Reviews

Even before the opening credits are over, Michael Moore tells us this movie is not for the 50 million Americans who don't have health insurance, but for the 250 million Americans who do. Actually Moore is lowballing his potential audience a little; it's more like 256 million. This, like other figures that are a bit off the mark, does not make the film the complete fraud that Moore's most shrill critics would have you believe it is. (Every politically motivated documentary does this. The discerning viewer figures out what's been fudged and what hasn't.) Moore clearly wants you to think about this: The only thing in your life that you absolutely cannot replace - your health - is being managed for profit. And while it may not happen to you, an insurance company may someday decide that your health is too expensive for them to pay for.

As he always does, Moore presents his case in an entertaining way, with funny stock footage, plus light and breezy music played over depressing facts and images. (A highlight is a recording of Ronald Reagan way back in the late 1950s, describing universal health coverage as the first step to full-blown commie socialism.) The idea is to work you into a moral outrage about how we can let this happen, and that part works well.

Then as he sometimes does, Moore starts reaching out a bit too much to make extra points that don't fit the scope of the movie. There's some wandering off into college loans, and how there is no more American dream for my generation. There's also a funny but off-topic conversation with some former Americans in Paris who talk about the generous maternity leave and child care options their government makes available to them. I could see him trying to connect these to his main point, but it didn't quite work for me.

And as he often does, Moore leaves out some facts that make our current situation a bit better. For instance, maybe Britain and Canada and France have better health care systems than the U.S., but our standards of living are a bit higher too. (The French youth who rioted in the Parisian suburbs a couple of years ago all had health coverage - I mean, what else could they possibly need? Jobs?) Also, maybe prescription drugs are a hell of a lot cheaper in Cuba than in the U.S., but that doesn't automatically make Fidel Castro a great guy and a humanitarian. This probably could have been avoided by pointing out that we live in a pretty great country, at least until we get sick.

You have to get past the strangely composed shots, which make it look like there was only enough budget for one take. You have to get past the occasionally garbled and screechy sound. And most importantly, you have to get past the idea that a movie has to have a plot. This one doesn't, but it wouldn't be the same if it had one.

The thing that struck me the most is how every character must, in some way, fend for themselves. Stan, as the head of the household, has an emotionally draining, low-paying job in a slaughterhouse. He knows that help isn't on the way for his family, especially from the city of Los Angeles, which seems more interested in tearing down the ghetto than doing anything to help its residents prosper. (By the way, there are only two white people in the whole movie. One of them works with Stan in the slaughterhouse, and the other is a burly, street-tough woman who manages the local liquor store. This subtly reinforces the reality that everyone here is on their own.)

Stan's wife has to fend for herself emotionally. She needs comfort, romance, even passion. But his job is so bleak, low-paying, and futureless that he doesn't have anything to give her when he gets home. And the two children are too young to understand what's going on.

The kids in the neighborhood don't have toys to play with or activities to go to. They have to fend for themselves when it comes to keeping themselves amused. So they make do with playing around demolition sites, see who can stand on their head the longest, and throwing rocks at trains, or each other. Education is never mentioned at any time - in fact, it's entirely possible that some of the kids don't go to school at all.

Stan's friends, as well as everyone else in the neighborhood, have to do whatever they can to make ends meet. Sometimes it's legal, like buying a secondhand motor to try and get their car working again. Sometimes it's illegal, like trying to cash a bogus check at the liquor store, or burglarizing those who are less able to defend themselves.

There are so many other small but profound commentaries throughout the movie that it would be hard to list them all. And the last two scenes (I guess you could call it an ending, although there really isn't one)are incredibly powerful and moving when you add them to everything else you've seen.

This is truly a one-of-a-kind movie. There was nothing like it before, and there hasn't been anything like it since. I'm glad I was lucky enough to see it.

I saw this movie at the AFI Dallas film festival. James Keane, the director, happened to be there with his wife, Jane Seymour (who is in the movie). He said it's being released in May and if you like it, tell your friends. Well, since I absolutely hated it, I figured I'd do the same. And then I expanded "friends" to include "everyone I could possibly think of".

At the beginning of the movie, we find out that Danny is 22, he's been blind all his life, and he's looking for love. That's about where the fun stops because from this point on he becomes a vehicle for cheap jokes and stereotypes. See Danny run down a hill and smack into a tree! See Danny get tricked into picking up dog poop because his brother tells him it's candy! See Danny walk right smack into a door! See Danny slip and fall on a toy! See Danny's therapist taking off her clothes because she finds him attractive and he can't see her! See his brother faking bench-pressing reps at the gym because he can't see the weights!

