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The highly-anticipated sequel to one of the all-time great box office hits, this film delivers what the audience wants. Excitement and action. Jeff Goldblum returns as wise-cracking chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, who joins a new expedition to a new island of genetically engineered dinosaurs. It seems that there was a second intended Jurassic Park, but it never got off the ground and the dinosaurs were left to roam free on the island. What Goldblum and company find there is a lot more dinos than there were in the first film.Steven Spielberg's sequel is not better than the first film, mainly because the opening set-up scenes are a little disappointing. However, the film really gets rolling when it continues the story on the island, and you encounter two T. Rex, a cartload of Raptors and a new group of small scavenger dinos, called "Compy's". The story isn't bad, but it's mostly setting the characters (and the audience) up for the wild ride to come. The special effects are more seamless than in the first film. Plus, there are quite a few surprises along the way, something you'd never expect from a sequel that's at risk of being predictable.
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"What am I supposed to say? I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork! How have you been?" - John Cusack as the hitman, pondering how he should explain what he's been up to his friends at his high school reunion.John Cusack is cast against type as a professional hitman, who is returning to the Detroit suburb of his youth for his high school reunion. He's also been assigned to take out a target, while another hitman (Dan Aykroyd) is after him for taking his hit from him. On top of that, he has to confront the girl he stood up at the prom (Circle of Friends' Minnie Driver) ten years earlier.
A typical quirky Cusack comedy, with some very good performances. Though the action tends to come and go in bursts, and the conversation lags at times, the film pulls off a hilarious reunion night climax. Besides Cusack's great performance in the lead role, Aykroyd, Driver, Cusack's sister Joan as his understanding personal secretary and Alan Arkin as Cusack's psychiatrist have their moments. This isn't just a crowd-pleasing action film, or a bloody-conversational art house piece. It's more of a mixture of the two, with a little Woody Allen neurosis thrown in.
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Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese teamed up in probably the best of their collaborations, in the brutal biopic of boxer Jake LaMotta (De Niro, who won a well-deserved Oscar for this). He was a monstrous fighter inside and outside the ring. His relationships with his wife (Cathy Moriarty) and his brother (Joe Pesci) were less than perfect and there is speculation that many of his fights were fixed by mob backers (particularly the ones with life-long rival Sugar Ray Robinson). You couldn't tell that though, the way LaMotta pounded the shit out of his opponents and demolished them.De Niro does the unbelievable task of making such a nasty individual like LaMotta such an interesting person. Scorsese on the other hand choreographs the fight scenes as if they were scenes from a war movie. Moriarty as LaMotta's don't-take-shit-from-anybody wife and Pesci as his don't-take-shit-from-anybody brother are well-matched with De Niro's powerhouse performance. Michael Chapman's gripping black-and-white cinematography puts the sport of boxing in the viscous light it deserves. With every staggering punch the boxers lay on their opponents, the camera seems to be right in their faces capturing the horrific beatings they take. Though it's a nasty subject, it is strangely hypnotic. Coming from a filmaker like Scorsese, I'm not really surprised.
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Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci reteamed ten years after Raging Bull to make this in-your-face adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's novel, about big-time hood Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his thirty years in the mob underworld. During these years, he is mentored by the paranoid Irish mobster Jimmy Conway (De Niro) and the hot-blooded killer Tommy DeVito (Pesci). His relationship with his wife (Lorraine Bracco) is strained, mostly because she despises his lifestyle while at the same time seems to relish in it.Only Scorsese could make such unsympathetic characters such as Liotta, Pesci and Co. so damned fascinating. The camera-work, art direction and editing are razor sharp, capturing the cold-blooded underworld in its glory days during the 50's and 60's, as well as the downward spiral many of it's members took in the narcissistic 70's and 80's. Pesci offers the stand-out performance, as the at times strangely charming, mostly viscous killer. The best scene in the film (after Liotta has laughed and told him he's a "really funny guy", to which Pesci angrily demands Liotta to tell him "How am I funny?!!"), will possibly go down in history as the most quotable scene from a Scorsese picture, since De Niro uttered the phrase "You talkin' to me?" in Scorsese's violent classic Taxi Driver.
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Wesley Snipes stars in yet another Die Hard retread, as a special airline security expert, whose vacation flight is hijacked by a group of terrorists. Led by the sadistic Charles Rane (Bruce Payne), it's up to Snipes to retake the aircraft. With the help of flight attendant Marti (Alex Datcher), he sets about dispatching the group one by one, until he has to fight mano a mano with Payne.Snipes is quite good as an action hero, but the material could have been far more original. Most of the supporting characters are disgusting and annoying stereotypes. The story also has a needless subplot involving Snipes and a racist Southern police chief. Payne doesn't have much to offer in the villainy department, since Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons and virtually every other British actor have played this kind of role before. And much better too!!
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This vanity film for the group Led Zeppelin has basically only the music to offer. Even the excitement for that dries up after twenty minutes, in this overlong two-and-a-half-hour film. It combines footage from their 1973 Madison Square Garden concert and newly inserted fantasy footage, that could be best described as footage you'd just love to take an axe to.Among the few golden moments, they include live performances of "Stairway to Heaven", "Rock and Roll" and "Black Dog". However, the concert footage is nothing to scream about, mainly because a lot of the fancy cinematography has been done countless times before in other concert films. The fantasy footage is distracting and makes the film longer than it needs to be. I can't even figure out how a movie, featuring an incredibly amazing band and a stylishly filmed format, could lack so much energy in the filmaking and music departments.
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On Thanksgiving Day, 1976, 5,000 cheering fans came to see the famed rock group The Band give their farewell performance. It was filmed and became one of the greatest rock documentaries ever made. They were also interviewed by the director, Martin Scorsese, about the origins of The Band, the rough times they've had and their feelings of the farewell concert. Many of The Band's musical cronies and friends joined them on stage to perform such songs as "I Shall Be Released", "Cripple Creek" and "Forever Young". Among the performers that played with The Band at the concert, they included Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Ringo Starr, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, The Staples, Ron Wood, Dr. John, Ronnie Hawkins, Emmylou Harris, Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton and Van Morrison.There are no fancy camera tricks, as is typical of most rockumentaries. Instead, the camera simply stays on whoever is performing on screen. What comes of it is pure magic. All the performers have rarely been better and the climax is as memorable as the final shot in Woodstock. Definitely for fans of not just rock, but all types of music in general.
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