Cynical Cinema

Alliance Films is on a roll with their epic films. A few months ago, they released a magnificent three-disc Limited Collector’s edition of El Cid to DVD, one of the great but forgotten Charlton Heston epics. It came with cards and comic books and dozens of special features and booklets and all kinds of trinkets. Today, May 27th, Alliance is releasing the next in this epic series, a Limited Collector’s Edition of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. The three-disc set is almost identical to El Cid in terms of the goodies that come inside. And the two films are very similar as well, in that they are massive military epics with casts of thousands, enormous sets, and Sophia Loren. Starring with Loren in The Fall of the Roman Empire is Alec Guinness, one of the most under-rated actors in history, as the reasonable and wise Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He may well be one of the three greatest to ever live, up there with Brando and Olivier and Nicholson and DeNiro and Bogart.

The movie begins with Marcus Aurelius calling together the representatives of all the nations within the Roman Empire in order to secure peace and prosperity for the known world. Of course, this does not take place over the course of the film, and when it ends three hours later, it is with the Fall of the Roman Empire. This disaster comes about when Aurelius’ son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer), gets wind of his father’s decision to turn over the throne to his adopted son Livius instead of him. So Commodus decides to kill his own father in order to take the throne. And that leaves Rome in the hands of a childish, foolish man, who refuses to negotiate with his enemies or listen to other opinions, and thereby dooms the entire empire quite quickly. Well, in three hours.

This movie is famous now more as the movie that caused the fall of Samuel Bronfman’s cinematic empire, moreso than as a film. But as a film, it stands the test of time. The “Battle of the Four Armies” is as impressive a set piece as anything staged in The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. 8,000 soldiers and 1,200 horses were used for the production, which was shot on a massive plain in Madrid. And the detailed reconstruction of the Roman Forum remains, to this day, the largest ever outdoor film set. With set pieces and sets like these, it’s easy to see how the movie cost a massive amount to produce. And when it became a gargantuan financial failure, it took Bronfman’s empire with it. He had previously been responsible for some of the massive films of the era - El Cid, King of Kings - but after this one he never made another. It was more his business plan than the failure of this film, however, that did him in. He had spent so much creating the sets for these epic movies that he overextended himself, and owed millions of dollars when he became financially destitute and shut down operations.

The Fall of the Roman Empire plays a little fast and loose with actual, factual, history. But the tone, the costumes, the sets and the structure of the armies and the senate are all perfect. The Battle of the Four Armies, while an impressive scene, never actually took place. But the scene toward the end where the senators attempt to bribe the military into making one of them emperor is taken from historical fact. But in the end, you don’t watch a movie like this to learn specific facts about world history. You watch it to be entertained. And The Fall of the Roman Empire IS entertaining. Livius is played by Stephen Boyd, who does a terrific job in a role that was first offered to (of course) his Ben-Hur co-star, Charlton Heston. Sophia Loren is great as always, and of course smoking hot. The role of Commodus was only the third movie role for Christopher Plummer, and it’s the role that propelled him to stardom. And Alec Guinness is simply magnificent as Marcus Aurelius, a role that sadly ends halfway through the movie with his death.

There are many similarities to Gladiator in this film, and indeed a few people have suggested that on many levels Gladiator was actually a remake of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that is the case, but the stories certainly approximate one another. They occur at the same epoch in history, they deal with the same characters and the same downward spiral that consumed Rome in all her glory, and certainly the final scene is almost identical in both films. But Gladiator is a little more fanciful, and The Fall of the Roman Empire is way bigger in scale.

Now - while I certainly do recommend picking up this film, and this three-disc edition is wonderfully done, you might want to wait. For true rabid fans of this film, there is another edition coming out later, possibly as much as a year later. This edition features the standard two hour and 52 minute theatrical version that has been around for years. However, there was some lost footage that was discovered, too late to be included in this particular edition, that will be added to a later set. This will, though, likely be the only set with the poster-cards and the booklets that are included here. So perhaps, if you are a hardcore fan of The Fall of the Roman Empire, you could well do both. Like my nerd-buddy Dave, who owns all thirty-four different editions of the Star Wars trilogy. On VHS and DVD and LaserDisc and reel-to-reel and so forth. If only he had a laser disc player.

