rraabfaber

Horrible. The worst possible script. Deplorable acting. A political agenda straight out of the Religious Right. Oh, and worst of all, a mostly naked (shivver!) Harvey Keitel. (That last comment was a spoiler, but it will have saved your eyeballs in case you thought of watching it.)

Keitel is supposedly an Italian who was raised in Afghanistan, which is where he converted to Islam. Yet, he speaks with a Chicago accent. F. Murray Abraham is an Islamic terrorist who we can't help feel is really a Jewish man playing his idea of a Muslim. The writer(s?) definitely had an political ax to grind. This is the sort of drivel that keeps us hating one another.

Did I mention this was bad? Or that it had no redeeming qualities whatsoever? Bad.

Really a dreadful film. I can certainly see the comparison to Bergman's Persona, which is a film I could never imagine having to watch again. The difference here is that it did not have the surrealism of Persona. It was total slice of life train-wreck cinema.

The performances were definitely stellar, but, as another viewer wrote, does that make it art? I could listen to my next door neighbors get drunk and have a fight and get the same effect. Honestly, films like this should not be allowed to be marketed in an attempt to recoup the studio's losses.

I think the fact that it was marked as a comedy by Blockbuster, and the trailer editing used clips to make us think it was a comedy was poor advertising. If I had thought it was a drama, I may or may not have watched it, but if I had, I wouldn't have felt so ripped off. Also, I will never ever trust another review by Peter Travers. How he thought this was a hilarious gut-busting film is beyond me.