Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Friday, August 5, 2011) (65)

So, it's pretty special right now that there's this new blockbuster called Rise of the Planet of the Apes and there's also a documentary called Project Nim and they're both about chimps and human-chimp interactions. In fact the first 20 minutes of Apes lines up almost directly with the first act of Nim. Special. Of course one film is more or less scientifically rigorous and raises questions about our humanity and methods and the other is a popcorn-seller that feigns those things, but really just gives us a bunch of shrieking primates (humans and chimp) and no story, structure or sense.

Will (James Franco) is a scientist working for a lab to develop an Alzheimer's drug. When one of the apes he does his tests on goes crazy he smuggles its baby out of the building and into his home attic for safekeeping. It seems that this chimp, Caesar, has been genetically enhanced by meds given to his mother. OK. Will's dad (John Lithgow) suffers from Alzheimer's, but when he's given these still-untested meds, he shows tremendous mental recovery. Will thinks he's on to something... .

What he's not onto (what would have been clear if he had watched Project Nim) is that living with a chimp is not easy and that chimps are really strong and can be very violent. At some point, Will meets a veterinarian (Frida Pinto) who explains to him that he has to let Caesar run around in the outdoors out of the house (he's been living with the feckin' chimp in the attic for three years! Jesus!). They fall in love.

Five years later, they're still living with the chimp (by which point it's probably bigger than a human and many times stronger) until he attacks a neighbor (stupid gag: the neighbor gets attacked or harassed several times in the film; it's actually not funny). He's sent to a primate collection center run by Brian Cox and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), who apparently hate primates, or something. Over time we see Caesar becoming the king of this zoo (oh, I get the significance of his name now!) and ultimately his revolt against the humans. Then there's a big fight on the Golden Gate Bridge (even though they start on the North side and then end up on the North side... confusing).

It's never clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are here. Draco and Brian Cox are clearly bad, but Franco is good (even though he's the worst scientist in the history of the world and Frida Pinto is the worst vet and the least interested girlfriend/wife ever) (there's a scene where, after living with him for five years, Franco shows Pinto the research he's been doing... and it's all out in plain view in his study in the house... as if she never though to wander in that room and read the stuff). The big pharma lab Franco works for seems to be bad, but we really don't care about it; the apes are good, then bad, then good again. There are a lot of people who die but no blame is assigned for their deaths. It's not as if this is ambiguous and interesting, it's just confusing and impossible to align with anyone (or anyape).

Technically this film is a big steaming pile of apeshit (question: why is 'apeshit' a synonym for 'crazy', but 'horseshit' is a synonym for 'shit'? Ima change that.). Baby Caesar looks like a special needs child (crossed with a Conehead) and looks nothing even close to real. The CGI animation here is a joke, particularly in the early stages of the film.

At some point when Caesar gets to be "fully grown", he is animated with the help of human-puppet-like-person Andy Serkis (who also did the "acting" for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies). Much attention and praise has been given to Serkis - and I absolutely can't figure out why. It basically looks like it could have been animated the same crappy way with or without him in a motion-capture suit. And really, if we're giving credit to the actor playing the ape, doesn't that mean the actors playing humans are doing a terrible job? (They are.)

(I want to add a few points here: 1) Most people don't know what the heck apes look like or how they move, so to say Serkis looks natural as an ape is bunk because that's an assessment based on no reference; 2) The original 1933 King Kong looked much more "natural" than this, whatever the hell that means; 3) I don't think Serkis does anything that thousands of modern dancers/Cirque de Soleil people couldn't do and I don't know why he's getting such attention.)

To say the wrting and directing in the film are bad is to insult bad writing and directing. (And yes, this might have a worse script and be directed more ham-handedly than Transformers 3.) Director Rupert Wyatt so totally doesn't know how to organize a competent sequence or scene that most of the time we're left wondering about basic things like what we're looking at or the geography of floorplans. The crowning jewel of the film is a totally unnecessary shot of Caesar and his crew, having busted out of ape jail, on top of a San Francisco trolly-car going over a hill and posing; the reverse shot of their backs show the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly obscured by the apes themselves. This is terrible shot construction (all digital, of course, meaning they could have put any of those elements anywhere on screen) and fits in nowhere to the continuity of the story.

