These are my film reviews as well as other review pieces that I’ve written. My film and other media reviews do contain spoilers a fair amount of the time, and not all of the reviews are tagged with SPOILER! notices. Consider this fair warning.
I expected more from this film. The pre-release cinematography was gorgeous but the story.. Man. The kids die, the wife dies the main character dies. Depressing, horrible stuff and she goes to hell and everything gets worse. None of this is really a spoiler (even though IMDb has flagged this review as containing spoilers) because all of that happens in the first act of the film. It has to happen for there to be any story to tell in this movie. The entire rest of the film is spent getting back out of hell. You have to have some belief in an afterlife to have any reason to watch this film.
Cuba Gooding’s brief appearance is the only and I repeat ONLY positive moment in the entire film. A nasty depressing ride I can skip ever seeing again.
Yes. I get it. The movie is supposed to be a tribute to undying love. I’m not buying the premise, and if I’m not buying the premise, the film doesn’t work.
I attended the premier in Austin, Texas. I enjoyed it immensely, especially meeting the cast members for questions afterwards. Sure the edit could use a bit of tightening, but the dialog was witty to sarcastic.
Harry Hamlin and William Shatner delivered solid performances. I have friends and family working in independent film and they completely got into this movie. Sad news folks. those people really are crazy. The real question is what is crazy in relation to film making? If you are making an independent feature, you are pretty close to certifiable already.
The Wife borrowed my IMDb account to write that review lo these many years ago (now it is 2020) I spruced it up a bit. We still tell the aleatoric joke to each other when we are watching something that reeks of needing a decent script.
This is perhaps the most wrongfully maligned film in all of movie history. Everyone I meet hates this film, aside from the lead singer of Abney Park. He wrote a song about it. I’ve watched this film too many times to count. It was my favorite stoner film for a long, long time.
Stoner film? A movie you watch while you are high. Forget Cheech & Chong. Forget Heavy Metal. Forget Dude Where’s My Car. All of those are good. None of them end with a guy jumping into a volcano with his true love. A movie featuring Fish as the native chief who shows Joe which path he has to follow.
The crooked road. The crooked road that he takes to work. The crooked road that mars the plaster in his apartment. The crooked road is everywhere in the film, as is Melanie Griffith who shows off her acting chops by credibly presenting several different characters with the same face.
The New York accent that always sends him down the wrong path. Poor Joe. Repeatedly sent the wrong way by people who use him, yet he always manages to find something of value everywhere he goes.
The mistake everyone makes is taking this movie seriously. It’s not serious. The thing I find most mystifying is that anyone would try to take a film seriously that starts with Once Upon a Time and ends with …And They Lived Happily Ever After. It’s a fairytale. The best fairytale. Try reading Mother Goose or the Brothers Grimm and then get back to me. None of them can hold a candle to this movie.
They just pay me to drive the limo, sir. I’m not here to tell you who you are.
This isn’t the best mix of the song. Neither of the versions on the album Taxidermy are the best mix of the song. I have a copy of the version I prefer but it was only available on their website back in the days when I paid to have access to their full library. I haven’t given them money since back in the day when Building Steam was new.
