Netflix Customer Reviews

Paul Taylor: Dancemaker

Four stars for the dancing, two stars for the documentary-work. Diamond focuses on Taylor's creative process but fails to probe his company's ideas or to rise above backstage gossip. As someone who watches dance but isn't trained in it, I thought I'd be less picky about camera-work than other reviewers, but the quality and framing of the footage became maddening. Professional politics dragged on while too little was said about artistic influence or content. We got a glimpse of what Martha Graham meant to him, but what does Taylor mean to his viewers or his artistic offspring? Instead of renting this, go to see a live performance (students doing Esplanade could easily trump this!).

The Art of Knitting & Crochet 2

As an intermediate knitter, I used this DVD to learn crochet to trim a sweater. Jennifer's knitting lessons come off more like a series of tips, without any conceptual overview of how a knitter decides among various ways of doing things. The Crochet Guild President is a better teacher, but beginners will be disappointed that the expert instructors' movements are ultra-fast, even on replay. We should have seen more cues about how to check that a stitch has been done correctly, and things like the directionality of winding the yarn around fingers and crochet hooks. Sound quality on the "Zen of Knitting" segment is excruciating and laughable. There are patterns for a sock and a crocheted granny-square afghan. There's a glossary of (most) stitches with painfully awkward menus. I find learning from books like Stitch-N-*itch far easier than this DVD. Get a book from the library, and then use this DVD when you're ready to concentrate on making the flow of your movements more efficient.

The Last Enemy

The political timeliness of this government conspiracy drama loses a lot of luster when the obsessive-compulsive hero abruptly starts to take grave risks in exposing himself to a mystery illness. It's hard to feel the urgency of universal ID cards and vehicle-trackers posing harrowing threats to personal freedom when we're so used to these kinds of monitoring technology already. Even the capable cast here seem to have stopped suspending disbelief in the the moving target of what's at stake in this awkward script. Relationships could have been developed further, and political moves made more realistic. It's no MI-5, but there are probably enough twists and occasional suspense to keep you watching until the end.

Coffee and Cigarettes

If the same starter material had been used for improvisation, this stellar cast might have done something interesting. Instead, the first vignettes take their own silliness seriously, which made me want to give up on the whole endeavor. Is anyone really intrigued by the variety of dirty dishes that coffee drinkers can produce?

Surf's Up

No, the creators had no good reason for casting penguins, except perhaps that other Hollywood movies had been cashing in on the cuteness factor. Still, the characters were well drawn and lively. Predictable plot twists didn't get in the way of the surfer spirit. The humor verged on adult.

The Art of Crying

In insular rural Southern Denmark of the 70's, a milkman father (Jesper Asholt) laments his failures as a grocer and a husband, constantly threatening to commit suicide. His wife sedates herself into denial while his 11-yr-old son Allan tries to distract his father from killing himself. Since the father seems to appreciate life only while eulogizing at funerals, Allan arranges for some more funeral business. You might predict the direction of this set-up, but plot twists come with plenty of surprise. The morbid humor of death comes into the service of life on many levels. While Allan's denouement, "There is nothing so bad in life that nothing good can come of it," depressed me, after reflection the catastrophic irony ultimately left me with trust in the intensity of feeling that pulls people together as much as it pulls them apart. The harshness of the characters' devastations, while depicted with discretion and compassion, seemed gratuitous until I learned from the extra features that the screenplay is based on an autobiography by Erling Jepsen. After his mother read parts of the novel, she had to admit, "It's unbelievable the stories our family has lived through." Just when you thought Danish cinema had bested the heights of family dysfunction, with barer honesty than any unsuspecting viewer might ask for (see "Celebration" and "The Inheritance"), this black comedy cuts to the heart of how bittersweetly an "overcompensating" child loves an abusive parent even after the secrets are out and the family has broken apart. (I saw this film with the original Danish subtitles because of the regional dialect, before the English DVD came out.) Unforgettable performances by the child actors.

Babel

Since more than 2000 people have reviewed this movie, I write this review mainly for my friend who asked what I thought. I loved the visual and lifestyle contrasts between Moroccan goat pasture and Mexican borderland on the one hand, and neon industrial Tokyo raves and boisterous wedding and village scenes on the other. It's true that the disjunct storylines never came together except into an expectation that our personal failings will play out according to fate as well as financial status. Another friend of mine thought the message here was to try everything you can to understand the unhappiness of your kids. Escpecially the deaf Japanese schoolgirl sticks with me, and I didn't have to mind blaming the entitlements of Brad Pitt's character and his wounded-on-1-level wife. The movie tries as hard to read life as its characters would have to try to understand each others' foreign languages. In the end it's In~arritu's close-ups of bare-faced emotion, between sweeps of overpowering scenery, that linger in my memory, not their forced connections.

