The Punisher, Detour, Runaway Jury, & Lost Horizon

The Punisher was unrelentingly depressing. Ugh. It's better than the 1989 version, but a dead rat can act better than Dolph Lundgren, so it isn't that big of a deal. Travolta was terrible. That was expected. After you go Scientologist you stop being anything worthwhile. Except that you are so crazy you can be interesting.

Detour was short. Short short short. I can understand that it was a fairly early film noir, and that it is definitely historical, but that doesn't mean that there was much I particularly enjoyed in it. And the stupid MPAA giving that ending. The alternate ending would have been much better. That is pretty much the rule. I can't think of any endings that are better with the censorship board. There might be one or two, but so many movies are predictable once you have a character murdered. So much better when you can't tell how it will all end well before that.

Runaway Jury was long. I'm not sure where it ranks on the John Grisham scale, except that there really isn't a good reason for any of his books or movies to exist. I also felt like it was another piece of liberal claptrap that made me want to vomit. Or something like that. Also, seriously, Piven? That guy's career pretty much is riding on Cusack's coattails. He was ok in this.

Lost Horizon was interesting, and the great line ("To put it simply, I should say that our general belief was in moderation. We preach the virtue of avoiding excesses of every kind, even including excess of virtue itself...We find in the valley it makes for greater happiness among the natives. We rule with moderate strictness and in return we are satisfied with moderate obedience. As a result, our people are moderately honest, moderately chaste, and somewhat more than moderately happy.") was pretty good. Plus, without the novel, we wouldn't have the Shangri-Las, which would probably mean that our music wouldn't be as good. Things named Shangri-La are generally good music. Now, Frank Capra is a fairly good director, but in this case, he just goes on forever. Too many scenes of people expositioning. And it's also too bad about losing the seven minutes or so of film, and just using the stills or sometimes just losing its sharpness. That, because of the expositioning, isn't as jarring as you'd expect, since a lot of scenes are of people looking in one direction and talking or listening. Oh, yeah, and it's racist. But at least there's some naked small boys and girls to make up for it. Wait a second. Naked small boys and girls don't make up for racism.