Reviews

Such cruelty toward his wife and children masquerading as "comedy" is beyond contempt. Combined with the odd names chosen and sad rumors that abound, it is proof that Schaub is an unhappy man lashing out at both his audience and those closest to him. This special is clearly a cry for help and an intervention seems very much overdue. His wife and kids should probably find a safe place to be until he gets the help he needs. I pray for them all.

These 10 ratings have to be shills. I have no doubt this was made with good intentions and full respect for the actual event, but this is a bad movie on basically every count. The acting, direction and dialogue are all weak and it comes off like a quickie TV movie from the 1970s. Cliches? It's got them all and they're all pounded home with a sledge hammer.

This is not an overreaction 1/10 review, but a genuine score. What the dolts who falsely uprated this piece of garbage had to gain, I'm not sure, but they're clearly lying. This is not just amateurish, but thoroughly untalented amateurish on every level. Handing a few cameras out to random passersby at a mall would likely produce something worthier. Anyway, good job on lies piled onto a heap of junk.

This is probably the worst acted and worst scripted film I've ever seen rated this high. The dialogue is laughably bad and the acting is without exception execrable. Now, if people are saying this is so bad it's good, then I get it. If they're actually saying this has any subtlety or depth as a real drama, they're a bit cracked.

There is absolutely nothing about this "film" that can fairly be called professional. To begin with, the digital capture is so bad as to verge on video tape. It is crisp to the point of lifeless and has no personality or artistry. The dialogue and story are completely hackneyed and seem like an alien's approximation of a thousand other stories, but only clumsily apes anything that seems real. But BY FAR the worst thing about this mess is the acting. The Mohawk older woman/mother may be the worst actress I've seen since Billy Jack's girlfriend. Strike that, because she's even worse. The two "actors" playing her son and daughter are also execrable, and not one word out of any of them sounds period. They seem like modern day people plucked out of a mall. It's all so, so bad. I don't have any idea how so many critics on RT gave this garbage a pass. The audience score is much closer to the reality of this waste of time.

It's hard to imagine an audience much beyond five or six that wouldn't be bored by this. It's like a much less funny, much more earnest Napolean Dynamite. It is so lacking in edge that it is virtually a marshmallow of inconsequential sequences strung together by emotions which it touts but doesn't really possess or elicit. It's a hipster's fairy tale that mistakes overly calculated naivete for heart and substitutes empty quirk for wit. It goes from A to B and takes forever to get there. If that ride had as much charm as this pretends to have, it might have made it a worthwhile trip. Sadly, it does not.

This is not a good movie. Wanting it to be a worthy valedictory for HDS isn't enough to make it so. When Harry is alone, just being or exercising or walking, there is some grace and some weight, but once he's required to interact with the rest of the overly emoting characters or the stilted, trite dialogue, he sadly feels reduced to their level. The direction, dialogue and other actors - with perhaps the exception of Ed Begley's brief scene - all seem amateurish and tone deaf. More than once, the attention turns towards Lucky and everyone in the place stops, turns to him and practically put their arms around each other, hum and sway, while he declaims about this or that. It's embarrassing and not worthy of a high school play, let alone a film that's based in tone and character rather than plot or action. It's like this film took its cues from Paris, Texas, but then dumbed it all down to the point of witless parody. Watch Harry do some yoga, have a couple smokes and give one knowing look near the film's end, but don't expect any poetry or even competence beyond that.

Positves; the actress playing the one girl in it. Negatives: virtually everything else. Every other character is an obvious, obtuse stereotype both written and played with virtually no subtlety. By far the most glaring and obnoxious of these is the bespectacled kid who incessantly (literally INCESSANTLY) does nothing but make supposedly funny sexual remarks every time he opens his mouth. It's weak, lazy, unrealistic and thoroughly aggravating. Of course, some kids that age attempt crude humor, but no one does it non-stop like a hack morning DJ. It being completely witless makes it all the worse. The hypochondriac kid is almost as bad and just as hackneyed. Making characters lazy types rather than human beings is cheap and speaks to a lack of talent on the creators part, as well as a lack of respect for the potential audience. This is an R-rated film written for eight-year-olds.

Over the top and obvious in every way. Zero subtlety, weak caricatures and crudely modern sensibility in supposedly historical drama/farce/whatever. It's as if Deadwood had been written for and by 12-year-olds. Seeing Samantha Morton reduced to such pap is disheartening.

This is like a couple hacks watched The Thin Blue Line and then set out to recreate its weight and nuance but lacking both skill and a compelling subject. It tells the largely non-story of author Gay Talese's effort to immortalize a motel peeping tom. Talese's "insights" into his protagonist seem as manufactured and tenuous as the protagonist's credibility and the film indulges rather than subverts the two blustering egotists it presents. Talese lives in a home ornamented with pictures of himself, while his counterpart has a basement full of "treasures" he boasts are worth millions. Talese's books repeatedly and laughably litter the background of many shots, including one at the home of "the voyeur" where the author just happens to be sitting in an easy chair with an older volume framed nearly touching him. The revelation near the end of the subject's duplicity to the author involves something which any high school kid would have checked before writing a story for his school paper, but neither Talese nor his vaunted fact checkers seem to have bothered. The only real subject here is two old men struggling to burnish their lives with some added relevance as the sun sets. If that alone were worthy of a film, it would have taken a filmmaker with deeper skills and more original ideas.