Reviews

I do not even know where to start. This film does not even seem to be written, directed, or produced by anybody connected to the original series.

It has a side plot that is shoe horned in and the cast is diverse, but the film seems like it was created in an alternate universe. We get glimpses into Tony Soprano's childhood and the names we know but those young characters are totally uninteresting.

This is a bad film, poorly executed, and an amateur careless endeavor. Sad. I will pretend it does not exist.

I wanted to love this film. I waited so long to see it because the company that distributed the film did a terrible job in bringing it to a wide audience sooner. I had to wait until it was up at On Demand on Time Warner Cable in NYC. I watched it in HD on my TV, but the "letterbox" format was very small and off-putting on a TV.

The film is... (in my opinion of course) awful. I don't even know where to begin. It's filmed partly with the hand held shaky cam, I suppose for some realistic or artistic effect, but it is just dizzying. But, what makes this film a huge disappointment is that it lacks "soul." I never got a sense of the spiritual journey "Sal" was on. It's just so superficial and filled with "noise." It is over acted in parts and I never sense any "truth" from the actors who played the real people.

The book, On the Road, is haunting. I read it and became obsessed and possessed. This film never even comes close to getting inside me. It seems miscast and the actors seem to have no sense of the material. It's superficial and the actors are so wrong. They just do not get it right.

And, it is not true to text. At the end (of the book) Sal says good-bye to Dean on West 20th Street in NYC. In the book, Dean "rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. In this film, the final scene does not take place at that location or even end that way. That's just disgraceful.

How could this happen? What were they thinking? The film does not inspire and it does not make me want to learn more about Jack Kerouac, the amazing and brilliant writer. We never get any sense of "the man." It's just sad.

I am depressed. I feel sick inside that a book so magical and so loved could have finally been made into a film and, in my opinion, be such a failure.

The finale to "Lost" failed on many levels, and not just because it did not answer questions. It was poor writing that was an emotionally manipulative, contrived, and done-before piece. I got it. I saw the different alternatives integrated into the characters' memories. I saw the after-life reunion that would bind them all together in eternity. But, the finale served to diminish the integrity of the entire series because SO MANY small questions were left unresolved.

I think the writers created mysteries and twists as they went along with no clearly defined answers or resolutions in their own heads when they created those mysteries. That is just plain lazy and sloppy writing. The classic "Twilight Zone" always had convoluted turns and deep mystery, but each episode always ended with phenomenal and imaginative explanations. (Think of the Agnes Moorehead episode). The "Lost" writers ended the series with some absurd and puerile after-life reunion, rendering all the possibilities regarding what was "real" a total unexplained mess.

So... whether they all died in the plane crash, or whether the island experience really happened, or whether they all lived out their lives in an alternate universe where the plane never crashed, or whether all possibilities happened in some Quantum physics world and all the options were integrated into their memories.... nothing was explained in terms of the events WE WATCHED for years on the island.

The whole ending was a major cop out because the writers kept building mystery after mystery, twist after twist, cliffhanger after cliffhanger, and they never tied anything up with clear explanations in the finale. The ending was terrible. The worst. They went for the manipulative tearjerker, but when the eyes dry... you have a disappointing empty suit.

"For all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'" -- John Greenleaf Whittier, in "Maud Muller" (1854)

Spike Lee almost created a masterpiece. But, his film is severely flawed because he cannot seem to leave his own agenda outside the set door. His fingerprint is evident in almost every frame of this film, and it is a shame. In the process of film-making he becomes that which he has claimed to historically detest. He casts in caricatures right out of central casting with a stereotypical Jewish judge and an empowered and confident female lawyer who marches into the courtroom at the end of the film to save the day as she dismisses the Legal Aid attorney. "Renata" has a killer body and freshly washed blown-out hair and in one scene she looks like she could leave the set and pose in a Victoria's Secret runway show. The film ends on a surreal dreamlike and emotional (perhaps confusing) note but I will say I was very moved. Spike Lee would have been praised widely for creating a spiritual allegory within an epic masterpiece if he simply managed to not bang the audience over the head with his personal hammer to achieve his political points.