Crash

The moral tales of Crash succeed at manipulating viewers into examining racism in all walks of life, but the moral judgment overarching all the dramatic manipulations is suspect despite the piteous intensity of the well-drawn characters suffering the consequences of racism. Sandra Bullock's character might have had some insight about why she feels bad after her and her husband-the-D.A.'s SUV gets carjacked at gunpoint, but insted she's stuck regretfully confiding in her maid and saying "I don't know why I feel angry all the time." The well-spoken black carjackers have almost humorously no insight about their crimes contributing to the racial profiling one complains about. Instead of observing how people learn from wrong presumptions about good and evil in others, the movie leaves us with the feeling that we only learn from each other in an implausibly small world in which everybody artificially bumps into everybody else's personal tragedy. I felt implicated in guilt not that I might inadvertantly make racial assumptions, but that my heartstrings could get pulled again and again by stereotypical blindness popping up in one surprising way after another. For me, realistic treatments of racism like Hotel Rwanda have caused me more lasting soul-searching.

The Baby Human

Once you get past cutesy commentary references to "baby humans" emphasizing that we're the only animal "genius in diapers", the live footage of babies in lab experiments here offers truly humorous and intriguing scenes. Three 45-min sections cover how babies 1) "walk"--make hazardously abrupt advances in their range of movement; 2) "think"--suddenly understand that some other individuals can actually prefer broccoli over goldfish crackers; and 3) "talk"--lose the ability to hear foreign language sounds but gain the ability to imitate and understand their mother tongue. The featured psychologists include some first-rate researchers. New parents and college students will probably want to refer to the similar book "The Scientist in the Crib" for experimental details and more philosophical interpretations of the results. Still, nothing compares to the evident confusion and epiphany on these baby faces as they miraculously leap from one stage of development to the next. Only the special features are worth skipping: name etymologies and fairly irrelevant baby trivia.

Infant Massage: The Power of Touch

Even though the filming's a bit dated, I prefer watching Ines's soothing motions here rather than reading a classic book by the same title. She demonstrates on a doll, but the 4 real babies are well behaved for their mothers. This makes a great "Instant Play" (no sound problems) if one watches first and then practices the moves on a baby bit by bit. The whole body massage takes only the first 20 min of the DVD. Next come 17 min of "special techniques" for colicky (crying and having digestion trouble), fussy (moving around a lot and bored), or premature babies. The last 10 min cover questions about timing, oil, health concerns and the like. A friend of mine adopted a baby with severe seizures, and doing massage in a similar way (from a book) was her most positive experience with the baby.

The Double Life of Veronique

Film critics love to lay open the symbolism of Kieslowski and to make perhaps too much of it (ask Freud when a floating bag of tea is just a floating bag of tea), as evidenced by the Insdorf commentary included on this disc. I'm a lover of the Decalogue, but for me the open-ended metaphysical questions in this film remained uninteresting. I couldn't trust the themes of prevarication (puppetry and court perjury) to rise beyond mere wish-fulfillment in the visual daydreaminess and indulgent erotic scenes. How can we be honest about "identity and human connection" when intuited connections overpower the conscious real connections?

The Shirley Temple Classic Pack

The second disc contains not just the 91-min "The Little Princess" (Temple's last major success as a child) but also the two 19-min shorts "Pardon My Pups" and "Managed Money". "The Little Princess" does not follow Frances Hodgson Burnett's book very well; a happy ending was tacked on. It's Temple's first full-length Technicolor film.

The Manchurian Candidate

I disliked the original film for its racism (distrust of communist Asians) and implausible paranoid science. The remade film solved these problems. Corporate interests in politics seem far more evil and conspiratorial than nations these days. While computer-neuron interface implants are still not a reality, at least their depiction is vague enough to suspend my disbelief. Meryl Streep gives an amazingly more disturbing stage-mother performance than Angela Lansbury in the original role! Denzel Washington walks a fine line of distrust in his own madness. The plot was easier to follow in the retelling, and despite my foreknowledge it managed to keep me anxious to see the ending. The thrill is back in this thriller.

