Reviews

Not to mention thoroughly offensive to those suffering from real, un-art directed mental illness. This is Cronenberg's IDEA of the character Spider's unbalanced state of mind/being, and as such, it's art directed to the point of being still born. We shift laboriously from rigid tableau to rigid tableau, each so controlled and its impact so minutely calculated, pre- determined and pre-digested. It's suffocation, not narrative.

Mr Fiennes is working so hard to be 'authentically nuts' and he pretty much succeeds, except how interesting can that be when we remain frozen outside of his reality? The device of Fiennes 'watching' his past is meant to give you access--to the story, the history, the zeitgeist, the characters, the experience. But because Cronenberg is wanking here, getting off on being the ultimate voyeur and controlling the fate of every last molecule, he leaves no role for the viewer other than his: the seedy voyeur. We get to be his partner in emotional and psychic violation. Being force-fed Cronenberg's IDEAS of derangement and ultra art- directed, 1950s-style sexual disgust are no replacement for a real and human, authentic and empathic experience of, or insight into, mental and/or emotional illness. Ken Russell goes to 1952.

Mike Figgis thinks he has something to say about life. He doesn't. It's that simple. A triumph of bloated, indulgent and affected style over zero substance, this film takes itself very seriously indeed. It is nothing more than a very, very long Calvin Klein commercial, and it's just chock-a-block with phony portent. I was actually embarrassed for Mr Figgis. It's painfully obvious he thought he was creating a masterpiece of art film, but his metaphors, juxtapositions, casting and editing choices were juvenile and grandiose and, therefore, ridiculous and laughable.

Possibly the worst use of Chopin to date.

And by the way, to the previous commenter from Seattle who thought they were being so smart and clever in dissing the person who used "cliched and hackneyed" in the same sentence.... actually, you shouldn't have been quite so proud of yourself. There is a distinction between the two, they are not one in the same; nor are they interchangeable.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, hackneyed is defined as "Trite, uninteresting or commonplace through familiarity or indiscriminate and frequent use." Cliche is defined as "A stereotyped expression, a hackneyed phrase or opinion, a stereotyped character, style, etc."

So you see, a cliche is a noun, a thing; hackneyed is an adjective, it's descriptive. So, one could decry the hackneyed symbolism of TLoSI while simultaneously finding its visual cliches contemptible.

this is a fabulous effort: a brooding, complex, and visually rich narrative. the awe-inspiring use of location, and the often claustrophobic interior

spaces/scenes tell the story as much as the plot and dialogue. both the script and the characters are fully developed, and the camera carefully and

thoughtfully takes the viewer into conflicting realities and cultures, letting them self-reveal and letting the viewer reach their own conclusion. to have any one of these qualities is unusual (especially with the manipulative, bloated budget schlock hollywood is spewing out these days), let alone having them all in one movie

i'm a huge sinatra fan but this film is embarrassingly bad. the first deadly sin was the screenplay; the second was sinatra phoning in his performance; the third was the silly waste of faye dunaway in one of the most melodramatic and prolonged hospital death scenes (the whole movie, basically) in film history. also ridiculous was sinatra's character's unorthodox and laughably amateur investigaory methods which would have resulted, in court, in the perp's attorney filing endless motions to supress.....jeez, delaney, does the word "warrant" ring a bell? even before a decade of 'law and order' taught us some of the hard facts and intricacies of the criminal justice system and its rules of evidence, we generally knew that the circumstances of evidence collection are crucial to their being admitted in a court of law.

contrived scenes, contrived confrontations, phony emotion, and a series of totally contrived plot devices made this a dreary movie indeed. and sinatra, usually so passionate, nuanced, and present in his roles, looked glum, subdued and very unhappy to be there. like his real emotions and energy were with some other personal reality, not the role of delaney.