The best thing about this movie is that I got to see the trailer for True Grit. Hopefully True Grit will execute on the premise it presented. I think Eastwood decided to channel Robert Redford for this dreadful, slow, rambling mess of a movie. For the first half hour you feel like something is about to happen, but after another half hour you realize that it's just going to play out as an eventless exposition on death. Yawn, yawn, yawn. It's almost an insult that the movie wraps up sensibly, given that nothing is ever at stake in the film, and the characters, though well-drawn, don't have anything of any importance to accomplish. I get the feeling that the people who rated this highly either: 1) have recently experienced a death, or 2) are about to experience a death. Aside from them, there is no audience or reason for this junior-high school level term paper to evolve into a script or a movie. As a produced screenwriter, I read a lot of scripts. I read a lot of good scripts. The fact that Hollywood in general can't distinguish a good script from a rambling mess is why a larger percentage of entertainment dollars is going to video games and reality shows. Nothing scary in this movie. Nothing that rises to the level of real drama. No real thrills. No revelations or truths revealed in a new manner...$50 million to produce. What a waste of studio money.