Holocaust is a now-legendary miniseries that ran on NBC’s Big Event series in the late 70s. Starring Meryl Streep, James Woods, and a ton of other stars, this is a seven-and-a-half hour marathon of remarkable brilliance. Streep and Woods are terrific as a German woman and her Jewish husband. They get married at the beginning of the film, just before the Nazis start rounding up Jews for the ghettos and for executions. The series follows their story, as well as many others. Woods’ family plays a big part too. His father, a doctor, is played by Fritz Weaver, and his mother is Rosemary Harris. We follow them all the way to the Polish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. Woods’ brother, Joseph Bottoms, witnesses and then escapes from the 1941 Baba Yar massacre, and with his girlfriend joins up with the Russian partisans in their battle against the Nazis.

Also a big story in Holocaust, Michael Moriarty is absolutely great as Erik Dorf, a German lawyer pressured by his ambitious wife to join the Nazi party. Although he is initially conflicted about the inhuman treatment of the Jews, he quickly loses his humanity and rises through the ranks of the SS to become a key architect of Auschwitz and the gas chambers. His story, while initially sympathetic, becomes more and more unpalatable as the film moves on, and eventually Dorf becomes the face of the evil that was the Nazis. He manages to justify his ideas and his involvement in the slaughter of so many innocents by thinking of it as just a job. He’s just following orders. His position is just a job. And his job is to find more efficient ways to slaughter Jews and better methods to explain it to the rest of the world. The Dorf we meet at the beginning of Holocaust would have recoiled in horror at the things done by the Dorf we see at the end.

Throughout, Holocaust is (of course) devastating and horrific. While we can celebrate the love between Bottoms and his girlfriend as they get married, and we can feel a certain amount of satisfaction and inspiration from the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the story is so well-known and so bleak that it’s tough to lose oneself in the nice moments. But that is as it should be. You don’t watch a series like Holocaust expecting comedy and love stories. But it needs some (relatively) light-hearted moments to alleviate that crushing sense of dread and depression one will feel while watching. Of course, the people who really went through this have no respite, but that’s no reason not to give us one as we watch. After all, you want people to actually watch this, if for no other reason than it’s an event we, as people, should never forget.

Holocaust won several Emmy awards, being ineligible for Oscars. One of the most decorated TV miniseries of all time, it won for Outstanding Limited Series, whatever that meant in 1978. Streep, Woods and Moriarty all won acting Emmys, as did Blanche Baker. Five other actors were nominated, without winning. The direction, by Marvin J. Chomsky, won, as did the script by Gerald Green. Morton Gould’s musical score was nominated for an Emmy AND a Grammy, and Moriarty and Rosemary Harris both won acting Golden Globe awards. In short, Holocaust won every award that was available to it at the time, everything short of the Oscars. Which makes it TV’s equivalent of Schindler’s List, an apt comparison in that it stands right up there with that film as the two greatest documents of the most horrific events in modern history. It comes out on DVD for the first time tomorrow, May 27th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Nightmare Detective opens with a scene of a man sitting at a table. Behind him, on the wall, is some super-long, disembodied hair, hanging from a hook like a hat. It takes a while to notice the hair, but when you do, and you realize what it is, you become instantly creeped right out. And that feeling will not leave you until this film is over. It’s the latest offering from Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, who has been called Japan’s answer to David Lynch or David Cronenberg. And that description is certainly apt. This man knows how to create a mood so creepy that even if nothing at all happens, the sense of foreboding resonates within the viewer. In Nightmare Detective, two things are constantly sources of fear and malice. Bridges and bicycles. They don’t sound so creepy thinking of them now, but these are the scariest bikes and bridges I’ve ever seen in a movie. And that includes that brilliant Emilio Estevez classic, Maximum Overdrive.