Koko: A Talking Gorilla

Despite the title, this film shows more about interspecies socialization than about language skills in primates. Director Schroeder pieced together footage he originally shot as a start on a fictional film about a domesticated Koko meeting wild gorillas in Africa. As a result, most of the evidence relevant to the origin of language (e.g. about Koko initiating conversation and extrapolating rules of word formation) comes in interviews with graduate trainer Penny Patterson. Penny seems more concerned with training Koko than with listening to Koko or examining Koko's understanding. The director's philosophical argument that gorillas are "persons" is presented in an untested way, and the interviews with senior scientists do little to clarify evolutionary relations. We are left in the dark about research on primate vocalizations and comparative anatomy. Koko herself is the star. She clearly communicates with body language beyond the signs she has been taught.

Paprika

Leave it to the team-player Japanese to examine the collective unconscious as a dream that merges everyone's dreams at once. It takes some effort to follow what is going on in this wandering self-referential script based on a women's magazine serial novel. Subconscious themes of death wishes, misogynistic sexual desires, professional humiliation and murderous chases pay homage to overdone classic movie plots, but the psychobabble triteness may be the only thing that keeps the madness of the dream entertainment accessible to the dizzy audience. Cutting-edge anime' visual spectacles spellbind us in the dream sequences. I cared more about the complex characters in Tokyo Godfathers, but the simplistic split personalities in Paprika fit with the creepy shape-shifting masks that clutter the inner world of the psyche.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Maybe social oppression offers the only excuse for so much self-sorry ego stroking? Can camp be overdone? Mitchell takes his glam so seriously we don't know whether to laugh, sympathise, or feel shock and revulsion at the genital mutilation and illusions of grandeur. We don't care about the superficial military and drag guitarist (Miriam Shor) boyfriends. The rock musical numbers are surprisingly tolerable. Imaginative animation and self-critical humor eventually win our hearts in this independent--but playing on stereotypes--romantic farce.

In the Womb: Animals

See an elephant, a dog litter, and a dolphin develop from single cells into fetuses and finally newborns. Computer animations contribute more than 4-D ulrasound to the film's visualizations, but these anatomically detailed views into the womb are realistic and riveting to watch. The narrator gives comparative information about the species that will probably give new insights even to biologist audiences. Some evidence for evolution is included: rudimentary legs appear on the dolphin embryo, and the elephant embryo develops ducts normally found only in freshwater fish. Footage of real baby animals will entertain kids and adults alike.

Harvey

This odd Jimmy Stewart comedy derives its humor from the tension between the social inhibition of caring what people think, vs. the socially uninhibited spontaneity of finding instant comraderie in strangers. The fun of the actors' comedic skills is only increased by a modern-day Freudian perspective that visions of a large white rabbit might represent desires expressed by other large pale members that society prefers concealed. If you can overlook the silliness, have fun puzzling over this strange piece of cultural fascination.

Gorillas in the Mist

Professional zoologists and conservationists tend to fault Dian Fossey because in her isolationist attempts to preserve mountain gorilla populations she used vendetta tactics that estranged natives, government officials, academics, and environmental groups alike. The film sheds no light on why Fossey's social skills with gorillas proved disastrously lacking when it came to the humans she might have enlisted to help her cause. Her Hollywood romance with photographer Bob Campbell doesn't enlighten us as to her choices even as the pair split up so she can stay with her gorillas. And the gorilla stand-ins seem rather puppet-like by modern computer animtion standards. Primatologist Robert Sapolsky talks about real gorilla eyes being so expressive you could swim in them. Still, the gorilla relations in the film transport us into the nonhuman primate world. My final assessment in Gorilla-ese: mm-WAH (translation, "it's okay").

Infant & Child CPR: What Every Parent Needs to Know

I've had CPR certification in the past. The only advantage this DVD would offer over a live emergency conversation with a 911 dispatcher would be the visual depiction of how much force and range of movement to use during CPR and abdominal thrusting (Heimlich maneuver). The recommended number of compressions to breaths in infant CPR has been changed to match the 2 breaths 30 compressions for adults (from the 1 breath 5 compressions previously for babies). The DVD tacks this revision onto the end of the instruction; it would have been easier to learn if the revised recommendations had been tacked on upfront. The extra commentary by the pediatrician covers only the bare bones of child safety, with no more depth than pamphlets we received from the postpartum nurses at the hospital. Furthermore, the pediatrician's claim that co-sleeping leads to SIDS is a gross oversimplification; reviews by Dr. James McKenna in peer-reviewed medical journals make the strong case that co-sleeping prevents SIDS if the factor is disentangled from factors of poverty, smoking at home, non-parents sharing the bed, couch sleeping, etc. The theatrical delivery of this DVD is slow and the menu flow is cumbersome. There is no summarization of the differences between toddler and infant training, making the details harder to remember. In summary, information from American Heart and Lung Association and Red Cross-type websites would be more effective infant CPR training. Rent this only if you have no experience with a resusci-doll. At best the DVD may lower your reaction times.

