Reviews

I would have liked to have rated this movie higher based on the excellent cast, but the poor direction of a bum script only proved that Ridley Scott is no Francis Ford Coppola. Even Jared Leto's portrayal of the peculiar cousin Paolo Gucci as a sort of cross between Freddo Corleone and Andy Kaufman had a certain strange integrity. The actors were able to suggest a passable Italian intonation, I don't count off for lack of perfection. But at 2.5 hours, the film was easily 30 minutes too long, and it failed to develop the dramatic arcs so that they gripped the viewer rather than merely came to pass.

The makers of this over-long doc take the easy way out by interviewing a a handful of players who essentially say the same things over and over. Little effort is made to explore the allure of the get-rich-quick fantasy against the backgrounds of the (almost exclusively) women who are drawn to this sort of scheme. No disrespect to the product, which many people seem to enjoy, but the societal drain of mass producing "business entrepreneurs" who function solely to contribute to consumer society should have been part of the picture too. This is the fast fashion which winds up in trash heaps in Indonesia where the jungle used to be. Could have been well told in two hours, not four.

Sluggishly paced with a cast of shallow, unlikeable characters. Only Christopher Plummer is worth watching, but his role is strangely small. Way too long for the modest plot. Exploitive gratuitous female nudity. The main character keeps a tank of exotic fish, and predictably these all meet a bad fate. Don't waste your time !

The talented Cameron Diaz is at her best in this brisk comedy about a "bad" teacher who does all the wrong things and triumphs in the end. Despite her questionable methods, she has a gift for guiding students through middle school and life in general. Wonderful performances from Jason Segal, Lucy Punch, Justin Timberlake, and the supporting players. The situations are far-fetched but make sense in their context. Sure it's a little gross, but nothing major. I highly recommend it.

Many reviewers here call this a "hidden gem," but to me it's hidden for a good reason. Yes, the lighting is interesting, sort of noir Victoriana - the backgrounds are busy but dramatic and distinctive. But the plot is slow and convoluted, and it lacks the crisp narrative style of "Laura," to which some compare it. Poor Claude Rains, who is good in anything, is paired with so many actors who tower over him that his small stature is rather jarringly accentuated in many scenes. Not a total washout, but not a masterpiece either.

I agree with the reviewers who found this movie contrived and phony.

To praise it, you first have to accept that Paul Giamatti's lawyer character, with whom we are supposed to sympathize, would commit the most execrable kind of legal malpractice and elder abuse. So far as the fraud goes, you have to wonder why the lawyer doesn't simply arrange to keep his wealthy elderly client in his own home, per his wishes, since he is well to do and could afford a full time live in caregiver. Why put him instead in a retirement home? To contrive what very little dramatic tension there is in this feeble tale.

Then, you also must believe that the evil absentee drug abuser gold-digger daughter of the elderly man can somehow turn out to be a fresh-faced cutie pie who's about ten years too young to play the degenerate mother of the 17 year old son. (You also must believe that the son has a full time hairdresser on the premises, as his strange bleached out 'do always looks the same, but this is the least of the problems.)

All in all, this movie is fake, false, and maudlin, bereft of realistic situations or characters. I gave it three stars seeing how everyone seems to feel obligated to say nice things about the actors, even if the movie isn't very good.

I was curious to see this one of the "Big Three" movie fiascos (the other two being "Ishtar," and "Waterworld," your list may vary) and so gamely gave the "director's cut" a try on TCM the other night.

I was not disappointed by the awfulness of this movie. I wish I could understand what those who think it's some kind of unappreciated masterpiece see in it. To me, Mr. Cimino is a director (and, let us not forget, also the writer) who cannot tell a story and does not respect his audience. This film is, after all, longer than "Gone With The Wind," but - unlike that fine film - scene after scene has nothing to do with anything before or after it, the dialogue is unintelligible in many places and anachronistically modern in tone, and the whole thing is unattractively photographed in sepia, as if to say, "look at me, I'm sure making a historical epic alright!" With all the unnecessary crowd scenes, it's easy to see why this thing turned into a money pit.

I appreciated many of the other comments on this movie here on IMDb, they hit the nail on the head. With regard to the various dancing scenes, I admit I did enjoy the one on roller skates, but can someone tell me where the orchestra was that was churning out all that high volume orchestral music on the lawn at Harvard in 1870? (Or did it just come down from Heaven?)

Whatever modest talents Mr. Cimino may have demonstrated early on in his career, apparently he deteriorated into a raging egomaniac somewhere along the way. Still, this movie probably could be edited down into some kind of small character-driven film. That would be a fun computer game. I would buy "Make Your Own Heaven's Gate" if it ever becomes available.

I stumbled upon this film on TCM and found it engrossing enough to watch all the way through. It is a bit "talky," but that's what you want in a play, after all, so long as it's not boring!

Unlike some other reviewers, I found the music track intrusive and distracting and feel the movie would have worked more effectively without it, letting the words create their own "music," so to speak.

The performances are serviceable all around, with perhaps Edmund Gwenn the standout, as some have noted. I also enjoyed the "surprise ending," sort of a unique twist in this genre of "we're not-quite-dead" tales.

In any event, the next time this one comes around, I recommend it!

Joan Woodward and the rest of the cast give wonderful performances, but this would-be character study is slow, ponderous, and obvious. Rachel is depressed and needs a new attitude. She rappels off a number of characters (a woman friend, a man friend, her mother) and at the end finally develops courage enough to start the second half of her life somewhere else. I thought this movie was a tedious downer when I saw it in a theater in 1968, and now with my wisdom and maturity of 40 years later, I still think it is more heat than light. As another reviewer here observed, Paul Newman had the clout to get it made, and vanity projects generally don't acquit themselves well. It was show-offy daring for its time, I think that's why it got so much buzz.

I give an E for Effort to Julie Taymore, but the problem is she didn't know when to quit. The movie veers from the sublime to the soporific, bogged down by a banal boy-meets-girl story that should have served only as a backdrop to move the musical scenes along, since it's not an interesting or original story in itself. The characters are more generic than "Rent," and the tunes are sewn into a less coherent whole than "Mama Mia," or "Hair," but this movie offers some imaginatively staged musical scenes and special effects which are in a class of their own. The elements of 60's social history are well suited to the music which originated at the same time, but the tone of the film becomes unpleasantly heavy, given that the film doesn't really have a point of view and eventually just dissolves into the gooey love story. Well worth seeing, but don't feel bad if you can't make it all the way to the end.

This is one of those movies that's a darling of the critics, but there really isn't much that hasn't been said before, and better. It reminded me a bit of the movie "Chocolat," which centered on a much stronger single woman character, but without the surreal charm. The male characters - even the bad husband and the stalker who becomes a different husband - were more complex, if not well developed, than the wimpy female leads, whose lives seemed to stand for the propositions that: 1) women don't need men, and children don't need fathers; 2) adultery is the key to relieving boredom of any kind, and 3) even a stalker is better than being single. That the gruff Andy Griffith character would go off and never be seen again, leaving the legacy of a life-changing gift, was totally predictable. To all this triteness, I must say BAH.