His slimy brother, Larry (played by Eddie Kaye Thomas, who apparently watched a lot of Mickey Rourke movies to prepare for the role), just wants him to get laid and sets him up with a string of predictably awful dates. See Danny's first date turn into a complete basket case the minute she finds out he's blind! See Danny's man-eating second date chase him into a bathroom stall! See Danny's third date paw at him under the table and tell a potential John that she costs $500 per visit!

By the way, Larry runs a limo service and he rents it out to prostitutes and their johns when he isn't busy. And this leads to an appalling stereotype. See the Asian man taking lots of pictures and asking Larry to take one of him with his hooker!

Wait, there's more. Leeza, a receptionist at a doctor's office for blind patients, takes a liking to Danny. (Because apparently you have to be someone who works with blind people to ever fall in love with one.) But she's Indian, and therefore her family has an arranged marriage set up for her. See Leeza fighting her mother for the right to marry whoever she wants! See the predictable lowlife she's been matched up with!

This is the first movie I've seen in forever that made me think of Roger Ebert's famous review of "North" as a comparison. You know the one - "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie." It was stupid, insulting, and actually offensive at times. I guess it was trying to be like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin", which I really enjoyed, but there's a huge difference between that movie and this one. "Virgin" treated its main character with respect, and its characters had human flaws of their own that explained some of their antics. But this movie treats Danny like a joke surrounded by phoned-in caricatures. There's probably a good movie out there about the social awkwardness that can result from being blind, but this is absolutely not it. To think James Keane said he was really proud of this movie.

I saw a screening at the AFI Dallas film festival, and as you can probably guess, this is an experimental movie that people will have highly subjective feelings about.

I don't hate soccer, and I enjoy abstract art, but this just didn't work for me. I agree with the earlier comment which said that Zidane's actions on the field had no context and no gravity or importance because we had no idea how they fit in to the rest of the game. Where was he on the field when he dribbled past defenders? Was he making a rush towards the goal, or just relieving pressure from the opposing team? When he sent a pass down the field, who was he passing to? Worst of all, when he is given a red card and thrown out of the game, why did he feel the need to go after the opposing player? It seems like to really appreciate the movie, you have to have a strong working knowledge of Zidane that I don't have and this movie doesn't give you. Without that, it's watch Zidane run, watch Zidane stand around, watch Zidane spit, watch Zidane not say much of anything that we can hear (by the way, how can you spring for 20 cameras and not put a microphone on him too?)

And at times, the cinematography is actually too tight on Zidane. In the second half, he makes a fantastic play, rushing up the left side and making a gorgeous cross for a tap-in goal at the right post. But we barely see the result of his great work.

To me, this movie is a lot like the short films Andy Warhol made where he would point the camera at a person and let it run for a few minutes while they stared into the lens and did nothing. Some people will find deeper meaning and some will really enjoy it, but many others will find it self-indulgent, dull, and pointless. I wonder how it would work if it were done with another sport where a player has more individual impact. Imagine this movie being tried with basketball, where the cameras focus on Kobe Bryant or Steve Nash or Kevin Garnett for a whole game.

At least I made it to the end - one lady a few seats down from me left the theater entirely, went across the street to Borders, bought some books, and then came back.

This is a visually remarkable movie. Charles Biname and Pierre Gill do a terrific job of bringing the viewer back to the 1940s and 1950s and giving the movie a hardscrabble, gritty look. They also capture the rough-and-tumble, ultra-competitive feeling of Original Six hockey, where only the best of the best made it in and many players repeatedly had to fight - literally and figuratively - to keep their jobs. The hockey action is right up there with "Miracle" in quality. (It's also kind of funny to see the modern-day players making cameos in the movie struggling with the flat sticks and smaller equipment from that era.) Roy Dupuis also does a fine job of portraying the slowly building frustration, and ultimately rage, inside the Rocket as the NHL appears to discriminate against him on the ice.

The only complaint I had about the movie, and maybe I'm alone here and maybe I'm just being cynical, but there were little bits that felt manipulative. Some American directors, and I'm not naming names but one of them is Steven Spielberg, are getting into the habit of making movies specifically designed to win a lot of awards. They put these tug-at-your-heart moments into the movie, but really they make you roll your eyes so hard you almost pull a muscle. At times the movie came close to turning into the Canadian "Cinderella Man," but fortunately it passed quickly. Maurice Richard was probably one of the five best hockey players of all time and this movie certainly does his story justice.

And if that's not enough, Sean Avery gets the crap beat out of him, which drew loud applause at the screening I attended.

