Largely more of the same; possibly cuter with the emphasis on kids. More streamlined, which is good. Hard pressed to fill out even 140RVW…
Spoiler-free Movie Review of Oh, God! Book II:
I’m not kidding – I really had a hard time even coming up with 140 characters about Oh, God! Book II…
Umm…it’s good? I frankly think in some ways Oh, God! Book II is better than the original, even without the novelty of the original premise. It’s just a cleaner story. On the other hand, if the first one was too long and it had to establish the whole concept of God coming to Earth and recruiting a spokesperson, you can reasonably assume that this simpler story should take less time. Which it doesn’t.
Louanne, the young actress who plays the eleven-year-old lead character Tracy Richards, is marvelous; very cute and precocious, but more importantly a kid. She acts like a kid, she gets frustrated with God about being put-upon and things being unfair. Really a nice contrast to the lead character in the original, worried about his job and family. Both work great, but differently…
Oh, God! Book II is a good picture; don’t let my extraordinarily brief review give you a different impression. It’s just that it is exactly what it looks like; if you saw the first one, you sort of saw the second one, too. Your preference almost certainly would be for whichever one you saw first. All of these would make better TV shows than feature films, but that’s sort of a minor point. They’re cute and fun…
I never before this moment noticed the KISS poster hanging on the wall of what is otherwise a fairly straightforward 11-year-old girl’s room. In the 70’s anyway. Which this isn’t. I’d like to think it’s some sort of rebellious statement from the set designer; “Take that, right-wing music censors! Even God’s chosen one listens to KISS…”
[schema type=”movie” name=”Oh, God! Book II” description=”God asks a young girl to help spread his word and influence with a slogan.” director=”Gilbert Cates” actor_1=”George Burns” ]
The best film sequel of all time? Easily. The best SW film? Probably. One of the greatest films of all time? Absolutely. Risky at time? Yes.
Spoiler-free Movie Review of Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980):
With a new Star Wars film coming out later in 2015, I’m going to be writing in-depth pieces on each film, so I think I’ll leave more discussion of The Empire Strikes Back for later. For now, enjoy the 35th anniversary of Episode V and watch it for the zillionth time. A New Hope will always be my favorite Star Wars film, but it’s pretty hard to argue that Empire isn’t a better film in nearly every way.
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After the rebels have been brutally overpowered by the Empire on their newly established base, Luke Skywalker takes advanced Jedi training with Master Yoda, while his friends are pursued by Darth Vader as part of his plan to capture Luke.
Adorable little movie that reeks of amateurism but is possibly more delightful for it. My first “indie” movie, really uneven but still fun.
Spoiler-free Movie Review of The Gods Must Be Crazy:
The Gods Must Be Crazy is probably the first independent feature film I ever saw, although that definition is questionable since it was a studio production in South Africa. But it was certainly the first non-mainstream film I went to in the theaters. I certainly saw The Red Balloon and probably a lot of other foreign films in libraries and in school growing up, but this was the first picture that played in cinemas alongside the blockbusters.
Actually, I saw it in a little theater in Needham, Massachusetts when my aunt took a bunch of us cousins. She raved about it, talking at length about this record-breaking film. Needham had apparently got a print of the film and the townspeople went so nuts over it that it played all summer long, setting some kind of record. From my research 30 years later, this appears to have been the case in a number of markets. The film was made and released in September 1980 in South Africa, slowly adding locations around the world before finally landing in limited markets in the United States in July 1984. Despite the brutal competition of that summer, the film became a cult classic and broke all kinds of box office records for a foreign film. Rewatching the film for the first time 30 years later, it’s easy to see why.
It isn’t very promising at first, with dreadful 1980’s nature film narration over a ton of stock shots of the bush and alternatively city life in what looks like Johannesburg. This is unfortunately a running problem with the film, as it appears to have been made on a shoestring budget with mono sound and low quality film stock. The footage seems to speed up randomly, often for comic effect, but sometimes just to speed up the run time. The other enormous difficulty is that the original voices were Afrikaans and they have been very poorly dubbed in English. The dubbing isn’t really the problem so much as the choice of voiceover actors – they are completely inappropriate.
