Reviews

I recently watched Angel Heart. I hadn't seen it in years, and stumbled across it one afternoon.

I was stunned as I was completely drawn into the world of Detective Harry Angel, and sat mesmerized for the next two hours, until the film's stunning conclusion left me breathless, even though I knew what was coming.

This is not a simple movie, but the simple plot line is that a hard nosed private eye gets in too deep when hired by a mysterious client to find a missing person. What follows is a complex, twisted tale of morality, secrets, and the fact that you can never outrun your past, no matter how hard you try.

For those of you who only know Mickey Rourke as the hulking ruin you saw in Sin City, you really need to see this film. Rourke was at his prime here, and gives a performance that is both believable and shattering. It is a portrait of a man who knows he is losing his hold on everything that he knows to be true, but is unable to stop going down the road that he senses will lead him to oblivion.

The first time I saw this movie, I was a teenager, and thought the movie was too slowly paced. Now, with a more mature set of eyes, I think the pacing is perfect. Languidly allowing the viewer to be steeped in the humid, foreign atmosphere of a sultry Louisiana.

The cinematography is fantastic, with every detail authentic, down to the fact that people didn't wear antiperspirant back then :-)

I absolutely believed in the world that Harry found himself being trapped by, and the horror kept growing as every new detail was slowly brought to light.

This is a film that demands to be seen at least twice. I have watched it twice more since that afternoon, and I am still finding new details that I had not noticed before. Be warned, it is intense, but it is an unforgettable classic film.

Okay, okay, I get it. This was supposed to be an updated version of those so-bad-they're-good movies from the 70's. You know, the ones that cost 20,000 dollars to make, and are a guilty pleasure that draw you in every time you see them pop up on the USA Network. The problem here, is that with the level of time and money involved, this should have been a great movie.

It isn't.

Quentin Tarantino is great at writing dialog for men, but he really stinks at writing dialog for women.

Another flaw is that while the exploitation films this one is supposed to be referencing to, suffered from a lot of problems, they were rarely boring.

This movie will put you to sleep before the first intentionally scratched reel is finished rolling.

The women, who make up 95% of the film, are truly empty, shallow characters. They look great, but you don't care about anything they have to say.

The dialog, which mimics basically every male character has ever written, goes on, and on, and isn't realistic to any conversation I have ever heard in my lifetime of engaging in female conversations.

There is no point to the dialog. It doesn't add anything to the story, other than making the run time insufferably long.

The pointless conversations go on for so long, the viewer secretly starts hoping that Jason or Freddy would get their rear end in gear, and finish these dull characters off, already.

Fans of QT say he is building up suspense. That is nonsense, the only thing he is building are calluses on the rear ends of people who are sitting in their seats waiting for something to happen.

Don't get me wrong, I can see where the money went. The acting is good. Kurt Russell is GREAT. The car crash scene is amazing and the chase scene at the end is incredible, but what you have to sit through to get to those scenes is long, boring, and pointless.

Tarantino's personal indulgences run amok in this film. The story would have been a great one hour, Masters of Horror episode. Stretching it into a 90 minute or 2 hour version (which is the one that I saw) made it an insufferable experience, made even more intolerable by the pat-myself-on-the-back attitude displayed by Tarantino in everything from his smarmy cameo, to the overuse of references from his earlier films...

Where are the scenes of Stuntman Mike's other kills? A montage of those would have been great.

Why didn't we get more back story on him?

He is, by far the most interesting character.

Why didn't we see him making his death-proof cars?

What happened between his time in Texas and Tennessee?

Are other stunt men helping him?

Is this a side-line for several frustrated guys?

The guys I see at car shows usually do look like they really, really need to find a woman...

An Evil Dead 2 tool-shed type montage of him making the modifications to the Chevy Nova, and getting excited about what he was going to do, would have been really fun to watch, but instead we get to see 6 vapid women eating, and cursing, for an hour.

All of these things lead me to say that the main problem I have with this film, is that all of the screen time goes to the irritating characters that we don't care about, and completely ignores the one character (Stuntman Mike) that would have drawn us in.

Mike Judge is incredibly talented, with a proved track record of making successful television shows and one bona fide cult film. So, of course, he cannot be trusted.

That seems to be the message from Fox which apparently took over this movie and cut it the way they wanted to, then dumped it with absolutely no fanfare or promotion.

First, the bad: The film is uneven and looks like it had a budget less than, or equal to, the money you could shake out of my sofa.

A narration has been tacked on that explains in painful detail, exactly what you are watching on the screen. The special effects and set design are awful and the jokes are extremely repetitive.

The story centers on the fact that America is becoming dumber by the year because stupid people breed faster. An average solider becomes part of a cryogenics project and is supposed to be frozen for one year. A female hooker is also chosen for the project, which is specifically looking for people that won't be missed by anyone.

The project goes wrong and the soldier and hooker are actually frozen for 500 years. Waking up only when a trash avalanche propels them into Washington D.C.

The satire is pointed and funny (the top show is, "Ow, My Balls" and the top film is simply called, "Ass.") but I kept getting the feeling that the film was not shaped the way Judge intended.

The choppy story suggests that many scenes were deleted or never filmed and the narration I mentioned earlier seems to be nothing other than an attempt to both make up for those missing scenes and explain the movie to those with IQ's lower than the residents of 2505.

The jokes are scattered and the second half of the movie completely falls apart, with an over-reliance on WWF style theatrics that are amusing at first but drag as they go on, and on.

There is a great story in here. There is a very funny movie that could have been made from this material, but we just aren't getting it here.

I am really hoping that a Director's Cut becomes available eventually. I would love to hear what Mike Judge has to say about this film. There is no commentary track on the DVD, which really should not come as a surprise considering how Fox botched the handling of this film.