We are introduced to the Nightmare Detective almost immediately. You see, the guy with the hair on his wall is having a nightmare. And the Nightmare Detective is able to enter peoples’ dreams in order to explain them to those people, and perhaps they will not be so frightened. However, this man having this dream decides he would rather remain in the dream than wake up, and he chooses to die. This screws up Kyoichi Kagenuma, the Nightmare Detective. He has lost the will to live, after seeing so many scary and creepy things in his life. In fact, we are not sure he has ever had the will to live. And this ties in nicely with the theme of suicides. A series of incredibly brutal suicides have been taking place in the city. Each of the victims have stabbed themselves to death, in bloody and gory fashion, while having nightmares. And just before they do, they have all called the phone number “0″. Which I assume in Japan does not connect you with an operator.

Japanese horror movies love this kind of stuff. Something anyone could do - like playing a VHS tape in Ringu, or dialing 0 on a cell phone. Simple things that are accessible to regular people are scary when all of a sudden they become supernatural. It turns out that the guy at the other end of the phone sucks the people who call into suicide pacts with them, and has the supernatural ability to enter their dreams and go after them. Which is always creepy, scary and gory. The cops go after him, but anyone who calls him ends up committing suicide in their sleep. So they enlist the help of the Nightmare Detective, who is legitimately suicidal himself. The hot-chick cop who convinces him to help is played by Reiko Hitomi, one of the sexiest Japanese actresses in the world, but a relative newcomer to movies with international distribution. She eventually sets up the obvious Nightmare On Elm Street style showdown where she confronts the killer in her sleep, with help from the Nightmare Detective.

The final showdown, while it is obvious from the beginning, is bonkers and difficult to understand, and it goes on for a very long time. But somehow it works. After all, it is a nightmare, and all kinds of strange things can happen in a nightmare that don’t have to make sense. The fact that Tsukamoto is able to sustain terror and tense creepiness for a solid half-hour without making it tedious is a testament to his skill. Nightmare Detective is a solid, frightening horror film that is worth seeking out. It arrives in stores tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.

All Hat is a movie that seems to be strangely unsure of itself. When I picked it up, I was fairly excited. Everyone on the cover was wearing cowboy hats and carrying guns. Shotguns and pistols and so forth. However, the movie is not a western. Not really, anyway. And it doesn’t involve that many guns. In fact, there are guns in only one scene, and they are both pistols, and the shotgun on the cover of the DVD box never makes an appearance. The whole movie, I was looking for that shotgun. When is it going to show up? Does someone get their head blown off? Or will they just be scared away by the cocking sound the shotgun makes? It never materialized. I was so desperate to see a shotgun by the time it was over that I watched all the special features. Was it left on the cutting-room floor? Did the editors deprive me of the chance to see someone blasted in the chest? It turns out no. The shotgun existed only to be photographed for the DVD cover, and nothing else.

Also, throughout the film, I was wondering where the title came from. All Hat? What does that mean? Why would you name a movie All Hat? How is that going to get people to watch, for starters, and what focus group came up with that gem? Well, it turns out that this Canadian movie was based on a book by Canadian author Brad Smith (a celebrated fiction writer, he also wrote One-Eyed Jacks, which is not to be confused with the very under-rated western directed by and starring Marlon Brando). And his book was named All Hat. And it comes from a bizarre line in the book and the film: “you’re all hat and no cattle, son”. What does that mean? Why do they think that’s a bad-ass line? Why did Keith Carradine deliver it like he was John Wayne? Why am I still watching this? Oh right, the shotgun.

