The Man in the Iron Mask

1998 Three Musketeers movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: King Leonardo the XIV isn't a very good king. In fact, he's an asshole, and nobody in France likes him except for one of the four musketeers who is sleeping with the queen mother. When King Leonardo makes a military decision based only on his sexual desires (a move he must have learned from reading about King David and Bathsheba), Musketeer Malcovich's son is killed in battle. The three musketeers who aren't sleeping with the queen mother decide to bust the man in the iron mask, Leonardo's brother Leonardo, out of prison and pull an ol' switcheroo.

If you were magically transported via a magical remote control and a time machine into this movie and asked anybody in France, "Hey, how's King Leonardo XIV working out for ya?" you would fall to sleep before the answer was finished because the Frenchman or Frenchwoman answering your question would deliver a verbose answer so monotonously that you'd think, "Oh, man. Is this answer ever going to get to an endmark?" and then decide to close your eyes for a little bit, just a little bit like you do sometimes when you're driving, but then fall fast asleep. The Man in the Iron Mask needed some of that bumpy pavement they put on the shoulders of highways so that the bumbabra-bumbabra-bumbabra noise wakes you up before you hit a tree, a ditch, or a hobo. I don't know whether to blame the dialogue, the bland music, or the acting, but this was just so stuffy. I normally like John Malcovich, but his uninspired performance here typifies what's wrong with this. He always performs his dialogue in a very deliberate Malcovichian way that ends up making the movie a lot longer, but here, it just seems like his character is struggling to get the words out, almost like he can't believe he used to be a musketeer but now has to say such boring things. He and the other musketeers (Irons, Depardieu, Byrne) each have moments where they shine, but more often than not, they overtheatricize and get all actor-y and make me think I'm watching performances instead of characters. And the biggest problem of all? I might be able to tolerate a single Leonardo Dicaprio in a movie, but this one has two. He plays two characters who not only look identical but act identical even though the story would seem to require that they don't have that much in common. I don't even know if Leonardo Dicaprio is a good actor or not, but I don't like him here one bit. I don't think the part(s) suit him, and I thought his face was tedious. This movie did get better as it went along, but it unfortunately went along a little too much. Or maybe a lot too much.

Muppet Treasure Island

1996 tale of swashbuckling puppets

Rating: 12/20

Plot: It's the exact same as Stevenson's classic novel except with a frog and a Gonzo. Everything else is exactly the same!

And Miss Piggy is added, extraneously. I don't like how her character is squeezed into the proceedings. I also don't like Tim Curry as Long John, partly because I picture (perhaps incorrectly) an older, scrawnier, and scruffier Long John and partly because Curry doesn't look at the Muppets when he talks to them. That's just inexcusable. I also don't like how the island itself likes, but I do like the sets that are used for the other settings. The puppets themselves are fun to watch with lots of complex movements all at once. You really feel like you're watching living things with these Muppets. The writing is typical Muppet stuff--some really bad jokes and some unbearable ones--but that's all part of the fun, and there are some nice moments when the humor gets a little dark. I wish the songs would have been a little more fun. They just don't work, although the choreography accompanying them is pretty impressive. All in all, this looks to be a half-assed affair. It would have been a really good straight-to-video release.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

1958 adventure

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Oh, snap! A bald magician with a lust for lamps has turned Sinbad's average-sized girlfriend into a really tiny girlfriend. Sinbad must return to the mysterious island where the giant cyclops lives in order to get a piece of a two-headed bird's egg so that his girlfriend can once again return to normal size. It's adventurous!

Ok, so the story is really goofy. And the acting is about as bad as it gets. But once again, Harryhausen's ingenious effects are there to save the day. A horned cyclops with fuzzy legs, a breathing and tail-swinging dragon, a four-armed green woman, two-headed birds, another swashbuckling skeleton. What more could you want? The film climaxes with a fight between a cyclops and a dragon which, along with the dinosaurs fighting in Gwangli, makes it completely obvious that Harryhausen was just an imaginative little kid who made his playtime available for everybody else to watch. My biggest gripe about this, other than the acting which is truly horrific, is that the genie is played by a little kid when a midget could have easily been substituted. Right up there with Argonauts and maybe even more enjoyable as it has just as many monsters while not being as long.

The Milky Way

1969 religious satire

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Two guys are pilgrimaging from somewhere in France to somewhere in Spain where they'll visit some place that has to do with Saint Thomas. Along the way, people bicker about religious dogma, a nun is crucified, shoes are stolen, a savior readies himself for a nice shave, a donkey needs babysat, the pope is executed, and a stigmatic child thumbs a ride for them. Definitely the pope and possibly God frown on the proceedings.

