Reviews

There is nothing worse than science fiction crafted by folks who don't have a feel for it. Grasping at a concept which wouldn't be so terrible by itself (a future where cloning is common enough that it is necessary to make it a crime for you to breed with someone too close to you genetically) the screenwriter proceeded to allow his ill-suited imagination to run wild.

When Tim Robbins' character was able to guess a security guard's computer password simply by getting her to tell him one thing about herself, I knew I was in for trouble. This ability was later revealed to be due to Robbins having taken an "empathy virus", viruses being used to grant instant (or nearly instant) skill upgrades to their users. Robbins' love interest complained about her own experience with such a virus -- a Mandarin Chinese language virus, which allowed her to speak Chinese, but as she complained, "she couldn't understand what she was saying." Okay, first off, empathy, no matter how intense, isn't ESP. Without incorporating some sort of true mind-reading aspect (like an empathy virus which actively releases virions into the vicinity, infects nearby people, picks up bits of their memory, then departs for the original host -- which is, as you can probably tell, a smidgeon on the impractical side) you can't justify being able to determine a specific detail like someone's password just by "listening to the things you didn't say". Nor can you acquire the ability to speak a language without understanding what you're saying -- the virus can't infect your vocal cords and translate for you on the fly, because a virus can't *think*. To give you the power to speak Chinese, such a learning virus would have to modify your brain. It would have to encode the knowledge among neurons, and once it's in there, it's *yours* -- you certainly understand what you're saying, because you have to. To use your own brain to perform a task, you must understand that task (for the most part). Unless, of course, they movie is suggesting that the virus was deliberately designed to put in place some bizarre multiple-personality mental schism where some sub-personae of yours functions as a built-in, one-way translator.

The mélange of languages spoken by the characters is decent enough, although nowhere near remarkable enough to warrant all the love other reviewers have given. What's more, all the multicultural insertions in the world can't make up for a simple, frustrating fact: The dialog stinks! It's slow, it's plodding, and it's unnatural. Again, I'm sure adherents have convinced themselves that the dull strangeness is simply the result of an inspired genius creating a truly futuristic (and therefore subjected to linguistic drift) form of speech. I disagree. Good dialog is good dialog in any era -- and the same goes for tripe.

Lastly, I'll revisit the central concept of the movie -- the banning of sex with yourself. Widespread cloning is a nice, classic sci-fi topic. So is global warming leading to ecological devastation (which Code 46 also incorporates). Unfortunately, the two don't go together! If you have an ecological disaster cutting down severely on the available living area, you don't run around cloning people! You have population problems enough as it is -- you don't add to them by cranking out re-issues. Regular, old-fashioned sex-and-birth provides all the population you need, and cloning of any sort would be ruthlessly suppressed.

To be fair, the movie wasn't all bad. It had some nice cinematography. Perhaps if I had watched it muted, I could've enjoyed it.

The absurd stupidity of the movie would be funny if not for the chilling realization that some folks actually believed this nonsense.

I found the scene with the "reformed" communist nurse who now worked in a leper colony (nice symbolism there -- that working with lepers, the lowest of the low, is still a step up from Commies) to be a good microcosm of the entire film. The woman explained that she reformed when she realized that communism was nothing more than a vast conspiracy to enslave the working man.

It's one thing to critique a philosophy because you believe it is unjust, or unworkable, or otherwise flawed. But to find yourself so threatened by someone else's beliefs that you'll put such ridiculous words into the mouths of your characters is insulting to the intelligence of your audience. It's also lousy propoganda. There was plenty wrong with communism (still is), but to suggest that it's a "conspiracy" trying to make slaves of the working class is downright crazy.

Particularly stomach churning is to see such pap come from Hollywood in 1952, right in the middle of Senator McCarthy's brutal reign of terror -- many of whose victims were actors and directors.

This film does do a good job of exposing traitors -- I'd say that those involved in creating it would certainly fit the bill. Not traitors to their country, of course. In fact, I'm sure they all believed themselves to be great patriots. They were, instead, traitors to their own kind.

