Aldri7

"Oblivion" is one of those movies thats hard to review without writing a spoiler. I'll have to be careful...

OK, lots of people have written reviews here complaining about how this movie is a rip off of so many other Sci-Fi movies like 2001: a Space Odyssey, Tron, The Matrix, Blade Runner, Wall-E, Independence Day, etc. So maybe thats the bad news. But the good news is that all of those movies were good movies, so at least here you can count on Oblivion NOT being trashy like the Alien series, etc. I mean thankfully, we have Tom Cruise, and playing a role too in which he must confront and understand his own existence almost like Bruce Willis had to do in "The Sixth Sense". So you will be forced to think a little bit, but it shouldn't take Sci-Fi veterans that long to get the catch. We've been down this road too many times now.

Anyway, Tom plays Jack Harper, a technician entrusted with maintaining power generating equipment and drones on a post apocalyptic earth. Who he actually works for is for you to figure out. Who Jack Harper really is is also for you to figure out, as well as for Jack, who is not really all there mentally. Now, IF Jack can remember whats been wiped from his memory, and many are counting on him being able to do that, he may be able to save earth from the aliens that wrestled control of it from humanity. There is still time, but only if a secret plot intended to bring him to his senses works. Thats the story, anyway.

OK, but is this enough to carry the film? Its a very lonely place where Jack works unfortunately, and we must first suffer through a pretty dull opening 45 minutes before anything really interesting happens. Here he is paired up with a beautiful assistant (Andrea Riseborough) but with virtually NO other support structure which is bizarre. So of course they make love. There seems little else to do and no one is watching anyway. But I found all of this boring and tedious. Meanwhile Jack stalks the planet like a Swat team member. Looking for what? Scavs? What are they doing there?

Slowly, a plot does begin to unfold, though, and soon nothing is as you thought it was in the beginning. Meanwhile, we've got some nice but not earth shattering cinematography to enjoy, an atrocious music score to listen to, and not a whole lot in the way of dialogue from anybody thats not military-talk. Yawn........Oh, and there are these drones with those blinking red eye-lights.

Eventually though, the minimalistic plot a la 2001: a Space Odyssey turns existential when a spaceship with mysterious cargo crashes and we get to scratch our heads a lot. Meanwhile, I like the flashbacks to NY and the "oasis" which was green, but inexplicably so given the seeming absence of any other life on the planet. I kinda don't have a clue as to how the shack and all that memorabilia got there, so it was almost like a dream. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't real at all, but a state of mind, like an eden. Jack visits the shack early on like a man returning to his childhood. Without his memories, though, what draws him there? Some strange attraction he will eventually come to understand, I guess, and a garden of eden and rebirth it will prove to be ultimately.

So, but thats about all I can reveal though, and you will have to see the movie to find out what really happens. I can tell you though that Jack does fall in love, or re-falls in love, which reacquaints him with his human side. Its a love kind of like in "Avatar" - a dual "love of woman/love of nature" kind of love. And of course, from there, just like in Avatar, we go right to the battle which climaxes the movie.

So yeah, its a rehash - I admit it. Avatar mixed with 2001: A Space Odyssey mixed with Independence Day mixed with Wall-E, etc. I'm glad that we never got to meet any real aliens though, which turned out to be one of the interesting little twists in the story. But overall, all of that thought provoking mystery surrounding Jack and his love and his past doesn't quite make up for the fact that so much of this movie is predictable visually, musically, and technologically. Morgan Freeman gives us his usual nice performance, but otherwise, we don't get much insight into the folks that he leads. Their plight? Their pain? Not really revealed, unfortunately. And lastly, ANY movie who's main character's name is "Jack" is going to dredge up memories of Titanic for me and WILL YOU PLEASE STOP REPEATING THAT NAME and calling it out over and over again!

JACK!........JACK!........Call him Clarence and maybe you won't feel so compelled to cry out.

Thank you....

