The cat in the hat comes back. Why?

Rating: 4/10 (13 January 2003)

***SPOILERS HO!***
Before I start I'd like to say that it's not that I really didn't like the film, it's a fascinating bit of history that America really buries away really well. A lot of thought and money has gone into it and it does look good. It's kind of like Titanic; very simple story. The trouble is its told in this case not very effectively and with pretensions to say all sorts of things of moment and import, but muddling all the many messages it's got into bleeeurrggh. It's kind of like a drunk trying to tell everyone they've left the gas on and the cat's not been put out. This can be a good thing providing much debate about greatness or otherwise as well as just what the hell was going on. In the case of this film though, that debate is one I'm going to pass on, it's not worth the effort.
It's a big wide sprawling mess. I'm not sure what it was trying to say, but I think it managed vomit instead of really saying anything. It most reminded me of sectarian inspired football (that's soccer) violence in the 1970's. I've never seen some much fake red hair outside a Bay City Rollers reunion concert and it does not suit Cameron Diaz at all. Nice scar though.
Daniel Day Lewis was good. He had a really fun character to play. The main trouble I think, was that everything looked so fake and staged. The accents were horrible, the hair was horrible, the costumes looked liked something out of a bad 70's BBC Dicken's adaptation. Of course, this may all have been accurate to a degree of painstaking historical research I'm not aware of. I know very little of life in New York during the American Civil War. It does give every actor with a bad accent in every movie yet to be made a brilliant excuse when challenged; 'Well my accent was way better than Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York and no one complained about that.'
I think this movie has had too much subtle hype. I was promised epic. Reviewers have said epic. Epic is a word that follows Mr. Scorsese around like 'Italian-American', 'Catholicism' and 'family'. This isn't epic. It is overlong and yet seemed to have lots of bits missing. The story is thin, the violence is inappropriately cartoonish, there seems to be a lot more style than substance and the message moves beyond ambiguous into the arena of confusion.
This is a product of Hollywood about a dubious part of 100% USA history in which the 'Natives' violently oppress immigrants at a time in the present when the USA is preparing for armed conflict on a variety of questionable fronts, a film which condemns the violence of the Civil War while seemingly reveling in the violence of the streets, a film that finishes on a shot of New York with the Twin Towers intact, a film being seen around the world. This is a film that wants to ask questions of an American audience and ends up confusing them while I really don't know what non-American audiences are meant to get out of it at all.
Maybe I'm just a thicko, lazy or not getting it, but the question that most readily springs to mind is, why Martin, why?