User Reviews

I enjoyed the movie.

There are some truly blissful moments, such as the first time a wailing car gets what's coming to it, or when the mayor suffers an even greater offence than our hero. Truly, these are worth the price of admission, just to see.

But the movie stumbles in places, trying to get all philosophical on us at points. I don't care about Hegel. Hegel's dead. Let's move on. To a three-way? What's that about? Seriously, someone this obsessed with car alarms isn't having a three-way. Or a two-way for that matter. Let him be the hero he is. That's enough.

Some other comments claimed to point to "hypocrisy". Not so. All of the sounds that he appreciated were sounds that many people want to hear, like a live music performance in your own home -- a sound created specifically to be appreciated and admired. Few people actually want to hear car alarms under any circumstances, or jackhammers, or garbage trucks, or any of the other utterly pointless noises that fill a city.

But, in summary, I did enjoy the film, and I was lucky enough not to be interrupted by the jerk two floors up from me who likes to blare his stereo (with sub-woofer) at all hours of the evening and night, into the morning. The police do nothing.

It's foolish to think a film will spur action, but at least we can enjoy it for 90 minutes or so.

Now, if I hadn't had sex with Bridget Moynahan in a month, I really don't think a car alarm would have interrupted me. Having said that I am in complete agreement with David (Tim Robbins). Car alarms, motorcycles, those damn beep beep phones - they should all be dealt with in the most severe manner. David has the guts the rest of us lack.

David did give them a chance. The legal system refused to enforce the law, so he justifiably took matters into his own hands. (It's in the Declaration of Independence.) Of course, he did jail time. He was fired, and his wife kicked him out.

He eventually joins forces with Ekaterina Filippovna (Margarita Levieva), and they manage to rile the Mayor (William Hurt). But, they do pick up a new partner (María Ballesteros) for their after hours fun.

This was a hilarious movie about how we need to take a stand for our neighbors. Really.

Oh, yeah, his wife takes him back in the end. Good for her.

Writer/Director Henry Bean's Noise isn't a perfect film, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it. Had Bean been able to even out the tone and style he would have easily one-upped his first effort, Ryan Gosling's coming out party, The Believer. But, as it is, Noise cheats itself out of being thought provoking and intelligent by indulging in random flights of fancy: self indulgent editing techniques (multiplying split screens), awkward shifts into broad humor and a handful of other scenes too pat for their own good.

But what's behind Noise is an important issue I can't ever remember being addressed in a film before: noise pollution. Bean doesn't just gloss it over and make it a one-dimensional villain, he fleshes out the issues on many ideological levels. At the heart of these themes is Hegel's concept of freedom: the notion of the soul as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. In other words, people matter more than cars with blaring alarms. These themes are filtered through David Owen (Tim Robbins), a successful husband and father who has become obsessed with silencing New York City's car alarms, burglar alarms and any other form of oppressive noise pollution. David's reasoning is sane (even if his actions are not) and if you live in a city, you can't help but sympathize with his plight and also feel a sense of wish fulfillment as he bashes in the windows of offending cars.David's increasing criminal/vigilante actions are the manifestation of what he defines as "impotence." By this he refers to the overall impotence he feels at not being able to do anything about all the things that are wrong with the world. His wife encourages him to just accept the world as is, but he refuses to, and his resultant actions not only lead him to jail, but to the collapse of his marriage and loss of his job. Instead of things spiraling into a dark abyss, fate steps in and leads David down a different path. He meets Ekaterina (Margarita Levieva) who inspires him to package his rage into a proactive and civilized manner, that ultimately allows him to deal with his issues and get his life back in order.

The bottom line is, we live in a world where personal freedoms have outgrown any sense of responsibility to being considerate of those around you. The result is a world where dogs bark and $hit freely, car alarms chirp unattended, children are free to cry, scream and throw tantrums, and no one really cares who suffers as a result. Sadly, there is little or no recourse to this problem and it is hard not to feel like David, impotent and frustrated by this affront to the quality of our lives. Noise pollution is a very real issue, a problem that affects the quality of millions of people's lives and I'm glad someone made a film about it since my silent suffering now has a voice, albeit an imperfect one.

http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/

I really enjoyed most of this movie. I identify with the main character's (Tim Robbins is delightful and capturing) complete and utter distraction by the car alarms and the horrific head splitting noise that they make. His vigilante antics were funny and inspiring, albeit illegal, but I understand how noise can drive you mad when there is no rest from it. I definitely was rooting for him. The movie stagnated when a menage a trois was thrown in out of nowhere having nothing to do with plot development or understanding the characters better. It didn't add anything to the movie. Instead it took away from the continuity and left me wondering what the point of it was. It seemed like it was from another movie altogether as filler for time purposes. Once that was over and the movie plot resumed, it had a satisfying ending.