The script, by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (veterans of schlock horror garbage), is a structural mess: the first two acts are really about nothing but Caesar being locked up and not being an interesting character and only the last act has any action in it. It also has some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. When Will finally finds Caesar after he's thrown his feces all over San Francisco, all he can do is to ask him (nicely) to come back home with him. Yes, Will, your pet chimp just went fucking crazy all over town, killing people and destroying a major steel bridge; I'm sure he'd love to move back to your suburban attic. Stupid.

I can't imagine why so many reviewers are so kind to this film. It's an absolute turd and has no redeeming qualities to it. Everything from the wooden acting (Franco has that in him, to be sure) to the terrible technical stuff to the terrible artistic stuff makes this movie just awful. Rather than seeing it, you should see Project Nim. It's a very similar story and done much better.

Stars: 0 of 4

The Roommate (Sunday, February 13, 2011) (5)

I was desperately hoping that The Roommate would be an amazingly trashy and hilarious psycho-sexual thriller weighted heavily to the shity and teen-set. It has all the makings of an amazing movie: two stars of teeny soaps (albeit pure pulp and the other an elevated drama dealing with teens), Leighton Meester (from Gossip Girl) and Minka Kelly (from Friday Night Lights and Derek Jeter's arm... which is not a TV show); a plot that sorta resembles Barbet Shroeder's Single White Female; and the fact that they two stars look almost identical. (OK - I should say that these two look so much alike that it was sometimes hard to remember which one was which. I think this is amazing and hilarious. They might be the same person with slightly different makeup.)

I was hoping for some bad, melodramatic dialogue, some hot lesbian sex (for no reason other than that such a dumb movie with identical-looking actresses is screaming for them to make out, like in Wild Things with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards), and some bad ketchupy bloody violence. Alas, I got none of that. This movie is a total dud and when I was hoping for some sort of dumb fun, I just got a really, really bad movie with nothing going for it.

As the film opens, we see Sara (Kelly) checking into her dorm at her LA university. A bit later she meets her new roommate, Rebbecca (Meester). They become best friends, but some of the other girls in the dorm don't like Rebbecca because she's a bitch to them. Sara meets some douchebag at a frat party, Stephen, and they start to date. Rebbecca keeps to her bed in the room.

She becomes more and more possessive of Sara, ultimately telling one of the other girls on the hall that she will kill her if she doesn't stop being Sara's friend (that happens all the time in the shower in dorms). Then they go to Beverly Hills (as if girls going to school in Westwood, say, wouldn't have found their way to Beverly Hills before November). When they go to Rebecca's house, Sara realizes that she has a weird relationship with her folks (how strange!) and her mother says something about how she suffers from bi-polar disorder and is on meds.

Apparently this is fucking scary as hell to Sara, who comes from somewhere in the middle of the country. A roommate on meds?! Holy fucking fuck! She has to move out right away. Once she tries to push Rebbecca away, hell breaks lose and Rebbecca kills some people in a very boring way. Oh - and Billy Zane is in this as some letchy art prof... I'm glad the brother is acting again! (He's the fucking worst!)

There is so much wrong with this movie it's hard to pinpoint what is the most upsetting thing. I know I hated the fact that Sara is so dumb and doesn't think Rebbecca is fucking nuts until she finds out she's bi-polar - and then shit suddenly gets bad. Like, there are tons and tons of people in the world who are bi-polar... I think it's just lazy. (And not so say the Shroeder piece was a brilliant picture, but at least the suggestion of borderline personality disorder is more interesting than violent bi-polarity. And if we really want to get into it, we don't really see anything bi-polar as much as we see psychopathology and some possible schitzophrenia. Again, I'm being paid more here than the psych advisers for the film.)

Considering both actresses look basically like the same person, I was surprised that Meester did such a better job than Kelly. Kelly's voice really annoys me. She speaks mostly in a baby-talky light and airyness and never enunciates or finishes words (which I thought was lesson one in acting... at least it was when I was in 5th grade). She's mostly overdone and telegraphs her emotions too far (I'm going to do a sad face, because my character is sad in this scene). Meester is actually pretty good here (in a terrible role). I'm impressed by her so far (she was also pretty good in Country Strong).

This is a movie to avoid at all cost. There is nothing in it at all. It's ridiculous and boring, not really funny (to laugh at, I mean) and much more work than it should be.

