Screening Log
This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.
April 2005 activity
Total Log Entries: 44
- Adam (0)
- Andrew (0)
- Chet (0)
- Chiranjit (0)
- David (0)
- Eva (0)
- Evan (0)
- Ian (0)
- Jenny (0)
- Katherine (0)
- Leo (15)
- Megan (0)
- Rumsey (8)
- Teddy (0)
- Thomas (4)
- Timothy (0)
- Victoria (0)
Total Comments: 7
- 2046 (0)
- The Interpreter (0)
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (0)
- Point Break (0)
- Muriel (0)
- Gloria (0)
- Zorn’s Lemma (0)
- Eaux d’Artifice (0)
- The Days (0)
- The Ladykillers (0)
- The Awful Truth (1)
- Arrested Development (0)
- Shaun of the Dead (1)
- Stranded (0)
- Finding Neverland (0)
- Secret Window (1)
- Eros (0)
- Closer (0)
- King of the Zombies (0)
- La Ciénaga (0)
- The Birds (1)
- Passage à l’acte (0)
- Wavelength (0)
- Duck Soup (0)
- Changing Lanes (0)
- 12 Monkeys (0)
- Ghostbusters (0)
- Maria Full of Grace (0)
- Laura (0)
- Stage Fright (0)
- The Idiots (0)
- Stray Dog (0)
- Mirror (0)
- Three on a Match (0)
- Before Sunset (1)
- The Power and the Glory (0)
- Aguirre: The Wrath of God (0)
- The Ring Two (1)
- Happy Together (0)
- Rocky IV (1)
- My Own Private Idaho (0)
- Suspicion (0)
- Young Törless (0)
- Days of Thunder (0)
Full Archive
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Stranded / Naufragos / Spain / 2001
If you can make it through the first hour of this picture (and it is quite an effort), there are a few minutes of decent sci-fi here, but only a few. The story is that of a six person team sent to investigate Mars. They crash land and spend the rest of the movie bickering about how to survive. The tale only picks up when three of the team is more or less told to leave the spacecraft and try their luck on the barren planet. What they discover in an ancient, and seemingly human-carved cave is mildly engaging, and ending the film with a trio of survivors attempting to eek out an existence on the red planet is sufficiently open-ended. But a few moments of mediocre entertainment does not make up for over an hour of drivel.
What is most astonishing about the film is that anyone, at any point during its production, thought they had a winner on their hands. The acting is horrendous, with only Joaquim de Almeida (Bucho in Desperado) and Maria de Medeiros (she was Bruce Willis’s woman in Pulp Fiction) offering anything resembling competent performances. The rest of the cast, even Vincent Gallo, who can be good at times, plods through horribly pretentious and repetitive dialogue, injecting every scene with emotionless recitations of why they are all going to die, and failing at every turn to instill in their respective characters anything resembling a personality.
Some might attempt to defend the film based on a bizarre sense that boring pictures filled with philosophically naive blather are worthwhile so long as they are pretty. And I must admit that some of the Mars surface sequences are nice to look at. But the moment anyone opens his or her mouth to utter a line from this trite screenplay, all aesthetic pleasure is lost.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Dej Productions DVD
21 Apr 2005 12:38 AM | Submit Comment