Sort of an episodic surrealist road movie, this definitely has its moments, but I didn't feel like I was the audience for it. Most of the dialogue, at least according to a note at the end of the film, is taken from religious texts, and I just don't have enough background on Catholicism and its history to get all the little jokes. There was a narrative structure here (although I was never sure about the time travel stuff) but this was still really choppy film making, almost like a series of vignettes instead of a real movie. Worth watching and maybe even worth watching again, but definitely not up there with my favorite Bunuel movies.

Dumbass/heretic:

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

1975 British comedy

Rating: 16/20 (Dylan: 12/20--laughed a lot but he wanted more plot coherence and a better ending)

Plot: King Arthur is riding around (sans horse) with hopes of recruiting valiant knights to sit as part of his round table in Camelot. He finds Lancelot, Galahad, Robin, and some other knights of varying degrees of bravery. After deciding not to go to Camelot after all ("It's a silly place."), they are directed by a cartoon deity to find the holy grail. Along the way, they meet black knights, pyromaniac sorcerers, a castle of siren-esque castle of beautiful women, bridges of death, snooty Frenchmen, and fluffy killer beasts.

This holds up so well as screwball period comedy, dada goofballery, and nutty absurdism. There are classic scenes (and admittedly a few that fall flat on their faces) and classic lines, stuff that college kids like to quote to each other while playing Halo or doing the drugs or whatever it is college kids do these days. There's also some quality low-budget set pieces that foreshadow Gilliam's later work, and some quality acting with the Monty Python chameleons playing multiple roles very well. Removing the problems with this movie (Dylan's problems with plot development and an ending he really hated) would take away almost all the appeal, by the way. There was a time, by the way, when I wanted to slap people who liked this movie, but I've gotten over it.

This is what I look like when I laugh:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

2006 action

Rating: 12/20 (Dylan: 14/20)

Plot: All of the characters from Pirates of the Caribbean: Give 'em the Rum so's He'll Stop 'is Whinin' return and huddle up to try and remember what had happened to them at the end of the last movie. A wedding is interrupted by arrest, and Captain Jack Sparrow has to find a squid-faced guy's heart so that he can pay off a debt. Then everybody else decides they might as well look for squid-faced guy's heart, too. A giant tentacled sea creature rapes a boat. Sparrow is diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, but that doesn't stop the cannibals from trying to eat him. In the middle of the movie, the characters have to again conference to attempt to figure out what's going on, and following that, they decide to have a swordfight. CGI-pirates frolick and gesticulate, sometimes in that order and sometimes in the opposite order. The movie ends just in time for the third part of the trilogy--Pirates of the Caribbean: Where'd You Park the Boat, Matey?

I enjoyed the first of the trilogy more than I thought I would and possibly more than I should. I still like Depp's character and visually, this was a lot of fun. The computer effects don't get in the way, used more effectively to paint artistic artificial sets than the action scenes with the giant sea creature or Davy Jones' and his mutants. The story's sort of a mess, really loopy and goopy and scattered and battered, and this lacks some of the charm and fun and creativity of the first movie. Subplots and sub-subplots emerge and muddle things up. Honestly, I'm not even completely sure what's going on leading into the third movie because one character's actions seem contradictory and I couldn't even understand what another character said half the time. The stunts and action scenes in this were over-the-top (the hour-and-an-half sword fight, the escape from the cannibals), but there's enough excitement in this, as well as more than enough attractive imagery, to make this worthwhile.

Note: There are a pair of pirates used for comic effect in this. They're sort of the R2-D2 and C-3PO of the Caribbean. I looked up the one with the artificial eye because he seemed familiar and remembered that he was the guy from The Office (the boring English version, not the superior American one). His first film credit is something I absolutely have to see--The Man Who Fell in Love with a Traffic Cone. Come on!

The Three Musketeers

1973 Comedy Adventure directed by Richard Lester

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A bunch of flamboyantly homosexual men grow mustaches, arm themselves with feathers and swords, and throw some kind of wild flamboyantly homosexual party where they break things and say things that may or may not have been witty in 1973. There is a flamboyantly homosexual terrorist attack involving a wagon and half a donkey. The attack, apparently at least indirectly the result of Raquel Welch's cleavage, ultimately results in all seven of the musketeers losing their boots and being forced to dance across the marble in their bare feet. They steal a computer and use it to download short fuzzy clips of Raquel Welch blowing up balloons, and the little one says to the big one, "Hey! How did your sword get in my scabbard? Eh oh!" a fair question that the big one responds to with nothing but twenty-four minutes of uninterrupted giggling. Then...flamboyantly gay swashbuckling! They pause, pile on a pair of horses (also downloaded from the Internet via an illegal horse-sharing site), and return to a castle to finish their flamboyantly homosexual party. The night and the movie end with the musketeers shaving each other.

Here I am laughing uproariously while enjoying the swashbuckling: