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Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson 1976
elaborates at tedious length on every single obvious irony that wanders in front of Altman's particularly lazy camera here. something this silly has no business being so laborious and smug.
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Needful Things 1993
dreadful, truncated, inert, toned-down adaptation of a bloated, pointless book that was only ever charming in the first place because of its dedication to expansive, gruesome misanthropy. only Max von Sydow seems to be having a good time, which is both appropriate and too bad.
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Harsh Times 2005
PTSD among military men (and women, not that you'd know that from this) is absolutely a serious problem, but this does absolutely nothing to dispel the equally insidious stigma that armed servicepersons are trigger-happy maniacs poisoned by duty and brainwashed into violence. here that's depicted with, it must be noted, pretty convincing verisimilitude, but it's also tied the most banal kind of twisted masculinity narrative, with a couple of bros tooling around a bleach-bypassed, step-framed LA looking to blow off…
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Brick Mansions 2014
literally no reason for this to exist. an almost 1:1 recycling of the already mediocre BANLIEUE 13, only 20 minutes longer.
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The Expendables 3 2014
"I am the Hague."
that's a line spoken by a covert mercenary tasked with escorting a war criminal to the International Criminal Court, and it's also a play on a famous line from a character (played once by the same actor) who's a satirical symbol of fascist totalitarianism. i love how the heroes in these movies, ostensibly the good guys, are ex-SpecOps black bag guys contracted by the CIA. like the Agency hires mercs under the table to do unambiguously…
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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides 2011
the last one, bloated and utterly indecipherable though it may have been, was directed by Gore Verbinski, so it also had a pirate ship blown literally to splinters in ultra slow motion and a sword fight between Sparrow and a squid-man on the mast of a ship spiraling into a whirlpool in the middle of a naval battle in the middle of a hurricane as the camera flew around it in circles. this has Rob Marshall's rote coverage and the…
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