Cyborg
"I am not sure I remember the opening words of “Cyborg” exactly, but I believe they were, “After the plague, things really got bad.” I do remember laughing heartily at that point, about 30 seconds into the movie. Few genres amuse me more than post-apocalyptic fantasies about supermen fighting for survival. “Cyborg” is one of the funniest examples of this category, which crosses “Escape from New York” with “The Road Warrior” but cheats on the budget.
The movie takes place in a future world in which all civilization has been reduced to a few phony movie sets. Leather-clad neo-Nazis stalk through the ruins, beating each other senseless and talking in Pulpspeak, which is like English, but without the grace and modulation. It’s cold in the future, and it’s wet, but never so cold or wet that the costumes do not bare the arm muscles of the men and the heaving bosoms of the women."
Home Alone 2
"Christmas carols swell from the concert below as the sanctimonious little twerp lectures the old lady on the meaning of life."
Hellraiser II
“Kirsty!” we hear. And “Tiffany!” And “Kirsty!!!” and “Tiffany!!!” And “Kirstiyyyyyyy!!!!!” And “Tiffanyyyyyyy!!!!!” I’m afraid this is another one of those movies that violates the First Rule of Repetition of Names, which states that when the same names are repeated in a movie more than four times a minute for more than three minutes in a row, the audience breaks out into sarcastic laughter, and some of the ruder members are likely to start shouting “Kirsty!” and “Tiffany!” at the screen."
Dead Poets Society
"If you are going to evoke Henry David Thoreau as the patron saint of your movie, then you had better make a movie he would have admired. Here is one of my favorite sentences from Thoreau’s Walden, which I recommend for serious study by the authors of this film: ” . . . instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
"In 1785 a jewel thief from Hanover named Rudolf Erich Raspe published a book in England which claimed to be based on the baron’s life and times.
The real von Munchausen apparently did not complain about this book that made free with his reputation, even though it included such tall stories as the time the baron tethered his horse to a “small twig” in a snowstorm, and discovered when the snow melted that the twig was actually a church steeple.
I remember the illustration that appeared with that story when I read it as a child: The baron on the ground, looking up in perplexity at his horse, which was still hanging from the steeple. I remember asking my father how the horse was going to get down, and my father speculating that he would have to wait until it snowed again, which seemed like a bleak prospect for the horse. And so I asked if the baron could feed his horse in the meantime by climbing up the steeple with hay. The mind of a child is wonderfully literal. And one of the charms of seeing “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” was to see some of the baron’s other impossible adventures, looking for all the world as if they had really happened, thanks to extraordinary special effects."
