salfan2

Film school grads who want to do crime thrillers should look to Huston, Hitchcock and Don Siegel as much as they look to Ritchie and Tarantino. This is a triumph of slo-mo, shock cuts and lousy dialogue over genuinely intriguing content. A putative class-warfare underpining is the excuse for torture and mayhem. There is vistually no humor here at all, espceially for a theoretic "dark comedy". The acting is fairly good, I'd like to see the cast with a decent script and director. But this waste of time and talent ain't it.

Not as exciting as watching paint dry, but a terrific non-drug solution for insomnia. There is virtually no narrative, no dialogue, no character, no camera movement, no compelling reason to stay more than a half hour. There is a sex scene early on, that goes on way too long, and is about as unerotic as anything put on film. This is the Ukraine's submission for Best Foreign Film, which makes me really curious about the other films it defeated to win the honor. Or maybe not so curious.

This film deserves to be seen by any human being. there's been a massive disinformation campaign against the film, but the story it tells is true and moving. That fact that a nation and its blindly indifferent people to historical truth lie about a fact does not diminsh the power of the film Shame on Turkey and its Armenian genocide deniers!

There is a good reason to hire professional actors as opposed to your friends, no matter how photogenic they may be. This is a first time director who knows all about the camera and special effects, but knows NOTHING about actors and acting. This is the most annoying, sounding like they're reading dialog off the page troupe of screen actors I've ever seen. Nothing is convincing, it all sounds contrived. It's hard to tell if the script is any good or not. It's arrogant of this director to think that anyone can act. It's a craft, just like working the camera or doing special effects. He needs to attend some acting classes (like for a couple years) if he truly wants to be a director. The late Gordon Willis, a genius behind the camera, tried directing and it was abysmal. He never directed again. He admitted he couldn't work with the actors, and they were professionals with a decent track record in the past. This guy in certainly no genius, but he really needs to get his head straight about what constitutes believable screen acting. Or maybe he should just shoot landscapes and avoid working with actors and dialog entirely. This film will never get released, unless the director has a rich family and they can four-wall it like The Room, another paragon of acting art. But that was laughable, and culty, and developed a following. This is just uber-sincere and serious. And awful.

This filmmaker should have his license to create films revoked until he's actually lived some life, as opposed to regurgitating tone and moments from Woody Allen, Rohmer and Truffaut. But without their wit and intelligence. I just saw this dreadful waste of time at COLCOA in Los Angeles. I've never wanted to shoot an off-screen narrator in the larynx before, but the vapid, pointless words coming at the audience to tie the random bits together is painful to listen to. And the incessant piano music from Mozart and Chopin to give the movie some class, or provide an ironic counterpoint counts as some kind of elder master musical abuse. All of the talented actors are utterly wasted as they serve the one-dimensional puppetry manipulated by the writer/director to fulfill his desperate attempt to be humorous. This film is the problem with film-school geeks who've been unjustly praised for their early short work, but have NO idea how human beings actually behave.

Just saw the special Showtime preview of the show ON DEMAND, and it doesn't work. I can imagine the rhythm of the show working better in Manchester, England, but Chicago is not the American equivalent of Manchester, and it almost seems like it could have been shot in any generic blue collar area in any city in the US. And considering the series is supposed to star WH Macy, he is virtually absent from the entire pilot. He does a voice over for the first few minutes at the top, and is schlepped in drunk for the last minute of the episode. Oh, and there's some so-so humping that's neither especially sexy or funny, but is obligatory for a premium cable series. This one has loser stamped all over it.

Kevin has delivered some amazing performances over the years; this is not one of them. He is woefully miscast. He can do the self-justifying con and obsession very well, the orthodox Jewish spiritual identity, not so much. And this latter quality was intrinsic to Abramoff's. character. When you see Spacey praying, and talking about his need to found a Jewish school for his daughters, or a kosher restaurant in DC because he can't get decent corned beef, it's laughable and unconvincing. Kevin can't even fake a religious affinity, let alone trying to convince anyone he's actually spiritual. And Casino Jack actually was spiritual by the accounts of his intimates. That's what made his massive fraud and corruption all the more shocking. The film basically serves as a chance for Kevin to do a lot of so-so imitations of other actors in other films. They fell flat at the screening I attended.

The whole film depends on Spacey's interpretation, he's in practically every scene, therefore the film basically doesn't work.

