Oliver1984

Menace was a brilliant film. There are many reasons to it, but I think what makes it so special is it's sense of style. It proves effectively that a gritty street-drama doesn't have to look bad in order to be realistic. Instead of using hand held cams and grainy film the Hughes' shoot their film with style, influenced by John Woo, and action-comics.

The violence used is also excessive and very graphic. There are brutal beatings as well as bloody shootings, all shot much better than your average action-movie. Like as in Dead Presidents, the directors aren't afraid of over-doing anything. Through slow-motion and impressive camera manoeuvering they're making great, exhilarating action.

Well, besides the violence the movie is great in many other ways. The shootings and bloodlettings are just to make it more realistic, which is pretty much the goal of the movie. In heartbreaking detail the main characters narrate us through youth criminality, drug-dealing, racism and a lot of other nasty stuff. The voice-over works really well, making Menace a sort of black "Goodfellas".

The story is great, in some points resembling some greek tragedy, with a storyline used successfully in other movies like Carlito's Way, Goodfellas, American History X and many others. It's about changing your life in time, before it's too late. If you don't change in time, all your past sins will come back to you. The movie is hilarious, sad, suspenseful and very educational for those who think there is racial equality in USA.

The Hughes' are young, aggressive and untouchable film-makers who intend to show you the real world, and do it with style.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I was going to see the Insider. I thought it was going to be a good entertaining action-thriller like Heat or Absolute Power, but wrong I was. The Insider proved me wrong about one thing, Michael Mann. Having made so many movies about bad guys getting shot, and sweaty cops screaming at each other, he underlines the facts that made his other movies so good, in the Insider. It's much more difficult than you'd think, and it presents Mann as a professional and experienced movie director, who finally gets a shot at what he really wants to do.

The Insider was entirely about people. There weren't any high-budget action sequences to boost the entertainment value. To make it even less commercial, it was filmed with handheld camera, and it didn't even try to look good, but to describe in detail the lives of the people involved. First I was uncomfortable with the filming style, but I soon realised why it was necessary. There was a certain realistic flair to it that made it even more touching, and it made the viewer either focus on the characters and the plot, or get bored.

The plot was very complex and it would have been very hard to follow if Mann wasn't such a good director. He has a firm grip of the cast, and doesn't let anyone overdo their performances. The dialogue isn't the hip, smart-ass kind you find in a lot of movies, but realistic and free of well thought out one-liners. They actually talk like real people do, and the humour is very low-key. The actors are in on it too, and no-one does more than his own part. The overall style is semi-documentary, touching th viewer on a deeper level, because these are real people.

The special thing about this movie is the way it depicts people. Usually in this kind of genre, the people are just tools used to get the plot moving, and machine guns and cars are the real protagonists. Michael Mann always portrays the people in bigger detail, and shows how the events affect them. In the Insider he throws away all the commercial gloss that remained in Heat (not much, though), and makes the ultimate Michael Mann-film, a humanistic thriller-drama at it's purest.

Besides the stuff above, Mann also delivers some intelligent media criticism, showing how capitalist executives can smother the truth and deceive the public in the name of the dollar. Great movie, but don't leave your brain in the coathanger when you see this one.

I guess when you hear Frank Darabont is making a Stephen King prison-movie, you can't avoid comparison with the vastly superior Shawshank Redemption, but the fact is that the only thing combining theses two movies are those three things.

Green Mile is a triumph in camera-work, direction and acting. The movies visual look is outstanding, and the actors deliver good performances. This is much courtesy to Darabont, since Shawshank also was well filmed and acted throughout. No complaints there.

But when it comes to plot it seems Darabont is trying to get away with the same thing he did in Shawshank, mixing a lot of sentimental crap in between, to make the movie more appealing to mainstream audiences. Where Shawshank was one of the rare movies to be overly sentimental, profane and grim at the same time (I still don't get how he pulled it off), and still being touching and entertaining, The Green Mile fails to do so. On one hand there are the graphic disgusting executions, and the tasteless barbeque jokes, and then there's a huge endearing innocent guy who's healing everyone. That just doesn't work.

There's probably more graphic violence in Green Mile than in Shawshank, but also more sentimentality, and besides there's a rather silly E.T wannabe subplot that's overshadowed by all of the other stuff going on. The result is a good-looking, entertaining, but empty movie.

Darabont is probably trying to make a statement about the death-penalty, but it isn't working the way it's supposed to. Just by having extremely graphic electrocutions of sympathetic characters, and inmate psychos sneering at it, it doesn't make the viewer think it's wrong. I think i actually heard someone laugh at the "barbeque-jokes", and that proves that the movie didn't do what it was supposed to. In the ending scene it's more effective even though the electrocution is shown off-screen, but it is spoiled by excess sentimentality.

The good part is that the movie isn't boring at all. It's very entertaining and the length doesn't seem to be a problem. Conclusion: to say it is an ultimate humanistic prison-epic is wrong, but to say that it's good, stylish entertainment is very close to the truth.