Reviews

This movie exemplifies amateurish film-making and "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." I had some interest in the nonsense voiced by Mark Levin, the late Andrew Breitbart, and other gabbers, so the film held my interest until its merciful if too long delayed end. Because former Governor Palin is almost a Rorschach inkblot into which factually challenged testifiers project their fantasies and nightmares, I did not wonder that "the witnesses" were unmoored to such an extent from the reality-based community. Still, the Palin supporters who can read would profit from perusing "The Lies of Sarah Palin" or similar studies of Plain's vacuous mendacity. "Game Change" was a far better film and far superior perspective on Senator John McCain's cynical recklessness in nominating Governor Palin. "Game Change" the book is even more frightening.

I awarded three stars. I have seen worse films.

I apologize to those who admired this film, but the detractors have much the stronger case. I agree that Meg Ryan was mediocre, in part because she was given too little to do besides smoke. I agree that the love story that was supposed to be at the center of the film never gelled. I agree that the Ecuadorian scenery and cinematography were terrific. Indeed, I enjoyed the closing credits and Van Morrison most of all the cassette.

I found myself ticking off elements of the story that I'd seen done better: "The Negotiator" was more taut; "Someone to Watch Over Me" was a modest film with a better love story; "The Bodyguard" was about as predictable and stale; "Commando" and "Predator" had comparable action; I think I even liked "Ransom" better.

The situation was intriguing. I wanted to learn more about kidnapping and ransom negotiation. The characters themselves -- with the singular exception of Peter (David Morse) -- were of no interest to me.

Sorry.

I feared that this would be a "chick flick." It was. However, it was a "chick flick" in both senses of the term.

In the pejorative sense of "chick flick," this movie is like a CD-changer with four CDs -- wacky, weepy. sappy, and sweet. Moreover, the changer has not even been put on random play, so the order of play among the CDs is predictable when it is not formulaic. Even fans of soap operas should grow tired of diseases and desertions, deaths and dopes.

On the other hand, Natalie Portman realized her character well and her speech to Ashley Judd was superior to any formal philosophy I have read or heard. Many elements of the picture amplify or exemplify the lesson that Portman there enunciates, so the film achieves coherence around the means that women use to get around the preponderance of lowlife males in the world. That is the good side of a chick flick.

I'd have cut out everything about Willie Jack after he leaves K-Mart. He is largely a digression. That would lose the film Joan Cusack's wonderful character but would shorten the film and keep it focused.

I was pleased by Sally Field's cameo but angered by the credulity of the central character with respect to "Momma Lil." I found it hard to sympathize with Novalee, so stupid was her trusting her mother. If the movie is about goodness, could we see goodness unalloyed by stupidity, naivete, or recklessness?

I enjoyed the characters, was intrigued by the beginning, was not annoyed by the predictable ending, and wish that much of the middle had been streamlined.

I agree with and cannot improve on many of the comments already posted: 1) superficial references to poetry undermine John Keating's supposedly transformative message, so that his instruction becomes messianic or charismatic rather than revelatory (BUT the chanting and marching while reciting "The Congo" seemed authentically musical and revealing of the poet's intentions); 2) sophomoric excesses undermined the authenticity of multiple issues, especially Neil Perry's relationship to his father (BUT Keating's interaction with Charlie Dalton after his realistic prank was a useful and effective exception); 3) failures to flesh out other students at Welton or students at other schools defaulted on definition of what made Keating's classes different, other than terrific impressions of Marlon Brando and John Wayne (BUT that certainly captures part of the entertainment culture in secondary and higher education TODAY, albeit perhaps not in 1962); and 4) utterly false notes such as Mr. Cameron's craven speech to his comrades in the closet (BUT great scenes such as Neil's and Todd's conversing over the desk set partly redeem the film).