There are other reasons to watch All Hat, besides the non-existent shotgun. First of all, Lisa Ray is very hot. (Her most famous role was in Deepa Mehta’s terrific Canadian-Indian film, Water.) And secondly, it is pretty short. So you won’t waste a large portion of your day. The movie begins with Ray (Luke Kirby) being released from prison and picked up by Pete (Carradine). Then there is some horse racing. We don’t know what Ray’s done to be put into prison, and it becomes pretty clear that we’re going to be told, slowly, in pieces, over the course of the film. Like it’s some kind of big revelation. But when we find out what that revelation actually is, it is…very disappointing. Also disappointing are the characters. Rachel Leigh Cook plays a jockey who is sassy and bitter and kind of a jerk. But we’re supposed to LIKE her for that! She’s a free-spirit! The bad guy, Sonny, is an absolute cartoon. He may as well spend much of the movie stroking a cat and enter each scene to the strains of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

And the big sting at the end, to nab the bad guy? Painfully unsatisfying, unless you’re really into those simplistic after-school-special movie endings. Imagine for a moment that the big gag at the end of The Sting was that Doyle Lonnegan gets a pie in the face. That’s about the level of clever we’re dealing with here. But I think it has more to do with shoddy direction than with an actual lack of cleverness to the premise. Lots of other strange stuff happens in All Hat. Every single character, almost at all times, is drinking. Beer, whiskey, from a flask, from the bar. Always. Like the Trailer Park Boys, only…serious. They all (men, and women, at convenient times) hang out at the local strip club. Small-town strip club, eh? Why would that be in the movie? Especially since there is NO nudity. Why have everyone hang out at a strip club all the time, unnecessarily, unless it’s a cheap excuse for cheap nudity? Maybe in this case it’s a cheap excuse for that expensive hooker bit.

Graham Greene shows up, just to let us know for sure that this movie is Canadian. And then - out of nowhere - there is a gross-out comedy scene, clumsily handled, as though it were out of Epic Movie or the crappier version of the Farrely Brothers. A guy gets sprayed, head to toe - with horse semen! What? Where did that come from? What movie IS this? What’s going on? Well, the answer is, not much of anything. A guy gets out of jail, his enemy is evil, Lisa Ray is gorgeous, there are horses that race, a sting is set up for the bad guy, the payoff is weak, you’re all hat and no cattle, the end. All Hat comes out May 27th, tomorrow, from Alliance Films. It’s worth skipping. You see, it’s all hat and no cattle. I think.

On May 27th, Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Jackass presents: Mat Hoffma’s Tribute To Evel Knievel. It’s a 45-minute film of Johnny Knoxville yapping about nothing while BMX legend Mat Hoffman gets a bunch of the best stunt guys in the world together to attempt to break some world records. The actual connection to Evel Knievel is dubious at best, but there is a very little bit of decent footage of Evel’s biggest stunts at the beginning of the movie. Then, we get Knoxville doing his I-talk-a-lot thing, as some seriously cool stunts are attempted in a dirt pit somewhere in America. Flying motorbikes, tandem jumps with midgets, funny crashes and painful crashes, and general…well…jackassery.

In the end, it’s 15 minutes of motorbike jumping and cool stuff like that shoehorned into 45 minutes. How is that extra 30 minutes filled? With Johnny Knoxville. Talking. And then trying some stunts himself, injuring himself in the junk…blah blah blah. Have we not seen all that before? Maybe a hundred times? C’mon Knoxville. Just shut up and show us the stunts. And the stunts are truly impressive. Travis Pastrana and Allen Cooke are true daredevils, maniacs with no fear whatsoever, who wax eloquent about Evel Knievel for a brief moment before attempting some death-defying motorbike action. Again, the connection to Evel Knievel is loose at best. He was a stunt guy, they’re stunt guys…you see?

That being said, there is one stunt which is totally worth the price of admission. It is even worth sitting through thirty superfluous minutes of braying Johnny Knoxville. And it’s one that actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie. You see, forty minutes of the movie are about motorbike stunts. And five minutes are about skydiving. We get to see Scott Plamer jump out of an airplane, tens of thousands of feet above the ground - without a parachute. He then, in the air, hooks up with another skydiver, attaches himself, and pulls the cord, landing what is not only an impressive stunt, but seemingly a staggeringly stupid one as well. Then it’s back to the motorbikes, but we’re pretty bored of them after seeing this one.

