SamDash95 Reviews

The Hours (2002)

Usual feminist garbage

[1/10 · 27 January 2003]

This was so awful, it's a shoo-in for Best Picture. I haven't seen pretentious crap like this since American Beauty. I had the same thought after that movie too.

(Spoilers ahead)

To hear Gloria Steinem tell it in her L.A. Times review, this is the greatest movie ever. From a twisted feminist perspective it might be. Virginia Woolf chooses suicide over a suffocating marriage. The movie suggests the Victorian times did not allow her to live her true lesbian desires. The fact of the matter is that Woolf was severely mentally ill. She was no heroine. She was a very sick woman.

Laura leaves her seemingly idyllic life, again, perhaps, for being stifled from her lesbian leanings. She leaves her nice-guy husband and children, without explanation, to "find herself." Though Steinem calls that a heroine, I believe a more apt description is cold-hearted bitch. Sh*t, marriage is hard sometimes; we don't leave when we're feeling a little blue. Just try and imagine making a movie with a man abandoning his family and trying to put that in a positive light.

And our third heroine, Clarissa, a -surprise!- lesbian is finally free when Richard commits suicide. Men just get in women's way.

Any wonder why someone like Gloria Steinem would love this feminist claptrap? Absolute garbage.

Signs (2002)

Slow to develop to a disappointing payoff

[4/10 · 8 September 2002]

I'll begin by stating that I enjoyed the "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable." I did not enjoy this. The movie is tediously slow. There are however more fake scares than a "Friday the Thirteenth" movie, a tired ploy when overdone, as here. The screams at those by my fellow theatergoers, however, were the only things keeping me awake through this "thriller". I kept looking at my watch through this interminable snorefest, hoping I would be rewarded for staying awake with a big payoff. The "payoff," to use that word loosely was so lame and hackneyed as to be preposterous. 4/10

American Beauty (1999)

Possibly the most overrated movie of all time

[1/10 · 20 April 2002]

I enjoyed the sequence at the drive-thru. I also thought Scott Bakula's small performance was pretty good. Outside of that, this was my most painful experience in a theater since "Club Paradise."

What was this movie trying to say? Marriage is a bad, arcane, suffocating institution? Adultery, pedophilia and drugs are good and liberating? All Marines are bigoted psychotics who abuse their wives and children, and are all of course closeted homosexuals? Perhaps that is what they think in Hollywood.

I was watching this movie with my girlfriend. Towards the end of this interminable nightmare I walked out. I walked back in when she didn't follow. After the movie, I told her that this movie was so critical of every good and decent aspect of American life, that it was a shoo-in for Best Picture. This movie does not entertain, it does not make one think, it just aggravated me. I had never wanted my money back so bad.

Battlefield Earth (2000)

Possibly the worst movie ever

[1/10 · 9 April 2002]

In a nutshell, this was awful. Where did the $200 million go? Did it all go to Travolta's salary? The effects are cheap. Some of the backgrounds look like a child painted them. The bad guys are the Psychlos, from the planet Psychlo (L. Ron Hubbard's little jab at psychology). Their costumes are laughable. The actors, to appear nine feet tall, walked on stilts. Apparently, they had not practiced. Forrest Whittaker's performance was intolerable. John Travolta's was worse. I never read this book, but this screenplay was incomprehensible. And the caveman who can flawlessly fly a Harrier that has been buried in the sand for a 1000 years? These, the same Harriers that were useless in Desert Storm for getting a little sand in their intakes. I can't stress how bid this movie was. Avoid at all costs. I only gave it one star because I couldn't give it zero. Awful, awful, awful.