CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1990)

[Update 11/16/2021: Need to redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Cyrano de Bergerac is a master sword fighter and poet who would gladly fight 100 men, but recoils in fear at the mere thought of expressing his secret love for the beautiful Roxane. Why? Because he has a giant nose and figures she will reject his love because he's so ugly. Cyrano is madly in love with Roxane so when she confides in him that she's attracted to a new soldier in Cyrano's military unit he wants to crush the guy, but instead he takes the cadet under his wing. Then when he sees the guy means well but an idiot.  Cyrano writes endless love letters to Roxane for him. Naturally, Roxane falls wildly in love with the young man, but how long and how far will this charade go?

CYRANO DE BERGERAC is a nice mixture of romance and action and even a little humor. The 137 minute run time flies by in a swirl of love filled wooing and sword swinging asskickery. The main attraction though is the portrayal of Cyrano by Gerard Depardieu.  He's a true pleasure to watch here. Every mannerism and gesture he does expresses something. Cyrano is a very loud and vibrant character, but yet Gerard still manages to capture the internal torment that Cyrano is going through and express it to the audience without us even realizing it.

The look of the film is also beautiful with impressive costumes and sets. My biggest complaint is the story wasn't as dark or heartbreaking as I had hoped. Also, I wasn't impressed by the Roxane character. I've never read the original story, but in this movie she didn't seem very well fleshed out. She was kinda a ditzy simpleton actually. That's just my opinion. Still it's a great movie, I just wish the Roxane character had given me more of a reason to be deserving of Cyrano's delicate prose. If you like romantic films then check it out!

KNOWING (2009)

MIT astrophysics professor Nicholas Cage discovers, via a numerical message found in his son's elementary school time capsule, that the Earth is fuuuuucked. So now, it's up to him to run around like an asshole screaming about the end of the world and save everybody's life. Well, I might have gotten a little ahead of myself. First, the filmmakers have to explain to the stupid audience that Cage is a godless sinner by having him drinking nonstop and trash talking religion while praising Science then have him change his mind when he sees the end is near. That's right, KNOWING is actually a heavy-handed Jesus movie...I think.  It might be a heavy-handed New Age hippie movie also...maybe. Honestly, I have no clue what's going on except that it's silly and fun to laugh at.

Silly story, zero tits, lots of CGI destruction, annoying kids you want to drop kick in the face, Cage freaking out and throwing stuff, mysterious humanoids, CGI moose on fire.  With the right sense of humor, KNOWING is a lot of fun to laugh at.

PRIMEVAL (2007)

A huge alligator in Africa is eating people. A 24-hour news channel sends in a news crew, an animal expert and a guide to not only film this man-eating monster, but also capture it alive!

That sounds exciting, but it's not. First off, it takes 22 minutes for the main characters to even arrive at the river where the alligator lives (why not just start the movie with the news crew arriving?!) and even then it's another good while before the alligator shows up!  Once the alligator arrives, you'd figure that it would be the star of the show, but instead, the story gets sidetracked in some unneeded bullshit about a local warlord.  Who cares?!

Ugly photography, slow pace, the main actor cannot even wear a shirt properly, everything has an ugly orange colour to it, below average computer graphics, roaring alligator, dude getting chased by the alligator pauses long enough to flip it off (how about you run away, genius), lame dialogue, boring action scenes, worthless ending.  I cannot even think of one reason to watch this useless clunker.  Skip it.

The fact that somebody got paid actual money to write this script kinda blows my mind.