mlawrencewyatt

This is not the worst movie I have ever seen. That said, it was awful. Rarely do I find myself laughing at a drama, but I can point out at least six times when I erupted into cackles. This film is about as subtle as a billboard.

First of all, the acting is SO forced and overdone (with the one grand exception of Ben Franklin, who has no idea what he's doing). James Madison is such an unstable cry-baby that one solid "Yo' Mamma is so fat" joke from Roger Sherman would have had him weeping all the way back to Virginia. In the music scene in the garden, I wanted so desperately for General Washington to say, "You know Jimmy, most men have been weened by your age...."

A huge problem with the film is that the main drama swirls around if the Senate should be represented based on the population of the state or if each state should have an equal voice. Call me crazy, but I never had a problem with the way congress is set up. I remember being a fourth grader in Ms. Pinder's class and thinking it was fantastically brilliant. So unfortunately, lines like "History will never forgive us for this" ("this" meaning equal representation in the senate) uttered by the protagonist of the film seem WAY over the top and ridiculous.

As a connoisseur of Mormon movies, I got a huge kick out of the casting. There were so many times when I was like, "Who IS that guy? Oh..... He's Pilate, from the 'Lamb of God.'" My personal favorite was how Doubting Thomas from "Finding Faith in Christ" plays a doubting Thomas. In fact there were so many actors from "The Lamb of God" and "Finding Faith in Christ" that I half expected the titular character of both films to walk on at any moment and hand them the Constitution.

Now let's talk about accents. The one pro-slavery southerner was the laziest accent actor I have ever seen. His idea of a drawl was clipping is -ing's into -in's. And he left it at that. Or how about the dude at the end who reads the constitution? He had a HORRIBLE Utah valley accent. (The fortunate thing about Utah-valley-dwellers is that they are totally unaware that they speak a variant form of English, so most of the people watching the film will be clueless on this point.)

Also, a personal note to Kurt Bestor: I expected much, MUCH more from you, sir. That score was like being hit with an ironing board. We know 15 seconds in advance before anyone says anything important because there's always an oh-so-subtle orchestra crash.

But I have to admit, as heavy handed as the script is on civic and theological points, it really has its moments. The tragedy is that each of those moments meets a massacre from the director and cast. Ben Franklin was SOOOOOO bad. I got the feeling he didn't really understand his lines--like he was ESL or something. I hated him before he was even on camera in the scene where Washington knocks on his gate and he fumbles on an otherwise funny line about women.

Or how about the concluding American Agrarian Montage? Look at us in our cute little montage! We're so American and agrarian! Heck, we're even equestrian!

So in conclusion, I loved the heck out of this movie in none of the ways it intended. It's horrible, and for that reason I would buy it in an instant if I could. BYU is capable of producing a great historical film, by the way. I recommend watching "Truth and Conviction" as soon as you're done with "A More Perfect Union" for a potent reminder as to why the institution is still accredited after producing such a piece of doo-doo.

I have never had such mixed feelings for a film. The first seven eighths of the movie are tense, shocking, beautiful, horrifying, and sublime. To that point, it is so well done that you think you can smell everything on the screen. Every character has depth, every line has just the right gravity, and every movement takes us deeper into the story.

Then comes the ending. If I were to give away the ending, you wouldn't want to see "Das Parfum"--not because I would have ruined a clever twist, or eliminated a fundamental tension, but because the film ruins itself. The last ten or fifteen minutes flop onto the screen and demolish the mood and meaning that the rest of the film has constructed. I understand that this is also the way then novel ends, but it is nevertheless a poor ending. The work forsakes its entire essence in order to make cheap misanthropic and sacrilegious jabs.

Still, most of this movie is a masterpiece. Alan Rickman is one of my all-time favorite actors, and he surprised even me with his performance. The score is largely excellent; it's a little over the top in parts, but still effective.

I gave it a five star rating because I'm torn exactly down the middle on this one.

The premise of You, Me and Dupree is that Carl Peterson (Matt Dillon) marries his boss's daughter, Molly (Kate Hudson), and then his best man, Dupree (Owen Wilson) stays with them after losing his job and all his earthly possessions.

You, Me and Dupree is bad. First and foremost, it's tedious. It has no real direction. Things happen, and a few minutes later, it doesn't matter that they've happened. You sit there and watch 108 minutes of meaningless, witless anecdotes that involve the same people, but have no real bearing on their lives.

As far as the characters go, they really aren't characters, and they really don't go anywhere. We never learn how Carl and Molly met, or why they love one another other than that they have sex a lot. Carl says stuff like, "Molly is the best thing that's ever happened to me," but we see no proof of it. Dupree is a little eccentric, but it's all been done before. I don't know anyone in real life who is as boring as the rest of the characters with the exception of Carl's father-in-law, Mr. Thompson (Michael Douglas). But neither Dupree nor Thompson perform with enough absurdity to make the movie work.

The movie is too long and unfunny to be a comedy. And it's not that I'm opposed to body humor, it's that the movie doesn't even try to be funny for huge segments. I laughed with the rest of them when Dupree broke up Carl and Molly's intimacy because of his emergency with the "crapper." The movie needs more of that, instead of trying to sustain drama and characters that aren't there.

Once, I felt that the movie was actually taunting me. Owen Wilson watches a clip from Roman Holiday, a film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. As he and I saw that clip, I thought to myself, "Why am I not watching that?!" Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson. Hrm..... Which should I pick?