I hate films that suck but have a complicated plot where you don't know what's going on because you probably weren't paying attention, but you definitely don't care enough to google and find out.... so then someone asks you "what was this movie about" and you sound like an ass saying "I donno but DON'T SEE IT" (5,898)
"Heat" is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Brimful not of Asha but of pointless shots, horrific acting, and flaccid stabs at emotional depth, this three-hour unintentional parody of the crime thriller drama is almost as criminal as "Magnolia."
It never achieves the "so bad it's brilliant" effect of "Point Break," but instead just wallows along in its own smelly muck of "serious adult themes" all the long way until its groanworthy ending.
How did this forced, clunking script attract actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, and Jon Voight? Simple : those actors need money to feed their coke / stripper habits. Each turns in a wrenchingly bad performance, choking out some of the most leaden, unnatural dialogue ever heard in a major flick. Pacino especially -- he was good in "Godfather" and great in "Scarface," but his pseudo-hard-boiled persona is so stupid and fake that he makes gangsta rap look like a "NOVA" documentary. Kilmer looks like a complete idiot reject elf nazi or something. He should have called it quits at "Tombstone."
Here's something : De Niro's mopey love interest is played by some woman with a bobo look and immense shag of curly hair, and as soon as I saw here, I was like "Hey look, it's Edie Brickell!" Well wouldn't you know it? De Niro's next line was "What's your name?" to which flopmop replies "Eady." !!!!! I'm not kidding, and there is no way this was a coincidence. She's not aware of too many things, including the fact that the movie in which she's supporting actress is a rank stack of fetid herring bowels.
There are some scenes in here that are particularly worthy of mention for their very risibility. Chief among these is the big shootout scene -- you know, the one that directly inspired the real-life 1997 "North Hollywood Shootout" wherein a couple of guys with assault rifles went ape after a bank robbery and injured ten cops. Those guys got shot a whole heck of a lot. In the world of "Heat," however, a few guys with AR-15s can take on about two dozen cars full of well-armed cops, and not only live to tell the tale, but win! As we saw in 1997, there is no @#$%ing way that a few guys could hold off, much less defeat, dozens of cops, but I guess it helps that De Niro and Co. only have to reload their rifles every 500 rounds or so. There's this ludicrous shot toward the scene's end of all these bullet-riddled cop cars (some with what look like shell holes in them) and incapacitated cops lying about as De Niro saunters out the side of the frame through a parking lot with Kilmer in tow. Unbelievable. Equally noisome during that scene is where Pacino takes a shot that no cop would ever take : from an unsupported shoulder position and with his assault rifle, he shoots junkie swine Tom Sizemore in the cabeza while Sizemore is holding up a toddler in his arms. I don't @#$%ing think so. You'd think that it would be impossible to make a huge machine gun battle boring, but these clowns somehow manage it -- I kept getting distracted and had to rewind a bunch of times to see how they "escaped." Heinous.
Another scene that's dumber than a bag of dead snakes is where the cops lay a trap for Kilmer at his wife's place. Kilmer pulls up in his car, wifey goes out on the balcony to lure him into the trap at the behest of coppers. She warns Kilmer away with a facial expression and he gets back in his product-placement Camaro and starts to leave. Wifey says to copper "It wasn't him." Copper radios his buddy downstairs to stop Kilmer and check him out; Kilmer produces a fake ID. Cop buddy radios back saying "Oh, this isn't Kilmer, it's G. Phil Wizzleteats! Says here on his license. And the car's plates are clear and registered to a totally different person! Everything looks kosher." Copeer radios back "OK, let him go." WHAT THE @#$% I'm so sure that cops on a manhunt haven't, say, looked at a photo of th' guy for whom they're lying in wait! Complete and utter unmitigated BAD WRITING.
In summation, "Heat" is hot garbage. I suffered through it so that you don't have to.
New rule of wrist : if any movie shows up as being longer than 2 hours when you pull it up in Netflix instant, TURN IT OFF RIGHT AWAY. You can save yourself a lot of heartbreak. (10,607)
At the center of the "story" Avatar is an "inter-species" romance between the humanoid Na'vi and a Human. Our protagonist falls in love with an "alien" woman and an "alien" culture, abandons all to quite literally "go native." In my opinion the whole exercise is at best sloppy sci-fi; the Na'vi could easily be swapped with any idealized aboriginal tribe on earth (if their mysticism was real), the setting could be any tropical forest (with phosphorescence), and the Marines could be employees any colonial company of the 17th-19th century without any major change to the story. This is sci-fi that I hate as the technology and setting aren't used to explore any interesting aspects of humanity and the robots and aliens are just there to provide a CGI spectacular.
