Reviews

Aside from the distortion of actual history discussed in most reviews below, this was simply a boring, hamfisted attempt to make a thriller -- a series of stock scenes and hackneyed plot devices strung together with no inspiration. The acting is mostly excruciating, and even the music selection over some of the non-speaking sequences was incredibly stupid and jarring.

Watching Ben Affleck in every scene is a surefire cure for insomnia -- the dullest actor in the history of film! When a balsa-wood mannequin directs himself and others, you get a run-of-the- mill made-for-TV movie glorified only by the appeal to America jingoism.

That this stinker was even nominated, let alone won Best Picture over Lincoln -- the worst Oscar decision since the forgettable Kramer vs. Kramer beat the timeless classic Apocalypse Now -- is due to Hollywood's narcissism -- two tinsel-town moguls concoct a fake movie to heroically save our boys and girls in Iran!

If you eschew drama for poetry, it had better be good poetry -- and Mallick fails again, despite the beautiful sets and costumes, amounting to lipstick on a pig.

I am not adverse to slow-paced, "poetic" films -- Kurosawa's Dreams, and The Fast Runner (Atarnajut), for instance, are glacially paced, but beautiful, intriguing films.

I turned on the subtitles (in the extended cut DVD) to read some of the barely audible voice-over whisperings of the characters' internal thoughts -- godawful trite dreck, like a 6th-grader's musings.

Mallilck needs to hire a real writer/poet to make this novelistic technique work. And cut back on the repetitious scenes of Pocahontas worshipfully twirling around in the grass like a stoned hippy chick, while the overbearing music score manages to be both annoying and monotonous.

I feel sorry for viewers seduced into thinking this unstructured, meandering, undramatic film is profoundly avant-garde and bohemian while they struggle to keep from snoring.

Cinematography is great, but that a great movie does not make -- there is nothing at all special about this indulgent autobiographical exercise in nostalgia and sentimentality. A trite, mundane, trivial story with no dramatic tension and dull dialogue. Take away the period costumes and the simpering strings score, set it in today's world, and you'd say, "this is a story worthy of a feature film?" I'll sum it up:

My brother and I grew up in Missoula, had some rowdy times (like millions of other brothers), I went off to college, he stayed home, I came back to Missoula and met a girl, then brother was killed in a barroom brawl (which is not depicted). And we went fly fishing a lot. End of story.

And how do you make a film spanning several decades in Montana without a single winter scene? It might as well be Florida, with mountains. The attempt to make fly fishing some sort of poetic symbol of life in general falls is just dumb and doesn't salvage this quotidian story at all.

The title, which sounds like a prop list, should have clued me in that this effort would be about as original and inspired as butter on toast -- an infinitely shallow and stupid Tarantino pastiche cobbling together every trite and overdone Hollywood cliché of the last 20 years. I ejected it after about 30 minutes.

The opening sequence is enough to tell you how bad this will get -- an Elvis impersonator (God, not again!) sitting at an isolated bus stop in... the American southwest (Gary Oldman). From out of nowhere, a hot babe assassin (not Uma Thurman this time) in stiletto heels appears miraculously, swaggers onto the bus and blasts away at Oldman with her stylish Gucci pistols. You can hear the director almost screaming, "Hey, I'm another Tarantino! Give me a chance!" Only he's not. The cast quickly overpopulates with a mind-numbing parade of cardboard cutouts, introduced with freeze frames and jittering titles: "The Girl Next Door." "Asian Elvis." "Midget Elvis." "The Cowboy." The usual spectacle of tired violence and mayhem ensues.

This kind of cool campy violence has come under a lot of critcism after all the mass shootings recently. Cheap thrills, and morally obtuse, making this effort bad on another level.

If Saturday Night Live had produced a satirical skit on how to produce a paint-by-number Hollywood film to entertain jaded morons, they couldn't have done a better job. than this turkey.