Henry Bean both wrote & directed this comedy about (based on his own true experience) a man who take revenge on those blasted car horns & other noise polluters.

Side note:Mr Bean also wrote & directed the excellent Ryan Gosling film THE BELIEVER a few years back. NOISE is his second film, I do hope he plans to make more films. He is talented.

Tim Robbins is very good as this man who is so disturbed that he must act this way,

The story takes place in New York City & that is one NOISY city to begin with.

William Hurt adds another delightful role to his resume as a befuddled Mayor of NYC.

Bridget Moynahan is our hero's not too patient wife & is very good, the entire cast is quite good.

As I stated above, I was not fully satisfied, Its one of those films I can say I liked, but then wonder why.

Maybe it cause I no longer am a New Yorker.

The movie played in few festivals & had a very short theatrical run.

It does warrant my rating but only faint praise.

Ratings: *** (out of 4) 82 points (out of 100) IMDb 7 (out of 10)

I would have liked this movie to focus on a lot more than car alarms. It shouldn't have been a comedy either, considering the serious stress caused by modern noise.

Depending on where you live, car alarms are a variable nuisance, and this movie dwells too much on them. Alarm owners are at least trying to thwart crime, and they ARE effective if the owner is nearby and alert. In a metropolis like NYC where people can't park near their dwellings, I can see how alarms would be more of an uncontrolled problem.

This movie makes it seem like nobody is paying attention to their alarms, which isn't true in many cases. It even semi-glorifies a car thief, making the alarm into the bumbling villain.

Subwoofer bass is far more deliberate and has become a form of terrorism on those who endure it. This applies to loud stereos in cars, apartments and condos, or nearby homes, which are completely under the control of perpetrators who belligerently treat their abuse as a "right."

Noise seems a lot worse when you know some evil scumbag is in direct control of it, and doing it to snub your "right to quiet enjoyment." Noise should be divided into categories of background, incidental and deliberate, with the latter being a felony if repeated too often.

MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS:

I immediately felt for the subject as I read the back cover of the DVD. A man out to put a stop to noise in New York! Love the premise.

And the movie started great. As a student of screen writing, I followed the form great in the beginning. This was a story about a man with not one, but two problems. He hated noise, and he was dealing with it poorly. Constantly he would be trying to eradicate it, but it would only get him into trouble. He would then try another method, that wound up getting him into even more trouble.

I felt with his cause, and his mission and all his obstacles. But then, as most common, midway through, the movie lost its pace. Mostly due to a weak second act, where his goal vanished in the place of a "romantic" subplot that had no effect or relevance to the story whatsoever. Furthermore the little goal he was still pursuing had little opposition, so those 20 minutes felt like 40 minutes! Horrible.

Luckily the movie ends great, with an escalation and battle that could have made the movie great, if it wasn't for the weaker second part.

I almost feel like, making a new edit of the movie, but the thing is it wouldn't be possible, as the problem lies with the script.

The rewrite I would do would entail David pursuing his goal of getting signatures, with MUCH opposition, almost to the point that he is about to loose faith that it is even possible. And then he struggles some more, until he finally succeeds, only to realize that it has NO effect as the mayor has made the charter revision, that nullifies their petition. THEN it would have been a death blow to him. And THEN his actions in the last parts of the movie, would have made more sense.

Too bad they didn't revise the script one last time. Oh well, it was a nice movie anyway.

This quirky comedy finds David Owen(Tim Robbins)slowly becoming obsessed with the noise on New York City streets. Trash trucks, motorcycles, speeding cars, car horns and the biggest offender to David's ears and inner peace is car alarms. The distracting sound of a constant car alarm renders him frustrated, impotent and psychotic. Owen instead of being powerless to the incessant noise, begins letting the air out of tires, busting windshields and cutting battery cables. After losing his job, wife(Bridget Moynahan) and daughter...David takes on his irrational vigilante justice full time and becomes known to the public... and NYC mayor(William Hurt)as "The Rectifier". Cerebral comedy, dark humor and strong sexual situations provides NOISE with substance. Others in the cast: Maria Ballesteros, William Baldwin, Margarita Levieva, Gabrielle Brennan and Chuck Cooper.