My memory is spotty when it comes to the first incarnation of Degrassi. Oh, I remember that Joey Jeremiah character with his funny hat, and Snake and Wheels and the hot chicks - Spike and Caitlin. And I remember I hated watching that show. Not so much because I didn’t like it, but because every single show dealt with a controversial subject and high school-age children. And after the show was over, my mom would try to get me to talk about it. “What do you think about abortion?” she would say. And I would squirm and fidget and try to escape to my room. I don’t know! I’m ten years old. I have no opinion on abortion yet. I liked the character in the show who had one, so I’m…pro-abortion? Can I go now?

Degrassi: The Next Generation, Season 6, is out on DVD May 27th from Alliance Films. And I just watched it. My recollection of the original being suspect as it is, I have no idea how this new one measures up. And perhaps my hindsight is from the perspective of a ten-year-old, and that is colouring my opinions some, but this new version of Degrassi seems watered down. And it seems more…Hollywood, I guess. For one thing, this new Degrassi stars way more hot chicks. WAY more. I think I liked the realism of the old show, in that not every girl was a knockout. It was more…real. And the one I remember, Caitlin, was just the really-hot chick in comparison. Like, a real high school.

And sure, this new Degrassi deals with the same stuff as the old one, only a little updated for today’s world. Season Six has episodes that deal with wars over girls, crippled guys trying to have sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, virginity, teen mothers, and - the modern twist - internet nudity. There is even a stabbing and a murder! But somehow this modernized version of Degrassi feels dumbed-down. Most of the actors are good, with a few exceptions, and the writing seems to be as good as ever. And so I can’t quite put my finger on what makes this new Next Generation show miss the mark. I think, and I really mean this, that it is the attractive women. Not only do most of them look too old for high school, but they also look like they come from Central Model Casting. And that gives an air of fakery to the school itself. The old Degrassi students looked like they came from, well, high school. As far as I remember.

That being said, once I put in disc one of Degrassi: The Next Generation Season Six, I had to see the second disc. And the third. I actually got into the show and wanted to see what happened next. I hardly cared about any of the characters, or their motivations or their drama, but the story lines are good and they’ll suck you in! Degrassi! Who would have thought? And I also liked the appearance of Snake from the original series, whose name in this series is … Snake. He’s now a teacher at Degrassi. Named Snake. Well, props to the old school, I suppose. A tip of the hat to that show that once rocked the world, in this one that merely rocked one Thursday afternoon for me.

I am starting to think one of the reasons for the rise in gun violence in the world is the dumbing down of TV shows. When I was a kid, and the A-Team fired three thousand bullets at people, none of them hit anyone, and certainly didn’t kill them. Yet in the old days, guns killed people. And killing people came with consequences. Take Gunsmoke, the longest-running Western series of all time. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s a show where guns are a way of life and Western frontier justice is doled out one bullet at a time. And the thing is - this show was actually very good! Marshal Matt Dillon has become something of a pop cultural icon in the years since Gunsmoke.

Also iconic are Dodge City and the bizarrely detached attitude the marshal and others have toward human life. There is an episode in Season 2 where the “suits” from the big city come out to check on the practices of the cops in this town. They make an ordinance that forbids anyone from carrying a gun in Dodge. Of course, guns are not only essential to these people, they are the “air they breathe and the water they drink”. Dillon, of course, being a good, loyal NRA member, wants to show this suit that taking peoples’ guns is a bad idea, so he lets a bunch of people get killed to prove his point. Then there is the episode where a guy yells “I’m going to kill you” and then gets shot, and the man who shot him hangs. Two episodes later, a man yells “I’m going to kill you”, and gets shot by a woman, and the marshal escorts her out of town and says it was self-defense. Frontier justice is certainly not blind, like the kind we have today. Allegedly.

But frontier justice IS entertaining. And so is Gunsmoke. Considering how long this show ran, and how popular it was in it’s day, I was initially amazed that it doesn’t show up too often in reruns on TV. But then it occurred to me - perhaps that is because when the 80s rolled around, and censors and silly anti-violence monitors abounded, perhaps this show was kept off TV, what with the occasional killing and so forth. And what was left? MacGyver and the A-Team. Gunsmoke makes me happy, in that it hearkens back to a better day for television, the type of TV we are only recently beginning to get again. Season 2, Volume 2 comes out May 27th, and is worth it.