John Wayne made some great Westerns. He shouldn't have branched out. Certainly not like this.

There are movies that are so bad that they become their own form of entertainment. Unfortunately, this is not one of them.

While it may have one or two chuckles, the vast majority of Freddy got Fingered is merely unpleasant. Gross can be funny, but Mr. Green has taken this truism to mean that even grosser is even funnier. It isn't.

Most of the gross in this film is simply disgusting. It's like watching some impromptu episode of Fear Factor, where the contestant not only doesn't fear any of the nasty things he's exposing himself to -- he seems drawn to them.

I'm afraid many of the folks who defend this film have gotten confused the same way Mr. Green has. Somewhere along the way, they had a "bad comedy experience", and this experience has led them to view the bizarre as redemptive purely for its unusual nature.

A few things I hope Mr. Green comes to realize:

1) Weird is not necessarily edgy. 2) Doing something someone else finds too disgusting to contemplate doesn't push the boundaries, or expand anyone's horizons. 3) Making your audience cringe is nothing to be proud of. 4) The fact that people stop and stare when they see something awful doesn't mean that they're being entertained.

There are probably plenty more, but why go into them? Clearly he'll never pay any attention anyhow.

One final thought. Tom Green *can* be funny -- primarily when his comedic notions are channeled by the constraints of outsiders. When tethered a bit, his oddball behavior actually does become edgy, entertaining, and provocative.

Freddy Got Fingered shows none of those sorts of constraints.

Boats make great spots for horror -- as they're enclosed (same goes for planes 'n trains, of course) The people on board can't get away (except, perhaps, by life boat or somesuch -- and that never works out).

What's more, boats have significant advantages over trains and planes. For one thing, a boat is much larger than a plane, and often larger than a train. You also have multiple paralell means of travel within the boat, so you don't have to spend half your time trying to come up with silly, novel ways for characters to get from one part of the conveyance to another.

This movie doesn't make much use of those advantages, however. Instead, it seems to take place in 3 or 4 spots on the boat, only briefly visiting any of the rest. When you consider that the ship offers literally hundreds of places for teens to run screaming, Jason to stand menacingly, and general mayhem to take place, it seems absurd that all the characters involved would spend so much of their time concentrated in such a small region.

You'd also sort of think, given the title, that Manhattan would play a more prominent role in the film.

On the whole, it's just a mediocre film. Nobody involved seems to be trying, and that leaves you as a member of the audience feeling just a wee bit neglected.

This would've been a *great* silent film. The acting really is good, at least in a Look Ma, I'm Doing Really Big Acting! sort of way.

Everything is HUGE. Every line is PROFOUND! Every scene is SHATTERED BY HUMAN TRAGEDY!

Mostly, I felt like gagging. Yet, like any train wreck, I couldn't tear my eyes away. This dialogue might've worked on the stage, although I doubt it. On the screen, it was cluttered, haphazard, hackneyed and pretty much every other stereotypical negative adjective you can come up with to describe a really bad dramatic work.

If you enjoy your melodrama in huge, heaping doses, you *might* enjoy the movie. Be prepared to wait, however. For all that melodrama, this thing sure plods along at its own pace.

This script must've sounded a lot different when the actors involved were reading it to themselves. It simply doesn't work once they get around to delivering it in front of the camera.

IMDB does us a great disservice, at times, when it uses its goofy computer-controlled "weighted score". Curse of the Starving Class deserves less than a 1.

Character-driven fiction is great, but when you develop your characters by simply pushing them through hoops with no plausible explanation for their maturation or evolution, it isn't character development! Your characters must have a motivation. Being drunk for a while and waking up in a field is *not* character development. That's a plot contrivance.

Stay away from this movie. Or at the very least, watch it muted. Perhaps you'll get some amusement from all the arm-waving the characters do.

Oh, and word to the wise -- to prove that this is truly an artsy film, you see James Woods in all his dangly male "look-at-me, I'm-the-figurative-and-literal-representation-of-the-naked-vulnerability-of- man" glory.

Don't say you weren't warned.