Stars: 0 of 4

Birdemic: Shock and Terror (Saturday, July 31, 2010) (86)

Birdemic is one of the worst movies ever made. It might be the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. Everything about it is terrible from the story and the script, to the acting, the editing, the sound and the special effects. There is no reason in the world to watch this film, and yet it was one of the most enjoyable movie-watching experiences I can remember in a long time.

In a recent piece in Harper's, Tom Bissell wrote about the film The Room as what he called a "post-camp cult film." That's the best description of Birdemic I can find. "It's so bad that it's good" is the general force at work here. Bissell beautifully explains the film as the "movie that an alien who has never seen a movie might make after having had movies thoroughly explained to him."

To describe the story that director James Nguyen wrote and directed is sorta silly, but I feel formally obliged to do it here. Rod works for an Internet sales company and one day bumps into hottie Nathalie in a diner at lunch. He asks her out and she says yes. They go out and fall in love.

At some point, totally unrelated to the romance, a flock of killer eagles begins attacking people in the Bay Area and killing them. Rod and Nathalie have to escape the terror from above and kill as many of the birds as they can in the process. Not to ruin anything (not that it matters if you know), but the birds ultimately give up and fly away for no reason. There's really no shock or terror in this at all.

The film is basically a re-hash of M. Night Shyamalan's terrible work from 2008, The Happening. In that, there was something weird where nature was killing people with wind and trees. In this, it seems nature is mad a humans for being bad to the environment, so it sends mad eagles to get the people. (By the way, if there was ever evidence that Shyamalan was a terrible writer and director it is that this movie - which is totally ridiculous - borrows the entire story, including small details, and it comes out totally silly.)

It it hard to explain how terrible every aspect of this film is. Aside from the silly story, every other technical aspect of the film is bad. The acting is beyond wooden (I'm guessing these are non-actors and maybe just Nguyen's friends), the editing is terrible, frequently cutting scenes off before they are finished. The sound is even horrible, cutting in an out as actors are speaking and leaving gaps of silence between visual cuts.

Maybe what makes the film so deliciously horrible is the special effect birds we see throughout the film. They look like birds you might have seen on a computer screen saver from around 1989. They don't move much and seem to hover in the air flapping their wings slowly, like giant, slow humming birds. Some of them are able to hang in the air without moving their wings, as if they were soaring, but also remain still as they do it. They are totally ridiculous and over-the-top.

It seems that this film, which was released in New York this past March, is already a cult hit. I saw it at a midnight screening where the audience was there to see something horrible and knew what they were getting (some of them might have seen it before, as they seemed to be laughing in advance of terrible things happening).

I'm not sure this would play well watching soberly in one's home. It's a bit like a really bad Rocky Horror Picture Show (there's even an amazing musical scene in a bar with a guy singing solo - though he apparently has invisible back-up singers and band). It looks like Nguyen is already working on a sequel to this film (The Resurrection). I look forward to that.

Stars: 0 of 4 (or alternatively "A Billion Stars")

Salt (Saturday, July 24, 2010) (83)

Salt is a totally ridiculous, recycled and dumb summer action blockbuster. There is absolutely nothing fresh about this film- I've seen it a hundred times before.


Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is a CIA agent who one day interviews an ex-KGB general who says that she herself is a Russian sleeper agent who is going to kill the Russian president the next day in New York. Surprise, surprise, she escapes her D.C. office and runs up to New York by Bolt Bus (I'm not kidding... I wonder if she used the free wi-fi on board). There she seems to kill the Russian president and triggers a series of events that nearly lead to nuclear war (omigod - yes! Nuclear was with Russia is totally something that is going to happen tomorrow).


Her boss and main buddy in the CIA is Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) who doesn't believe she is a Russian spy and tries to defend her to all their spy buddies. At some point he has no choice but to admit that she probably is a spook, but then she gets away again and gets into the White House for a meeting with the President because she's dressed like a drag king (again- I'm serious). Now the question is will she start the nuclear war, will she kill the Prez or will she stay loyal to the United States.


It seems to me the only reason you would cast Jolie is because she's hot and gets you that vavavavoom t&a scene where she strips off her clothes or gets nekkid with some hot foreign dude. But for no reason, there is no sex to speak of in this whole film. And the film comes in at under 100 minutes, so it's not like they had to cut the sex scenes. I don't get that. Maybe director Phillip Noyce and writer Kurt Wimmer thought that would have been too cliche to put in. Instead they went with a movie about nuclear war with the Russians... in 2010.


