual movie-goers think about it. That alone becomes, in my mind, one big reason to be against simultaneous format releases... it lets people find out, or at least have a chance to find out, what others think of a movie before they invest big bucks in owning it.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Have a nice day.

In an earlier commentary, a poster named "Johnny Phoenix" includes the following:

"Writer/producer Jim Carabatos does as I mentioned before have some good moments in his story with some of his viewpoints and philosophies, but after a while it starts to seem that he just really enjoyed the superior Full Metal Jacket and Platoon and wanted to remake them in his own style. Examples are shown in scenes such as the characters fighting amongst one another and continuing discussions on the mens reasons for being there. His characterization is also lacking and a few of the men that your supposed to care about you just don't because they just aren't there for long enough or just don't have a lot of dialogue."

I want to start by saying to him the same thing I said to people who wrote in commentaries about "Dark City" that it stole its story from "The Matrix". That thing is... "Hey, Look at the release dates of the movies you are talking about. Just because you did not see a movie in the theatre when it first came out and "discovered" it later on video after you had first seen the movies you compare them to, does NOT mean that the movie YOU saw later copied anything from the other movies."

Dark City was released a year before The Matrix, Hamburger Hill was released the same year as Platoon and the year before Full Metal Jacket. Platoon and Hamburger Hill were being made at the same time and Kubrick kept super secret security on all of the film projects that he did. With all of that said, I am curious how the poster I quoted justifies saying that James Carabatsos' script was copying ANYTHING from Platoon or Full Metal Jacket.

Now that I got that out of the way, let me say that I feel that this movie, though not perfect, is infinitely superior to either Platoon or Full Metal Jacket... and I was running movie theatres when all of them were released and showed all of them and, thus, saw all of them MANY TIMES. Hollywood came out in force to worship at the feet of the great god OSTONE upon the release of the first of his "Gospels of the 60's According to Saint Oliver" and Hamburger Hill was virtually ignored as a result.

Carabatsos, who in 1977 gave us the unfairly underrated story of a vet trying to cope with the world after his return from Viet Nam (Heroes, starring Henry Winkler, Sally Field, and Harrison Ford) returns to Viet Nam soldiers with Hamburger Hill. This is a taut story from a well, written script by someone who did his hard time in the Air Cav in Viet Nam. Are there a few cliche's? Yes, but the many great things about this movie make such minor flaws insignificant. I also think that this movie is the American Graffiti of the 80s in that, if you go look at the cast list, you will find it a virtual Who's Who of soon to be stars of TV and/or movies... Dylan McDermott, Courtney B. Vance, Don Cheadle, Michael Boatman, Steven Weber. This outstanding cast gave us a movie of depth and impact without any of the melodramatic flourishes of Kubrick or the disjointed, rambling (often incoherent) stories of Stone. Watch this movie, then watch it again... then watch it again a year later (I personally watch it at least once a year and it still overwhelms me) and then go back and watch Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. If you can honestly tell me that either of those movies have ANYTHING that elevates them as better movies than Hamburger Hill (with the exception of R. Lee Ermy as the Drill Sergeant in Full Metal... the only good thing about that whole movie) I would like to sit down with you and all three movies and watch them with you and discuss them. Any takers?