The Invaders was a pretty cool series from the 1960s that existed for only two seasons. In point of fact, only a season and a half. It was kind of the antithesis of The Fugitive, in the sense that it was about a guy chasing others, rather than others chasing the guy. The guy is David Vincent (played by Roy Thinnes), an architect who is the only human alive who knows that aliens are invading the Earth. His being an architect is a pointless addition to the story, because it never comes up. He spends every episode running around, chasing the aliens (who of course have taken human form), and trying to warn the rest of the world. Thinnes is quite good, but the supporting cast around him changes so much in each episode that they are all very hit-and-miss.

But the rest of the world won’t listen. Either they think he’s just plain crazy, or they are actually aliens and try to silence him. Although, this makes little sense also. The aliens seem perfectly willing to kill anyone who is willing to expose them, and anyone who agrees with Vincent ends up dead. But somehow, they just keep leaving him alone! I guess it’s the only way the series could go on. But it didn’t go on long. In fact, it appears to have been mercifully short-lived, with the season and a half running time and all. And although it didn’t do too well, and was cancelled before it wrapped up and got resolved, it certainly was a harbinger of shows to come - V, The X-Files, and dozens of others. Maybe before it’s time, maybe not that good. Season One of The Invaders comes out May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment. I assume Season Two (the final season) will be coming out soon. I am curious to see how it ends, or if it does end at all.

The best reason to watch Rawhide, the TV series, is that it is good. The second-best reason is to watch Clint Eastwood in the TV show he did before he was CLINT EASTWOOD. As Rowdy Yates, his TV persona is just about as powerful as his Man With No Name persona (the one he filmed while on a summer hiatus from Rawhide during Season Five). Season Three, Volume One is on DVD May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it is well worth it. The other major star of the series was Eric Fleming, whose deep voice and stoic character are perfectly suited to his role as Trail Boss Gil Favor. There are some irritating characters, the ones you would expect from a Western TV series in the 60s. Like, the cook always has to be an eccentric and crotchety old coot with a beard. And his assistant has to be a man with the brain of a child but lots of brawn. But Rawhide rises above these stereotypes, and succeeds at being a very good show. Sadly, Eric Fleming didn’t continue on to a Eastwood-calibre career after this show, he was drowned in Peru during the filming of an adventure series called High Jungle in 1966. But he could have been big.

Another huge reason (for the movie buff, anyway) to watch Season Three of Rawhide, is that this will be the only chance you ever have to see Clint Eastwood share the screen with Peter Lorre! Lorre, on the downside of his career, and looking about as fat and bloated as Orson Welles, was as creepy and glib as ever in Episode 5, called Incident Of The Slave Master. (All the episodes are called the Incident of something or other.) He is running a slave operation in the west, and the cattle-driving gang put a stop to it. With, of course, gunfire and horses. Lorre died in 1964, before Eastwood released A Fistful of Dollars later that same year, and it’s not like the two would have been cast in similar movies. A small moment of trivia for the rabid film fans.

Also for the rabid fans in Season 3 - the only on-screen pairing of Eastwood and Lorre’s Maltese Falcon co-star Mary Astor, in an episode called The Incident Near The Promised Land. Astor retired in 1964. And Mercedes McCambridge, who lit up Hollywood with her screen debut in All The Kings’ Men in 1949, appears in Incident Of The Captive. McCambridge guest starred often on Rawhide and other TV shows like Gunsmoke and Laverne and Shirley and Bonanza. But she is likely best-known now as the voice of the demon in The Exorcist. Too bad - she really had a great career that added up to much more than that.

