Lestyr

I agree completely with the negative critics statements on the inside of the DVD. This movie's defenders have tried to pass it off as "cerebral" and "psychological" on this very page, and as a "profound portrait of how corporations ruin our lives." It is none of these. First of all, what makes people think it's cerebral? The endless whining? The laughable "we're all the middle children of history" attempts at philosophizing? The hardly novel idea that men need to have an outlet for their pent-up aggression? And the leftist idea (which has been out there since at least the time of Marx) that corporations have been destroying our lives and screwing us over? Praise the movie as cerebral, and you'd better be cerebral yourself to recognize it. Get yourself a book of Dostoyevsky or Kant and see how you handle real deep thought.

Second off, that it's psychological. Simple because the main character has a certain mental disorder (I won't be so bad to reveal what it is), is it psychological? After we see the character's illness in the movie, it seemed to me Norton fighting Pitt was like a bad Candid Camera joke. I was half-expecting the director to come on after the scene and say, "You took that scene seriously? Sucker!" It's amazing what this movie expects you to believe, particularly after the plot twist which, like the Usual Suspects (to which it has been often compared) is just too clever by a half, and voids entire sections of the movie.

I'm a fan of Ed Norton because I like his work. I also liked Seven quite a bit, so I can hardly be dismissed as a Fincher-hater. And I still agree that men in our society are fundamentally demasculinized in a way previous generations never had to deal with. But after seeing this movie, I think the solution may be worse than the cure.

Talk about a long-winded piece of dung. I haven't seen anything so overlong since Wagnerian opera. There were plot points (Ghost Dog goes to kill this guy) that a good director could have taken in maybe five minutes, a genius in one, but inexplicably took twenty here. It was like I was watching this whole movie in slow motion, for I have never seen a movie with such a high body count bore me so thoroughly. And maybe it's just that the vast majority of people don't understand the Eastern philosophy behind those samurai quotes, but the general reaction at my place was "Huh?" Nobody got them, and the quotes were sufficiently opaque that they may as well have been in "Waterworld" as this cinematic turd. And what was up with that Caribbean ice-cream vendor? Talk about an unnecessary subplot. And why were the mobsters always watching cartoons? Nobody knows. And how could the movie destroy such an interesting premise? For the same reason so many of us dislike opera: It bores us to death in a medium we don't understand.

In my distinguished career as a movie critic, I divide movies into three catagories: Good movies, bad movies, and movies like Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders. Consider, if you will, the amazing symbolism found in the critic playing with magic. Can you not see the critic playing a Faust character, an alchemist toying with a power beyond him and then getting visited by the devil? Does this not symbolise man's hubris? Does it not show the inherent limits we are all capable of? I'm disgusted NOBODY finds this in this movie. And what of Merlin himself? The looks he gets on the street when he's in search of the Creepy Monkey toy only highlight the alienation wizards, wiccans, sorcerers, and Clinton Cabinet Members feel when they walk down the street. My god, are you not human? Can you not feel their pain?

I'm kidding, of course. I don't need to tell you (but will anyway) that this movie is no movie that anyone except convicted politicians should ever see. And to think this was intended for children. Is Elementary School not enough torture for our young people? Do not watch this film, especially if you don't have the maturity to laugh at the hokiness of the Creepy Monkey Toy, or you don't have MST3K to help.