ThiefHott Too much of everything

ShangLuda Admirable film.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

nutolm This movie is a raw satire about intolerance. It' s not really about political right or left wing views, but about people who fail to understand what freedom of speech really is. The main characters don' t think about their own limits - just the other people' s. This group of elite students conceived their own mission, a mission to get rid of everybody who they think have the wrong opinions about the society. As mention in the movie - i you travel back in time and met the young artist Adolf Hitler, knowing what he would do as a grown man, would you kill him to save millions of lives? I probably would, but to change history - what consequences would that make for the future? That' s the question I asked myself... This is the debut for director Stacy Title, the theme is controversial, and the product has a visual style that appeal to me. The actors are very good, Title and her staff have apparently picked the right cast, and everybody did an outstanding job - even the guest stars. Stacy Title haven' t done anything memorable later in her professional career - which makes me wonder why, for with this production, she hit the nail on the head.

Robert J. Maxwell This is a pretty amusing send up of self righteousness and political extremism on the small scale. Five liberal room mates -- Diaz, Eldard, Gish, Penner, and Vance -- at a university in Iowa share a full-course meal in their home with a young man who reveals himself to be an unashamed macho war monger. A fight breaks out and the guest easily overpowers the wimpy hosts but is stabbed in the back by one of them. The victim burps, falls to the floor and dies.For the most part, the instrument of the deliberate murders that follow is poisoned wine. Let me recount the names of some of the right-wing victims: Bill Paxton is the dedicated warrior; Charles Durning as a minister who thinks queers deserve to die of AIDS; Mark Harmon as the ne plus ultra of male chauvinism; Jason Alexander as a man devoted to despoiling the earth; Pamela Gien as a librarian who thinks that "Catcher in the Rye" is pornographic. She doesn't drink so she has to be stabbed in the back.But this is the kind of comedy that doesn't need an excess of gore to be funny, so there is no gore at all. The ludic element lies elsewhere -- partly in occasionally clever but noetic unknowables. Example: If you were alone with Hitler in 1929, knowing what you now know, would you let him live? Partly the humor lies in ancillary themes. The Gang of Five decide to bury their first victim in the back yard, resulting in a suspicious-looking mound of earth. They put a tomato plant on top to disguise its contours. Eventually they have half a dozen huge tomato plants growing on the graves and there is a super-abundance of red ripe home-grown tomatoes. At first they can the tomatoes but the cabinets are finally filled. Then they slice them and hang them up to be sun dried. The tomatoes keep coming and getting bigger. They begin skeet shooting the tomatoes. They swing at them with baseball bats. Their last supper is spaghetti with marinara sauce. Another scene has Carmen Diaz planting pansies around the borders of the graves but it simply make the place look more like a cemetery than ever. (She gets PO'd when Vance rips them out.) And one of the roomies is a painter. He recreates, in a monstrous manner, Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel. On the dining room ceiling. (It should have been Da Vinci's "The Last Supper.")They run into trouble when they manage to persuade a rabble-rousing, right-wing TV maniac, Ron Perlman, to have a good meal at their home. During the dinner, before he is served the "dessert" wine, he cheerfully admits that he only rants on television because of the ratings, that in actuality he is full of crap. He thinks both extremes are dangerous and that centrists control government and always will. And if he met Hitler alone in 1929? No, he wouldn't kill Hitler. (The hosts reach for the "dessert" wine.) Instead, he would do his best to talk Hitler out of his designs. The connivers hesitate, then scurry outside for a discussion.Left alone in the dining room, the phony right-wing nut job lights a cigar and wanders around. He's about to pour a glass of the "dessert" wine but it smells funny to him. Then he picks up a local paper and reads an item about all the missing locals. The penny drops and he stares back at the bottle of poisoned wine. Lieutenant Columbo should have such intuition.It's all kind of amusing, so why isn't it funnier than it is? Great material, nice photography and lighting, and no clunk performances, but I kept thinking what Ealing Studios might have done with this plot in the mid-1950s. There would have been less extravagance in the performances for one thing. The room mates keep arguing and shouting at one another, leading to a scene in which one is about to shoot another with a magnum. There would have been fewer victims, probably, and more comic elements attached to each murder. Some of the victims are hardly seen, getting barely enough screen time to say a few words before their demise. There is discontinuity in some of the characters too, and it stands out. Carmen Diaz is flippant about the first murder but anguished for no reason by the last. Except for Courtney Vance, Jr., who remains consistent, their positions through time are erratic. And sometimes the mood shifts violently without justification.But, these qualifications notwithstanding, I kind of enjoyed it. I still wish it had been made in the mid-50s by Ealing, but it's kind of fun, and welcome relief from most of the garbage showing up on the screen lately.

lastliberal It's 1909 and you're alone with a young artist named Adolph. Do you kill him? A hypothetical question becomes real for a group of friends (Cameron Diaz, Ron Eldard, Annabeth Gish, Jonathan Penner, and Courtney B. Vance) that inadvertently have a gung ho ex-Marine (Bill Paxton) for dinner.They decide that the world could be a better place if they removed some of those who pollute it with their thoughts, words, and actions. Come on, you've probably thought of the idea too. Wouldn't America be a better place if someone had gotten rid of a few right-wing nut-jobs before they could do serious damage to the country? They choose one each Sunday - anti-gay (Charles Durning), anti-literacy (Pamela Gien), anti-environment (Jason Alexander), etc. - you guessed it, until they come up with what they consider the ultimate prize - a Rush Limbaugh type (Ron Perlman) that causes them to pause. Is he really bad, or just out for money and publicity? Is that a bad enough reason to kill him?The answer and ending were a perfect ending to a funny movie.

fierstein This movie would've been a hoot amongst some of the pseudo-intellectual Arts students when first released. But it was rubbish, the politically incorrect dinner guests were all crude stereotypes, and the ethical 'discussions' at the dinner parties would have been better left as an msn conversation rather than turning it into a script and subjecting viewers to sit through it.So in short, this is a movie about a group of lefties, who despite the lefty catchcry of tolerance, murder a bunch of people who hold differing opinions to them. Now dark humour can be funny, if accompanied with some humour to begin with. But this wasn't funny. Unless one finds the murders in themselves to be funny? It came across as being nothing more than the scriptwriters deepest fantasy, that he tried to turn into a lighthearted romp. Perhaps someone from the other end of the political spectrum should rewrite 'The Turner Diaries' as a dark and witty comedy. I wonder if there will be the same lack of outrage that accompanies the release of these kind of movies. Perhaps Mel Gibson might direct it? I hope you dear readers perceive that I'm being sarcastic...