Sunday, April 09, 2006

Severe Warning

Partly viewed: "Prime," with Uma Thurman, Meryl Streep, and some kid.

Verdict: Ack! Ack! Ack!

Confession: I skimmed the second half. Just hopped scenes to get the gist of the plot, and find out what happened, the way one does with particularly bad fiction. It was That Bad.

Details of badness: Wooden, affectless, unimaginative dialogue. Painfully long scenes of people fidgeting. Impossibly, purposelessly contrived plot. Characters without any. Interminable fake sex scenes substituting for substance. The horror.


Pretty Lady felt that it was her public duty to get this information out there as soon as possible. Do not, under any circumstances, spend two dollars or two hours of your precious life on this movie.

8 comments:

dlkjdfsa said...

This is the inevitable unfortunate path most art is taking. As more art is produced it becomes more difficult for true originality.No where is this more apparent than Hollywood and there lust for the formulaic money makers. Those lucky cave painters had it easy, I mean buffalos come on! As a painter, I know that with my colors I can only produce a limited range of darks and lights set by my black and white paint. I can however create an infinite range of lines, forms and patterns. This is probably why abstract expressionism is so popular in the contemporary art world. We are only confined to what is visually possible. "Statements" rest somewhere between the finite and infinite. Love is love and pain is pain (finite), no matter how one "says" it (infinite). Good and bad in art has always rested on a purely subjective level. That's not to say I don't trust your judgment Pretty Lady. I feel you are a great judge of character and am pleased to be forewarned of wasting my finite time.

Anonymous said...

Yes, yes, all fine and good. You never did say whether Uma got naked or not?

Pretty Lady said...

She might have, EN, but I didn't have the patience to wait and see.

And Rabbitslayer, the thing that pained me was that this could have been an excellent movie, if the screenwriter had been the sort of artist who pays genuine, close attention to the infinitely unique characteristics of genuine human speech and character, rather than attempting to distill it down to pseudo-Freudian pablum. Nature itself is so infinitely creative that the artist who ignores it and attempts to reinvent the world according to his own limited imagination is begging for a fall.

dlkjdfsa said...

I was looking for something witty to say as I am a big fan of wit. I thought about asking you to skim the movie again to see if Uma really does get naked as this would make it worth sitting thought the pain of an uninspired money grabbin' screen writer. I reread your paragraph. "pseudo-freudian pablum" caught my eye, I know I could use this somehow! I just wasn't sure what a pablum was. www.webster.com and I was on the way to knowledge. The definition to this word was all the humor I needed. Sometimes I wonder about my standards. Whether all of you think it's funny will be up to the critiques. Maybe it's only funny if you don't know what it means in the first place. Maybe it's only funny to me...

Main Entry: pab·lum
Function: noun
a trademark for an infant cereal

Pretty Lady said...

Honeybun, all my humor is utterly intended, for those who have Eyes to See, or patience to do the research. I am so please you are one of them.

Anonymous said...

I am glad I did not rent that. I started to because the trailers make the movies look so good.
Did you ever watch Pride and Prejudice, PL?

Pretty Lady said...

Pride and Prejudice continues to be checked out and unavailable at my corner Blockbuster, tragically. I rented "Stay" instead; review forthcoming.

Anonymous said...

You must watch it. Even though the book has been shaken up and rearranged, it is so delightful. I loved the casting.