Dances with Wolves review

 Number 333 on the top 1000 films of all time is the Kevin Costner's 1990 epic Western 'Dances with Wolves.'

Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) is a soldier in the US Civil War. In 1863, he is assigned to a military post in the American frontier. Instead of finding his assignment, he finds a group of Lakota. There everything he has ever known is flipped on its head.

I've never rated Costner much as an actor. He's very wooden and over-the-top. After seeing this, I don't rate him much as a director either. Dances with Wolves was a slow-plodding affair that had no business being three hours long. The film centres on Dunbar's relationship with the Lakota, but they barely feature until an hour in - which was also the first sign of tension.

How Dances with Wolves won the Best Picture Oscar is beyond me. How it beat out brilliant films like Awakenings or Goodfellas is even more stupefying. And don't even get me started on Costner being nominated for Best Actor. His constant narration slowed the film to an absolute crawl. He logs all his interactions with the Lakota in a journal. This is accompanied by the slowest, most monotonous, expository voice-over known to man. We see something on screen, and, for some reason, Costner felt the need to over-explain it ad infiniteum. 

It made everything very on-the-nose. It would have been much better if the audience had been left to figure things out for themselves.

Dunbar wasn't an interesting character to follow at all. I was far more interested in the dynamics of the Lakota tribe. It would have been more interesting if the film had been told from their perspective rather than from a tepid soldier who loves the sound of his own voice.

I did not care for Dances with Wolves. It was an overly-long, tedious affair. And how it was the 1990 Best Picture winner is a complete mystery.

Field of Dreams review

Number 715 on the top 1000 films of all time is the sports-fantasy drama film 'Field of Dreams.'

Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) is a corn farmer in Iowa. Haunted by his poor relationship with his late father, he fears growing old without achieving anything. And that's when a mysterious voice tells him to plough part of his corn farm and to build a giant baseball ring instead. Several months after building the field, ghosts of famous baseball players Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) start appearing.

"Build it and and they will come" is the famous line from this film. Let me tell you if somebody built this film in a middle corn field in Iowa, I would not come back as a ghost and see it. I am not a baseball fan, so I didn't think I would enjoy this at all. However, the real reason why I did not enjoy it was that it was cheesy, overly-sentimental and completely lacking in any type of dramatic tension.

To say it had a slow start would be an understatement. The beginning is so lacking in any conflict that it almost put me to sleep. There's a middle-aged man, whom I have no reason to sympathise with, is going through a mid-life crisis. He thinks the solution to this is to go build a baseball diamond because some random ghost told me to do so. His wife goes along with this and the diamond is built without any issue. Ghosts of baseball players start appearing and Kevin Costner starts pitching and batting with them. Everything's hunky-dory. Where's the tension? Where's the conflict? Where's any reason for me to be interested in this film?

And the lack of any central conflict was this film's biggest problem. Ray Kinsella's mid-life crisis had such little immediacy and urgency that it was not engaging at all. His wife Annie (Amy Madigan) was fully supportive of his dreams, which again removed another source of conflict. Any recognisable conflict came from Ray and Annie potentially losing their farm to the bank, but even this was mostly-glossed over. And this all eventually culminated when their daughter Karin falls or is knocked off (it isn't clear which) some beachers and tumbles down in the most unrealistic and silliest looking way possible. But then she's healed by one of the baseball - playing ghosts. Just what?

This film wasn't entirely bad - James Earl Jones was enjoyable in a supporting role. But Field of Dreams was so lacking in substance and conflict and tension that it failed to be anything other than boring.

Open Range review

 Number 817 on the top 1000 films of all time is the 2003 Revisionist Western 'Open Range,' directed, produced and starring Kevin Costner.

Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charley Waite (Kevin Costner) are two cattlemen hired to drive a herd across the state of Montana. But they quickly get on the wrong side of the local town mayor Denton Baxter (Michael Gambon.)

This Western strongly reminded me of the great Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960's. Of course, I'm talking about Sergio Leone who dominated the genre with his "Dollars Trilogy." Costner employed the same fantastic cinematography that made those old Westerns so visually stunning to watch. I loved the sweeping visuals of the great American landscape. It really emphasises the immensity and isolation of living in such an expanse.

Unfortunately, Costner traded off great cinematography with a plodding narrative. The pacing was slower than it had any right to have been. Except for the ending, which we'll get to, much of the pivotal violence happens off-screen. For example, Baxter's men attack Spearman and Waite's two ranch-hands killing one and badly injuring the other. We knew this was coming, so there was no surprise reveal. But because we didn't see this violence, we don't get to see Baxter's true villainy - or, in this case, his hired gun Butler (Kim Coates) who led the attack. Either way, Gambon's presence as a villain was severely hurt.

In the build-up to the climatic sequence, we get lots of banter between the two leads delivered in Duvall's most gravelly and Costner's all-American tones. And this wasn't the most interesting to watch. Waite also purses a relationship with the doctor's sister Sue Barlow (Annette Benning) which I found a little unbelievable. An attractive older woman like Benning has managed to stay single for just long enough for the cowboy Costner to sweep her off her feet?

We plod along to the final gunfight between Spearmen, Waites, and Baxter, and his posse. By all accounts, this should have been the most exciting part of the film, but we spent so long getting here that I had almost lost interest, The super-powered guns and questionable physics did little to help things either.

To be honest, I've never been keen on Westerns. Sure, they look great on-screen, but cowboys has never been something that's interested me. Open Range did little to change that opinion.

JFK review

 Number 306 on the top 1000 films of all time is Oliver Stone's epic political thriller: JFK.

Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is the former New Orleans district attorney. After President Kennedy is assassinated, the Warren report declares that Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) was the lone perpetrator. Garrison has his doubts and reopens the investigation. He inadvertently unearths a massive conspiracy theory. The huge ensemble cast includes Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and John Candy.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a film needs a very good reason to be over three hours long. And it needs an excellent reason to be three hours and twenty-five minutes long. JFK had no such reason. it was one of the longest films I've seen and far longer than it needed to be.

It's safe to say that Kennedy's assassination is one of the most controversial topics in history. Few people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting as a lone wolf. The true perpetrators range from the mob to the CIAS to the Russians to the Cubans. Any one of these explored in isolation could have made a very interesting film, but where Stone went was how he tried to connect everything. Reportedly, he read two dozen books on Kennedy's assassination and his research team read 100-200 books. And it was like Stone tried to include every single scrap of information he could find. This made for a bloated, unfocussed film.

The supporting cast was huge and certainly could have been trimmed down. Garrison's many deputies were very similar to each other and I regularly mixed them up. Some of them were also ultimately pointless to the plot as they were involved in subplots that went nowhere. Bill Broussard (Michael Rooker) is one such deputy who becomes uncomfortable at how the conspiracy begins to implicate LBJ. He betrays his former boss by starting to work for the feds, but we never see any consequences for this.

Stone was heavily criticised for taking liberties with history. But my issue isn't so much was he included, but what he didn't, which was nothing. He included everything which was not necessary. I could have done without seeing how Garrison's investigation was affecting his family life. This would have cut the film down a lot.

And everything was slow that after a while it became very tedious. Much of the film were characters sitting in a room either quietly talking or loudly yelling at each other. As such, a lot of the supporting cast was wasted. Gary Oldman did very little as did Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. With so many famous faces, it's inevitable that you can't give them all the attention they deserve and a lot of them did fall by the wayside. Although, John Candy and Joe Pesci gave memorable performances and Costner's ending monologue was particularly powerful.

The film did have the potential to live up to its ambitious premise, but if you have to watch a film in two halves then it is too damn long.