lame movie moments [Archive] - PSI TECH Discussion Forums

jefflucas

04-14-2001, 03:27 PM

On 4/14/01 2:42:45 PM, Jonina Dourif wrote: 

>called "Powder" 

> 

>Has anybody seen it? 

> 

 
<IMG SRC="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/630542845X.01.LZZZZZZZ.gif" align="right">
No, but I've heard of it.

 
<A HREF="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0114168">IMDB Link</a> 

SPOILER ALERT

 

Scroll down for a review:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

POWDER

 

(Star, Star) (2 stars)

 

Date of publication: 10/27/1995

 

By Roger Ebert

 

`Powder" has all of the elements of a successful fantasy, and none of the insights. It's a movie

where intriguing ideas lie there on the screen, jumbled and unrealized. It leads up to bathos, not

pathos, because not enough attention was paid to the underlying truth of the characters.

They're all just pawns for the plot gimmicks.

 

The movie opens with a mother's death in childbirth, as the father disowns his newborn son, an

albino. The youth, nicknamed Powder, grows up in the basement of his grandparents' home,

reading every book he can get his hands on and remembering every word. By the time the

grandparents are dead and the sheriff's department finds him down there, he knows everything

in the books but nothing about the world.

 

An intriguing set-up, even if the pancake makeup on Powder (Sean Patrick Flanery) makes

him look less like an albino than like a mime. But then the movie takes the first of many wrong

steps, by sending him immediately to a reform school. Why? What has he done? Of course we

get predictable scenes involving the school bullies, but after Powder performs a neat trick

(magnetizing all the spoons in the dining room and creating a pyramid while mashed potatoes

are still dripping from them), you'd think the bullies would take heed. Not a chance.

 

Everyone in this movie seems a little slow to catch on that Powder is really special. There is,

for example, Duncan (Brandon Smith), the intolerant local deputy sheriff, a redneck who likes

to shoot deer. The deer hardly feel a thing, he explains, but then Powder acts as a conduit to

carry the deer's fear and suffering into the deputy, who is so transformed that he sells his gun

collection - yet still plays the heavy, making things tough on Powder. To quote "Citizen Kane,"

there are some people who need more than one lesson.

 

Two good people sympathize with Powder: Jessie (Mary Steenburgen), the head of the

school, and Ripley (Jeff Goldblum), the science teacher, popping up with his quixotic insights

like a clever jack-in-the-box. Powder has some sort of strange relationship with electricity,

which causes him to draw down lightning and interact with classroom experiments, but the

movie uses this only as the occasion for special effects without payoffs. ("You know why there

isn't a hair on him?" Goldblum asks. "Because he IS electrolysis.")

 

Meanwhile, Powder comes across as a cross between Cliff Robertson's "Charly," the Elephant

Man, Mr. Spock, E.T. and Jesus. He is wise beyond his years, has great compassion and

insight, suffers much, and attracts intolerance and meanness even better than lightning. He is

also very smart.

 

After an I.Q. test, for example, a psychologist tells him, "All of the tests indicate you have the

most advanced intellect in the history of mankind. Do you understand what that means?" (If

Powder's so smart, why does he have to ask?)

 

Powder has instant insights into his tormentors. He can "listen to people from the inside," and

knows the school bully was abused as a child. His empathy draws only insults; the bully calls

him "Light Bulb," and when he kisses a girl at a picnic, her father warns his minders, "You keep

that thing on a leash." At one point, his enemies even take him out into a storm, hoping he will

attract lightning.

 

The movies mistakes are: (1) to limit Powder's activities to the conventions of genre pictures,

instead of exploring his effect in a more realistic world; (2) to prevent his enemies from learning

from him; (3) to upstage his emotional insights with his electricity tricks; (4) to fail to explain his

reality, so that there are no rules to create discipline in the plot, and (5) to expect us to be

satisfied with an ending that settles less the more you think about it.

 

I suspect that "Powder" was at one stage an interesting project. But then - I'm only guessing

here - the production process led to a dumbing-down of the material until the movie was faced

with a paradox it could never explain: How could anyone as smart as Powder have a problem

with the morons in this movie? The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think

that proves there's no audience for unusual, original pictures - because they think they've made

one.

 

POWDER (STAR) (STAR) 

Jessie Caldwell Mary Steenburgen 

Powder Sean Patrick Flanery 

Sheriff Barnum Lance Henriksen 

Donald Ripley Jeff Goldblum 

Written and directed by Victor Salva. Running time: 111 minutes.

Rated PG-13 (for intense, sometimes frightening thematic elements and

for language). Opening today at local theaters.

 

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

 
<A HREF="http://www.dvdempire.com/Exec/v4_item.asp?userid=93818199575903&item_id=6097">Link to the DVD</a>

snow

04-15-2001, 02:46 PM

Ok, now this is totally stupid: In the end of Gladiator, his African friend, after Maximus has died, takes Maximus's little prayer totems of his wife and son, and buries them, in all places, in the gladiatorial arena. That is so stupid. If you were Maximus, and you despised being a slave and a gladiator, and were doing it only to have your revenge on the psycho who put you there and slaughtered your wife and kid, would you really want your precious prayer totems buried in that place? I'm sure....how lame. 
 
Kimberly

snow

04-15-2001, 03:17 PM

On 4/14/01 2:42:45 PM, Jonina Dourif wrote: 
>called "Powder" 
> 
>Has anybody seen it? 
> 
I saw it a while back....but that skinny albino guy freaked me out....the movie was kind of a poor man's cross between Edward Scissor Hands and Phenomenon...as I recall....but I remember crying....then again, I always cry at movies. Speaking of crying...I was balling when I watched the families of the china-prisoner-war-guys reuniting on Whidbey Island on tv....homecomings are always such tear jerkers.