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Okay, the character of Dr. Eddie Jessup is kind of a pompous ass, and there are a few groaner moments of, call it, self-importance.

But this movie breaks real ground.

One of my all time favorites.

And I'd like to point out that everyone is crazy about the much-touted and notoriously-expensive hallucination sequences, ...

Of course if you've seen Russel's "Tommy," some of the over-the-top sequences will look familiar and tinged with peculiar British-isms. And then there's the ending - well, it's controversial, that's for sure - anticlimax or not ?

But for me the most electrifying parts are the ensemble cast acting.

In the scene where Blair Brown is trying to cope with the trauma of the events in the isolation tank room, there's a very beautifully conceived long single shot through house windows. Russel needs credit especially for the argument between Balaban and Haid - some of the best acting I've ever seen - character actors hardly EVER get to put this kind of stage-acting energy on film. It stays with me still. They truly seem absolutely furious with each other, their lines overlap, it's absolutely convincing.

Some of the greatest effects of this movie are simply good movie craft - when Jessup first sees the love of his life walk through the door, fantastically back-lit, and the music comes up and cross-fades into the next scene - it's breathtaking.

It's the moments like that, and the very intro of the movie, with the slow title crawl, the deadpan lines read by Balaban, the first shots of Hurt in the tank, the eerie music ... This movie still stands out, still looks good,... and stands superior to other, more recent imaginings of internal hallucination become external.

"Cold Mountain" - a movie that you can watch.

Script: tight, if you can mentally insert the "Years later..." card between a few scene cuts, and I know you can. A few Oscar-bait monologues are clunky in that adapted-from-the-novel way... but that's just me, I like to be shown rather than told by a character what they're going through.

Production design: convincing, believable, with that old movie-magic feeling of being a window into the way people lived oh so long ago and far away... (though when Kidman walks in front of it, the jarring incongruity jumps out that, despite her partial grime-over, there simply were no women as pretty as Nicole Kidman 140 years ago. Squinty-eyed pout-machine Zellweger looks more like Appalachian mountain breeding stock.)

Cinematography: Amazing. Everything has the natural light look - absolutely absorbing. One of the most beautiful winter snow scenes ever filmed.

Story: Good Guys good, Bad Guys bad... with their character conflict/resolutions built right in. A series of long, protracted tragedies you don't have to see comin' round the mountain when they come. But still, the familiar crudeness and cruelty of events have that original-source feel - when life was more of the hardscrabble scrape than the dreamworld we live in.

Casting: Ahhhhh... this is where the movie both succeeds and fails.

It's mostly inspired. Jude Law and Brendan Gleeson are very good... no, they're excellent.

The character actors are all first-rate - I mean, you could SMELL the backwoods witch goat-lady.

Jack White does a fine understated job, though I found it impossible to stop seeing Jack White and thinking how cool it was that Jack White was in this movie, and wondering if Jack White was really playing his instrument.

(It couldn't have been more amazing if his character's name was "Jack White" too - I mean, that even sounds like the name of a traveling mountain musician. Anyhow, the point is it kind of breaks the spell. )

And Philip Seymore Hoffman is good in anything.

But this movie belongs to Ray Winstone. His Confederate villain is more than just menacing. He's got the violence of battlefield madness in his quiet voice. (Can you believe he's British ? His Southern accent wasn't just convincing, it was FLAWLESS, something that even American-born Yankees can't manage.)

I know villains never get For Your Consideration treatment - but this one should've instead offfffffffff..... (*drum roll*)

ZELLWEGER-MANIA !

She won award after award for this. People gushed about how great she was as the comic relief. Hm. I didn't find anything she said or did particularly comic. And I could spend a little while detailing why she shouldn't have all those awards. Cause Renée Zellweger stinks.

