Stumbling upon this HBO special late one night, I was absolutely taken by this attractive British "executive transvestite." I have never laughed so hard over European History or any of the other completely worthwhile point Eddie Izzard made. I laughed so much that I woke up my mother sleeping at the other end of the house...

Been lurking for a couple of years or so. I have never been moved to post on here before, so perhaps this movie is worth a star for that, but I doubt it. I just watched it on DVD, having missed it in the movies due to illness and never got around to watching it till now. I had not read extensively about it, certainly not even thought about the movie in some months. It was just what the buddy picked up in the store, so it got watched.
Bad mistake.
The shot I spoke of in the the summary up top is in the trailer and on the poster. Right from the off, Jason Statham has hair. Like in no other GR movie. Or any JS movie that I've seen. At least not in the quantities on display here. And Ray Liotta in underpants SHOULD be advance warned. It's scary and funny but not in a ha-ha-humour way. Its more in an almost-TheOffice-but-slightly-mutated-and-so-failing-sort-of-humour way. They each say the same thing: "This movie is not like anything you expect this movie to be."
Now, based on previous, extensive, movie-watching experience, I expected this movie to be a few things. Like:
() Coherent,
() Interesting or engaging,
() Not a complete and utter farrago of navel-gazing,
() Something more substantive than a motley bunch of badly-realised fables from what is just a standard eastern mystic ideology dressed up as a "cool, modern, self-aware art-form",
() Hopefully better than "The Idiots".
As you may have guessed by my tone, it thoroughly failed to check any box above. Instead it was:
(x) Badly edited {pace all over the shop, 70s-amateur high-8 style jump cuts, incomprehensible "plot" "twists!!!" delivered through hackneyed flash-back montages, I could go on...},
(x) Shot as if by a depressed 14yr-old goth who'd just spent the weekend watching Truffaut and Godard with the drapes drawn
(x) So up its own behind with the whole "I'm really smart, me" motif/ message, that it feels determined to repeat it every 20 minutes or so, just to make sure the dumb people (ie: everyone who doesn't like it) in the audience make sure they get the point,
(x) A genuine waste of my time.
As for the undoubted ability of some people to "get" something from this, fine. I'm glad you enjoyed it. One poster said something that caught my attention: under-25s probably understood it better because of the editing. Maybe, but editing is supposed to make your work more accessible, not less. As for the "Genius is only recognised by the enlightened" brigade out there, go suck an onion and grow up. There is nothing more presumptuous and self-serving than people who say the reason another person doesn't know great art is because they don't understand the 'craft /materials /moon cycle /filaments of supreme rational thought' which the 'auteur /poet/ artist/ palm reader/ idiot savant' is using to explain his or her 'vision /grand scheme /oneness with Gaea /great big bucket of dog-sick'.
For me and many, many more people, its garbage.
Movies, art, stories, poetry, anything designed to be viewed by another human is supposed to be engaging and moving. In some direction be it metaphorical, spiritual, emotional or whatever you're having yourself.
The only way this moved me was forward in time, two hours closer to my own inevitable demise. "The greatest trick He ever pulled was making You believe Any Part of this movie meant Anything at All"
And now, please, by all means, toast my buns for me.