Jon Voight

A Rare Treasure

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: National Treasure
  • IMDb: link

National Treasure

National Treasure is a treasure hunting movie of the finest caliber.  With great locations, strange clues that must be deciphered intertwined into U.S. history, a race against time to find the treasure, a great cast, and peppered with action sequences but with its soul relying on the characters’ intellect rather than only their brawn, it’s all you can ask for, and a little more.  Disney has had mixed success in its live action movies, but this can be put alongside the best of the bunch.

The movie begins with John Adams Gates (Christopher Plummer) telling his grandson the story of a great treasure of King Solomon passed down through the generations and protected by the Knights Templar and Freemasons who eventually smuggle the treasure to the New World and hide it, leaving a series of clues by which it might later be uncovered.  Through mischance the Gates family has the only known clue to the treasure which he now passes on to his grandson.

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Save Yourself From September Dawn

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: September Dawn
  • IMDb: link

September Dawn

What a horrible film.  The “true untold story” of the Mountain Meadows massacre is a blueprint for all future filmmakers on how not to make a film.  Filled with a heavy handed message, simplistic characters, insipid dialogue, religious intolerance, and a laughable love story, the script for this would have been better used as toilet paper.  From beginning to end September Dawn is a mess.

A wagon train of settlers are traveling west.  The good Christians making up the wagon train pass through the Utah Territory and come face to face with the vicious evil Mormons led by a diabolical Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight) and lorded over by the emperor of evil Brigham Young (Terrence Stamp).  You remember the movies Hollywood used to make about evil bloodthirsty Indian savages?  Well Christopher Cain brings the style back using Mormons instead.

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Less, Far Less, Than Meets the Eye

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Transformers
  • IMDb: link

As a kid I had Transformers toys, I watched the television series without fail, and collected the original Marvel Comics Transformers series (all 80 issues and those lame cross-over mini-series too!).  So the fanboy in me was ecstatic when I learned that a live-action film of the comics, television show, and toys I grew up with was going to be attempted.  But when I heard that Michael Bay was going to head the project I felt less than thrilled.  Remember, this is from the guy who defended The Island, but I still doubted whether Bay could translate the stories of my youth to the big screen.  I shouldn’t have worried because he didn’t even try.  There isn’t a single recognizable moment from the Transformers of my childhood other than you’ve got robots that transform into objects and vehicles.  I am deeply saddened that Bay and his writers didn’t trust the source material and the original character designs and mythology choosing instead to throw out over twenty-years of history to do it their own way.  The result is less, far less, than meets the eye.

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