The writing and direction in this film is so terrible it's surprising it was released at all. At one point when there is a gunman shooting at people in the White House (because, of course, you can attack the President inside the White House) a short bald man turns to the assailant and says, "don't kill me, I'm just the National Security Advisor." Really?! That passes for good dialogue in Hollywood these days? That's a joke of a parody of action movie dialogue. If you were making a movie making fun of dumb action movies, that line might be too silly to include.


Beside this, the action scenes are terribly done and totally unbelievable. For a moment I'll forget that one of the big action scenes takes place inside the White House where the secret service agents around the President are basically stuffed suits, no better at fighting than ninja movie bad guys (one karate chop to the neck and they out cold). One of the big chases is in New York, after Salt has apparently killed the Russian president and after she escaped the CIA in D.C. the day before. The NYPD (why they're involved is beyond me) take her in a police cruiser across the 59th Street Bridge for some unknown reason - but then get caught in traffic on the bridge, giving our heroine enough time to break some windows and escape. Again - really?! That would happen? That's even hard to believe in the world of dumb action flicks.


This film gave me nothing. The story is totally unoriginal with a few requisite dumb twists that are not all that surprising. The writing is terrible overall and the directing is laughable at best and horrible at worst. Who gives a crap about the acting? - it was lukewarm throughout (though why Schreiber has a southern accent in the film is bizarre and his execution is horrible). There is no reason to see this movie. It's not even stupid summer fun. It's terrible.


Stars: 0 of 4

The Lovely Bones (Tuesday, December 15, 2009) (195)

One of my most significant and important movie memories was in the fall of 1998, when I went to see the Robin Williams movie What Dreams May Come. I remember it mostly because it was the first time I watched a movie and realized before it was over that it was a piece of garbage. Up until that point I had passively watched movies and not really thought about whether they were good or not - but this one jumped out at me as being particularly bad.

As I watched The Lovely Bones recently, all I could think about was how much it reminded me visually and viscerally of What Dreams May Come. Director Peter Jackson uses similar CGI elements that are so contrived and Thomas Kinkaid-esque that they have no depth to speak of and are simply alienating. It also has a somewhat similar, boring story - one that never really connects to anything I care about and never really comes to a sensible conclusion.

Based on the 2002 Alice Sebold best-selling book, the story is simple, if rather foggy. The film is narrated by Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who tells us in the opening scene that she has was killed in 1973. We see a brief lead-up to how this happened and then a truncated version of the murder itself. Then we see her parents and police in her Pensylvania town look for the murderer.

Through the film, Susie exists in a middle zone between heaven and earth, but it is never clear why she is there. There are elaborate visual sequences showing her discovering this fantasy world where she can be on a sunny beach and look at snowy mountains ten steps away. For reasons that are never clear, she cannot move up to heaven and must stay in this dreamy limbo place.

Unlike the movie Ghost, say, it is not that she's waiting for her murderer to be discovered before she can move along. She seems to just be hanging out - and even she seems to not know where to go or what she's doing there. We also see the lives of her family (especially her father and younger sister) being turned upside-down by the pain they feel at her loss.

I think one of my biggest problems with this story is that there seems to be a beginning, and then there is what appears to be an end - but by the time we get there, it is not totally clear where we are or what we have just seen taking place. I can be sure that I've seen some action and some dialogue, but I don't know how it all connects or why I am supposed to care.

The script is terrible (maybe the book is too - but I haven't read it). Not only is the structure messy, but the dialogue is ridiculous. To make matters worse, the inclusion of a narrator is one of the most unnecessary elements I've ever seen. She tells us almost exactly what we are seeing on screen - so if she wasn't there telling us what we were seeing, we could understand it well just the same. I

n addition, Susan Sarandon, playing Susie's grandmother, comes in at one point after her death, when her parents think they need help keeping the house and looking after her siblings. It is never clear, though why she is there, as neither one of the parent's seems that busy or distracted that they can't keep doing their duties. There's a terrible comic relief sequence of Sarandon vacuuming and sleeping while drunk and smoking cigarettes. It's feels out of place and rather inappropriate tonally. For the most part, Jackson seems to put style over substance concentrating on lavish computer-animated settings in the middle-world and pretending that helps advance the narrative (which it does not do). These sequences are indulgent and pointless.

