Reviews

A god-awful mess. Ineptly staged and filmed. Clumsy, wooden, static, immature, and grating. Cukor was still learning the ropes, I guess. Life's too short. Don't bother. Why not give it one star then? Because there are a few witty lines. And Constance Bennett is easy on the eyes. I think the low point of the film is when the portly black housekeeper stops the director (played by a terrible actor) and tells him that she has talent. She starts to sing "All of Me." She is completely off key, so he grabs her hands and hauls her fully dressed into the swimming pool. Like I said, it's just good awful.

Illogical, poorly acted, poorly conceived. My 13-year-old son dissected it brilliantly, laying out all the blunders the writers made. Even the primary set looked like phony crap. When nothing feels real, when plot holes are ignored, it's impossible to instill fear in the intelligent.

Terrible, lifeless, dreary tale. Boring, predictable. Nothing but shoe leather and screen-waits. Henry Fonda is about as Italian as a stalk of Kansas corn. This gives proof to the adage that no movie is better than its script. Even Hitchcock needed great writing.

Terrible film. Tuesday Weld is wonderful and gorgeous as ever and her performance is truly effective. But Rowdy McDowell is just terrible. He's about ten years too old for the role and his mannered, British satirical style is entirely in opposition to the material. They needed someone sexy, charismatic, and anarchic. The story hinges on it Young Jack Nicholson comes to mind. But with an overacting prig at the center of it, the whole thing collapses within minutes. I struggled to get through it and finally game up. I bought it because someone recommended it as this sexy, funny film, but it's anything but. The 60s were littered with little movies like this, now all but forgotten and for good reason. Avoid at all costs.

Sometimes for fun, I will read the worst reviews of a movie that I think is brilliant. I did it just now for The Drop, which I watched just two nights ago, and was amazed at the depths of my fellow man's stupidity. To hear fools say that nothing happens in this movie is a sad testament to the lack of sensitivity and awareness of some moviegoers. As brilliant as the cast and the director are, the real star of this movie is the screenplay. The subtle sophistication with which Dennis Lehane continually ratchets up the suspense is just incredible. It builds and builds and builds, and it's hard not to know that something big and terrible is going to happen.... I found the last ten minutes as satisfying an ending as any I have watched in recent memory. Don't miss this movie.

The film is small, uneventful, slow, hideously gory at times but never, ever scary, with an overall patina of pretension. I was mostly restless and couldn't wait for it to end. It is largely well directed and decently acted, however. Ashley Judd is brave, but simply doesn't have the chops for such a difficult role. She is terribly self-conscious; she cannot even think without acting thinking. Harry Connick is spectacular. His is the most 3-dimensional performance in the film. But whatever good work there is is for naught. Because it is all in the service of barren, limited material. It's based on a play, you see, and that's how it feels. Bill Friedkin did a fairly terrific job, considering the script. Maybe this will convince some folks to give him one last chance to direct something of more scope. When the movie was over, I felt as though I had been liberated from jail.

Unforgettable

Tsotsi is gorgeous, riveting, poignant, and thrilling. Not only is it a first-rate piece of storytelling, but it also takes the viewer into a world of South African poverty and crime that he has never seen before. Director/writer Gavin Hood offers us a tale of tragic redemption and uncommon poetry in a subculture of the most abject immorality. Truly unforgettable.

The only work in recent times to which this movie can be compared is City of God. There, too, the viewer is brought into a world of poverty and crime he probably never knew existed. It is a world so bleak that it forces the viewer to examine his own morality and wonder how much of the civility he takes for granted in his life is merely the luxury of the well fed and comfortable. These characters live on the edge and their primary passion is survival.

What makes Tsotsi, in the end, a finer film than City of God is that it offers a more complex sense of hope; it reminds us in an honest and unsentimental way that inside even the hardest cases there is a soul, which is never beyond redemption

James Dodson is a magician. Here, he has taken a fairly simple story and about a low budget and somehow managed, working both as producer and directer, to craft a beautiful, polished, splendid tale of enchantment, romance, and danger. The performances are strong, the visuals lovely, and the action breakneck. A strong recommend for children and families. Be sure to check out a particularly funny performance by Richard Kind, as the Wizard.