Her accent is inconsistent and drawling - it's Appalachian mountain folk accent, Renée, not Savannah, not 'Bama, not Texas or Nawlinz... Study the dialect tapes, honey. Amazingly, she's up against British, Australian, and Irish lead actors, and yet her accent is the weakest. Maybe that's why she kept changing her mind about it as the movie progressed. (Do like Kidman does - pick one wrong accent, and stick with it.)

Zellweger plays her character with three emotions - mad, madder, and wounded-&-mad. But it's not the bitter anger of a young woman whose life has already let her down and had to come up fighting - it's more like the pouting petulance of a teenager who spends most of the day brooding cause she's mad at her mom. She's so ADORABLE when she pouts ! Oh no, her pouting is out of control ! Ha ha, oh, Renée !

How does Zellweger keep getting work ? Beats me. I wonder if her British affectation is any more convincing.

Who would've been better in this role ? Oh, I could say something cruel like, "Hold an open casting call and throw a rock."

But instead, let me ask who might have been a WORSE casting choice for Renée Zellweger's role. The answer springs immediately to mind: Winona Rider. An only slightly worse choice.

Also, it seems Nicole Kidman is in the movie. "Cold Mountain" may have originally been a vehicle for her. I like Kidman, and she's done good work elsewhere; it's just that this was just not a standout role for her. Next to the wailing klaxon horn of Zellweger's acting, Kidman seems merely to perform adequately. And again, it doesn't help that she's just too Hollywood-pretty for the part.

Truthfully, both female leads could've been cast better. Because the other issue is that not for a MOMENT did I believe that Jude Law's and Nicole Kidman's characters were attracted to each other.

Sting, who used to be a rock and roll singer, wrote the theme song that uses the word "ain" in the title, which just gives me Reason #98 to want to kick him in the *ss. But I can't fault the movie's music at all. Good score, great sound.

So there you go. "Cold Mountain." A movie that you can watch.

A lot of soft-core sex, yes... after about the fifth sex scene they become not only gratuitous, but untitillating and annoying. In fact, some of the sex just blatantly screams "fanservice" (anime term).

The politics are heavy-handed and sledgehammer style. Yes, W.'s there, playing a demonic presence - but somehow it's less insulting to him than, say, a European movie would've been.

Great bizarre surreal stuff in the first 45 minutes. Kind of liked where it was going.

There's a lot of it that reminded me of manga mixed with 60's Italian surreal trippy movies. But then the last 1/2 of the movie just seems like they ran out of money and ideas.

After it hits the hour mark, you start to feel the momentum running down... some of the best ideas that you expect to be going somewhere just unravel. Characters are used up and disposed of, or sometimes just disposed of. A whole scene plays out in a cave that I thought would never ever ever end. I don't mind that they didn't spoon-feed the essential message of the film but... What WAS the message ? No clue. If any Amer/Euro etc. movie started dropping philosophy-bombs like this in an attempt to prove how smart it is, it'd be laughed off the street. But since they're spouted by a kawaii Japanese girl, well, then, bless her heart.

A strange title sequence at the end of the end credits, too.

Some budgetary constraints are very apparent - sound effects, many editing points, and one (I hesitate to even call it) shootout was hilariously awful. Some very cheap makeup jobs.

I compare this to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure" - they're different kinds of movie but "Cure" also has a surreal sense - the characters feel like real people and it's terrifying. "Sachiko" just leaves me... pfft. nah. Good enough.

A lot of great things about this movie. Realism, visual effects, the Japanese acting, fantastic. Tora! Tora! Tora! is well written and well paced - the editing is tight, if dizzying and confusing.

Problem is, Fleischer's ham-fisted directing and some lousy post-production.

Honestly, he's NOT a good director. Besides the great actors in this movie (Robinson, Robards, Balsam, etc.), all the other actors deliver flat, unconvincing, hackneyed performances. What excuse could you have for framing that cuts off people's heads, or leaves 2/3 of the top of the frame empty to no artistic purpose ? And ohhhh, those sound effects - besides being the same wall-to-wall clichés, the mix is so bad, whole lines of dialog spoken RIGHT into the camera disappear completely.

