balformatted

I was very surprised when this won the Oscars for best picture and director. It's a fairly standard action movie. The battle scenes are gory but not very realistic -- somehow, long, drawn out affairs are over in about 15 minutes, the good guys are super killing machines, etc.

Gibson is a good at playing cool, restrained characters like Mad Max, but not good at playing a romantic lead or inspiring leader -- he was trying to be Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, but ended more like Graham Chapman in Life of Brian.

The entire portrayal of the agonized Robert Bruce was very dopey.

The direction is flabby, and uncertain, the pacing off, and the costumes aren't even terribly interesting or authentic.

Historical dramas tend to work best when they don't try to turn their stories toward universal truths, but focus on the characters and situations at hand. Gibson tried to turn Braveheart into a rousing statement about honor! truth! passion! freedom! but ended up just parroting the standard Hollywood line.

Fantastic show. As everyone else seems to note, canceled way too soon. Puts shows like NYPD Blue, Six Feet Under, and other critical darlings to shame -- had more depth, cleverness, backwards humor and good, understated acting in a single show than a year's worth of Six Feet Under.

Definitely leads off the list of "why don't the networks spend the six hours it would take to hire some intern to transfer the tape to DVD and release this oblivion" shows.

Leadbelly isn't a great movie, but it does a good job of conveying a sense of the man, and the lead performance is very strong.

Director Parks doesn't quite carry off the sense of how alien a world the old segregated South was, and the movie has a bit too much of a this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened quality to it, rather than shaping Leadbelly's story to make a great movie.

But overall the movie is engaging, entertaining, and educational, and you get a sense of why he was such an influence on today's music. It's an enormous shame that the Weavers never credited him in "Wasn't that a time."