They've assembled a Rolls Royce of talent for this, and every one performs admirably. The problem is, this is the WORST idea for a TV series since My Mother the Car. It is an Everest of a lousy idea to have a multiple personality mom as the motor for a half-hour series. It's a great showcase for Toni's acting talents...but that's what it boils down to, a stunt to showcase an actress's range. It was much better artistically and commercially when it was called The Tracy Ullman Show. Each character was fully developed as a sketch, and Tracy could return to each character week after week without having to worry about a narrative arc.

I liked Juno and think Diablo has a real ear and eye for quirky speech and behavior, but she doesn't know when an idea should be a movie or a TV series. This might have made an OK one-off film, where you have time for development and you're not bound by the 28 minute clock. But this just seems half baked and striving for something it never can achieve....a real family trying to cope with an amazingly rare syndrome that has lasted for 17 years!!!! Gimme a break. I liked Sybil and Sally Field justly earned her Emmy, but this stinker gives the syndrome a really bad and somewhat boring name.

This film deserves Stateside distribution. These are multiple stories of mostly middle-aged women within varying degrees of unhappy relationships who all meet to take belly dancing lessons initially to the disdain. of their neighbors ("only sluts would shake their hips and expose their bellies to men"). But the women are really doing it for themselves. It's a feel-good movie by the end, but aside from some not completely believable reversals on the parts of husbands, the film is beautifully drawn well-acted and very entertaining. The actress who plays Pasha is especially beautiful. But all the women in the film reveal their own beauty in their own ways.

The good news first: Fiona Shaw delivers a jaw-dropping, outrageously entertaining over the top performance as an inebriated rich matron who's alienated from everybody in her life and may hold a key to something important. She's got about 15 minutes of film time. And Mia Kirschner is really poignant and heartbreaking as the doomed Betty Short seen only in flashback during some black and white screen tests, with De Palma of all people supplying the voice-over commands to her offscreen. She has about 8 minutes of screen time. And that's it for the good stuff.

The rest of the film is an incomprehensible mess having very little to do with the Black Dahlia murder. It's well shot and beautifully composed for the most part......but the plot points and discoveries the characters make just don't add up at all! It's just a narrative mess, and I wonder how De Palma thinks he can get away with this. Does he think that an actual story that an audience can follow is unnecessary if you have nice tracking shots and startling compositions? I just don't get it.

This film is actually pretty dreadful on many levels. First the music is thuddingly melodramatic; it's like the producers saw the dailies and said "well...there's not much going on, but we'll fix it with the music". The pacing is often glacial, but most disastrously, the film is FATALLY MISCAST. Sean Penn is screeching and braying as Willie Stark, and during his long speeches about "the hicks" he gestures like John Belushi doing Joe Cocker. He simply is nothing, physically or temperamentally like Huey Long on whom the character is based. On the other hand, I bet Penn would have been great as the journalist Jack Burden, and certainly far superior to the miscast Jude Law who is unbelievable as an investigative journalist. Ironically James Gandolfini gives a good impression of what Willie Stark should be in the secondary role of Tiny Duffy. And Jackie Earle Haley is chilling and most effective with virtually no dialog as Sugarboy, Willie's gunsil. Almost every other actor, Hopkins, Winslet, Ruffalo is wasted in this totally unnecessary remake of a very good 40's film.

OK, maybe not...but it's not worth the slim chance cause this steaming turdball isn't incompetent enough to be really Ed Wood funny...but it's boring and insulting by equal measure. How did Josh Becker ever get a chance to direct anything? Oh that's right...he's a personal friend of Bruce and Rob Tapert's. Has nepotism ever yielded anything this truly worthless? I'd like to hear comments. Do you think the Sci-Fi channel will ever repeat showing this disaster? I know some people said they actually enjoyed this crud....but I bet they are shills who know the filmmakers. If they offered a Razzie for worst TV film of the year...this would certainly rank right up there!

I saw Alexander tonight, at what was the first large public screening of the movie, and is it a stinker. It's virtually incoherent, Alex speaks with an Irish brogue, his mother (Angelina Jolie) speaks with a vague Russian accent, it's violent as all hell..but amazingly not exciting. The battle scenes are impossible to figure out, and the film goes on wayyyy too long. Several people walked out of the screening. The tone and amazingly stiff clichéd dialog go back to the Joe Levine sword and sandal epics of the 1950's and 60's, the ones that were dubbed from Italian. I can't believe Stone wrote and directed this dreck. I normally enjoy his movies; they're certainly never boring. But this one is a snooze-a-thon. I see huge losses and empty theaters once the word gets out on this bomb. Oliver, go back to what you know, provocative modern day stories.