Imagine if instead our protagonist had to deal with an environment and alien species that was genuinely alien. Instead of dealing with a furry's wet dream of anthropomorphic cats, what if they where sentient blobfish? Instantly the love story is made more difficult by the fact that there is no innate sex appeal. Now the story has to deal with the issue of what love is should the blobfish even be capable of love. Suddenly we have to dissect what love is and weigh intellectual attraction v. sex appeal, human hormones in conflict with blobfish ones. And we'd also have the question of what is it like to be put into a truly alien form that lives in a truly 3D environment and swims as primary locomotion. Our characters would have to deal with how grounding is a human body; how does form effect our interactions, our self-concept, and our view of our environment?
Dealing with complex questions about humanity is what makes science fiction a great medium. Avatar is lazy. (44,872)
I've seen my fair share of what Wikiapeadia considers bad, sure enough this movie makes the list. In the scale of movies I've seen this is it the zero rating from which I judge all bad movies, there is nothing redeeming this film. The "so bad it's good" phenomena that have made movies like StarCrash fun is absent, instead "it's so bad that it sucks the joy out of life."
The plot:
An astronaut crash lands and disappears, a monster suddenly appears causing death through super radiation. In short, if you like B-movies you've seen the plot before and you've seen it done much better. There's a twist at the end that is either far to clever for this movie, or just too stupid for words.
Problems with this film are not limited to the following:
Pacing - I can't say that it was glacial, as glaciers move and a good part of this film doesn't. For example this movie contains scenes like nearly 10 minutes of emergency vehicles backing up and just sitting there. (Perhaps a deeper metaphor for the plot?) It's almost surreal; the pacing falls somewhere in between Quantum of Solace and the epic The Cure For Insomnia.
Continuity/Editing - Going from one ice shelf to another is a jarring experience, while some attempt is made via the Voice-Over Guy tries and fails to lessen the impact as this movie stumbles from one scene to another. On the bright side; these violent bouts of sloppy editing may be the only action in this movie. Almost as bad, the actors are replaced halfway through, in many cases playing a roll someone else had already started (Oddly enough it took me a while to notice as the characters are indistinct.).
Action - What action there is only comes from narration by Voice-Over Guy. The monster smashes a lab? You tell us Voice-Over Guy, as even smashing a high-school chemistry set may be too exciting for the audience. Grizzly murder? Doing a cut-scene with a monster looming over the camera might induce palpitations, so once again Voice-Over Guy comes to the rescue. We are treated to a couple minutes of Go-Go dancing which would be preferable to the rest of the movie, but as best I can tell the footage has absolutely nothing to do with the plot nor even involves any of the actors.
Acting/Dialog - Like to watch movies about people drinking coffee? You're halfway there, there are three problems though: 1. You can tell the actors are reading from cue cards. 2. The dialog stretches out for far too long, content is a bit under par for even a B-grade movie. Think 70 minutes of Ed Wood monologues strung together without any discernible purpose. 3. All sound is missing in places, in others the dialogue is unintelligible.
Direction - In all fairness I can't blame the actors, it seems as though the director just set up a camera and let the actors try to work through it. If there was any continuity in Monster a Go-Go! I'm sure it was incidental. This film either has no direction or it's direction on a higher plain of metaphysical consciousness where narrative can be implied without or despite content.
There are extenuating circumstances in the creation of this horror; this film was dropped due to budget problems and left unfinished for four years. It was picked up, then roughly spliced together by another director who need a second movie quickly to fill his double feature. All the same I'd never sign my name to a monstrosity this horrible: Shame on you Bill Rebane for putting it on celluloid!
If you absolutely have to see it, you can find it on the internet. (27,081)
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At the center of the "story" Avatar is an "inter-species" romance between the humanoid Na'vi and a Human. Our protagonist falls in love with an "alien" woman and an "alien" culture, abandons all to quite literally "go native." In my opinion the whole exercise is at best sloppy sci-fi; the Na'vi could easily be swapped with any idealized aboriginal tribe on earth (if their mysticism was real), the setting could be any tropical forest (with phosphorescence), and the Marines could be employees any colonial company of the 17th-19th century without any major change to the story. This is sci-fi that I hate as the technology and setting aren't used to explore any interesting aspects of humanity and the robots and aliens are just there to provide a CGI spectacular.
Imagine if instead our protagonist had to deal with an environment and 
I've seen my fair share of what 
