Reviews

I've watched several episodes of Jeff Ltd., because it can take time for a new series to find its rhythm. Honestly, though, this show started out bad and just got worse.

On the plus side, the look of the show is very slick and professional, but that's not necessarily an asset to comedy anyway. But overall, the characters are dull, passionless, and the tone is too cool and cynical to let any of its lowbrow humour work. It's very hard to imagine a group of TV professionals sitting in a room watching this show and saying, yep, that's funny, that works. Because it really, really doesn't.

I managed to force myself to watch 3 episodes of this show, hoping it would improve. It did not. It was a nightmare. To call this show amateur would be an insult to amateur comedians who can sometimes be very funny. Jessica Holmes is painful to watch. Who is responsible for green-lighting this show? It feels like a Canadian content filler program "Bob, is that young woman still sitting out in the waiting room? Jessica Something? Why don't we let her do a show, and we'll let your brother direct it."

Come on. This country is full of funny people: let's see some of them on TV.

I saw the restored print at the Toronto Film Festival and I was floored. This movie drew me right in and gave me a complete emotional workout, a very rare thing.

It deserves comparison to my favorite films of the period, such as "Mean Streets" and "Midnight Cowboy". It is bursting with passion and integrity and a need to communicate with it's audience. Great characters, intimately drawn.

I've seen a lot of Canadian films, and sadly, this one stands head and shoulders above every other English language film we've made in this country. I'm not talking about French Canadian films of which there is no shortage of fine examples.

What about it? Can anyone come up with a better English language Canadian film?

I've loved the original film since I was a kid. When I heard it was being remade, I shuddered. But then I read that Jeff Daniels and Patricia Heaton and Richard Benjamin were doing it and I thought it had a chance at being good.

Wrong.

My wife and I stared in slack-jawed amazement as every joke went down like a lead balloon. I used to think that scripts like this one and The Odd Couple were impossible to totally screw up because the lines were so funny. I was wrong about that too. This movie should be studied as an example of how talented people working with excellent material can somehow still create something almost unwatchable. But how?

The only person who is funny in this film is Alan Cumming. And let's not even talk about the child actor.