I am grateful for a previous poster's having posted the Robert Frost poem, for I believe that the use of that poem in the film by itself diagnoses a major flaw in the film's makers. Please read the Frost poem carefully. I believe that Frost unambiguously tells us that, RETROSPECTIVELY, we claim that we took a less popular path and that that choice explains our difference or betterness. Frost carefully and repeatedly makes it clear that the two paths were almost indistinguishable. Only when reviewed later and from a distance does the preferred road get redefined as "striking out for new ground" and other pretentious nonsense. When I first watched the film, I was incensed when Keating retraced the popular misconception that Frost was advising his readers to dare the road less traveled by because that would make all the difference. I found that part of the film doubly disappointing because Frost's important insight was distorted and because Keating, by restating the popular view, was violating his own advice. At that moment, Keating made his students' and my lives quite ordinary!

I doubt that the screenwriter or director ever read the poem carefully. Indeed, I hope for their sakes that they did not. Instead, they took the after-dinner speaker's misappropriation of Frost's poetry for the words that Frost selected.

For the reasons above and others, then, I concur that "Dead Poets Society" butchered poetry and the teaching of poetry (BUT I agree with Keating about the "American Bandstand" approach in the preface to the assigned text).

However, I also agree with commenters who laud the film as a coming of age film. If one "read" DPS as the story of Todd Anderson (and, to a far lesser degree, Knox Overstreet), it would be a far better film. Indeed, Todd likely remembers Mr. Keating for Todd's impromptu rap on Walt Whitman, sweaty teeth, and truth as an inadequate blanket. Looking back, Todd may indeed see a road less traveled by. That road's reward had far more to do with risk-taking, personalized instruction than with poetry.

In sum, this movie is nowhere near as bad as contrarians have asserted. It is nowhere near as good as admirers have claimed. It is an incomplete accomplishment.

Others have commented on caricatures and on "heroes versus villains" simplicity of the characters. I generally agree. I should point out, however, that the plaintiff is portrayed as having succumbed to casual sex and professes to have been very naive about the etiology of HIV. As some have noted, the plaintiff's attorney is a homophobe and, Demme and the script make it clear, overcomes that tendency but a bit in the course of the film.

The caricatures to which I should draw attention are the lawyers in this lawyer-laden film. Demme and the script have created a festival of lawyer jokes. The advertisements and literal jokes ["What do you call 1000 lawyers chained to the bottom of the sea?" is an example] MAY have been an attempt to analogize between stigmatized social groups [such as gays] and stigmatized occupational groups. If so, I do not believe the effect was achieved. Instead, the film plays to stereotypes and mythology about law and lawyers.

Take the brief interview in which Denzel Washington's character establishes that a injured man is pushing a lawsuit without merit. Added to Washington's TV ads, the ambulance-chaser stereotype is realized -- but to what end? How does it advance anything to play to slander and innuendo about plaintiffs' attorneys? At best the viewer sees that, confronted with a genuine case, Washington turns it down to get Hanks' character out of his office.

Moreover, the laughable testimony by the law partners virtually handed the plaintiff the case. Why would lawyers tell stories about Navy latrines or expound on the Bible when they knew it would hurt their case?

So, when you hear that this film is sappy and politically correct, please realize that such comments are slightly off center. The film is sophomoric rather than sappy. The humanity of the Hanks character is actually realized deftly, in my viewings of the film. The film IS politically correct -- but the political correctness is in slurring lawyers as a class. It is politically correct to castigate lawyers.

Could have been a much better film with a little thought and care.

This movie amused me because neither Luedtke nor Pollack, it appears, thought that it mattered why the congresswoman was behaving as she was. The makeout scene in the parking lot of Ronald Reagan Airport made no sense at all. It was a genuine flub that threw off the rest of the movie. Perhaps the film-makers did not want to follow the very different manners of the two protagonists as they coped with grief and betrayal. That might have made for a TV "Movie of the Week" weepfest, I grant them. However, in the absence of such clarification, K. S. Thomas had nothing to communicate to me. I believe that the writer and director owe me three bucks!

