September 22, 2006

Film Critic Quote of the Week

David Edelstein in New York magazine, on "All the King's Men":

"Willie tosses away his prepared text and finds his true voice. He tells the hicks that he’s a hick, too, and that hicks have to stand up for themselves because no one else will. And sensing that something momentous is happening, the people begin to stream toward Willie, climbing the fences to get a better view, their smudged faces upturned. And all I could think was, How can they hear a fucking word? It’s not the Louisiana accent. (Presumably that wouldn’t be an obstacle to Louisianans.) It’s that Penn is never happier than when he can mumble and brood and get all inward... By the time the sequence ended, I thought I’d seen five of the stupidest minutes in an American movie since Lady in the Water."
- I saw the movie tonight- big, big disappointment. A long boring mess of nothing, the film consists of little more than Penn's mumbling, scenary-chewing, mostly unintelligible perfomance, intercut periodically with "intrigue," involving the Jude Law character, that isn't intriguing at all.

Also ruining things are shoddily bad character development, James Horner's intrusive score, and director Steve Zaillian's endless repetitions of certain scenes and lines, as though we need them to understand the plot (remember the endless close-ups on glasses of water in Zaillian's "A Civil Action"?) And repeated references to evil oil barons are meant to remind us that, in case we missed it, the movie is Really About Bush.

Has a cast this great ever been assembled for a movie this bad? Penn, Law, Anthony Hopkins, James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson... I can't think of any other movie with that pedigree that fell so flat. Can you? There must be a reason they kept this one on the shelf for a whole year.

Posted by Stephen Silver at September 22, 2006 12:55 AM
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