Love / Hate

Rating: 5/10 (17 January 2007)

By giving this film a 5 rating, I'm ensuring my comment will (probably) never get seen!!! After reading several comments here on the "loved it" end and several on the "hated it" end, I find myself agreeing with both. I liked the story (even though as one "hated it" fan says, it's old news.) I liked much of the acting -- with particular praise to Michael Gambon for his near perfect accent and slimy affect, and to Russell Crowe for his understated but dead on portrayal of Wigand. Some of Pacino's work did seem stacatto, blustery. Two aspects of this movie, as a film, were quite disappointing to me. It needed an editor. There were several segments that were pointlessly drawn out, the director's "little darlings" I think, that were not quite sleep-inducing to me, but just irritating. The movie could have been far better at 2 hours. The other problem was the music. It was, for the most part, either pointless and irrelevant, or just awful and overpoweringly distracting. The awful part consisted of a rather abstract vocal composition that should never have been 6 miles from a microphone, ever! While it was intruding on the shoot, I have no idea what the characters were doing / saying / thinking, and I'm unwilling to watch this (unedited) piece of work again to find out.