I saw this as part of the AFI Dallas film festival. The movie looks good - it was shot in high-definition video - and it has a zany premise. Imagine a company run entirely by vampires, and all the twists on the usual office environment that that entails. Then one of the managers loses his mind, some of the other workers turn up dead (with stakes driven through their hearts, of course), and he hires a non-vampire to replace one of them.

Genius performance from Darrell Hammond as the company's president, who underplays his entire character and starts spouting off pointless corporate buzzphrases as he gets dumber and dumber. Steve Burns also does well as a do-gooding office drone who is left to train the new hire.

I thought the movie did a little too much explaining when it came to the backstory and some of the truths and myths about vampires. The story would get on a roll, get some good laughs in, and then suddenly it would stop down for 1-2 minutes at a time to fill in some details that you didn't always need. (Although one of them was hilariously random - apparently one of our former U.S. Presidents was a vampire.) I could have used a lot more Jason Mewes, too.

Overall it's good entertainment and probably destined to have a long life in midnight-movie series.

I was lucky enough to see an unfinished version at the AFI Dallas film festival. The best thing about this movie is that you can enjoy it on any level that you want to, and it still works perfectly. If you want to root for the earnest underdog Steve Wiebe as he tries to break the Donkey Kong world record, overcome some truly pathetic human beings along the way, and step out of his own not-quite-good-enough shadows, you can do that. If you want to learn more about one of the hardest arcade games ever made, and see how players are able to crack the codes on classic games and rack up insanely high scores, you can do that. If you want to laugh at some of the social misfits of the competitive classic gaming elite, many of whom look exactly the same as they did 25 years ago, you can do that. If you want to sit back and enjoy the Uncle Rico, stuck-in-1982, puppetmaster douchebag that is Billy Mitchell, you can do that. (Seth Gordon was at our screening and I thought about asking him if he ever wanted to just blurt out, "Man, you're a loser!" at any point during their interviews.) If you want to just laugh at everyone and think to yourself, "It's fricking DONKEY KONG!", you can do that too. Or you can do all of them at once. The film is layered with so many different plots and subplots and a healthy amount of extremely low-stakes espionage and subterfuge. But importantly, it never feels like there is too much going on.

This movie does everything a great documentary does. It finds a subject that you didn't know you cared about until you saw it. Its characters tell a fantastic story but the movie doesn't choose sides (in this case, one character was so incredibly unlikable that Gordon doesn't have to). And it gets lucky to capture moments that are so surprising, intense, and exhilarating that no one could possibly write them in a script. If you see this version first, you may not want to see the fictionalized version that's in the works, because there's no way it can possibly top the real thing.

Admittedly I'm hard on romantic comedies. Too often they are wildly unrealistic, filled with characters who are inexplicably wealthy and who act like people you just want to punch in the face because they're so neurotic and self-centered. At least this one doesn't have that problem.

But it has a different problem. Westfeldt doesn't really address the movie's main questions. Is it best to just "go with it", or do you have to build your relationship like you would build a building? How important is marriage, and what's the point of it anyway? Why can't people talk to one another directly? What happens to your present when your past jumps up to haunt you? If you love each other, does it really matter what your life ambition is?

These would be great things to think about, but instead Westfeldt bogs down the movie by having Ira's mom get into an affair with Abby's dad. Then when this news comes to light, everyone withdraws to their separate corners and plastic surgeons and therapists. (By the way, you could see the "therapists screw everything up" angle coming from the first five minutes of the movie - in fact, I'm still waiting for a "New York romance" movie to not involve a massive amount of complaining to therapists. Or analysts, as Ira's parents take pride in calling themselves.) Granted, it was at least funny to watch. But there's a scene near the end where Abby pulls in all the therapists, both sets of parents, herself, and Ira for a giant session. While everyone else starts yelling at each other, Ira and Abby look across the room at each other and mentally reconcile. The most telling thing to me was that at that moment, you could see how many unnecessary characters there were in the movie because the room was filled with them as Ira and Abby walked out together.

If you can make it through the first five minutes of this movie, you'll be fine. I think John Cameron Mitchell might have front-loaded the movie with sex to get the closed-minded in the audience to leave the theater before he really got started. And that's totally OK.

I was surprised and even affected by the emotional intensity of the cast when each of their relationships hit their rockiest points. But at the same time, the resolution of them seems too easy and not totally satisfying. Sophia's husband is clearly uncomfortable at Shortbus and he's already upset that he can't give her an orgasm. How is he going to handle things if she has one, and he isn't at the controls? Also, James and Jamie decide to open up their relationship, which sounds like it covers their problem. But does it? Both of them opened up emotionally to the new people in their relationship and that's bound to create much deeper issues.

