Change Your Image
Sorcerer2001
Reviews
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Puzzled, wondering if I missed the bigger point, but at the bottom line, not entertained.
Everyone experiences a movie from their own point of view. Given that, I spent alot of the movie trying to discover a point of view in which the movie would make sense. Finally, I gave up the idea of making sense and went for the experience. But the experience I got was a quirky, misguided look at a dysfunctional family who drove their only brother to dyslexic, comatose, bi-polar half-life magnified, as if it needed to be magnified, by weird camera and sound track treatments. One couple we went with left. The audience was complaining so loudly that we could hardly hear the dialogue. Still I know that to those who can't hear the music, the dancers seem insane (George Carlin) so I continued to look for the redeeming value in this movie. Unfortunately I ended feeling like the brunt of a social experiment gone bad. If the writer would take this boundless energy he obviously has and rather than trying to express and have people get his own mental state, he creates the same simple story told powerfully, the customer (us humble movie-goers) would have heard the story in our language... if I had wanted to see a foreign movie, I would have picked one that didn't have an English title. This is the kind of movie that makes me wish I had better eyes. But then, wishing I was a better movie-goer may not be the best experience to call me back... I paid $9 for the experience.
Finding Graceland (1998)
Transformational Sleeper
Warning! Don't try to watch this movie without an IQ in excess of 100 and don't try to watch it with your brain... watch it with your heart.
It's clear why this movie didn't appeal to many audiences. It uses uncertainty and ambiguity like a craftsman. It raises more questions than answers. It suggest that a side of life exists that most people rarely suspect much less see.
Harvey Keitel is an unlikely angel hitching his way back to Graceland. The movie illustrates our unwillingness to accept the fact that our world is what we say it is and what we say it isn't.
Hidden in this predictably country and western-flavored, womanizing, motel tour across the southern countryside is an Elvis look-alike that doesn't look like Elvis, but knows things that only Elvis knows, and even wears the same shoe size as Elvis.
And the bottom line... the road less traveled that Elvis clearly steers for each person he encounters is redemption... personal transformation. But then, angels really don't make good entertainment, do they?