I haven't been so disappointed since Bush got reelected. I was mainly interested in this movie because Tommy Lee Jones was in it, and I would have to say he did an admirable job with the senseless drivel he was forced to deliver. Kathleen Turner is not one of my favourites, but here I just wanted to reach in and strangle her. The whole thing was a spielbergesque schmaltzfest of embarrassing proportions, and what flabbergasts me is that so many people seem to embrace it on so many levels, as if it actually had something meaningful to say.
It is insulting that they should be able to take a condition such as autism (which the child doesn't have but the movie wants you to think she does) and trivialize it and make it the centrepiece of a maudlin, unrealistic dumbed down piece of soap drama.
The eponymous house of gravity-defying cards itself could not, by any stretch, have been built by a 6-year-old, or anyone else. The virtual reality simulations depicted were preposterous in 1993; today they are a ludicrous parody. Those are just a couple of the obvious technical failures.
I am quite prepared to suspend my notions of plausibility to allow artistic fulfillment, but that only works when it is needed as a vehicle to get the message through. There is no message here, it is just fatuous nonsense of the worst kind: Deliberate emotional manipulation of the sort that Mr. Spielberg is a master of.
This doesn't work on me, and I find it dismaying that it does seem to work on so many others, as shown here by how few reviewers were able to see through it. If you like having your intelligence insulted, then by all means, watch this.
It is insulting that they should be able to take a condition such as autism (which the child doesn't have but the movie wants you to think she does) and trivialize it and make it the centrepiece of a maudlin, unrealistic dumbed down piece of soap drama.
The eponymous house of gravity-defying cards itself could not, by any stretch, have been built by a 6-year-old, or anyone else. The virtual reality simulations depicted were preposterous in 1993; today they are a ludicrous parody. Those are just a couple of the obvious technical failures.
I am quite prepared to suspend my notions of plausibility to allow artistic fulfillment, but that only works when it is needed as a vehicle to get the message through. There is no message here, it is just fatuous nonsense of the worst kind: Deliberate emotional manipulation of the sort that Mr. Spielberg is a master of.
This doesn't work on me, and I find it dismaying that it does seem to work on so many others, as shown here by how few reviewers were able to see through it. If you like having your intelligence insulted, then by all means, watch this.