The story of how the Wizard of Oz came to be the Wizard of Oz is one I suppose might captivate a lot of people. But you might end up leaving the theatre a bit disappointed to find out exactly how it happened. Oz it seemed at the time was dominated by a trio of powerful sisters, all young and lusting for a man. Strangely, no suitable guy could be found on the premises though, and so they must wait for the gods to deliver a unsuspecting con-man from Kansas who arrives via a tornado and is named "OZwald". Oswald is soon courted by the sisters, all of whom are witches but only "good" vs "bad" in the context of their relationships with men and the outcome of their petty sibling rivalry. Predictably (and to many peoples discomfort), the least beautiful witch is the most evil while the good witch (Glinda) is the most beautiful. MIla Kunis on the other hand, the third witch, is at first less tainted by evil, but then transforms into the wicked witch of the west when sister Glinda snatches Oswald away from her. Got it all? And so an entire war is unleashed because of this petty rivalry among three powerful women. No other guys figure into this. Its as though Oz itself is devoid of any other men of any stature - every other guy is just a simpleton, soldier or dwarf. Huh? anyway, so the "wizard to be" has to figure out how to stay alive thanks to his unfortunate preference for blond, beautiful witches over dark haired, less kindly witches. If he can do that, then Oz is his for the taking..

Anyway, so thats the story. Oz was always about the war between the witches, but at least in the original "Wizard of Oz" there is Dorothy's own story or quest which had some heroic qualities. But here, the Wiz is just a hapless guy who gets thrown into a mess he has no control over. His lack of heroic qualities actually is what got him into this. And so he must figure out how to adapt and con his way into becoming the heroic leader the witches all want him to be. So what kind of trouble was OZ in anyway, that they had this need for a wizard? I don't really know.

But what I really liked about the original Wizard of OZ" was that the wizard turned out to be this familiar guy from Kansas while all around him were these people that were like aliens to Dorothy. And so only the Wizard was able to get her grounded, her head turned around right and headed back to Kansas where she belonged. But here, the Kansas vs OZ thing is lost. The wiz never looks back, returns to his roots nor wishes he had an Auntie Em he could talk to. Strangely, his girlfriend from Kansas is also the good witch. So maybe he doesn't need to look back. But the jist is that everything he does in this film is out of necessity as a way to save his skin. He has no control over his fate otherwise. Generally in these situations, people do more than just grin and wise crack their way through it all. I suppose being fought over by three women isn't all that bad, but on the other hand, I kept hoping the wiz would show a little broader range of emotions. The effect is that the movie is all glossed over fantasy with nothing deeper to chew on. I mean, I hate to wax sentimental, but when Dorothy went "there's no place like home" a lot of people could actually relate to that at the time...

So, yeah, Mila Kunis is a central figure here and I know she was the jealous girlfriend in "That 70's show". And so I kept flashing back to her in that role and seeing this jealous, vindictive high school feuding over boyfriends thing going on in "OZ" which was the main theme to me. But I don't think that as a prequel to a classic Hollywood movie, this was up to snuff. It was an alien to the original. Very little attempt was made to rekindle the character of the original wizard, who was all homespun and Kansas bred. The rural vs urban theme in the original was central to the plot. The original wiz was a con man but with a heart born of humble roots. The wiz here on the otherhand is just a con man, a city slicker perhaps who wound up in Kansas doing magic acts because I guess he felt he could make a buck.

Anyway, but there were some things i enjoyed here so it wasn't all disappointing to me. This is not a movie i would tell people to stay away from. It had cute moments and nice visuals, and the homages to Thomas Edison, etc and the technology of the times (1905) were nice. But its funny how this story sort of reverses the original in that Dorothy was young and innocent while her traveling comrades were older. Here, its the companions that are or seem childlike. But the sidekicks were pure Disney fantasy as was the humor and that also left me a little nostalgic for the original. You've got over 70 years of filmmaking in between these two movies, and too much in Hollywood has changed for them to bear much resemblance to one another.

"Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is over 25 years old now and so I thought it was about time I gave it a review. Recently I also went back and reviewed Risky Business, NL's Vacation and a few other 80's movies and so I'm kind of going to try and compare it to its contemporaries.

Anyway, I'll kick this off by asking a few question: No 1 - Where do you think Ferris wound up in life after he graduated from High School? Another question might go like this: "If you liked Ferris, how would you compare your life now to that of someone who didn't like Ferris?". THere is a polarization of attitudes here at IMDb over him, and so these would seem to be relevant questions.

And so to begin with, as has often been pointed out over the years, the biggest issue with Ferris for many was that he was made of Teflon - i.e. nothing stuck to him. I think that this was due in part to the fact that he got so much love and attention from his parents that he never considered the possibility that others might not also love him. This in turn made him feel impervious to wrongdoing and caused him to do morally questionable things :) Another issue is that he came from that part of society where parents are powerful enough to bully school administrators whenever they feel like it. Witness Ed Rooney's shivering in his boots when he thinks he's talking to Sloan Peterson's Dad. So, Ferris moral compass is a bit skewed, and if you have any teaching experience, you have probably seen this all before.

Now, contrast him to buddy Cam and maybe Joel Goodson of "Risky Business". Cam and Joel, in contrast to Ferris, had moral consciences. Where Ferris would just sort of go out and do something whenever he felt like it, Cam and Joel were more restrained and prone to weighing pros and cons. All of these differences to me were related to each character's relationship with his parents. Only Ferris seemed to take his parents (and their love) completely for granted. And where Cam would say "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life", it shows you that at least he's thinking about it. Joel Goodson was also on a career path at the time his story takes place. But Ferris? Does Ferris ever talk about what he wants to do with his life? No, not that I can recall.

So, I ask myself all of this because I am no longer 18 and am not that successful in life. I also got a kick out of skipping class when I was in high school, and didn't like to talk about what I wanted to do afterwords because I didn't know. And......I always pretty much loved this movie which has perhaps caused me to be blind to its message. And just what was the message?

Well, a good movie will take you on a journey, a journey in which the principal characters change. Well, but the problem as I look back on it now is that Ferris DIDN'T change that day. Cam did, and Joel did in Risky Business, but Ferris learned only that, once again, deceitful and impulsive behavior results in no consequences. This was perhaps the movie's message, that Ferris was some sort of God or something and well, "just don't try this at home kids!" Sounds like I really didn't like him, heh? Well, but i DID! I'm not one of those Ferris haters. But I gotta admit, of the three characters I'm referring to, he's the one who's going to have the most issues to deal with later in life, IHMO!

And so the irony to me is that Ferris was the catalyst that caused Cam to grow up and face his fears, but it was really Ferris that needed a catalyst, not Cam. Catalysts cause other things to react and change, but don't change themselves. This was the "Teflon" aspect of Ferris's existence. He didn't project any sense that he needed to work on himself, to grow. Perhaps unconditional parental love is not always a good thing then, and Ferris never appreciated how good he had it. Guys like that can get you in a lot of trouble because they have few moral boundaries owing to that love. I don't know, but remember that "the motorheads, dweebs, wasteoids, dickheads, etc" all loved Ferris. That left Ed and sister Jeanie to lead any attempts to burst his bubble, to catalyze any change in him. They don't succeed here, but maybe they planted some seeds in his brain? So "wake up and smell the coffee", Ferris. Cam's dad's is going to find out that you really wrecked the car, not Cam. And then your reputation is going to be the next hot topic around town.....

OK, OK......there, I've said it. I've made my peace with myself and with Ferris. Yeah, we love you, and I'd still pluck my money down to watch you outsmart Ed Rooney and the whole town of Chicago. But if immortal youth is the only God in this universe, you've got some years of reckoning ahead of you. That is unless of course, you drift into theatre, acting, comedy, or are independently wealthy. Because I guess I still don't know what you were really planning on doing with YOUR life? What skill sets were you going to bring to the rest of world?

Well, you might have made a pretty good houdini....