Reviews

While the promised story sounded fascinating it was a broken promise. What started off as unsubstantiated family stories, after the filmmaker's investigation, remained unsubstantiated family stories. No real proof was offered for anything and nothing was told to us that a general knowledge of history and common sense didn't already tell us, except for a few names of people who never did make it big in their particular field.

Couple that with constantly tilting, zooming, undulating motion of the camera on mostly impersonal historic still photos, surprisingly impersonal personal photos and lifeless re-enactments, it was one amateurish waste of time.

It did contain some great period music, but we did not need the entirety of several songs playing over the dizzying camera work without advancing the story in the least.

Over all it was 85 minutes of someone completely in love with a family legend that while sad and tragic, is really very commonplace in history and could have been told in full in about 7 minutes. And should have.

.. in this lazy, uninspired, homophobic, stereotype-laden piece of sitcom dung.

Metcalfe is the only one who seems to even be trying and even she falls onto the ledge of the overacting pit the rest of the cast wallows in on occasion. There are child actors on soap operas with more subtlety than even a single moment of this show. This show, should it last much longer, could just be a career killer for a couple members of the cast. The acting is just that bad!

While pilots can be uneven and not so great, the second episode will often then clean up and correct the problem areas. Or in this case, the show sinks even further into the well of awful.

We have all seen this movie many times before: The quirky stranger comes into the life of a harried person or dysfunctional family and causes havoc and in the process helps them learn the true value of what is right in front of them if they'd only stop to notice.

Hollywood has made this same story probably hundreds of times and we've all seen it in one incarnation or another more often than we can count. Sometimes the predictably of this age old story is just so much like ticking items off a checklist that you can't turn it off fast enough.

And sometimes the predictable, feel-good story is, instead, done well and with just enough original bits that it feels like that old, stretched out, faded, fuzzy sweater you just can't part with because it is just so darned comfortable and comforting.

We all know the formula of these films. We all know how it will end. But because Uncle Nino does it with such easy charm and gentle humor and none of the cheap, emotional manipulativeness most employ -- we just don't care!

It is nice to see Joe Mantegna do something other than the typical macho roles we are so familiar with and Gina Mantegna is so natural she inadvertently puts a spotlight on how most child actors have more 'the right look' than any real acting chops.

This show should have lasted much longer than the partial season it aired. It was an original, witty, satire of local LA news. Because they were on a new network, they were able to take chances the other networks never would. It was funny and twisted, full of great one liners. It used popular music to set a mood better than most shows even today. The use of Sting's version of "Fragile" is still a vivid memory. The network should have given it a little more time to find it's legs - if only so we could find out what kind of repercussions came from Lou's startling announcement in the final aired episode.

And the cast was brilliant -- a character actor lover's paradise! Nearly everyone in the cast was a great character actor - only a couple of complete unknowns -- Birney, Coburn, DeJesus, Velez, Yagher, Pollack, Austin, McGill, Byrd, Anderson, Canada -- how can you go wrong? I may be the only person to still have some of the episodes on video (I have 5) and still watch them occasionally. That is perhaps the best testimony on this show's quality -- 10 years on, I'm still watching my videos.

I wanted to start this review by writing something positive about the movie. I'm trying to think of something. I really am. While it's certainly not the worst movie I have ever seen, there is also nothing there to make up for the time I lost watching it.

The writing was very bad. There was no suspense. Every plot point could be seen miles ahead of time, even by TV movie standards, which are pretty low. Characters seemed to learn things magically, as there was nothing shown to give basis to their conclusions.

The acting was so bad. Sean Young was just painful. She showed the emotional range of mold. Even her scenes of grief over losing her husband were very cold and completely without feeling.

The other actors - weren't great but they didn't make me cringe as Young did.

Something positive -- hmm -- the photography was adequate and I didn't see any equipment get caught in any shots.

I only watched this movie because I was so impressed with Olivier Martinez in SWAT. But this is no SWAT. SWAT had a plot and some likable characters and made sense. Bullfighter had none of these.

I should have realized that it couldn't possibly be any good, after all, the always painfully bad Michelle Forbes had a starring role.

One poster here called the movie incoherent. Another called it the worst movie ever. Both gave the movie far too much credit. I am so glad I got it from the library for free, yet I still feel ripped off.

IMDb needs to include a "0" in the "rate this film" vote, just for movies like this one.

"10 Things I Hate About You" is a rarity in the genre of "teen" movies. The teens are for the most part smart, and the film is not non-stop drug and sex obsession. In fact, that's hardly a part of the plot at all. I did find the glorifying of the "Let's Party 'Till We Puke - that's what parties are for!" attitude unfortunate and disappointing, because the characters were otherwise very intelligent and mostly independent thinkers. But, that, too, was only a small part of the whole.

This movie is intelligently written and acted and does not rely on the tired clichés that ARE nearly all other teen movies. The interaction between characters is the real draw, though Larry Miller playing the same character Larry Miller always plays in everything he does, gets old quick.

8 of 10.