PROOF THAT LATTES CAUSE BRAIN DAMAGE

Rating: Null/10 (1 April 2002)

I had high hopes for this movie. I remember the rounds of ecstatic reviews. I had heard glowing praise from friends. And the premise... well, it sounded really good on paper.
It wasn't 40 minutes in that I found myself trapped inside a particularly wretched episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Like Tom Servo at the end of his rope, I found myself literally screaming "END!!! Damn you, movie, END!!!" (well, my actual comments were considerably more profane, but you get the idea).
This is a TERRIBLE film. It caused me great physical pain. I wish to find all the people responsible for it and subject them to two hours of something equally painful, like forcing them to listen to scratchy Slim Whitman LPs at 78RPM, or watch endless 3-D film loops of Rosie O'Donnell braiding her armpit hair. I wish to educate these pretentious b*****ds that "odd" is not the same thing as "clever", that "obnoxious" is not the same thing as "edgy", that there is a razor-thin line between showing contempt for your characters and showing contempt for your audience, and that comedy should actually be FUNNY, dammit. And then I'd feed them to starving wolverines, just out of spite.
I am not familiar with director Spike Jonze's oeuvre, but I enjoyed his convincing portrayal of a redneck imbecile in "Three Kings" about a thousand times more than this execrable cinematic wank-a-thon. The latte-swilling twits who laud this film as "an original work of daring vision" evidently live in a universe where Terry Gilliam was smothered at birth. Made BY poseurs FOR poseurs, it is unrelentingly obtuse, phony, idiotic and BORING. Not to rip from Roger Ebert, but I hated, hated, HATED this movie.
I'll give it points for a fine cast and a cool concept (both utterly wasted), and some absolutely brilliant puppetry scattered here and there between endless bouts of wacky psychosexual tedium. Pity it couldn't have been two hours of the puppets instead of this pseudo-hip beret-wearing nonsense. An extremely grudging 2 out of 10 for this CRAP movie.