SF and Fantasy Movie Reviews Starting With O
Oh, God! Book II (1980) 
Genres: F Com
Watched: 50 min
God appears to a little girl and gives her the task to raise His popularity. While she undertakes it willingly, she faces tribulations, like anyone whom God chooses. It's a nice enough movie but not very exciting, so I never finished watching it when it was on TV. Veteran comedian George Burns plays a laid-back but spunky God. This is the middle movie in a series of three.
The One (2001)
Genres: SF Act
Evil Jet Li goes around killing his counterparts in parallel realities to absorb their strength. Policeman Jet Li has to stop him plus his own police force who think he's gone nuts.
The Others (2001)
Genres: Hor
Ghost story with Nicole Kidman. It's OK but you have to understand that ghost stories are going to be slow. Ghosts seldom zoom around like Casper.
Outland (1981 UK)
Genres: SF Det
Sean Connery is a ruggedly sexy marshal sent in on a new assignment to an Ioian mining town.
The plot's all right but: (1) The action takes place on a tough mining outpost full of tough miners. It doesn't make sense that neither side in the conflict is able to get more recruits. (2) The tactics leave much to be desired. And those there are some of the least competent assassins ever. (3) They have funny ideas about decompression. It's like magic decompression that's several orders of magnitude stronger than real decompression. And they seem to be a bit confused about gravity. And (4) J says: "It would have been better if it was half as long. They could just run it like this" (he was going at twice the normal speed at the time. It was indeed an improvement. Admittedly this was an out-in-zero-pressure shot so everyone was moving pretty slowly, whether due to the encumbrance of the unwieldy spacesuits or what, I don't know. Why are astronauts so poky?). The rest of the movie is pretty slow too, but scenic, in the sense that they did a good job capturing the manly vibes of a big mining compound.
Both the dialogue and the acting are very decent. And it's so pleasant to see realistic actors and acting. If this movie were made today everyone would have gay hair and make no use of their upper-facial smile muscles because that's not cool. And the confrontations would all look like they were happening between ten-year-old sociopaths with delusions of grandeur. But here the confrontations are largely believable.
Now Sean Connery is ruggedly handsome, but he is too well-groomed. It gets to be pretty freaky. I know the man's hairy, OK? I've seen his back in a Bond picture. Exotic island, bathing trunks, yikes! Hairy back. So why is his facial hair so perfectly groomed? He has not a wisp on the bridge of his nose, or his temples, or under his brows. His obviously copious brows were plucked by an expert. His beard and mustache couldn't be more perfectly symmetric. Is he supposed to be some kind of ruggedly handsome closeted marshal? And his wife points out that he keeps going for this sort of job exactly all through his career, where he's in close quarters with a bunch of off-Earth ruffians. So eventually she objects. I bet. It's inappropriate to force me into such speculations when I'm trying to enjoy an action flick about a rugged marshal. Restraint in the grooming of the rugged types is advisable. Grooming Sean Connery may be fun for the makeup folks, but they must be kept in check.
Please note that all material on this page is Copyright © 2005 by D. Aline Lurie.
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