Reviews

This movie is one of the most manipulative movies I've ever sat through. All it needed was a flashing red sign below the screen telling me when to cry. It's fine to evoke emotions, but they were trying way too hard. Granted, the movie opened it a scene of a child dying, so it was clearly indicated from the beginning that this movie was going to be a barrel of laughs. I suppose I knew what I was getting into from the fist scene.

Sure, not every movie has to be upbeat, but this movie was so unnecessarily depressing that when the lights came up in the theater, half the audience had committed suicide. Okay, I'm lying. I saw it on Netflix. I was going to see it in the theater, but they outlawed it in my area because of all the suicides. Every other scene had something horribly tragic happen. Being needlessly depressing is not the same as being deep. This movie had nothing interesting to say at all. It was hard to feel very strongly about the end, because by the time that happened, I had become desensitized. In 2 hours. Because it was City of Angels. Of course something depressing is going to happen; it happens every time you turn around.

Moreover, the characters were difficult to like. Seth (Nicolas Cage) came across as incredibly creepy. The man used his powers of invisibility to hover over people to read their minds so he could try to understand human emotion. That's not sympathetic. That's downright invasive. I mean, he sat in the bathroom watching Maggie character bath and I'm supposed to like him because he's depressive, even though it clearly explained in the movie that angels don't feel negative emotions? And, not to be mean, but the movie goes through great lengths to present Nicolas Cage as a sex symbol, which seems off. He is an average looking guy with no personality whatsoever. What is it about him that is so damn appealing?

Maggie (Meg Ryan) is a big question mark. For one thing, I like to think that my doctor would feel distress if I died during a procedure, so that seemed realistic. However, it later becomes clear that this was the ONLY patient that has ever died on her operating table... So, to recap, she's an ICU surgeon who had never had a patient die before that. THAT'S realistic. She also comes across as very cold in some scenes. It was half way through the movie that I realized that the doctor she is sleeping with is her boyfriend, and not just a sex buddy. So, essentially, she is cheating on him with Nicolas Cage's character, and doesn't seem to see anything wrong with it. Even when he proposes to her, she seems more disturbed by the fact that he proposed than any of her own wrongdoing.

On the positive side, it's a very aesthetically pleasing film. They especially had some wonderful shots of the mountains in the Lake Tahoe scenes. Also, if you are a particularly sentimental person, than the over-the-top tragic nature of this movie might not annoy you as much as it did me.

As for me, I just found this movie to be to be over-the-top tragic to the point where it seemed unnatural and manipulative. I feel that a plot should unfold and if tragedy comes, it should come naturally; this film seemed to use story as a segue into the cry scenes, and it shows. The dialog is bad, the story is full of holes, and the characters are unlikable. Ultimately, it is for that reason that I give it 2 stars.

I avoided watching this movie for a long time, because the commercials frankly gave me the impression that this was going to be another sex comedy, when, in fact, it is actually a nice story.

Part of what makes this movie great is that Carell's character is very likable. Carell's ability to play grotesque characters straight comes through very well here. It makes Andy seem very easy to sympathize with, and makes the viewer hope for the best for him. While I don't imagine that his so-called "problem" is the norm, I would assume that it's not as rare as people think, especially for someone as socially awkward as this character. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) his nerdy demeanor and his social awkwardness, he's hard not to like. He is particularly sympathetic compared to the jerks who try to take him under their wing. Seriously, if the nicest guy in your group of friends stalks his ex-girlfriend, you need to find better people to hang out with.

I also enjoyed the ending, where the film reaches the conclusion that his virginity wasn't a curse, and that it was worth it because he eventually met the right person. I liked this message because they don't beat you over the head with an overt moral message, but instead it's just kind of something that makes sense for this particular character. It's kind of a cute ending for a movie that has such twisted humor throughout the whole thing. This is the kind of comedy I like: twisted humor, but an overall good story.

Overall, it was a good movie that I will definitely watch again.

Politically correct or not, people have never really gotten over their interest in the sideshow. It is this that makes the movie entertaining. This being the case, it probably would have been better to have done a documentary on the sideshow, as opposed to attempting to write a bad story around frighteningly bad acting.

Harry Earles was not an actor. I couldn't tell if he didn't speak English or if he merely had no understanding of inflection. His sister (who played his wife. CREEPY) was slightly better, but only very slightly. So what do you do when you have a group of circus performers who can't act? You surround them by actors who also can't act. Yeah, that makes sense.

The story claims to show the freaks as the truly "normal" ones and the other performers as the "freaks", which I suppose was an unusual concept in 1932. However, they also essentially portray the freaks as a cult in various points of the movie, and when the main antagonist is paid back, they disfigure her and then apparently use some sort of bizarre unexplained magic to turn her into the human chicken, making her "one of us" (hence the mantra). I realize, of course, that it was the 30s and they couldn't show anything, so they were trying to do the "what you don't see is more disturbing than what you do see" deal- something I generally miss in horror films. However, this wasn't so much disturbing as it leaves the viewer confused. I somehow doubt this really helped the argument that they were trying to show them in a "positive" light.

Despite all of its flaws, there is something incredibly intriguing about the movie. There's a great intensity to it. I love the fact that they used real sideshow performers, something that never would have been done today.