Elling

A warm Norwegian comedy about two mental patient friends trying to live independently in an Oslo apartment. As they get drawn out into the city to interact with a pregnant drunk and a cantankerous poet, they face up to their fears and discover that they are far from alone in their desires to connect with other minds and hearts. Elling is fastidious while his roommate Kjell is crude, and the hard-fastness of their sheltered opinions sets up much of the humor, but expressiveness and experimentation win our sympathy and keep us surprised at the enjoyment they find in a slightly rigid Norwegian society.

The Station Agent

Bucking the tradition of fantastical Hollywood dwarf characters, Fin (Peter Dinklage) shows us with unforgettable sincerity the everyday private life of an introverted train enthusiast dwarf who moves to a small town. Olivia (Patricia Clarkson, a grieving artist) and Joe (a failing coffee stand vendor) are drawn with equal sensitivity to their unique reasons for loneliness. The uncommon friendship that builds up between these three gradually exposes their fears and resentments. Unfortunately, the plot devices that set up their interactions seem as forced as the scripts in a beginner playwriting class: for example, a minority girl who just happens to collect railroad spikes insists that Fin talk about trains to her elementary class so that he can withstand the taunts of the first kid to react to his physical stature. Why place a coffee stand on a deserted gravel road while there are trafficked intersections nearby? The artist twice runs the dwarf off the road as she drives distractedly without seeing him. As a result of this focus on the story concepts rather than the individualities brought by the strong actors, the slow plot developments seem two-dimensional, the very same tribulations that first met the eye when the characters were introduced. Still, many viewers will appreciate the charming take on how shared hobbies can bridge discrimination.

The Tao of Steve

Dex (Logue) plays a plump Don Juan playboy who wins girls over with intellectual banter and a patient repression of desire. He breaks his own codes of coolness when an attractive opera-set designer (Greer Goodman) shows up at a college reunion in Santa Fe and recalls a sex encounter that Dex doesn't remember them having in college. Predictably, Dex's cool showoff-slacker detachment succumbs to his deeper feelings of needing love. Writer Duncan North developed his peculiar version of Taoism as a 16-year-old high-school student in a bar, and based the story on his own experiences at the Classics program of St. John's College in New Mexico. Readers who truly love the wisdom of classic authors may be put off by Dex's self-serving name-dropping and party posturing, but at least the witty repartees will keep the comedy going for some who stop caring whether he loses his theories about romance.

The Inheritance

Opening with a flashback of marital demise, the personal and familial downfalls in this intense Danish-Swedish production allow the audience no hope of retreat. Christoffer (Ulrich Thomsen) unexpectedly inherits his father's factory and gets sucked into shoring it up for 900 workers that stand to lose their jobs. In poignant contrast, his free-spirit wife Maria (Lisa Werlinder), an actress in Sweden, exhibits a sincerity of caring for individuals in their own right instead of their usefulness--a caring that becomes diametrically incompatible with the capitalist machinations that ultimately consume Christoffer's whole family. I loved the relentless build of conflict through completely understandable but tragic choices. Ghita Norby gives an equally strong performance as the controlling mother. Responsibility to others never felt so self-destructive.

The Fountain

To enjoy this movie you need to accept that two plots are fantasy fiction getting written within the third plot (the only realistic, contemporary plot) by a historian (Rachel Weisz) and her scientist husband (Hugh Jackman); what's confusing is that the writers appear as characters in all three stories. Despite all the abrupt transitions, this movie succeeds with new profundity at retelling the wearisome tribulations of seeking the Tree of Life. Pros: - Rich visual effects give all the death and rebirth fresh surprises, even when we generally see what's coming. - Hugh's scientific race to understand aging manages a flavor of near reality (and conveys more thrill and insight than media coverage of long-lived mutant worms that really exist). [Forgive the supposed intuitiveness of drug molecule conformations...] - God's death as a creative act seems universal when we encounter it as a Mayan myth and through examples of personal sacrifice (the NT Christian references come packaged with familiar historical baggage that doesn't hit us over the head). Cons: - Due to apparent budget constraints the movie had to be cut to 96 min, not enough to orient us to the reality of the contemporary plot vs. the status of the other two as fiction. - We'd care more about the relationship between the main characters if we saw more of its development. You can feel their isolation from each other from the outset.

