Reviews

Sunset Boulevard was a masterpiece.

This is a different type of piece. Embarrassing for both William Holden and Billy Wilder. The other actors? They must have all had rocks in their head.

Incomprehensible characters, a plot that makes Silas Marner look like Indiana Jones, and a dunderhead author who thinks this stuff is of keen interest.

The power of fantasy to hypnotize both the creator and the audience is a dangerous drug. Whether delivered as a novel (as in Don Quijote), or Sunset Boulevard, or Mulholland Drive ... or in garish vaudeville and Ziegfield Follies shows, it is a fact of humanity.

After watching this, I think I understand Stephen Sondheim's "Follies" now. At the time I saw it on Broadway it seemed like a celebration of neuroticism. I just got the message: the hypnotic power of music, illusions of glamour, and an appreciative audience to divide an individual into a fantasy self hopelessly divided from a real self gets a much clearer treatment here.

This is a beautifully-told story that genuflects respectfully to the very monster it warns about.

It is fascinating to see a show that departs so severely from all the rules of both drama and comedy. Or maybe those are just American rules.

The characterization is the major vehicle for advancing the theme that people are not the fictional character stereotypes that others expect them to be. They are in fact far more fragmented, complex, and ridiculous. To the extent that the Law itself -- or maybe it's just the jury system -- is predicated upon clearly false expectations, Law itself, and Law Enforcement may be risky ventures into medievalism.

There was a really scary story locked into this soap opera, I think, but it got buried under the "Lost" mystery-story approach.

If Eleanor Lance had just brought Lassie to Hill House with her in 1963, it would have turned out this way too.

Some folks believe that a haunting is a complicated problem of delusionality that links an observer to a place that contains unknown residue from a prior occupant.

That is not this show -- where ghosts are sweet and funny and accommodating, and a good time is had by all as mother birds lovingly eject the dead fledgling from the nest, and it happily takes wing.

Reality is never as insane as this show, but it is far more interesting.

Aside from the fact that Esther is a seriously manipulative psychopath, and Tutti has some bad death issues, Judy Garland manages to disguise her character beautifully.

We're all fortunate that Garland refused to sing the original words to "Merry Little Christmas" -- 'Have yourself a merry little Christmas, It may be your last.' Her reasoning was that the audience would hate her. They sure would have, and it would have blasted the main character's cover permanently.

Instead we got this wonderful collection of songs and silliness!

In small-town America of the 50's, it doesn't pay to trust your Old World relatives. They're just not right over there: if it isn't one thing, it'll be another.

Creepy, authentic vampire messes with creepy, authentic people during a creepy, authentic era.

What a scary little confection built totally around the power of clans, clannishness, and tribalism to take over one's mind.

It's definitely not safe to stray too far from the social compact that binds a community together.

At another level, it is a dystopian view of Post WW-II trauma. Kraft has begun to believe that his exercise of individual prerogative and duty has inculpated him in moral crime. Old folks say that he doesn't have the power of God: they know that God makes all the decisions.

In reality he is bedevilled by an ethical -- and professional - crisis between his duty to himself, and his war-torn new duty to society. He is pitted unknowingly against someone who is fighting to defend the notion that one is obligated to defend the old cosmic power that was controlling everything under the sun until WW-II created a new reality.

I agree with the poster who said the ending was a mess ... but only to a certain extent. Andy's confusing of the carving of a gravestone with using the wrong-colored pin on a map is relevant to the theme, but it kind of detracts from the mind-blowing central message that none of us -- not Kraft, not Andy exerts the power of God. And that sorta parallels the 50's shocking realization that they did not stop the Holocaust, because their very conception of the deity did not permit such a thing. In many ways, this film captures the horror of the WWII realization that God was no longer in control of the universe.

Not since Holly Hunter tied herself to a falling piano has a love story reached a climax that moves the audience to tears of laughter.

I'm up to Episode 5, and it appears that the room serves the function of what Catholics call a confessional. Guests appear to either confront or escape deeply concealed guilt.

The room itself appears to coerce this, whether or not the guest is willing, and in spite of all self-justification. And, so far, nobody is innocent. Very creepy invitation to leave one's defenses at the door, and subject oneself to the harshest possible scrutiny ... in private.

The parallel between Freud's use of sinus surgery to cure "female hysteria", and the nasal idiocy proposed by the faith healer was was struck me.

Unless I missed the whole point, the heroin relived her teenage experience with the "Knockadoo" by repelling, once again, a thinly concealed rape attempt that was being offered as what she really, truly, needed and wanted.

The characters were not developed at all, so the plot resolution meant little.