Throughout the film the acting is pretty terrible. Mark Wahlberg (who I normally like) is much too earnest and feels much more like Dirk Diggler playing Brock Landers in Angels Live in My Town (from Boogie Nights) than a concerned dad. Rachel Weisz doesn't seem to react in any particularly strong way. She gets very sad and then upset with her husband for getting obsessed with finding the killer, then leaves the house to go to California for rest and relaxation. She's not much of an emotional part of the story - and basically as unnecessary as Sarandon.

The worst thing about the acting is that Jackson, a Kiwi, has a ton of non-Americans cast in small roles. Almost every single one of them struggles with their American accent at some point. This is terrible and something that could be easily fixed (I think) in post-production (with ADR dubbing). Stanley Tucci, who plays the creepy neighbor murderer (I'm not giving anything away - this is explained early in the film and in the trailer), has a bizarre creepy affect. Why he couldn't just speak normally is totally a mystery to me. Not only does he have to look and behave like a freak, but he hast to talk like one too. If Jackson is so deaf to American accents, he should not be making movies set here (he can stick to movies in Elvish instead).

After finishing the film, I had to think for awhile to figure out what I had just seen because it basically didn't make sense. Aside from being incredibly boring and much too long (it runs 135 minutes), I don't think much really happened beyond from the initial 'girl-is-murdered-in-a-cornfield' set-up. There is no story arc and no important character development. The direction is horrible and script is choppy and minor-league. The look of the animated parts is terrible, over-done and more nauseating than paradisaical. Overall this is a failure of a movie.

Stars: 0 of 4

Antichrist (Sunday, October 25, 2009) (152)

This is an open letter to Danish filmmaker extraordinaire Lars von Trier. Please note, I do not recommend that anyone see his new film Antichrist. It is shocking and disgusting and terrible. OK - maybe you should see it because it is so wonderfully bad. How von Trier is considered a modern master is beyond me. WARNING: This letter has lots of spoilers and might not be totally SFW. Again: Don't see this movie.

Dear Lars von Trier:

I wish I could say that when in Antichrist a dead fox with its guts spilling out jumps up and says directly to the camera 'chaos reigns' that I knew the picture was a piece of garbage. But sadly, this fact was clear to me way before this sequence. Your movie is totally fatuous, quasi-intellectual sophomorism. And you are a conceited demagogue.

Your film opens with what I think is a very elegant slow-motion sequence with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg fucking wildly in the shower and their baby falling out an open window to his death, all while a Handel aria plays. This is nice, but is not even a close of anything to come. Once the baby dies, the Gainsbourg goes into a state of extreme shock (she seems to be bi-polar) and gets hospitalized.

When she wakes up (after a month in a coma!) Dafoe, who is some sort of psychiatrist, decides he doesn't like the treatment she's getting, so he flushes her meds down the toilet and resolves to treat her himself. As he treats her, she goes through several stages of 'recovery', with some episodes of crying, self-mutilation and, again, jumping on her husband to fuck him (I mean, why not!?). At a certain point, he decides that they should go to their country house deep in the woods, because he believes part of her problem is that she's afraid of nature (or something like that). Once she gets there, she begins to get better, but ultimately goes fucking bat-shit and attacks her husband.

Your need to show graphic sexuality on screen makes no sense to me. Yes, it's very frank, but I'm not sure it really helps tell the story. I don't need to see vaginal penetration in the opening sequence to understand they are screwing (I think you were trying to make a visual allusion to the stabby violence that would follow, but this was still pretty juvenile). I don't need to see Gainsbourg hit Dafoe in his erect cock with a paving stone and then jerk him off until he spooges blood on her shirt. I don't need to see her drill a hole in Dafoe's leg and then attach a grinding wheel to it with a wrench as a 'man-anchor'. I don't need to see her cut off her clitoris with a rusty scissors. None of these details give me a deeper understanding of anything and are basically all totally fucking gross.

I guess your point in this movie is that men keep women down and hurt them, so it is a woman's right to fight back. Or maybe that men make women into monsters, so we should not be surprised when women fight back. But this argument falls apart once we know that she is bi-polar and is suffering from an extreme depressive episode followed by an extreme manic episode. Also, Dafoe's biggest sin we know about is that he tries to become her shrink (I guess that's something about man's control over women), but this is not the worst sin in the world. Yes, it is very unethical, but it should not lead her to castrating him, or whatever she does. You also show Gainsbourg putting the kid's shoes on the wrong feet to torture him - which means either she's an incredibly negligent mother, or an outright evil one who hurts her child so directly. She is not an easy woman for us to love.