When I saw this film in my youth, I loved it. I thought the casting inspired and the ending taut. As I have watched it anew over the years, I continue to enjoy the poker game and the characters but find the side plots a bit muddled. Clearly, the writers and director wanted to compare high-stakes poker to lower-stakes living. I do not believe that they quite pulled it off. The Kid and The Shooter succumb to temptations as they would not fall prey to bluffs, but I discern no clear moral or point.

Oliver Stone's "JFK" is far superior as cinema to this effort: production values, acting, script, and scope all favor the later, longer Stone film.

That said, I can recommend this little film to any viewer who would like to ponder the Warren Report at a deliberate pace and enjoy a conspiracy scenario created largely before Watergate "upped the ante" by revealing demonstrable evil.

"Executive Action" surpasses "JFK" in the words on the screen at each movie's end. The 1973 film ends with a mosaic of dead people and displays an actuarial computation of the odds that all of those people associated with Dallas and 22 November 1963 would be dead within ten years of the assassination. While I have reserved judgment regarding the accuracy of the alleged calculation, the monumental coincidences do fill the screen. This is much more effective than Oliver Stone's finishing hyperbole. More important, the faces filling the screen have much more impact than occasional bodies tossed from cars in "JFK."

In sum, this movie is worth seeing if you see it well rested.

Take my review for what it is worth, but I could not make it through "The Accidental Tourist." I have turned off only a half dozen cassettes in my VCR-viewing career. After about an hour, I decided my life was too short to see this movie through.

Why couldn't I abide this film? For the most part, I could not care less about the characters. Quirky characters amuse me, but feeble people do not. I have never much enjoyed any Woddy Allen comedy in the last 25 years because I always want to pummel the whiner that Woody plays. William Hurt [whose work I usually enjoy] plays just such a weenie in this film.

Sorry!

I agree with previous comments about the superficiality of these characters. I disagree with previous comments in that I thought that was the point that Kasdan was trying to make. In this opinion, I may be 180 degrees off, in which case the detractors are correct.

I enjoyed this film in a theater and on television. I liked the snappy patter. I thought there was a plot, albeit a slow-moving one without much action.

For me, the plot revolves around Nick [William Hurt]. This cynic is another disappointed naif who has largely checked out of a world that has disappointed him. He is the member of the ensemble most bent on demystifying the "idealism" of the others and the Sixties. Nick's "cushiest berth" speech is priceless, for example, in unmasking the "misty, watercolor memories" of the poseurs.

Each of the other characters may be "read" as a representative of different strategies for coping with the death of youthful dreams, beliefs, or illusions. Harold [Kevin Kline] is every bit as skeptical about their youth as Nick but has his manufacturing to keep him warm and busy in the present. Sarah [Glenn Close] is a professional who is apparently happiest in her domestic role, no matter what she might have planned in Ann Arbor. Michael [Jeff Golblum] is, in my view, the member who has changed least from a hedonistic, sardonic observer divorced from most of what is going on around him. Berenger, Williams, and Place confront their changes in dialogue, so I shall not belabor them here.

Perhaps most interesting is Chloe [Meg Tilly]. I see Chloe as a latter-day hippie. She exhibits stereotypic features and sentiments of self-absorbed, live-for-today boomers even though she is not one. She alarms some of the ensemble despite the way in which she mirrors the selves that they are all nattering about. [This would be a better story, I believe, and my interpretation of the movie would persuade me more if at least one of the characters acknowledged how much Meg resembles the hippies whom those of us old enough to have know hippies knew.]

In my view, then, the cynical [Nick] is verbally worn down by the delusionals and won over by the realist [Chloe]. At film's end, the delusional chorus are leaving Nick in the arms of the post-boomer hippie. One dark side of the 1960s [drug trafficking] yields to one bright idea of the 1960s [attempted realism] in the form of the one person in the ensemble who doesn't like to dwell in the past.

