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mikelancasterghs
Reviews
Meet the Spartans (2008)
Excruciatingly unfunny. Should be a zero score.
More from the unfunny writers and directors who gave us "Epic Movie" and "Date Movie" but this time there are no laughs to be found. And really, I was hoping it would be funny. The film is startlingly unoriginal and plays like a 3-min "Saturday Night Live" sketch that has been stretched out to 84 mins. Bad acting, terrible casting, worse special effects and a literally non-existent laugh-to-joke ratio, this film was torture to sit through. The directors couldn't even get the so-called celebrity "look-a-likes" right. Seriously, if they hadn't have said "Hey that's Paris Hilton" or "Ugly Betty" or "Lindsay Lohan" you would not have recognized the "celebrity." There is not one laugh in the entire 84 minutes. How this got through test screenings is beyond me. Does 20th Century Fox not read scripts anymore before they commit millions of dollars to a production?
Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007)
One of the worst films of 2007. I can't believe it's getting a U.S. release
Painfully unfunny.
The film has very little dialogue and no laughs. It's just Rowan Atkinson mugging endlessly for long stretches to the film camera, and when he's not doing that, he's making funny faces in his video camera.
Even Mr. Bean's most ardent American fans will find the film tedious, and a tremendous letdown from the first film from 1997 which was quite amusing. Children, especially, will be bored silly and be begging to be taken out of the theater.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS (you've been warned): Plot: In London, Mr. Bean wins a raffle prize. It's a trip to France, and in particular, the Cannes Film Festival. But confusion ensues from the moment he sets out on the trip. Armed with his video camera, which gives us a weird Bean-point-of-view of his vacation antics, he boards a train and happens upon a young boy who is sitting alone. It seems that Bean has inadvertently prevented the lad's father from boarding the train and it has now left the station. Bean does everything he can to reunite the boy with his father, and eventually lands in Cannes, where the police think he has kidnapped the boy. There much more to the plot, I'm just giving you the basics. Don't even get me started on the love interest.
It all ends at the Cannes Film Festival where a crazy director -- Willem Dafoe (the ONLY bright spot in the film) -- is set to premiere his latest 'artsy' film. Naturally, having Mr. Bean and his video camera anywhere near the cinema spells trouble for the director.
The running time for 'Mr. Bean's Holiday' is 90 minutes but it feels hours longer.
I am quite surprised that Universal Pictures is wasting the money to release this in movie theaters in the United States when it should have gone direct to DVD. The film, such as it is, is simply not releasable to American audiences.
The bottom line is this: There are no celebrity cameos, no laughs, little dialogue (at times it appears to be almost a 'silent movie'), and kids will hate it. There, I said it.
Sorry the film is such a mess. I wanted to like it, and I enjoyed the first one. This one is horrible, sad to say.
This will not do well at the U.S. box office... mark my words.
The One: Making a Music Star (2006)
Cancelled after one airing?
No surprise except in how quickly ABC reacted to the dismal ratings. According to published reports (Variety) the show garnered the worst ratings in the history of the ABC television network.
And I quote: ABC's music talent competition "The One" opened Tuesday night to cancel-me-now ratings.
The article went on to say that the show received a "shockingly low 1.1 rating/3 share in adult 18-49 and 3.08 million viewers overall."
That makes it the weakest premiere for any reality show on any network and also below all series bows in ABC history.
From the first moment I saw the commercials for this I knew it would fail. We don't need another American Idol clone. But ABC should have given this show a fair chance to succeed.