It's tough to dis a movie that you're supposed to like. But sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do your critical duty and just slam a film, no matter how touchy the subject matter might be.
I hated Shoah. Yes, the famed ten hour documentary about the holocaust. I had to leave after two hours because it was so poorly made.
I was assured that the rest of the film was exactly the same but let me just judge the first two hours on their own.
There was no historical footage—it was all "new," which meant the audience was shown a few bricks in an empty field and told to imagine the huge factory or whatnot that used to occupy the space.
Primarily the film consisted of interviews where the subjects' conversations were not intercut with one another so they would repeat some of the same points over and over again since the interviewer asked the same damn questions to everyone—and they weren't even good.
And, another annoying and time-consuming thing about the interviews was the language barrier. The filmmaker spoke in one language to a translator who asked the question in German to the subjects, who answered to the translator, who then spoke to the filmmaker—only being subtitled in the last stage so that the audience didn't even get the emotion to go along with the word, just the dull monotone of the translator, who would occasionally argue that she had already asked a question that the filmmaker had wanted to ask because she had phrased it differently.
Make any sense? No? I didn't get it much either. But then, the filmmaker didn't seem too bright a guy. It took him six people before he could get an answer that explained to him what it means to draw one's finger across one's throat—you know, pretending to slit your throat.
Remember that one shot that lasted maybe five seconds in Schindler's List when the women are being taken to the death camp and one sees a little boy make this gesture as a warning? Five seconds—tops. But in Shoah it took forty-five minutes.
If the rest of Shoah did go the same, I say that this ten hour film could have been cut down to a good hour and a half and not lost anything except for a translator and a few long panning shots of empty fields.
Another film that I could be accused of being politically incorrect for disliking so much was Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. I like Jonathan Demme a lot and love watching his films to see where he'll put Charles Napier next. I felt sorry for him with the studio's major recut of Swing Shift and an apparent massacre of Married to the Mob as well (as evidenced by the extensive out-takes during the end credits, where it appears that MTTM was about an hour longer). But I hated Philadelphia.
"We're Gonna Put AIDS In Your Face!" That should have been the tag line of this film, done all in close-ups shot with long lenses with depth-of-focus so short that even people's ears were out of range!
The opera scene was just damn embarrassing and if there's one thing I hate it's the movie myth that whenever someone dies, a baby is born—how many damn babies were at the party after Tom Hanks died? Did they pass them out as door prizes?
Tom Hanks saying that he was ready to die—that's a laugh. Unless Antonio Banderas whipped up a batch of euthanasia, Hanks was just getting ready for a few months or years of suffering—not a blissful death.
And those home movies at the end? Here—look!—Cry! I didn't know his character well enough to give a rat's ass when he died and we never knew him as a child to begin with. What cheap tactics!
I know I sound callous dissing films about the holocaust and AIDS (how many mainstream AIDS movies have come along since this white-wash and wimpy star vehicle?) but if you make a bad movie, bad movies deserve what they get, no matter what their subject matter is.
-mw