Most of the dialogue in the film is hilariously bad. Several times in the screening I went to, the audience laughed AT the film. At one point, after Gainsbourg has been depressed for several months and unresponsive to Dafoe's treatment, and he says earnestly, 'This is not going to work.' I mean - really, Lars?! That's the best line you could come up with? When the fox said 'chaos reigns', just about everyone in the theater laughed (again) - but aside from the ridiculous line, I don't even understand what the fuck it means. Is the fox a mythological symbol of chaos? Is the woman chaotic? Is there something about the relationship between men and women that is chaotic? Is the fox the Antichrist? I don't know.

Throughout the film, the cinematography is striking, but frustrating. I found that the blue-green, hyper-stylized look of the film made me forget at moments how bad the movie was and enjoy looking at it visually. Maybe it's unfair of me, but I want my bad movie to look really bad too. I think it's cheesy for your turd of a film to look good. (It's also very anti-Dogme 95 of you to have a film look so fancy, bt-dubs.)

I have a few final questions for you: Why is the film set in Seattle? It seems like a totally random place. Is this a criticism of American culture? I don't know how emblematic of America Seattle really is. (I also object to the fact that I don't really associate Seattle with snow, but rather with rain -so I think the snow in the opening sequence is lazy overkill and visual obfuscation). Do you object to psycho-pharmacology and talking therapy? Do you think one is better than the other? At one point it seems like you hate all therapy, but then you let the women who is in bad therapy hurt somebody, so maybe you like therapy. Which parts of the body did Willem DaFoe's body double play? What does this film have to do with Andrei Tarkovsky and why did you dedicate the film to him? Have you considered retirement, and if not, why not?

Most importantly: This film seems to break almost all of the Dogme 95 ten rules. Was this done on purpose? Do you think Dogme is bullshit the way we do? Of all the broken rules, #6 (no murders or weapons) is especially shot to shit - why did you do this? Do you think it makes you an ego-maniac and a hack to write a manifesto and then get sick of it after less than 14 years?

I appreciate that there is a credit at the end for 'research on misogyny' - but I think you are really a misanthrope - at least that's the only explanation I can figure on why you would make this movie - because you fucking hate humanity and want to make us suffer like dogs.

Sincerely,

Aaron

No Stars

Julia (Thursday, October 8, 2009) (141)

Most bad movies have one or two interesting or fun elements in them. It might have a terrible script or horrendous acting, but might look nice or have a good scene. Julia has nothing good at all in it. The script is terrible and unfocused with bad dialogue and a ponderous narrative. The acting is not good, including Tilda Swinton, who has had some good performances in her career, but struggles here with an American accent. The direction is loose and directionless and the visual style is uninspired.

Julia is an active alcoholic who goes to an AA meeting where she meets another drunk, probably schizophrenic woman. That woman has a plan to kidnap her son away from her husband's rich family in order to make some money. She asks Julia for help for the plan and Julia agrees, sensing that she can make an extra buck. She hatches her own plan to kidnap the kid from the mother and extort more money form the rich family. The plan goes pear-shaped and Julia is left with the kid and no cash - so she runs for Mexico with the boy (huh?!).

One of the biggest problems for me is that none of the characters are likable and their behavior is irrational and the story is disgusting. Julia's drunkenness is never really addressed and it's not clear that she has the slightest bit of a goodness in her body. When the boy is crying and soiling himself (more than once) she's oblivious and heartless. But the strange thing is that Julia is not supposed to be an evil character - it seems that director Eric Zonca shows her as a tragic character who has made a string of bad choices. I guess she has an addictive personality, but her decisions are irrational, even for someone who drinks a bottle of vodka before noon.

Overall this is uncomfortable and uninteresting and just plain boring. I don't find kidnapping and drunkenness interesting or enjoyable to watch - and I also don't know why I would want to watch it for 150 minutes. The script could have easily been cut down by 45 minutes at least (structurally, there are four acts - which is sloppy, to say the least). Swinton should be ashamed of her thin, shrill performance here.

Stars: 0 of 4