I had a coupon for one free rental at Blockbuster. I’m home alone this weekend. I went a little crazy with the renting. So here are five reviews for five pretty high profile movies that I’ve never seen before. Enjoy.

——The Elephant Man——

I really enjoyed this one. This is David Lynch’s extremely touching telling of the Elephant Man story, probably the most subdued stylistically of all of his movies if only because it’s main character is bizarre enough already without needing Lynch to do any of his magic on it. The direction is excellent. It drops you right into Victorian London without any effort at all, the style, cutting, and camera work working perfectly for the period. The first third of the film involves slowly revealing the Elephant Man piece by piece, only intensifying the feeling that you are trying to get a peak at him at a freak show. He appears to be a monster at first, as horrible as his appearance, until that moment when he actually begins to speak and you realize at that moment that he is an extremely intelligent, articulate and sensitive human being. When you finally make this realization you feel so sad with all of the pity you now have towards him that all you want is to see him finally be happy after all the years of ridicule and abuse. Unfortunately, everything doesn’t work out perfectly for him. I can’t remember the last movie that I’ve felt so sympathetic towards the main character, or towards Anthony Hopkins’ extremely touching doctor who is struggling with his own demons as to whether or not he too is just exploiting the Elephant Man for his own gain. This is an excellent movie, definitely worth seeing.

(A)

——Donnie Brasco——

I love mob stuff. The Godfather movies are some of my favorites. I love the Sopranos. My favorite games right now are the Grand Theft Auto series. So while I enjoyed this movie quite a bit, I still don’t really see what the big fuss about it is. Everyone else seems to love it. I’m not sure if that’s because they love Johnny Depp and/or Al Pacino or what. For the most part this movie is like a really excellent episode of the Sopranos, paying a close examination of the not so glamorous aspects of Mafia life. But then about two-thirds of the way into the movie I was getting a little bored, hoping for something interesting to happen to shake things up a little to make this different from just about every other mob movie I’ve ever seen. I got what I asked for in the scene where Depp smacks around Anne Heche after not talking to the FBI for three weeks because he has serious feelings for Al Pacino’s loser character. The scene kills two birds with one stone, showing both his crumbling marriage and the reason why it’s crumbling: He can’t get out just yet or else everyone will know he was a snitch and kill Al because he vouched for Depp. This was the meat of the story I was looking forward to. Unfortunately the ending takes that conflict nowhere. The FBI pulls him out and that’s the end of the movie without any resolution to the main plot points. What happens to Al Pacino? Does he get wacked? How does Depp deal with this? What happens to his marriage? Does it recover? None of this is dealt with. I know it’s based on a true story, but come on. Throw me a bone here.

(B+)

——The Beach——

Trainspotting is awesome. 28 Days Later is really awesome. The Beach is…not. The cinematography is really pretty. The soundtrack contains lots of great electronica bands like The Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Leftfield. But the script is paper thin and poorly written. The voice over is horrible and unneeded. The dialog is pretty stupid, as is Leonardo DeCaprio. Now, enough time has gone by from Titanic for me to forgive him and give him the benefit of the doubt, but man do I really want to kill him in this movie for being such a dope. He’s an annoying brat. That makes it kind of hard for me to empathize with the larger issues of the movie, which I’m sure would have been better if the script was better. As it is this would have played a lot better as a B-Movie. I like Danny Boyle but I just didn’t buy this movie.

(B-)

——Raging Bull——

This is a superb film. Raging Bull features probably my favorite directing of any Scorsese film I’ve seen thus far. The boxing sequences are quite simply some of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen. The editing show him attacking his opponent like a wild animal. The soundtrack only intensifies that feeling by incorporating primal animal noises into the background. Blood gushes from the victims like nothing I’ve ever seen in a boxing movie, or even out of anything besides a good horror movie. All of this is compared with Jake’s odd home life. He’s impotent socially, emotionally, and physically, and he takes all of that rage out on his wife and especially in the ring. Because he can’t satisfy his wife he becomes extremely paranoid that she’s sleeping around on him. An excellent film. I liked this one a lot.

(A)

——JFK——

Jebus. If I was considered paranoid before, I’m twenty times that now. I think this is probably the tightest of Oliver Stone’s movies. Even though this film is way over three hours long, I was riveted to the screen the entire time. If half of the shit this movie claims is true is true then the government has a whole lot of explaining to do. I mean, there is a whole lot of amazing stuff going on here. Each piece of evidence is pealed away like a layer of an onion, and right when you feel like all the information that has spilled out is overloading you the entire thing is summed up in the end so well that you see the onion and more than the onion all at the same time. This script must have been like 500 pages long. The entire movie is wall to wall talking. This kind of overwhelmed my sister who isn’t as familiar with all of the historical background, but for me this was total gravy. I really liked this one.

(A-)