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Duck Soup (1933)
Duck Soup (1933)
1933 | Classics, Comedy, War
8
8.7 (12 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Decent Story Held Back By Too Many Confusing Plot Points
In Duck Soup, a wealthy widow offers aid to a struggling country on the condition they make a chaotic idiot their leader.

Acting: 10

Beginning: 10

Characters: 10
Main character Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) is absolutely hilarious. He has quips for days and he’s always doing something to liven up a scene. The other characters, while good, get lost in the greatness of his funny antics.

Cinematography/Visuals: 10
Numerous setpieces abound here which keeps the movie fresh. The movies’s consistent change of scenery and large visual spectacles propels Duck Soup to almost passable heights. I can appreciate a movie with a constant change of pace, especially older films.

Conflict: 3
I spent a decent amount of this movie trying to figure out just what exactly was going on. The conflict never seemed strong enough for me to think the stakes were worth it. It was clear the focus was more on the comedy aspect rather than driving the story.

Entertainment Value: 8

Memorability: 3

Pace: 10

Plot: 7

Resolution: 5
The ending was meh and that’s me being generous. It was essentially a compounding of the story as a whole which totally lost steam for me towards the back half of the movie. it felt like, by the time we reach the end, the writer forgot what initially made the story great in the first place.

Overall: 76
When you don’t really know what’s going on right off the nose, it makes it hard to settle into the story. Duck Soup does a lot of things rights. However, a solid main character and grandiose scenes aren’t quite enough to mask the fact that the movie falls just shy of being good. Not terrible, but definitely not great.
  
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Charlie Cobra Reviews (1840 KP) rated Cooties (2015) in Movies

Jul 7, 2020 (Updated Oct 26, 2020)  
Cooties (2015)
Cooties (2015)
2015 | Comedy, Horror
An Irreverent Off Color Zombie-Comedy
Contains spoilers, click to show
I thought this movie was very underrated by the critic community. I really enjoyed it and felt it had exactly what I look for in a zombie movie. The premise fits well with it's genre because in real life this would be terrible and frightening. Kids being zombies, yikes. But since it's a comedy it was easy for them to set up some pretty funny scenes of them having to fight off kids that are trying to eat them. Critics saying it not being funny enough are hard for me to agree with because it had plenty of laughs for me, although some of them fell flat or were kind of lame. And that it was too ugly and violent for younger viewers, well hello, it's rated R. I do have to say that away from the premise the story or plot wasn't all too creative but it plays out well over the 94 minute film. Some critics also commented about "uninspired plot mechanics" which to me was more about some of it being predictable or cliché with zombie tropes common to the genre but I thought they fit into the plot in a good way that kept the direction of the movie going. One thing that I did agree with was that the ending was disappointing or unsatisfactory but I've learned that in zombie movies that's something you have to expect sometimes. There's not going to always be a happy ending or any kind of ending sometimes but there was a funny after credits scene where the janitor is shown for a couple of seconds. I give this movie a 7/10.


  
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Karina Longworth recommended Caught (2015) in Movies (curated)

 
Caught (2015)
Caught (2015)
2015 | Mystery
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"It was was directed Max Ophuls and it stars Robert Ryan as a character who was intended to be based on Howard Hughes. Max Ophuls had been hired by Hughes’ production company, RKO, early to make the film that was actually supposed to be Faith Domergue’s big starring vehicle, and that movie just turned into a disaster. The production of it dragged along over five or six years with many different directors. After Ophuls got fired from it, he got hired to make an adaptation by another company of a novel called Wild Calendar. He told the screenwriter that he was paired with that he didn’t want to actually adapt the novel; he wanted to use the structure of the novel to make a film about how terrible he thought Howard Hughes was. They basically culled the notes of everything that they’d ever heard about Howard Hughes and Ophuls’ personal experiences, and the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, went out and he met women who had had encounters with Hughes and then put it all together in this film which is about a shop girl who gets involved with a mysterious millionaire. The mysterious millionaire’s played by Robert Ryan, who was an actor who made a lot of different kinds of movies, and to a lot of film noir fans and B-Movie, genre film fans, he’s considered a great star, but he really looks like Howard Hughes in a lot of ways. They’re both very tall and lanky and have kind of a similar jaw. Even though Hughes knew this movie was being made – he insisted that he be sent dailies – he asked for some changes so that people wouldn’t think it’s him. The character and the performance are a lot like him. Nowadays, especially given everything we know about Howard Hughes, the similarities are impossible to ignore."

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