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L.A. Story is a film dedicated to the premise that the city’s reputation as a haven for free-spirited oddballs is actually understated. It also looks under the well-buffed exterior of the so-called “beautiful people” and finds layers of desperation and loneliness below the insecurity we already knew was there. This Los Angeles is a place where a woman’s breasts feel odd if they’re real.
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Dune is an absolute triumph of art direction over coherency. That’s not to say that it’s completely incomprehensible, but in its theatrical length, the average moviegoer will probably be lost in this heavily compressed version of Frank Herbert‘s mythos.
The Dune series of novels, especially the first, has been compared to the Lord of the Rings stories, due largely to density of detail in the universe. Another parallel is that both were considered virtually unfilmable. Unfortunately, David Lynch was not given the degree of control and freedom that Peter Jackson< had and the film suffers for it. Forced by the De Laurentiis family to condense his movie into just over two hours, Lynch's theatrical cut feels more like a highlight reel than a cohesive story. Continue reading
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Star Trek: First Contact holds the distinction of the being the best, by a wide margin, of the “Next Generation” era of Star Trek movies. Not coincidentally, it is the only one of the four that doesn’t feel like a television episode that had been blown up for the big screen and needlessly stretched to two hours.
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Even though Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country effectively passed the torch to the Next Generation cast, the powers that be at Paramount apparently decided that the torch needed even more passing.
My guess is that Rick Berman lacked the faith that the new cast could carry a film franchise without an assist from the original show. Whether that position has any merit is debatable, but the end result was Star Trek: Generations, whose merit is equally debatable.
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The movies utilizing the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation exited the stage not with a bang but with a crashing bore and forever destroyed the myth that even-numbered Star Trek films were the good ones.