ArrivederciBaby

I can't believe that this is the same director whose early career gave us the wonderfully human "My Life as a Dog", "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", "Once Around" and "Something to Talk About".

It was sad enough that Lasse Hallstrom's subsequent Miramax years ("The Cider House Rules", "Chocolat", "The Shipping News", "An Unfinished Life") had turned him into an increasingly grating supplier of glossy, soul-less Oscar-bait.

But nothing could have prepared me for the thoroughly hollow, painfully over-the-top cartoon that is "Casanova".

One of the film's central images - a hot air balloon - could not be a more appropriate metaphor.

Dreadful.

Lasse... Come Home!

Happened upon this pile of dung accidentally. Phoniest load of "reality" TV since "The Casino."

Dear producers - although you obviously think we're all morons, most of us really can tell the difference between written/prompted/acted "reality" and the real thing. Kind of like plastic barf versus actual barf.

Someone here wrote that this show's like a train wreck you can't look away from.

Actually, I could look away, and rather easily.

I'd say "nice try," but clearly that wasn't the case.

If only M. Night Shyamalan were half the genius he thinks he is, we might have a decent film-geek movie-maker on our hands (ala Spielberg or Tarantino). With each of his films since "The Sixth Sense" getting progressively more insipid, however, it appears that we merely have another hubris-driven windbag with a camera and a PR team. I'm sorry, but any filmmaker who interrupts the climax of his own film for a long and pointless cameo is clearly working from ego rather than artistic integrity. (Don't even get me started on the totally self-serving "Buried Secret of M. Night" TV debacle.) Boo, indeed.

4 out of 10 for a good William Hurt performance.