The Emperor Has No Clothes

Rating: 3/10 (17 May 2008)

Yes, three stars. This film is a miserable waste of time, and don't let the other 'fooled' reviewers, the swooning Academy who wasted three (of the four) Oscars on it, or anyone else tell you otherwise. Just because a movie is confusing, unexpected, amoral, cynical and bleak, and yes, hell, doesn't have a happy ending - just because it's DIFFERENT from 99% of the other junk that Hollywood spews out - just because you maybe don't understand it, doesn't mean it's a great movie. Go with your gut instinct (if you've seen it). The movie DOESN'T HAVE AN ENDING, happy or otherwise. Imagine if Blade Runner Director's Cut, never mind restoring the controversial Unicorn Dream Sequence, actually ended on that? If Arnie in T1 had killed Sarah Connor and walked away, while the Police Captain had decided he was just too old to be bothered? I mean, who watches a movie for that? A waste of $5.99 for FIOS HD.
I want to clear the air here a little by saying that the Coens directed (and more importantly perhaps, wrote) one of my all-time favorite movies, Miller's Crossing. I don't have a problem with extreme violence - Starship Troopers, Hard Boiled, Platoon, Natural Born Killers, Rollerball - all excellent, but they had a point to make, a beginning, middle and end. Unlike this bag of old shite. Let's be clear, there's no mysterious insight into human nature here, just a profoundly depressing lack of ideas, dressed up as Texas-noir art-house nihilism.
You want to hear about real senseless violence? Read your local newspaper. Read about the psycho guy in Louisiana who threw his three kids off a bridge to drown. Read about the millions slaughtered in Rwanda or Congo or pretty much everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa in the last ten years for no particular reason. That's emptiness. Real-life, meaningless, depressing death-into-nothingness. I don't need Hollywood to give me the fake deal.
So which Oscar did it deserve, IMHO? Bardem, for being a great edge-of-your-seat psychopath. The problem is the plot, the point, or lack thereof. I'm sorry to have to be the little boy who stands up in the crowd and contradicts everyone else on the planet who just doesn't want to be the one to look stupid, by not understanding some work of genius. But the Emperor really does have no clothes.