thoward1223

I just felt compelled to post this because somehow... and I can't even begin to understand how... people and even professional critics like this movie. I don't get it. I loved Evil Dead and I still don't get it, because this wasn't campy -- it was just bad. Seemed thrown together very quickly, with a few scenes stripped whole from Evil Dead 2 and some of the worst writing ever... It just didn't feel like camp. It felt like dreck. And the ending was telegraphed so early in the film that the last 30 minutes were almost physically painful to watch. And yet... the Washington Post said the ending was a shocker.

If this wasn't a Sam Raimi film, no one would even have suggested it was supposed to be funny. They would have just figured that it sucked. Maybe that's his joke on everyone, after all.

Just horrifying. I like Cameron Crowe, I sat through Vanilla Sky (although mostly just for the soundtrack), and I think Orlando Bloom is likable enough. But I wanted this movie to end more than any movie I've seen in years. It just seemed like one big contrived emotional breakdown in search of a catharsis that never arrives.

Here's the thing. The last section of the movie -- in which Orlando Bloom's character follows the map laid out by Kirsten Dunst's creepy stalker-ish character to finally open up and find himself and blah blah blah -- was also awful, and staggeringly dumb. BUT -- that could have been the basis for a real movie. Not the map part, just the wandering around and finding himself part. Maybe not an original movie, but a real one. Instead it was just one more disconnected sequence tacked onto a whole slew of them, and it made me angry that the movie was made in the first place.

Hated it.

Intelligent but very heavy-handed about its purpose, and it's virtually impossible to care about any of the dozens of characters because we know so little about them or their motivations. And the extraordinarily complicated plot, with so many characters and subplots, feels only loosely integrated even toward the end of the movie -- or as if the integration is a little forced.

My biggest problem, though, is that I just didn't really understand the point. Showing problems without shedding any real light on them, without providing any insight, and without really making the characters experiencing those problems fully human -- which would make the problems all the more compelling -- just seems empty. It's a movie, after all, not an investigative news article -- and a fictional movie at that. Just caring about an issue doesn't mean you know how to make a good movie.

I saw this movie almost accidentally. Didn't know anything about it, really, and the movie I was really planning to see that afternoon -- Ingmar Bergman's "Saraband" -- was no longer playing. So I picked this one, not even realizing it was in French.

Right away I liked it, though. There's something wonderful about seeing an old, black-and-white film noir on a big screen. Very tight plotting, believable story, pretty good dialogue (assuming the translation was good) that holds up well after all this time, and very well-filmed. And although I don't usually love Miles Davis, the music was perfect for the film. Smoky, tense, and elegant. Great atmosphere, and a pretty cool way to spend an afternoon in downtown Washington.