KevNJeff

Take ONE KIND OF JOKE - and beat it over and over again until your audience is dead. The squirm joke is the only thing happening here. The filmakers tried to seee how many different ways they could show people speaking inappropriately (the queen of such comedy? Julia Louis Dreyfus. OF COURSE she's in this disaster). Unwatchable. Horrible. A massive step backwards. Simply catastrophic. You want to see this movie done right? It's called "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner"... thoughtful, intelligent, beautifully acted. This is pure unadulterated garbage. So much talent wasted: Jonah Hill has proven he knows how to act. He's a mess here. Cameo's that are nothing short of bizarre (Richard Benjamin? WHAT???? WHY????) Matt Walsh's character just made me want to stop breathing and leave this world.

Ah - so close, so close. This could have been a SENSATIONAL film - (my favorite movie of all time is 2001: A Space Odyssey). Instead, they chopped up the time line and forgot that dialog is meant to be heard, understood and processed by the audience. Fully 3/4 of all the dialog in this film was lost to this audience member. Poor diction from the actors, poor recording equipment, accents... I have no idea WHY I wasn't allowed to understand the dialog. After a point I assumed it wasn't important. That's like saying the notes of music aren't important in a symphony.

The other major detraction was the chopped up time line. I am so sick of this gimmick. Stop it. NOW. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Just tell that GD story. Beginning - middle - end. We don't need you to take the scenes, splice 'em up, toss 'em in the air, and tape them together willy-nilly. It's stupid, annoying and adds absolutely NOTHING to the experience, except perhaps to show your insecurity as an artsy-fartsy movie maker.

To reiterate: if they would have looped the dialog and left the time line linear, this would have been a SENSATIONAL film. Instead... a fail. No wonder it was released to video.

Oh and by the way - the alien is an OCTOPUS. That's almost as lame as the reason behind the conflict in Star Wars was.... TAXES.

Stop treating me like I don't have a brain.

I'm not going to do a full review of the film - I'll offer these bullet points: 1. Cinematography was distracting & annoying. So many closeups with hand-held cameras... flattering ONLY to Tomei. Do we really need to see just how huge Jonah Hill's chin has gotten? 2. Superb performances by the Actors... excellent chemistry.

3. The marketing people need to be fired. A reprint of Peter Traver's Rolling Stone review was prominently displayed on a 6' high signboard in the lobby of the 'plex in SF where I saw the film. I couldn't believe I had just seen the same film - this film is NOT an uproarious comedy. It is (at best) a DRAMEDY - but mostly it's a closeup examination of some broken people who are trying to implement some fixes. I never laughed once... I mostly cringed....

I was fortunate enough to see this film at the Sundance Film Festival, and while I was ostensibly in Park City for skiing, this film will stand out in my memory as the high point of the trip. Poignant, heartfelt, authentic, beautifully acted, outstanding direction, incredible script - I could go on...

When the director of the film came out to address the audience before the screening, he commented about all the love that went into this film. This "touchy-feely" stuff tends to make me a bit uneasy, but in fact, every frame of this picture showed that love.

This film is so utterly honest with it's subject - a gay man dying of AIDS, post 9/11 - that you wonder how a film like "Philadelphia" is still regarded in such high esteem. As a gay man, I felt "Philadelphia" was fraudulent - unreal - pure Hollywood sap. (I won't ever forget the scene when Hank's character, covered with KS lesions, is handed a newborn baby to cuddle. Yeah, that'd happen...)

If you want the real thing, check out this amazing, wonderful film - we now just have to pray this masterpiece finds a distributor.

The auditorium I saw this film in at Sundance probably held 1500 people. There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

... well, hard to say. It might very well be the bottom of the barrel.... rock bottom. Worst animated flick from Disney EVER. Trainwreck of a film. Sitch is horrible - not funny, not cute, not amusing, not appalling. Just bad and boring. Family Setup (orphaned kids, teenage older sister about to lose younger little sister)... lame. How could an animator blow the chance to draw Hawaii? They did here. Same with the outer space sequences. How they spent $80,000,000 is incomprehensible. Pitiful.

...as the best, shining example of why actors shouldn't direct themselves.

Bill Paxton's performance was agonizingly bad - a trip to the dentist would have been more pleasurable. I sat through this film hoping against hope that the kid would just haul off and kill his dad, in hopes the movie would be more watchable. Sadly - Paxton's character stays with the movie almost to the end. Pathetic.

Spielberg has done the impossible - he's actually made a movie worse than "1941" - although we all found it very amusing that he managed to make a visual reference to that horrid film in this, his newest worst film.

This train-wreck of a film is heavily populated with visual references to previous works by Spielberg & Kubrick. Never mind the mind-numbingly stupid story about a mother's love, pinnochio and fairy tales. The rambling, boring, and ultimately stupid story line couldn't support this self-indulgent homage to Spielberg's past works, and was utterly disrespectful of Kubrick's legacy.

These visual references that populate the film include the extra-terrestrials from Close Encounters, the ferris wheel from 1941, a wheelchair-bound actor from Dr. Strangelove, musical passages reminiscent of 2001... the list goes on. In fact, the only pleasurable part of this horrid piece of dreck is figuring out where the references were placed. They weren't hidden - the challenge was trying to stay awake to find them.

Speaking of music - I'll never go to another movie scored by John Williams. He's tapped out - finished - kaput. His best work was done years ago, and all he's doing now is recycling old passages we've heard many, many times before. Considering Spielberg was pretty much doing the same thing as he put together this mish-mash of undeveloped storylines, it provides for an utterly unsatisfying experience. Consider my writing this review a cathartic passage - I'm attempting to cleanse myself after having sullied my moviegoing experience. I chose my titles carefully and try to avoid pop-culture garbage. This time, though, I really stepped in it.

Pretty messed up movie - should have been campier... Adam Sandler's contorted face and annoying speech impediment made this film hard to watch - but the scene with Ozzy makes it all worthwhile. Truly hysterical pop-culture joke included in this scene.

Being a member of the lowly masses who has more than a little difficulty deciphering pentamic diameter (sp?), I went into a special showing of this film wondering if I was going to get lost yet again while trying to understand what the hell these people were talking about.

Even though the production appeared to stick very closely to Shakespearean dialogue, I was still pleased and delighted to find I could understand not only the plot, but the character motivations... their demons, their pain. Not since Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet have I had such an easy time of following a Shakespearean story.

The updating and placing of the story in New York City, into the ruthless environment of big business in the new Millenium worked very well - and special kudos should go to the location manager. New York is always photogenic, but the treatment of the big apple in this production is a particularly compelling.

Only complaint goes to the soundtrack - the constant funeral dirge, in it's many flavors, started getting a bit annoying. Nonetheless, the play's the thing, and if you like Shakespeare's storys, but have some trouble with his way of speaking, check this out. It's not a light nite out at the movies, but it's damn good and it'll stick with you.

The problem I, and everybody else in my party, had with this film, was its' apparent inability to decide what exactly it was trying to do. Was this a psychological thriller? Was this a ghost story? Was this a horror film? A scene that featured a young teen with the back of his head blown off as he turns away from the camera seemed to suggest this was a horror/ghost story type of film, but the script verged on more thoughtfullness than that. Pensive performances punctuated this schizo feeling. The film had dangling story lines throughout - but we all admitted, the twist at the end of the movie salvaged it. We saw a sneak preview, and the audience, too, seemed to agree with us. Some fool brought their 7 year old child to the screening, and the kid, seemingly bored out of his mind, started tossing his hat up into the air. Somebody hollared out, "If your bored, why don't you leave?" Uh, nobody said he was bored, but it was a good supposition.