peterbonilla1029

first of all, let me say that I liked Zach Braff's film. It is definitely an impressive first film, and we should all pay attention to whatever he does next. It generally had good production values, and I thought the camera-work was impressive, and its simplicity helped add to the overall drearily-comic effect of the movie. Braff was good, Sarsgaard was great, and Natalie Portman was phenomenal, by far the most engaging character I saw in a film this year, and probably one of the most instantly likable ever.

But good lord, it's not THAT good. An 8.4 rating out of 10? You have to be kidding me! It definitely has its problems, most of them having to do with the script, which is at points underdeveloped. A good third of the movie is spent on a quest, looking for what we don't know, and once the goal is reached, we are only left to wonder why they spent so much time searching for it. It could have been very sweet and moving, but came out as confusing and anticlimactic. And the ending was completely botched, taking the easy way out in my opinion and completely ignoring the development of their characters up to that point.

It's good, but it is nowhere near the icon of indie film-making many say it is, nor is it anywhere near the cultural landmark and ballad of the depressed 20-something generation they want it to be.

Around a 7 is what this film deserves, and that is what it gets from me.

Michael Moore is a talented filmaker, with a talent for using humor as a way of making the bluntness of his points plainly apparent. His films I often find disagreeable, sometimes highly so, but I often find myself laughing during them anyways. He is also someone i would call an ambulance chaser, taking issues out of the spotlight and using them to push his radical political agenda.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a film which does this to an eggregious, shameless extent, to the point where he goes against his own credo as a documentarian. Though his films often leave out much of the other side of the argument, they generally do a good job at educating the public on issues they are not well aware of. His latest film takes advantage of the fact that most of us are not well-educated on certain events in order to be able to make the ridiculous points of the film sound well-founded.

Working on the assumption that most of his audience is A: liberal and B: ill-informed, Moore takes what is actually not the most confidential information and puts a radical spin on it, making the Bush administration look like it much more control over the events of 9/11 and beyond than it, or any administration, could possibly have had. It demonizes the president way beyond the point to which he is able to be legitimately criticized for his mistakes, which are legion. What he doesn't want you to remember is that our government is every bit as responsible for deciding on the actions taken since 9/11 as our president and that John Kerry, his party's chosen one, was behind the agenda every bit of the way until it went wrong.

Michael Moore is a person that people look to when they are disillusioned at the current state of things, whether the rest of us like it or not. However, in the case of Fahrenheit 9/11, he uses the growing resentment of the bad state of things to hoodwink the public, and the resulting film has way more holes in it than in other Moore works. The film is ultimately a cheap shot at the right, which Moore made because he knew he could get away with it. It is not really documentary, and something worse than yellow journalism. It's sensationalism, and it's success has cheapened the value of the Palme D'or.

American Splendor is a well-made and very interesting film, but I must confess that I have a hard time relating to these kinds of films. No knocking the film itself, but I don't typically respond well to movies that probe the gloomy, working class world and bring out its dreariness. You have to dig deep to find the humor in these kinds of movies, and in the end I couldn't get there, the same way I couldn't get there with movies like Ghost World, which I couldn't stand and absolutely could not find the humor in. This was far better, at least. Paul Giamatti is definitely Oscar-worthy with his role. Having the real Harvey Pekar as the narrator gave the film a fresh and very human feel. The screenplay was very clever and overall the production values were good. In the end, something just didn't really sit well. Maybe it's just not for me, but it was definitely worth the look. 8/10