And the last reason I can think of is that theme song. One of the best theme songs in TV history - load ‘em up! Move ‘em out! I think most of us under the age of 50 are mostly familiar with the song because it’s the one Ackroyd and Belushi sang at that country and western bar in The Blues Brothers. And that’s how I know it too, and it always brings back fond memories. Rawhide is a solid Western TV show from the 60s, it involves Clint Eastwood, and that’s a good enough reason for a Western nut like me to want to pick it up. I love them cattle drivers. It isn’t Red River (the all-time best cattle driving movie…yes, there is an all-time best cattle driving movie, thanks to the Duke), but it gives me my western fix in the meantime.

P.S. I Love You is out on DVD now.  My girlfriend watched it with her friends, then insisted that I absolutely had to watch it with her also.  And I get why.  I really do.  This movie is designed specifically with women in mind, and I think the people who made this decided to completely forego any audience they might receive with men and concentrate entirely on the female demographic.  So it’s the opposite of, say, Shoot ‘Em Up, a movie that didn’t care about a female audience at all.  And neither one is very good, for that reason.  When you decide to make a movie, and you decide to focus that movie entirely toward one group of people, the movie becomes very calculated.  You are designing a movie, moreso than creating one.  And P.S. I Love You is an incredibly calculated, contrived film.

It stars Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank as a married couple who are still hopelessly in love after twelve years of marriage.  Then he dies.  He has had this inoperable brain tumour, see, and he knew he was going to die.  But he knew that pretty young Hilary Swank was going to be devastated by his passing, and was going to lose her mind, so he decided to help her out.  And before he died, he created a series of notes and messages that would be delivered to her from beyond the grave.  Oooooh.  So, she gets these notes, and follows the instructions, and eventually gets over her crushing grief.  In the meantime, each note triggers a memory of Butler, so we get to see flashbacks of them in younger, happier times, being in love. 

And that’s all there is to this movie.  It’s basically two hours of people being in love.  And people loving each other for TWO hours is BORING.  And the love story is not the only thing that’s contrived here.  Hilary Swank goes to Ireland at one point.  While there, she meets a guy and tells him her whole story - my husband died, I’m here to see his country and family, blah blah blah…my name is Holly…then they sleep together.  Then, in the morning, she says her husband’s name.  And they both get a shock when they find out that they actually know each other!  He is her husband’s childhood best friend!  Well…wouldn’t he have put two and two together?  I have a best friend that recently died, he married a girl named Holly, there is an American woman in his home town named Holly, whose husband has recently died…and she looks exactly like the Holly I met when they got together…wait, that’s YOU?  It makes no sense, but lets us in on more tear-jerking moments and some “humour”.

But the most contrived thing about the movie is the constant preponderance of tear-jerking moments.  With a film like this - dead guy, grieving widow, there are many opportunites to throw maudlin, sappy, crying moments into it.  And this film does not miss a single opportunity to do so.  And so some women might enjoy this, because they want to cry throughout an entire movie.  But me, being a cynical guy, am screaming “come on, already!  That’s enough!”  But it isn’t enough.  They need to cram more of it in there.  And so we get two full hours of this, which is way too long.  This movie is a calculated, irritating string of moments designed to make people sad.  And there is really no story whatsoever.  It is two hours of two people being in love, and because one of those people is dead, we sob into our hankies and wipe our tears on the pillows on the couch and appreciate our loved ones around us.

 Or, we get uncomfortable, irritated, and we count the minutes until it is over.  Two hours of people being in love, even if those two people are as attractive and likeable and good as Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, is not a movie.  Kathy Bates plays Swank’s mother, and she is given nothing at all to do.  Gina Gershon and Lisa Kudrow show up as her best friends, and they are fairly useless except to create contrived comedic scenes.  Like the one where their lifejackets all inflate.  Hilarious.  And Harry Connick Jr., while he is quite funny in the film, doesn’t seem to serve any purpose either, and Swank’s relationship with him is so briefly touched upon that when it comes to a head later in the film, we have absolutely no idea why.  If you are going to watch a movie designed by a focus group for women to make you cry, watch The Notebook.  At least that film had a story, and you just might enjoy it.  P.S. I Love You is just too calculated to be any good at all.