kerridv

I like Egyptian archeology but this was heinous. Completely disrespectful to the dead and the glee shown by Dr. Hussein was disgusting. Where does anyone get off opening a tomb and then extracting the mummy, as if we are any better than the tomb robbers they kept mentioning. It's one thing to find artifacts for a museum, it's another entirely to remove human beings for the sake of television. Disappointing.

NG stick to Dr. Albert Lin and his beloved LIDAR, at least he shows reverence and respect for ancient cultures.

As a movie-viewer you have the responsibility to suspend some disbelief and let movie magic, improbabilty, and fairy-tale take over to some extent; the studios, in turn, have the responsibility of making a film that will let you do that. Some films pull this off flawlessly; others don't. Guess which category The Majestic falls into.

This movie had more sap than a Vermont forest in fall. While I was willing to let some things slide, the ultra-predictiblity of the film and the hounding "life is art" message was too much. Jim Carrey plays Pete Appleton, a screenwriter who gets blacklisted from Hollywood during the McCarthy witchhunts. He drives off in a car, crashes into a river (a scene in which too much time is spent), and loses his memory. The citizens of a small town find him and believe him to be a long-lost hero of theirs, who dissapeared nine years earlier in WWII. Martin Landau plays the owner of a dilapidated old movie theatre who thinks Pete, now "Luke," is his son. Together they rennovate the theatre, Luke picks up his relationship with his old girlfriend Adele (Holden) where it left off, and life is rosy.

Even though it's your basic memory-loss story inserted into a thin shell of anti-communisim, it isn't so bad thus far; until we see the McCarthy bad guys determined to find Appleton and slay him as the king of all communists. Here the plot crosses that line from comedic screenwriting 101 to just dang ridiculous. Every cinematic plot point ever made in history is paraded across the screen, leaving the second half of this film more limpid than the first.

What's ironic is that this film starts with Appleton sitting in a room twitching his face while the producers mangle his script to make it more hollywoodesque. I guess we are supposed to laugh at the fact that these producers (recognize the voices? Garry Marshall, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, and Sydney Pollack) are inserting every stupid plot trick into Appleton's script; however, because the movie itself did just that, I was groaning, not laughing.

And the point was? This movie was so bad I don't know where to begin. The only saving grace was that John Cusack's in it; otherwise skip it altogether. It's really unfortunate because I'm a fan of Billy Crystal usually but this one bombed.

It didn't really seem to have a plot; something was going on about Eddie (Cusack) and Gwen (Zeta-Jones) being famous actors who were married but had a bad breakup. In order to promote a new film and save both their careers the studio makes them put on an appearance of reconciliation; in the meantime Julia Roberts as Gwen's sister Kiki falls in love with Eddie and blah blah blah. The jokes fell flat and the message was silly. Are we supposed to feel bad for two obviously spoiled actors who break up? Boo hoo. The title doesn't even make sense.

Can't really say much about Julia Roberts or Catherine Zeta-Jones; I don't think their parts required any acting ability whatsoever. John Cusack was good only because he is John Cusack.

Don't even bother renting it. I only saw it because I was stuck on a plane for 9 hours.