While this movie is a welcome antidote to the Hollywood movies that treat sex as a popcorn diversion with no meaning at all, I don't think it dives quite as deep as it should. It sets you up for a big, emotional climax, but it doesn't deliver. I guess that makes it the movie equivalent of blue balls.

I'm really getting tired of the "guy who refuses to grow up already" archetype. I'm sure this one was better than something like You, Me, and Dupree, but there were still two problems:

1. All of the scenarios were all blown out to the Nth degree. Normally, I'm thinking there would be some introspection, guy talk, and learning to live with and embrace the progression in their life. Instead, we get a 29-year-old cheating with a college student, a second character casually deciding to leave his wife and infant, a third character staging a home invasion to tell his ex how much he loves her, and a fourth buying an RV and going who knows where.

2. Your life does not end when you get married. Your life does not end when you have a kid. The male characters in this movie believe their wedding is also their funeral, which is insane. I found myself annoyed with them after about half an hour. Just because you put Zach Braff and his puppy-dog face into your movie doesn't mean I'm going to side with him.

This is a movie I went back and forth on seeing. I'd see a commercial and think it would be terrible. Then I'd see the trailer while waiting for another movie and think it would be good. Finally I decided to go. This was a tragic mistake. For a couple of minutes, though, it was looking pretty good. I was getting prepared for an intimate look at how sane, educated people handle adult relationships. Then the opening credits ended and there's David Duchovny, talking to his son while he (the son) is on the toilet and explaining how a fart can be better than a poop. It didn't get any better from there.

Not counting porn, this is the worst-written film I have ever seen. Now there are plenty of badly-written movies out there, but they don't pretend to be anything other than a crude vehicle that gets you to the CGI, stunts, and/or bloodshed. This is even worse than those because Bart Freundlich thought it was going to be about something important, and it's just absolute junk. The characters in this movie do not exist in real life. They have no depth or dimensions or personalities. They are all completely unlikable. (I started applauding when Duchovny tells Billy Crudup's character to shut the hell up. You and me both, David.) They don't talk or think like anyone I've ever come across. They float from wildly expensive restaurant to wildly expensive restaurant and whine about their problems without ever stopping to think that they are the cause of them all. Would you want to sit through an hour and 40 minutes of rich, pampered, pretty white people living in a bubble and complaining about how much their lives suck? I didn't think so.

But wait, there's more. The script makes Maggie Gyllenhaal look like a sniveling, whiny private-school sorority girl. That alone is an art crime against humanity. But considering Crudup is reduced to a one-note death-obsessed Neanderthal, and Duchovny ends up speaking jive during a particularly bigoted note in the script, and the whole thing wraps up like a teen drama on the CW, I think I'm on pretty solid ground with my assertion.

Yes, it only deserves 1 star. I thought to myself: Was there anything of value that I could take from this movie and justify giving it maybe 2 or 3 stars? There might have been, but the movie was such an insult to me and other smart people that I decided it wasn't worth it to figure out what they were.

It's amusing and yet horrifying to watch the gang from Greenberg, Carville, and Shrum twist this election around to help an unpopular, clearly unqualified candidate win. They are gleeful at every positive turn of the polls. In one scene, Rosner seems almost orgasmic when he hears good things from a focus group. After the election, a demonic Carville gloats that the only time they led in the polls was on election day, then compares the peak of a campaign to the peak of sex. (Another highlight was Carville trying to spell "repetition" on a marker board and leaving out at least two letters.)

Whether they are immoral or amoral is up to you. GCS helps run Goni on a return to "capitalization", which means converting Bolivia's natural resources into money for its poor public services. But because they're landlocked and don't have the industrial might to extract and sell the resources themselves, they get fleeced by foreign companies and fail to create jobs for the natives. GCS either doesn't understand that their ideal policies don't work in countries like this, or they don't care and just want the paycheck from Goni's campaign. Either way, their arrogance is off-putting and Rosner's contrition at the end of the film about how things turned out doesn't seem heartfelt.

You can also, subtly, find a parallel in this movie to the first Bush campaign. To many, Bush is unqualified to be President and is simply a vessel for other people's ideas, but he was elected anyway. As it becomes obvious from the people and researchers that Goni has botched things in Bolivia, you can't help but think of former Bush administration officials who have left their posts and turned against their former leader. Except for the deadly riots in the streets, they are virtually the same.

If "The War Room" was a movie about the idealism of New Democrats, this one is about what happens when it is taken to the wrong place. Definitely two movies that could be seen back-to-back.

P.S. MF, I'm sure the movie knew modern campaigning goes on in Bolivia. The anger of the audience was from the hubris of GCS thinking they could sweep in from their cloud in Washington, help their guy win, and everything would turn out right.