erniemunger

Ronin is a genuine achievement and should be compulsory subject matter in every film school programme, for it is one of the few movies in the history of the medium to have no plot whatsoever and still be allowed to waste millions of dollars on cast, stunts, and locations.

Instead of settling into one of Hollywood's golden gated retirement homes, Frankenheimer ventured out to dummy-direct this no-brainer and collect a fat check, propped up by a devoted cast of living dead eager to get a piece of the cake.

In lieu of a film, this magnificent bunch turned in an elaborate ad for German cars, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Boring, stupid and not remotely funny US teen dung.

It's hard to believe that Kevin Smith was hailed as an Indie director, unless the etiquette applies exclusively to films that make a point of scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Weinsteins certainly deserve Guantanamo for hyping this sort of self-indulging manure.

And the IMDb rating for this anal regressive bomb would seem to indicate that a long, dry fart in a mall will do for most American publics.

If anything, Smith is the Osama bin Laden of film.

Run for cover!

It's the fifties. The streets of L.A. are run by a hard-nosed elite squad of the LAPD who kick around the undesirables with the approval of their hierarchy and little, if any, regard for the law. Max Hoover (Nick Nolte), the leader of the pack, is a Jack Gittes type with violent mood swings but, would you have guessed, a tender core. When a gorgeous brunette (Jennifer Connelly, yelp) is found dead, Hoover is faced with his secret love life. In order to solve the case, he will have to come clean... Mulholland Falls is an expensive-looking go at a well-rehearsed genre that started with Chandler and had its heyday with Polanski's never equalled Chinatown (1974). The sets in this modern retro noir are lavish, with a special mention for the countless exteriors, helping to create a more or less credible atmosphere. The acting and dialogues are, well, appropriate though characteristically over the edge, which is likely to turn off some viewers but is a seemingly inevitable corollary to the species. So where's the hitch? Of all things, the plot stinks. When, in Chinatown, Robert Towne's screenplay skillfully interweaves its back story (a real estate scam) with the main intrigue (murder case), solidly anchoring the film in real-life history, Mulholland Falls clumsily attempts to construct a link with 1950s nuclear bomb testing in the Californian desert and fails miserably in doing so. The result is more of a hoax than a story, which has the wild bunch cross swords with the Atomic Energy Commission and half the US Army, culminating in a frighteningly moronic ending and a no less far-fetched resolve. Mulholland Falls (cryptically named after a minor incident in the film) is all surface and no depth, which is a shame considering the budget and cast at its disposal.