scotorum

After reading some reviews I was expecting a bad one, but I like romantic comedies so...I was surprised by how much I liked it, and was left wondering what people didn't like.

I concluded that it was the heavy ranking on sleazy reality talk shows. An awful lot of people love watching other people squirm while their dirty laundry is aired. Apparently it lets them feel better about themselves. So a movie that might suggest that the whole genre is scum requires fans to defend against it, and the only way they can do that is to blame the movie.

I hate those shows with a passion because they are one symptom of the decline of western civilization. So I thought the movie was ultimately hilarious. Three cheers for this celebration of personal integrity!

That was my expectation when I started to read the reviews here. So I was startled to see such a high overall rating for a film that moves at the pace of an arthritic slug and which ultimately paints such a bleak picture of human nature.

Did we learn something here about exploiting the apparently downtrodden and innocent? Or was it like bad sex you still got off on, ultimately satisfying enough that you kind of forgot all that you had to go through to get there?

After you get over being fascinated by and adjusted to the innovative minimalist set (ultimately part of the problem, since there is little variety on screen), this IS frequently an excruciatingly plodding, yes boring film. The townspeople's attitudes and behavior must evolve, but do they have to evolve at what seems at times like the same rate that species evolve new physical characteristics? Arggh!

I appreciate deliberate plot development, and my perceptual system has a hard time with the now common flash-cut music videos and movie promos (when they start giving me a headache - usually after about twenty seconds - I just shut my eyes), but here I'm on the side of those spoiled by fast-moving action films and video games, whom I imagine find most of this film little short of sheer torture!

It does finally pay off with a meaningful ending, sort of like most of the original Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents shows. You find yourself periodically muttering to the director, as if he's there beside you holding your popcorn, "why are you doing this to me?" until, after what seems like an eternity and a half...

A Scandinavian shut-in during the long cold northern European winter might find this movie better than spending the time listening to the wind whistle over the semi-perma-frost. The rest of us, with the possible exception of a few drama majors, would be better off working out on the treadmill and making arrangements for that overdue root canal.

This is a pretty good examination of the damage cliques can do to the fragile developing self images of high school teens.

Lindsey Lohan seemed so right for the part of the homeschooled outsider. It's hard to imagine she had wanted to play the part of the self centered insider!

I've only been hanging out in the movie reviews site for a few weeks, and I'm already very tired of reading reviews that trash decent films. I just finished reading a review of Walking Tall by the same reviewer whose review was featured when I checked out the reviews here, and his/her/its trash review was also featured over there. If all those who seem to hate every film they watch just stopped writing reviews in here the rest of us who are not flickophobes would be very grateful.