Contrasted with the Japanese-directed segments, his weakness shows terribly.

He wasn't one of Hollywood's great directors. How dare I slander the work of the man who brought us Million Dollar Mystery, Red Sonja, Conan the Destroyer, Amityville 3-D... ? Guess I'm a jerk. Point is, someone else should've directed Tora! Tora! Tora!, and it would truly be a classic.

Tim Robbins must've been attracted to this project by the aroma of anti-corporate-hegemony / subvert-the-dominant-paradigm.

Ah, but underneath the power-corrupts message (how many hyphenated terms can I use ?), the message, as well as the last line of the movie, is, "Human knowledge belongs to the world !" (cue triumphant music, freeze-frame on fresh-faced grinning rebel heroes basking in paparazzi approbation).

And fake news reporters wrap up the story lines. That's convenient. Seriously. It really is a great convenience - I'm not griping.

I mean, the plot "twists" and tense thriller moments are actually paced well - not that they're any surprise, but nice tight editing. The script is weak (example line: "When you kill people, they DIE.")

It's always a challenge to have tense thriller moments comprised of people typing on laptops, staring at a screen with pained expressions and saying:

*Click, click* "There... "

*click, click, wait for 'Loading' bar* "C'mon, C'MON ! "

"Get me those IP addresses !"

"But..."

"JUST DO IT !"

So the villain, a handsome Bill Gates with hired goons, is foiled when every worldwide broadcast is interrupted with incriminating video of him declaring, "The people of this town are morons ! I will get no comeuppance !", and then Victoria Jackson embraces Weird Al and Michael Richards celebrates and... oh, wait, that's UHF. Or was it Dabney Coleman ? I seem to recall some movie where Dabney Coleman was the bad guy and he got broadcast saying nasty things. No, wait, it was that Eddie Murphy movie, and it was that senator, and somehow Joe Don Baker was involved...

Well, anyway, this movie goes all-out with this well-worn device, using all the prerequisite reaction shots: passers-by on a sidewalk stopping to watch a shop window TV - cut to mom and pop in their rocking chairs, sitting by the old B&W with the 6 inch screen - cut to the crowded barroom staring gape-mouthed at a screen... Same shot sequence as the opening of "Anchorman," in fact. Except add in stock helicopter flyovers of Times Square, the Ginza, etc., the big screens making the big payback even big big bigger.

What a nice idea. The basic assumption is that wider dispersal means more believable - the broadcast is SO big, so worldwide, that no amount of spin could fix it. Why, if it were just a local TV interruption, Mr. Big Bad could spin it away, no problem - but it interrupted Leno. In Japan !

I like the idea of media as a weapon. "Aha, you have a gun in my face, but the tables have turned cause I got BAD PUBLICITY on you !"

And it has to be something that will get the bad guy arrested - in real life, any corporate monster is going to be much more afraid of shareholders dumping stock than any actual jail time.

Anyway, so, the moral of the story, besides "when you kill people, they die," is: Human Knowledge Belongs to the World !

So those programmers were murdered for their code, then the hero declares that he's "given back the code" to the dead programmers by releasing it to the public - so, somehow, making the source code they wrote available for download appeases their revenge-minded spirits ? Are the restless earth-bound ghosts that tech-savvy ?

This movie actually tries to make a moral stance out of what amounts to industrial espionage and property theft, aka the very real problem of software piracy, by referencing the Open-Source movement. Hey, I'm all for open-source software - but it's not the SAME as pirated software. Not the same at all.

What are we saying, that intellectual property isn't real ? That it doesn't deserve to be protected, but just to be released to the wild ? Well, then, why should programmers work at all ?