This movie fulfills it's zaniness for about the first 20 minutes or so, but then the gags just get repetitive. It's the same thing over and over – the guy just can't stand the noise from car alarms, vandalizes the car and gets arrested. He leaves his wife then conveniently finds a beautiful girlfriend who finds him another beautiful girlfriend… Tim Robbins almost seems somewhat bored with his character, but William Hurt is great as the despicable mayor of New York.

And what's with these luxurious Manhattan apartments. Tim Robbins wife plays the cello and he's in business, so where do they get the money for the 2 floor apartment on the Upper West Side? After he loses his job he still has a large apartment near Greenwich Village?

I picked this movie because I like Tim Robbins. The premise of the movie sounded interesting. While conflicts make for good movies, this one left me somewhat hanging. If he HATES all the noise, move away. But as one character said: You LOVE to HATE the noise. what I didn't understand was the threesome with the other girl... What was that about and what did it have to do with the plot? I'm sure there could have been another way to introduce this girl and have her do her "inner beauty" monologue.... Maybe I didn't fully "get" the movie and all it's ideas. It was interesting, though for the most part and I liked the ending. But it's definitely a DVD rental kinda of movie.

If you took an extended rant by Andy Rooney on the evils of car alarms, mixed it with a late night, dorm room bull session by a bunch of college kids who just had their first philosophy class and blended that with a man's mid-life crisis…you'd end up with something like this film. Except Noise is even worse than you'd imagine that combination could be.

This sputtering, ostentatious, anti-social and smug goulash of a movie essentially presents the equivalent of the Unabomber as not just a hero, but a moral exemplar. Chris Owen (Tim Robbins) hates noise. That makes living in New York City, one of the noisiest metropolises on Earth, a bit problematic. But that's where David lives with his wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan) and his daughter Chris (Gabrielle Brennan). David doesn't just hate noise. He rages against it as an assault on his personal dignity. He's so consumed with fury that he starts attacking cars whose alarms have gone off without reason and continue blaring without stop. Even after he gets thrown in jail for his vandalism, David still won't stop. He loses his job, but he won't stop. His wife takes his daughter and leaves him. He still won't stop. David becomes an urban vigilante known as "The Rectifier", disabling car alarms all over New York. That draws the absurdly irrational hatred of the city's mayor (William Hurt) and the attention of a young European woman named Ekaterina Filippovna (Margarita Levieva). She's captivated by David's purpose and certainty and tries to direct him away from petty theft to political progress. The mayor tries to stop them and that suddenly morphs the film into a courtroom drama.

Just in case I haven't made it perfectly clear yet…Noise is horrible. It is a wildly inconsistent and alienating movie that splices political agitprop, philosophical wankery, juvenile power fantasies and middle aged desperation into one long stream of consciousness that batters against you like waves upon the rocks. This is the sort of movie that thinks a having a few lines of dialog reference Hegel makes it intellectual. It thinks it has to specifically point out the obvious contradiction in its main character because the audience is too stupid to see it themselves. It fantasizes that angry social misfits are exactly the sort of man with whom women want to have a threesome. And it glories in an unreflective, Holden Caulfieldesque sense of superiority over the rest of the world.

Tim Robbins shuffles through Noise like a severe manic-depressive whose medication occasionally wears off. William Hurt gives a bizarre performance as a 19th century anarchist's idea of what a politician is like. Bridget Moynahan might as well be a potted plant. Margarita Levieva plays a character so convenient and ephemeral that it would have made more sense for Ekaterina to be a schizophrenic hallucination that only David could see.

Noise makes it seem like writer/director Henry Bean suffers from multiple personalities and each took a turn in crafting a different part of this film. Unfortunately, all of his personalities are terminally boring and none of them know what the others are doing. Fantasy and realism, drama and melodrama, comedy and tedium rattle against each other. There's even a point where the movie acknowledges that it's fiction, presenting itself like edgy propaganda meant to provoke a response from the audience. The only response you'll want to make is to throw something at the screen.