Kettle of Fish

If you can believe in interspecies love between a frog and a fish, then perhaps you can believe in the romance between Gershon and Modine. The director tried hard to make good on charitable funds promoting scientists in the movies...and she had as hard a time getting laughs about her unbelievable characters as she did inserting gratuitous far-fetched lines about evolution. Is there a Darwin award for movies?

Who Gets to Call It Art?

Fun footage of famous late-20th-century artists doesn't make up for the failure of this biography to develop any of the themes that come up. Sure, it's interesting that Geldzahler befriended more artists than other curators have, but how did those relationships affect his preferences, or his ideas about presenting art, or his personal life? We get only off-hand remarks from his contacts about the pricing of art, and the popularity of art, and the relationship between artists and museums. Geldzahler's own ideas about the historical progress from abstract to pop art are left a mystery. We're left to assume that he got the authority to call art art just because he was enthusiastic.

MirrorMask

The melodramatic plot of this movie boded disaster when I first overheard the opening half hour of the sound track while my husband was viewing it out of my sight. As soon as he drew me over to the TV to see the fantastical imagery, I could completely forgive the predictable indulgences in the script. Puppet shows naturally rely on simplistic characterisations, but the themes of authority and creation in this coming-of-age story raise enough questions to make the symbolism interesting. In adolescent fascination, appearances are both true and misleading; connecting and alienating; beneficent and harmful. I can see how the scenes weren't uniformly beautiful or magical enough for the critics, but I felt the animation style could be clumsy and inconsistent and while staying appropriate to the awkwardness and ambivalence of the teenage lead. The playfulness, rather than perfectionism, of the creators add to the interest of the movie as a story of emotional development.

Medea

Gradual dramatic build barely makes up for langorous pacing in this atmosphere-indulgent take on the classic Greek tragedy. The worst excess of the Dreyer script is the unbelievable way in which the older brother willingly participates in his and his brother's hanging. This foggy Medea deserves her suffering, and evokes little pity. I wish we'd had some substitute for the chorus to help us relate to the strange poisonings and the inscrutable compulsions felt by Jason and Medea.

Hunger

This plodding movie creates a mood through repetitive plot elements rather than action-driven character development. The starving writer gives his money away, out of pride, whenever he acquires small change. He says he is "sensitive, rather than mad", insofaras he "dies by harsh words". Because his denial is hard to relate to even at the beginning of the film, it gets more and more difficult to sympathise with his delirious failures later on. The cinematography and music are beautiful, and the impulsiveness of Per's improvisation holds the attention, but I enjoyed the interview with the director more than the film.

Bellydance: The Art of the Drum Solo

I rented this DVD in the third trimester of pregnancy, when a prenatal bellydance fitness DVD left me wanting more understanding of the traditions and creative process behind the art. The DVD met and exceeded my expectations. Intermediate dancers will find sufficient mechanical instruction in Sonia's slow breakdowns, which move quickly to faster repetitions that are then pieced together in combinations. (The reviewer complaining that the combinations are never strung completely together seems to have missed the menu entry "Performance", which is a typical performance-length sequence of combinations.) Amazon reviewers say that the drummer Issam Houshan's CD "Wassan Pharaon" contains a track similar to his solo on this DVD. Sonia and Issam do a great job of exhibiting the tempo and accent cues they give each other in order to collaborate effectively. The moves are stylistically straightforward, with just enough introduction to "accents" to inspire experienced dancers to go further. The DVD extras showing Sonia's one-on-one master class with Raqia Hassan in Cairo provided just the artistic context I was looking for. The qualities that make Sonia a respectful and capable student--her personality comes to the fore only as she develops the articulation and fluidity of the movements and performs them to the music--also make her an effective teacher, breaking down an approachable process of development open to progressions in other directions. The choreography has pleasing variety and the rhythms include Saiidi, Maksoum, Kuwaiti, Malfouf, Fellahi, and Karatchi.

Pilates in Pregnancy

Slow, controlled pilates would be fine, but the pokey instructions and pacing of this routine make it _infuriatingly_ slow. The mood is one of relaxation throughout the exercises. I would recommend this only to a beginner (as a supplement) or to someone with injuries. It's not exactly clear at what stage women begin to have the "bump" that tells them to do the "late" pregnancy routine: tummy-lying discomfort, or back-lying discomfort? The later pregnancy routine includes: heel-toe prancing; roll down with bent knees; swimming on all 4s; cat stretch; leg kicks at hip height (on side); front thigh stretch; hamstring stretch; upper back stretch; chest stretch; Relaxation. For a comparison, the book "The Pilates Pregnancy" by Mari Winsor includes 22 exercises for third-trimester pregnancy--most of them more active than stretches!