Reviews

A good little film with a dark edge to it. What's most amusing about the negative comments on this page is the outrage over the fact that the movie's content didn't match the video box artwork. If you're foolish enough to make your rental decisions based on a video box cover, then you get what you deserve. If you're looking for an offbeat and quirky movie about a first date gone very wrong, then you might enjoy "What Happened Was". If not, then let me suggest that you stick to poop like "You've Got Mail."

Yes it's long, bewildering, and often pretentious, but it's also one of the most original and powerful American movies that I've seen in quite some time. Comparisons with "Saving Private Ryan" are pointless since the two movies spring from completely different artistic sensibilities, although I will say that I vastly preferred "The Thin Red Line", flaws and all, to Spielberg's movie. I also suspect that fifty years from now, long after the "Private Ryan" hype-machine has died away, Malick's movie will be seen as the better work. The movie sometimes resembled a strange mix of Sam Fuller and Andrei Tarkovsky (The opening shot is nothing short of brilliant). The spiritual and philosophical underpinnings of the film, and the way they are presented, alternate between the profound and the maddeningly pretentious. Malick seems to have bitten off more than he could chew here, and one can feel him struggling at the end to bring all of his philosophical threads together into some sort of resolution, but he just can't seem to pull it off. Still, the overall effect is both haunting and beautiful. Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker, put it nicely when he rattled off all the problems he had with it and then concluded, "But, a week after seeing 'The Thin Red Line,' I am starting to be spooked by it, and already I need to see it again." Same here.

Frankly, I found the movie depressing. James Whale's life and career are whittled down to little more than the image of a witty-but-tortured queen. So what if Ian McKellen's performance is brilliant? That Whale's career could be reduced to his "gayness", and done in such a kitschy manner, struck me as cheap. And that "poignant" ending was a laughable piece of melodramatic cornball.

Are people's spiritual and religious lives so shallow these days that they're actually buying into the kind of cheese-ball mush that "What Dreams May Come?" serves up? Give me a break. This was "Spirituality Lite". Narcissistic poop masquerading as meaningful spirituality.

Yes, the opening sequence is breathtaking. Once it's over with though, the movie is a tired rehash of every WW II movie cliche. It also features perhaps the most dreadful score of John Williams' career.

Critics have been raving about the faithfulness of this version, and while it is certainly faithful in the strictest sense of the word, gone is the wit, the humor, and bitterness of Nabokov's novel. They have been replaced by exactly the kind of garish puffery that Nabokov was making fun of.