I can't understand how anyone who read this script gave Bean the money to make this film. I can't imagine how anyone who watches Noise would ever give him any money to ever make another movie. I can only hope he can find himself some other employment so we're not subjected to any more of his work.

Noise is about a man suffering a mid-life crisis, but this crisis doesn't play itself out as an affair or the purchase of a sports car or boat. Instead, David, our protagonist, exhibits his crisis in the form of an all-out attack upon noise.

David and his wife, Helen are dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers. She is a musician and he is a successful businessman. They love the city and would never consider leaving, but David is becoming increasingly aware of the noises around him. Sounds that one comes to accept as natural in city life have started to grate upon his nerves and his sense of right and wrong. The utmost villain in David's life is the car alarm.

In New York City, there is an ordinance against car alarms sounding for longer than a couple of minutes, but the law is basically ignored by the police causing the public to be victims of the noise. David decides that he will no longer play the role of victim and goes through his neighborhood with a baseball bat smashing any car alarming. He is eventually arrested and goes before a judge who does not approve but is forgiving. David is warned that if he continues his crusade, he will be jailed.

Just as it is difficult for a man approaching his later years to give up his beautiful lover or his shiny sports car, David cannot give up his obsession with noise. His campaign is eventually noticed by the press and the mysterious avenger soon becomes a champion of the people much to the chagrin of the unsympathetic mayor of New York. David's mania eventually leads to misfortune.

Tim Robbins stars as David, and he is perfect for the part combining just the right amount of drama and humor to make you believe that his character is a real person. Movie fans are very lucky that Robbins and his partner, Susan Sarandon takes parts in little films such as this for their considerable acting talents certainly all to the value of films.

The uptight mayor is beautifully played by William Hurt in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek performance that delights.

It is interesting to note that Noise is fairly autobiographical of writer/director, Henry Bean's life. He is, indeed, a New Yorker who went on a smashing spree against car alarms and was eventually jailed.

Noise is an enjoyable dark comedy with a valid message. The message is serious but the wit of the piece makes its delivery a very entertaining hour and a half.

** Early plot spoilers**

I am not a fan of Tim Robbins. He bores me to tears. Think films tend to do the same. I had put this film back on the rack 4 times before I got it. Tim Robbins plays a vigilante who hates noise so he lives in NYC.. He has taken it upon himself to destroy car alarms etc. that bother him. He leaves stickers behind at scene of the crime so people know he is "The Rectifier." His wife discovers what he has been doing and suggests "close the window." Robbins is too proud to be pushed around by noise makers. "What if I want the window open?" he responds. Eventually he gets arrested again. This time he goes to jail, loses his job and his wife, who suggested he see a shrink. He gets out of jail and maintains his quest.

I enjoyed the way the movie ended, that was genius and entertaining, however the rest of the movie was not. The writers went half way to create symbolism and metaphors. They should concentrated on making the film entertaining.

The movie contains sexual scenes, nudity, and the f-bomb. What was up with the girl with the French(?) accent complaining about her ugly looking privates? I keep reminding myself not to watch any Tim Robbins films but I do anyway.

I expect nothing but the best from Tim Robbins. Another environmental awareness movie that delivers. This time the pollution is ....... NOISE. I guess the title gives it away. This was a well scripted film that played more of an intimate nature. Watching this , one can get the feeling they are at a small playhouse. Camera angles were excellent. Tim Robbins is for all intent purposes a good person with good moral values , a family man that loves his wife and daughter. For some reason though he is obsessed with unexplainable noises , mostly car alarms that do not go off. He is a noise vigilante and even has a name for himself, that I will not divulge here. Its an intellectual film that is refreshing ,original and creative . Along the way, Mr. Robbins meets supporters and detractors and the plot goes from there. Is he crazy? Is he a hero? ETC. That is the beauty of this film , leading to , what I feel, a wonderful ending that opens up the Pandoras Box for many other questions and discussions. It is a movie that stays with you . My criticisms might be that there were lagging parts of the film lasting from 3-7 or 8 minutes , at a few points in the movie. I also did not exactly care for the back and forth in time frames. If anything , the viewer should have been let in on what made Mr. Robbins tick. Maybe a childhood traumatic experience, screaming parents etc. Still with its few faults this is a well done movie and one that people can actually learn and exercise your mind over a cup of java at a new age , trendy coffee shop or having dinner at a sushi bar.