It's just a simple-minded movie ending, I know - a Robin Hood story, or read in other political terms, a socialist fable. But this robbing from the rich to give to the poor happens instantly and effortlessly. It's not swiping a sack of gold and then stopping door-to-door and handing it out. Buy the domain name, set up a server, and revenge is SWEET ! So, in fact, this denies that there's any value to the property at all. Human knowledge belongs to the world - thanks, programmers, thanks content-creators, now don't be selfish, don't be greedy, just fork it over. Your work belongs to everyone. The world's benefit is your reward. Our heartiest thanks !

Anyway, if I were a programmer, my job would be cut and outsourced to India, and I'd quit the business and go to culinary school to learn to bake. Yeah - Let them steal CAKE - let 'em just TRY ! Mwah-ha-ha.

I own every single episode of MST3K, have seen each many times. Been an ardent fan since 1991.

To this day, I find e. 323 "The Castle of Fu-Manchu" the most stomach-churningly bad one of all - not that it's the most inept, most intrinsically AWFUL Mistied movie of all time - I leave that to "Beast of Yucca Flats" and "Manos"...

But for me, personally, this one punches me in the gut and kidneys. Other MisTies may disagree - but I say Bring on the Coleman Francises, your Ray Dennis Stecklers, your Bert I. Gordons... Leave me OUT of Fu-Manchu land. The levels of "bad-good" and "bad-bad" get turned upside-down when a movie is Mistied - but no amount of riffing by Joel and the bots can save this technicolor-spraypainted dog turd.

So much I'm confused about - this is a Spanish film made in Turkey ? did they just completely run out of money before post-production ? Has any movie ever had worse color printing/timing ? Did they not think anyone would notice B&W stock footage spliced back-to-back with color soundstage shots ? Did they just lose 50% of the film and spliced together as best they could ? Just what on earth was it about ? What was with the ending ? What happened ?

I think the reason this one MST3K movie makes me so livid mad and sickened more than any other is that, up to a certain point in the film-making process, "The Castle of Fu Manchu" had a budget and some promise - there are some nice costumes, some good casting, pretty women, and cool locations.

But in the end, I feel like I've watched some guro/snuff film - physically sickened. In fact, the last time I had the flu, nauseous, retching up everything I'd ever eaten EVER until there was nothing left to reverse-peristalsyze but stomach lining, I couldn't help but have the movie's bored, listless mid-tempo title music playing in my head while I dry-heaved and my head spun and I cursed the day I was born.

In conclusion, if I met this movie on the street, I would slap it in front of its own mother and spit on its shoes.

Other MST3K movies suck. "The Castle of Fu Manchu" FAILS.

I'm a white guy. Saw this movie in theater where the entire crowd (full house) was nearly all black. So I'm watching this movie, realizing that every single white character on screen (with exception to a charisma-free Sandler) is utterly terrible: one-note, shallow, flat, weird/creepy, etc. (oh yeah, the former governor of Minnesota, too, but as he's wearing an "X" jersey, I suppose a self-deprecating reference to the XFL debacle, he fits in the last category). And all Texans are racist and sadistic, by nature of being Texan. Okay, well, I don't know many Texans, maybe MTV does. But I'm not just getting my liberal-white-guilt dander up: this movie REALLY is racist, and very violent - I mean, not just football rough-and-tumble, but I mean just taking grim pleasure in punching and kicking, in very personal "gangsta beat-down" kinda ways. Everybody loves to see a prisoner get punched in the stomach with a truncheon, repeatedly, with a sound effect like a giant slab of meat splatting on a marble floor - but after four or five dozen times it loses its dramatic impact. The race baiting is really so deliberate, it's insulting: the filmmakers could defend themselves by claiming that the one scene where "n*****" is used as the worst possible fly-off-the-handle taunt (and practically right INTO the camera, repeatedly) is an indictment of racism. It's not at all; it's re-enforcing stereotypes and reactions, re-enforcing subservience vs. dominance roles, re-enforcing grinning complicity vs. dignity, as well as just being the basest kind of audience manipulation. Oh, the movie CONDEMNS racism on the surface, sure - and thank God, because I don't think enough people knew that racism was bad. And it IS a prison movie - so naturally, every black person you see in the movie is a criminal. What's funny is that no crimes happen in the movie - a little harmless B&E, a little sabotage, but the only violence perpetrated by anyone in the movie is by the white drawling guards, and mostly upon Adam Sandler - and normally, that would be entertaining enough for me.