The story, however, makes up for any and all faults and you quickly forget everything else. The plot is simply told: the San tribe is living a peaceful and simple life away from the modern world in the Kalahari Desert when a glass Coca-Cola bottle is dropped from a passing plane into their midst. While at first they marvel at this new object, using it as a tool, it soon introduces new feelings of greed and jealousy and before long they are fighting over it. Recognizing the negative influence this foreign object has created, bushman Xi (Nǃxau) tries to return it to the gods whom he believes sent this instrument to them. When throwing the bottle into the air has no effect, he resolves to take the object to the end of the world (“about twenty days’ walking, or even forty”) and throw it off.
A second storyline involves Kate Thompson (Sandra Prinsloo), a city-dweller who tires of the “civilized” world and moves to Botswana to become a teacher. There she will encounter biologist Andrew Steyn (Marius Weyers), who goes absolutely to pieces around women, becoming the world’s clumsiest man. The movie quickly shifts into slapstick that is sort of tiresome, but commits to it so completely that I found myself won over by its dedication. There’s a third storyline about a revolutionary leader/terrorist that doesn’t totally work but is sort of necessary for the plot.
Everything about the movie is a bit overdone, from the characterization of the bad guys, to the incessant slapstick humor and the heavy-handed symbolism and commentary on the “civilized” world. And yet the movie is very enjoyable. There’s an innocence to the proceedings that is somehow charming and the flaws seem to melt away next to the good heart on display. I know there was a sequel, but I can’t imagine why, as The Gods Must Be Crazy is a wonderful little film that with luck will never be remade and is still worthwhile 30 or more years later.
[schema type=”movie” name=”The Gods Must Be Crazy” description=”A comic allegory about a traveling Bushman who encounters modern civilization and its stranger aspects, including a clumsy scientist and a band of revolutionaries.” director=”Jamie Uys” actor_1=”N!xau” ]
A comic allegory about a traveling Bushman who encounters modern civilization and its stranger aspects, including a clumsy scientist and a band of revolutionaries.
Poster
Runtime
109
Tagline
The critics are raving… the natives are restless… and the laughter is non-stop!
Dangerfield fails to ruin Harold Ramis’ directorial debut, a loosely strung together collection of classic improv. Unapologetically dumb…
What’s more:
I’m not the world’s biggest Caddyshack fan. I know that’s sacrilege to many. I’m reviewing it today because the ridiculously talented Harold Ramis has just passed away and this was his directorial debut.
It’s hysterically funny and I enjoyed the hell out of it as a kid who was too young to be watching it. (I have no idea where I saw it – someone else’s house, that’s for sure.) It is unquestionably a comedic classic.
But it has a few flaws that are deal breakers for me:
It is directly responsible for the career of Rodney Dangerfield. Really I could probably stop there. He was an obscure stand-up comic who would have likely never have gotten a break into film without this movie. And would I accept this movie having never existed as a reasonable price for having never been exposed to Rodney Dangerfield? I absolutely would. I’d take that every time.
Ted Knight is unwatchable. I know he’s doing his thing and it’s his shtick; I don’t care. I hate it. It was funny on the Mary Tyler Moore show. It’s cartoonish and stupid here.
The biggest thing against the film is also actually it’s best feature: it’s really just a long series of improvised scenes. It’s not that there isn’t a plot, it’s just that no one cares about it. Think about it – who is the star of the movie? It’s Danny Noonan, the dorky caddy played by Michael O’Keefe. You forgot he was even in the movie, didn’t you?
This is exactly the movie you expect from a bunch of sketch comedy professionals. But then you’d expect National Lampoon’s Animal House to have felt even more like that for the same reason – but it didn’t because John Landis was able to rein in the comedians. Ramis let everyone go for it and the bit parts essentially became the film. So you get genius scenes like Bill Murray’s “Cinderella story” but you also end up with Dangerfield becoming a main character.
In the end, the great comedy far outweighs the lack of cohesiveness, leaving us with a classic.
