Reviews

Enjoying the show quite a lot. Great acting and importantly, dialog. Interesting characters. Well filmed. Interesting storyline with some nuance. Glad it isn't all chases, with a fight to the death in every episode.

In a way, I'm disappointed hearing of the second season because I wanted a finality type of closing in the last episode of this season. If it's just continual chase stuff, I won't last that far into season two. Hoping they come up with at least a semi-resolving last episode for season one.

I am a Norm fan (recent controversy aside) -- save some of his over reliance on blue material -- and like the concept/idea of a free-wheeling talk show where the host and guest might just say whatever the F comes to mind, just like in a real conversation and so, I had some hopes for this show.

But, this show has some major problems, all of them fixable and I hope they do. I have only seen the first three episodes. I guess the Drew show was my favorite because she was over-the-top and kind while dropping f bombs, etc, all around. I've read that the Jane Fonda episode was the best, so will probably watch that one.

1) The "sidekick" has a loud laugh that comes way too often, at stuff that isn't necessarily that funny. Guessing Norm has him out there for support and as a buffer but he is a big negative. Suggest minimizing his screen time as he is a distraction in a show that already has focus/time wasting problems.

2) Norm interrupts his guests too often and hurts the flow of the show. Judge Judy escaped this problem but Dave Letterman was a big victim of it. You've got Dave on, don't waste him, which Norm did.

3) There's no plan. You can make an argument that just winging it can work and I think that it can but Norm needs to do less and waste less time with interrupting and blurbs that aren't that funny. Use your guest more, be more of a straight man but still be weird.

4) I don't need to be shown that stuff is funny with all of the exaggerated laughing, both from Norm and the sidekick. Seinfeld has this problem on a lot of his "coffee" episodes.

5) Dump that card/joke/comment/questions routine, it doesn't work.

At 29 minutes, the show can not be this unfocused and rambling with not enough funny stuff; it won't survive. With Norm and the kind of people he can draw to the show, this should be much better than what I've seen so far.

Amusingly bad, with overly long, uninteresting scenes that add nothing to the story. But don't worry, there certainly won't be one, just like the original series with it's many threads going nowhere, multiple lack of resolutions and just plain lazy writing.

Yea, it's weird. So what? I only watched the first episode and am done, just like I should have been with the first series after about 1.5 seasons.

A few random thoughts, not very well expressed .....

My gosh, if this wasn't the most tedious film I've seen in a while. Nicely filmed and edited but filled with overly long and lingering-too-long scenes, not to mention completely unnecessary (we had already established that he was troubled) ones, this film is the antithesis of cinematic economy.

Then there was the extreme over-use of flashbacks throughout the film. The back and forth in time thing has been done to death now and maybe "Manchester" was the peak of this technique. Having snow/no snow on the ground helped to figure out where the heck you were.

Surprise punching people really hard in the mouth (yea, I know, he was troubled) doesn't do anything to gain your main character sympathy with the viewer (which the story needed because there was virtually nothing positive to latch on to), especially when you stand around looking morose and mumbling for the entire movie.

The cause of his angst -- learned well into the film -- was a pretty big downer especially since the rest of the movie up to that point was so darn tedious and oppressive.

This movie tried way too hard to be like real life and not a movie.

I started out liking this film quite a lot; it was quirky with great acting by Cooper and Lawrence and nice support work by all of the other players. I doubt though that it portrayed the bi-polar disease very well at all but that wouldn't have fit into the 'black comedy' flavor of the movie.

Then, the storyline weakened to standard Hollywood fare with the DeNiro Eagle's fan sidebar -- which I liked up to this point -- taken to an extreme with the betting angle, along with Cooper and Lawrence getting involved in the dance contest along with the other Pros, and being able to get above a five score, to win the betting Parlay. C'Mon.

The happy ending with them worked though.

The storyline weakening ruined the film for me; they should have kept it as a "small" film, where maybe not as much 'happens' as in the "bigger" movies.

But I still enjoyed the acting and dialog.

Honestly, any movie that includes in its cast, Sonny Bono (Pre running into tree, skiing), June Lockhart, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Moriarty doing a lip syncing dance to Blue Cheer's Summertime Blues deserves some consideration.

This 'film' really is a wonderful combination of bad dialog and acting, ridiculous situations and animated 'special effects.' Consider also, that any film that Sonny Bono appears in cannot be easily dismissed. I think the last movie I saw him in was an LSD/marijuana scare film from 1968, at my High School.

I gave it 2 stars here to underscore it's badness but for me, it ranks highly in the worst movies ever made list, which means that it's extremely entertaining.

I was 16 in 1968 and got involved with all of the 'hippy' stuff, which for me/us, mainly consisted of going to lots of concerts and getting altered quite a bit - we had a lot of fun in a (believe it or not) simpler time. I attended several peaceful (for the most part) anti-war protests in Chicago in 1969 and got involved with a group of students at my high school (Lane Tech) who were trying to change the dress code and several other restrictive parts of the setting there; a few kids were even involved in SDS (a pretty radical group).

I think this film, though well-made for the time and depicting a fairly accurate account of the conflict between true radicals and the 'establishment' (in the tribunal scenes) fails badly with the 'punishment park' part, a ridiculous and implausible scenario where young people convicted of conspiracy against the government are sent off into the dessert on foot and without water and then hunted down and executed by the police and National Guardsmen. In depicting law enforcement as such totally brutal cowards, the film does a disservice to the credibility of real events back then such as Kent State and the 1968 Democratic convention.

Anyway, for me, the totally black/white stereotypical portrayals of law enforcement in this film ruin the credibility of the message so I'll pass on saying this is a good movie.