It ain't Goethe, I'll grant you, but it ain't garbage either.

This is probably my favorite movie about the law. Its portrait of legal ethics is far more scathing than "And Justice For All?" and far more informative.

I admire so many of Paul Newman's performances but this one most of all. Milo Shea is terrific as the defendant-loving judge, making about the same point as Dean Stockwell's judge in "The Rainmaker" but being less obvious and more sinister. James Mason is perfect as the defense attorney for a powerful entity--cheating at every turn even though he has overwhelming advantages. Charlotte Rampling plays Laura perfectly. Edward Binns, whom I seldom see praised, is terrific as the bishop whom Mamet has mouth the words "What is the truth?" like a latter-day Pilate.

Best of all, the ordinary folk in this movie get an opportunity to challenge the tendency of professionals to bury or to bankrupt their mistakes.

Don't let the title fool you. There are multiple verdicts that will determine multiple fates.

I agree with most of the comments already made and so will not repeat the praises of performances, techniques, pace, and so on. I even agree with the comparison to Riefenstahl. As I sat in the theater, I said to myself that this was the greatest piece of propaganda I had ever seen. I meant it as a compliment, for cinema is replete with messages that aim to shift attitudes and manufacture beliefs. Most do not do the job as well as Stone's film.

That said, I have rethought my position. If Stone included so many overlapping and competing theories [and assassins!] in one film, mustn't he have known that each new possibility would dilute the probability that previous suspects were responsible? Think of Oliver Stone in front of that federal jury: just as each new conspirator that Garrison named created a reasonable doubt about Clay Shaw's role in the matter, so too every new "force" that Stone identified made it less and less probable that the list of suspects could conspire successfully. If Stone seems to draw to Dealey Plaza every group of nuts extant in 1963, that makes it hard to understand how they managed not to shoot or at least expose one another.

So, suppose the movie is about how conspiratorial thinking defeats itself. Once a Jim Garrison is prepared to disbelieve official accounts--and, boy, does the Warren Commission invite disbelief!--then vistas of suspects are opened up. If Lee Harvey Oswald is a patsy, his background suggests multiple agencies who could have used him. If one follows the money [as in "All the President's Men" or Jerry McGuire], then a host of powerful dudes stood to benefit from JFK's demise. [Granted, most of the well-heeled stood to profit no matter who was president!]

I appreciated the movie when first I saw it. I enjoy it annually now. I appreciate most the sheer vertigo that ensues when one begins to doubt authorities. I suspect that that vertigo, more than all the citizenship primers ever printed, keeps most of us most of the time within the flock that the authorities assemble.

Because I so enjoy the script and the characters and because the story is simple but not simplistic, I find this corny film to be my favorite comedy.

Lemmon and MacLaine were terrific, but they always were [even in crummy films]. MacMurray was good, and he usually wasn't ["Double Indemnity" and "Caine Mutiny" excepted]. For me, what makes this a standout production is a first-rate bunch of second bananas. Edie Adams gave her greatest performance [a low ceiling I acknowledge]. Larry White, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen (sp?), and MacLaine's brother were wonders.

I almost always enjoy Billy Wilder, but never more than in this film.

Add me to the list of movie-lovers who dare to call "Citizen Kane" flawed. Enough has been said about Welles's innovations and his being a prodigy. I suppose all of that to be so.

All that being so, how am I to appreciate fully the techniques when the story is so ordinary? I apologize to those who love this movie but the writers came from radio and, to judge from this work, should have headed directly to television.

I suppose that I might criticize Welles as an actor but, given the caricature he was supposed to "realize," how great could his anyone's] performance in that role have been?

Rather than ramble on, let me conclude my review with a summary of the above: if a movie has a prosaic plot and a caricature for its protagonist, all the cinematography in the world cannot make it great.