Reviews

Words cannot describe the combination of blissful nostalgia and childlike wonder I experienced while watching this new version of my favorite cartoon for the first time. I've been hoping for years that Cartoon Network would air the old MOTU episodes, but I never expected an all-new series! Finally, they've got an original action cartoon worth watching!

I usually like every movie I see. Unless it's just unbelievably bad, I can watch it, probably two or three times. There are the movies that stand out, too, of course, the ones that I can't stop talking about weeks after I've seen them-movies like "The Usual Suspects," "Silence of the Lambs," "Goodfellas," you know, classics. But really, I'm fine with almost anything; I even liked "Scooby-Doo".

But this movie sucked, bigtime. A movie can commit a number of offenses, so long as it isn't boring. As long as it can hold my attention, it'll do. This was probably the most boring movie I've seen since "Ishtar"; this is compounded by the fact that it was about 11 hours long.

I'll not go into all the other reasons this movie reeks so distinctly as a tiny floater in the mighty pile of dung that represents ALMOST EVERY MOVIE EVER MADE. People have already taken care of that for me, but believe me: I could go on.

I liked this movie up until the ending. I suppose I still liked it after the ending as well, but it was formulaic and unrealistic. Although, I suppose the only other alternative would've seemed really mean.

The fact is, no guy's going to go for a girl as fat as Rosemary. A guy can fall in love, pretty easily in fact, and there're plenty of things that aren't going to get to him; if he wakes up one day and realize she's a mammoth, though, it's not going to be, "Oh, you're a whale? No problem!" He might be able to work it out, eventually, but not in the blink of an eye. That's what happened here-Hal snaps out of his superficial rut the first time he sees Fat Rosemary.

They could've done something a bit more original with the ending, I think. Like having a year pass, letting Rosemary go do her missionary work or whatever that was, and then when she comes back, not only has Hal realized that he truly does love her, but he's a fat slob now too! Like, even fatter, I mean. Not that he's THAT fat.

At first, I refused to see this movie, since I've hated everything Tom Green's been involved with so far. But a few friends just wouldn't shut up about it (someone even said it was "brilliant"), so I watched it on cable one night. Rather, I tried to watch it.

I started having trouble paying attention about five minutes after it started. It wasn't interesting or in the least bit funny. It really doesn't make any sense, either, even if you overlook the fact that, in real life, anyone as stupid as Tom Green's character would've been institutionalized. I'd say his father went easy on him through most of it.

Really, after seeing Gummo, I figured I'd witnessed the absolute bottom of the cinematic barrel. While Freddy Got Fingered wasn't quite as close to the bottom as Gummo, it was close enough to keep it company.

SPOILER: Don't let anyone tell you you're close-minded if you hated this movie. This movie was, beyond an inkling of a flicker of a shadow of a doubt, egregiously awful. There are always going to be wannabe artsy types out there who claim to see things other people don't; they "get" movies like Gummo, or at least they pretend to, so they can act as if they're in on something the rest of the world just isn't smart enough to understand. The truth is, though, that there is absolutely nothing to get. This movie is not innovative, nor intriguing, nor even interesting in the least. There's no underlying meaning to it at all (writer/director Harmony Korine admitted as much in an interview). It's just a loosely continuous assembly of vignettes depicting random scenes of filth, squalor, and depravity.

The movie is not a social commentary, as some have argued. It offers no insight into the lives of the people it exploits. The entire backstory-the tornado-serves only as an excuse for the rest of the thing, as if it mattered. It goes like this: first, we get to watch a shirtless boy in a bunny hood spit and urinate off an overpass; next, we meet two teenagers who ride their bikes around the desolate and dilapidated town, looking for cats they can kill and sell to a local restaurant owner; then, we're introduced to three bleach-blonde sisters who don't seem to have any parents and who busy themselves with such activities as ripping electrical tape off their bare nipples. These are the only recurring characters to speak of. Nothing they do is even remotely interesting or entertaining, though. And every other character is memorable only for the few minutes it takes the viewer to rid himself of the feeling of disgust, only to be disgusted again and again by characters he should be feeling sympathy for.

And that's really why this movie is so awful. Don't get me wrong, it'd be awful no matter what, but it wouldn't be entirely without merit if we could actually feel anything other than disdain for the characters. But these are not real people, everything is actually scripted, and none of it is believable at all.

The shock value is negligible; it's not really shocking, but even if it were, there are better movies to watch if that's what you're after. It's not innovative, either-it's actually almost a blatant rip-off of some other, more noteworthy films. It's quite obvious that the only purpose here was to be pretentious. Of course, it probably wasn't meant to be so obvious.

If you were a kid in the '80s, you were all about He-Man, and I was no exception. I had the toys, the books, the lunch box, the underwear-pretty much everything I owned, in fact, bore the likeness of my all-time favorite cartoon character. So when I found out there was going to be a movie, I thought my life was complete.

I really couldn't have been more disappointed if they'd put He-Man in a tux and top hat. This movie sucked. First off, Battle-Cat, Orko, and pretty much all the villains from the original cartoon were replaced by new characters that everyone hated. Skeletor's mask didn't even come close to looking skeletal, and all his troops (since when did Skeletor have "troops"?) were direct rip-offs of a handful of costumes from Star Wars.

Then we have He-Man, who wears a cape (?) and never becomes Prince Adam. Plus, Lundgren has problems hiding his accent and can't really act anyway. The annoying dwarf Gwildor would've been forgivable if they'd only changed

his name to Orko! Come on, we all knew this was the movie's answer to Orko...just a few minor changes to the script, and one big gripe could've been avoided. And who could forget those two teenagers? Man, I wish I could...

But these complaints come mostly from a fan of the cartoon series. On its own, as well, the movie has a whole host of problems. For one, the script is awful. Even for a sci-fi/fantasy adventure, there's nothing about the story that's even minutely believable (why do Eternians speak English?). There's no reason for Skeletor to be so fixated on finding this "cosmic key," since he's already got one. They try to cover it up by adding the line, "I must possess all, or I possess nothing!" but it doesn't work.

Then, on Earth, when He-Man and company lose the key, they just so happen to run across the two kids who found it.

With the exception of Frank Langella, none of the actors did a halfway decent job, though it's hard to tell based on what they were given to work with. And the resolution at the end is so predictable and cheesy I even stood up in the theater as a six-year-old kid and yelled, "Bulls***!"

I could keep listing the its flaws, but my hands are cramping in protest to thinking about this movie. It gets 3 out of 10 from me.

To sum it up, the movie was great. Raimi nailed all the little nuances from the comic, and the actors couldn't have been more suited to their roles. I've seen it four times so far, and I may even go again in a week or two. This is one of the best movies of any genre to come around in a while.

It's not going to win any Oscars, and, invariably, critics are going to bash it, but Spider-Man is an immensely satisfying flick. It simply could not have been done any better. There was plenty of what everyone came to see: smoothly stylized web-slinging and wall-crawling, made to look just as the comics depicted them; an over-the-top, believably psychotic villain in Willem Dafoe (who also had Green Goblin's posture down perfect, a nice touch and the kind of thing that makes having a huge fan direct the movie worthwhile); and a well-played love triangle that also captures of the feel of the comic perfectly.

I've heard people gripe that there was no plot, but the movie followed the comic book almost to a tee; there was no reason to expect that it would be any different. If anything, David Koepp did a great job melding the Green Goblin storyline into the introduction to what will probably end up being a series of films. I've already been to see it three times, and I'm sure I'll go at least a few more. I give it a 10/10.