To give the movie credit where credit is due: a bunch of great songs all the way through. What a sweet music supervision deal this movie must've been, for MTV, for Sony, for a bank of happy lawyers !

Oh yeah, another message of the movie: McDonalds is better than drugs or sex. Believe it ! What's their big popular sandwich, a something something with cheese ? Oh, they repeated the product name at least twenty times, how could I forget ?

I like football movies cause I like football. Sometimes movie football is more drama than realism, and that's okay. This movie moved away from the realistic, and moved away from the drama as well. Football is a plot device, a tool, providing many soundtrack song placement opportunities.

Oh yeah - this movie, in one of the opening bits, also shows how much fun driving while stinking drunk is - fun and ultimately harmless. Many cars get totalled, terrible wreckage, flying down the 101, then BOOM, our hero stumbles out drunk as hell, with maybe just a scratch on his head. But it's okay ! The wrecked cars are all cops, no one gets hurt, and it's all good fun. See, honey?, this is what grownups do to let off steam !

Shame on Chris Rock for being in this turkey. For a comedian who's gotten so much mileage out of race stereotypes and sub-textual racism in society, he's not doing his beloved peoples any favors here - and he doesn't really do anything funny.

One bright glimmer of hope for comedy: Tracy Morgan as a classic-flavor prison bitch. He plays it to the hilt, and makes it as funny as the boneheaded script would let him. Good for him.

Shame on everyone else. There's a lot of them to be ashamed - all the way through the movie, I kept saying to myself, "Damn, HE'S in this, too ? And there's THAT guy !". Thanks, MTV power ! Now see if you can Premiere-plugin airbrush the age spots off of Courtney Cox's cleavage.

I walked out of this movie during the last third, wandered around the theatre, dropped in on other movies. Came back just in time for an anticlimax that Bert Reynolds, I'm sure, had insisted upon in his contract - HE was going to get the big winning touchdown. Hoo. Ray.

Oh, I see that Adam Sandler's production company is called "Happy Madison" - Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, very clever. See, if I ever made just one crappy horrible sports/retarded flavored comedy after another, I'd want people to remember me for them, too.

So what was up with that "Punch Drunk Love" crap, anyway ? Who thought THAT was funny ?

Seriously, I just have to come to the conclusion that the reason Adam Sandler did a great movie there was because of P.T. Anderson, because his talent is of a school-cafeteria-lunch table clown level.

One great thing about this movie, too - good sound. A very good sounding mix on this movie. Good sound.

well, re: the first comment, I can't imagine what either Purple Rose of Cairo or Last Action Hero have to do with Burn Hollywood Burn, or with each other, or with ANYthing... but anyway...

"IF YOU LIKE FLY-FISHING, AND ENJOY THE CRISP, TART TASTE OF STRAWBERRY-RHUBARB PIE, YOU'LL LOVE THIS NEXT USER COMMENT..."

It's a fairly funny movie. It's always good to see Eric Idle working. Of course, now with "Spamalot" a huge hit, he's set like Mel Brooks.

Honest to god, maybe this movie is meant more as an "inside joke", but I feel like it was one that I got - Joe's point is that he was coerced into making a movie ("Showgirls") that was so bad, he wished he could've done anything to prevent them from putting it out - because when they did, and it bombed, he couldn't help but take the blame.

Also, you get to see Jackie Chan stoking' some honeys, and Stallone flexing his ego. and the Alan Smithee gag ran for quite awhile.

I got the feeling the industry really HATED Ester-H. Where is he now, I wonder ? And why is this movie in the Bottom 100 ?